A Deeper Blue

by S. E. Harmon

  I mapped his mouth gently with my tongue while I drew back by micrometers, just enough so he followed me bit by bit. After a few minutes, he was damn near across the console, and I chuckled into his mouth.

  Blue pulled back a little, his eyes dark and intense so close to my face. He stared at me for a second and then leaned in and gently bit my bottom lip. Then he tugged and worried the tender flesh there until a soft sound escaped my throat. We both watched breathlessly as he let my lip slide free. “You find something funny?”

  I shook my head as arousal spiked hard. Not anymore, it wasn’t. I took his face in my hands and held him still while I plundered his mouth to my liking. One kiss turned into another and another until I realized somewhere along the line that a simple kiss goodbye had turned into a bit of a make-out session.

  “You should go,” he finally managed, lips still crushed against mine.

  “Your hand is in my hair.”

  “I know. I’m going to miss curfew, but I can’t seem to let go.” He kissed me again, trailed kisses down my jaw, and buried his face in my neck. “You smell like coconut and something tropical I can’t quite place. What did you use?”

  “Soap, Blue. Fucking soap.” I laughed against his mouth. When it was just Blue and me and we forgot about everything else, our relationship was ridiculously easy. “If you’re good, I might show you how Mama and I make soap down by the river, right next to our little house. It’s on some sort of prairie, I think.”

  With a grin, he kissed me one last time. “Are you capable of answering questions without being sarcastic?”

  I shook my head sadly. “Not that I’m aware of, no.”

  When he got out of the car, he was still chuckling. I watched him through the rearview as he grabbed his duffel from the back and tossed it over his shoulder. By the time he came around to my side of the car, I had lowered the window. “I’ll see you in a couple weeks,” I said.

  “That sounds good to me.”

  He leaned in and kissed me on the lips—a soft peck, really—and straightened. And then we saw him, almost at the same time. One of his teammates, Bjorn Rakevik—not the most pleasant of people—stood near the front entrance, one hand on the back of his neck. He was on the phone, and even from our vantage point, he looked to be having an animated conversation. The wife, maybe? I remembered his wife as a petite, beautiful half-Asian, half-black woman who seemed to hate sports almost as much as she hated smiling.

  Guess we weren’t the only couple who argued from stress before football camp.

  When I glanced over at Blue to share the joke, I blinked in surprise. He looked as though someone had turned him to stone, frozen by my window. I gave him a nudge.

  He finally focused on me, his expression a sharp mixture of worry and fear. “Do you think he saw anything?”

  “What? No. He’s on the phone.”

  “And that means he doesn’t have eyes?” Blue sounded seriously freaked.

  I wished I could touch him and reassure him, but I was fairly certain that would just make things worse. “Blue. Baby. Look at me.” When his eyes met mine, I nodded. “It’s all right. Even if he did.”

  “But—”

  “You and me. No matter what. Right?”

  He blew out a pent-up breath. “Right. It’s not like I was planning to keep it a secret forever anyway.” He glanced back at the building, where Bjorn had disappeared through the glass doors. “I just….”

  “I know.” I couldn’t resist anymore and reached over to ruffle his hair. “You don’t even know he saw anything. So stop worrying about it and go do your thing. Go play.”

  His mouth quirked. “You sound like a mom dropping her kids off at the park.”

  “What kind of parent would you be? You don’t just drop them off.”

  “Well, how’re they going to learn responsibility if you’re sitting in the car watching them like a stalker? It’s called independence.”

  “I’m fairly sure it’s called an Amber Alert.” I grinned at him. “You’re going to make a shitty father one day, Blue.”

  He smiled at me, but his eyes weren’t teasing anymore. “As long as you’re there to keep me in line, I think I’ll do all right.”

  Kids? The teasing dried up in my mouth. Really? Maybe I’d harbored secret hopes of one day having a few kids, but that dream, like most of the others, had morphed and changed. We couldn’t even kiss goodbye in a hotel parking lot without drama, and he was talking about one day having kids?

  You’re taking this way too seriously. He’s just joking with you.

  “Wow.” A little irritation crossed his face. “If I’d known just mentioning future kids would shut you up, I would’ve done that a long time ago.” I tried to laugh it off, but I wasn’t entirely successful. My laugh sounded weird and high-pitched, and the little irritation on his face turned into big-time annoyance. “Really?”

  “What?”

  “What?” His eyebrow climbed. “You turn into a mute anytime I mention anything about the future.”

  “I do not,” I said hotly.

  “Oh no? I must be dreaming, then, when you said you didn’t want to move in with me. Must’ve been someone else.”

  I groaned. Yup. I knew he was still pissed about that. “You really want to do this here?”

  “Why not here?”

  “Mostly because you just almost had a panic attack at the thought of your teammate seeing us kissing. The teammate who doesn’t know you’re with a man?” My voice was sharp as a set of fresh knives, and I had no desire to temper it. “Besides, we probably shouldn’t argue in front of the three point five kids we’re apparently going to be hiding from the world at large.”

  His palpable anger was gone just as quickly as it came on. I thought he might swallow his own tongue, holding back various responses until he finally blew out a deep breath through his nostrils with his lips tightly compressed.

  When he finally spoke again, his voice was low. “I know I’m being a hypocrite right now. But I look at you sometimes, and I just… want. I want you, Kelly, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.”

  I couldn’t not touch him right then any more than I could stop the tide. I gripped his hand for a second and gave him a quick smile. “Ditto, baby.”

  I waited until he disappeared inside the hotel and let out a deep breath. I wouldn’t go backward for anything, but the direction our relationship had taken scared the hell out of me sometimes. A simple drop-off had turned into two near fights and a make-out session in the front seat of his SUV.

  I stared out at the parking lot for a moment, just wondering. Thinking. When had our easy, breezy friendship turned into this challenging… thing we shared?

  When had it become so hard to just be us?

  CHAPTER 5

  Blue

  FIVE YEARS in the NFL, and every single fucking year, I underestimated how intense camp would be.

  The sun was like a living, breathing opponent, and sweat dripped off my body as one of the assistant coaches put me through my paces. Donnie Young was more wide than tall, an all-American former tight end with buzzed red hair and cheeks that were perpetually ruddy from exasperation and irritation. As far as I could tell, anger was his happy place.

  He clicked his stopwatch as I finished my wind sprints, and I stood, chest heaving, as he wrote something—most likely negative—on his clipboard. He made a derisive sound, and I gritted my teeth. “Again?” I asked.

  “Ya think?”

  “What was my time?”

  “Sixteen seconds slower than the last time. Maybe you should put down the refrigerator you’re carrying.” He glanced up from his clipboard and checked my back. “Oh, that’s right.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “It’s only the third day back. I’m just working out the kinks.”

  “Those kinks must be heavy.” His voice rose for no reason at all, and I had a feeling things were going to get embarrassing really quickly if I didn’t improve. “If you’re not going to do better than
that, you might as well hit the showers.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I’d done a pretty good job of keeping myself in check over the summer, but I still had a lot of conditioning to do. I also clocked in ten pounds heavier than my target weight, and Coach Young was clearly determined to take it out of my hide.

  “Let’s run it again,” I said.

  “Let’s.” He raised his bushy red eyebrows. “Someone who has the balls to call himself the Blueprint better put up better numbers than that.”

  I actually had nothing to do with the nickname. My college coach, Grady Myers, came up with that all on his own. But I knew better than to correct Coach Young when he was on a tear. I lifted my shoulder to wipe my face on my shirtsleeve. I don’t know why I bothered. I was sweating in places sweat should never be. “Got it, Coach.”

  I ran sprints until he was satisfied, until I passed my first time and last year’s as well. Coach Young’s eyebrows went down a pinch, which, in his world, was ecstatic approval. “Get something to drink,” he instructed. “Gotta stay hydrated at Camp Cupcake.”

  I wasn’t going to touch that Camp Cupcake thing with a ten-foot pole, so I just nodded and went to grab a water from one of the stations.

  Training camp had changed—no more two-practice days in the elements, no bare-bones dormitories you had to share with some guy who should be on a first-name basis with a bottle of Febreze, no unspoken competition or hitting each other in practice so hard that you might sustain an injury before the season even started.

  Current NFL rules allowed us to hold only one practice a day. And instead of relocating the team’s entire operation to some godforsaken place four states away, we just used the facility. It made perfect financial sense. They’d just renovated the entire building for a shitload of money. Our brand-new shiny athletic compound was a hundred times better than the shitty college dorms we stayed in the year before. Our head coach, Coach Maxwell, still wanted us to get the bonding experience that came with staying together, so they rented rooms for us at a nearby hotel. The hotel was nothing to write home about—exactly midway between upscale and a dive and ten times better than the dorms.

  Regardless of all the league changes that made vets and rookies alike grumble, we were all there for the same reason—to play football. Some days were grueling and filled with conditioning and agility drills. Coaches stalked us from the sidelines and yelled that we needed to run, dig deep, and most important of all, “move your fat, sorry asses.” Direct quote.

  Others were marshmallow days that Coach Maxwell hated with a passion. They opened up the training camp to the public for two weeks. It was a good time to interact with the fans and reporters and sign shit, but it became a struggle to stay focused. I liked to call those Coach Maxwell’s balloon days, when he constantly looked ready to burst with impatience or irritation. He popped antacids regularly during that period, and when asked a question, he began every answer with a muttered “Jesus Christ” that we all pretended not to catch.

  Our main goal hadn’t changed. Every player on the team needed to learn every other player’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. Without learning each other’s rhythms, we couldn’t function as a team when it counted. Our less lofty goal? Scope out the fresh meat and see if they had skills or if they sucked.

  The plays and the timing would come with time and practice. But you could tell right away who had the heart, the will, and the determination to play. You could separate the complainers from the guys willing to put their heads down and work. And from day one, you could see who was going to be an asset, who was going to have a temporary locker, and who was going to take a slow ride on a bus home.

  When I got back from hydrating and sneaking a break, Coach Young brought McAdams over. We were going to be running a lot of two-tight-end sets, so we needed to train together. We took turns blocking and receiving as one of the trainers threw us the ball. McAdams was gracious as always, and by gracious, I mean he took every opportunity he could to try to show me up. Key word? Try.

  I made it my mission to make great catches and great reads, and I completed that mission with flying colors. I beat him down the field and flipped him the ball, and he caught it with a scowl. “Another whole summer, and you haven’t gotten any faster,” I said as we jogged back to the starting point. “Imagine that.”

  McAdams gave me the finger, but his light brown eyes were warm and amused. “I’m surprised your joints haven’t snapped like twigs yet. Must be doubling up on all that calcium?”

  Fucker. I certainly wasn’t going to admit that Kelly had indeed started buying the orange juice with extra calcium.

  I had a number of choices to respond with, but I went with “Shut up, rookie,” and that suited me just fine.

  He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not a rookie anymore.”

  “You’re always a rank rookie when I’m on the field.”

  He laughed. “Let’s see if you can back up that big mouth.”

  McAdams and I had come to a sort of wary truce. Yeah, he’d fucked my boyfriend in the past, but I could get over that. As long as he knew Kelly was mine and that, if he tried something with Kelly, there was room for him in my trunk.

  Coach Young blew the whistle next to me, and I winced. I hadn’t even realized he was that close. “McAdams. Run these next few on your own,” he barked. “Blue, you’re next.”

  I certainly didn’t mind another break. I stood on the side and watched Coach Young and two trainers working with McAdams. One of the trainers threw a bullet, and McAdams sprinted to catch it. The pass was a little high, and he didn’t have enough lead time on it—our quarterback Vaughn had a knack for throwing the ball where you were going to be, not where you were—but McAdams caught it anyway. A smile tugged at my lips as I watched him spin out of a touch tackle from the other trainer.

  Not bad, rookie. Not bad at all.

  “I wasn’t aware your contract involved lounging, Blue.”

  I startled and looked over to find Coach Maxwell beside me, and I spared a brief moment to wonder how long he’d been there, and how long I’d been the Mayor of Chillaxing, standing on the sidelines.

  “Coach Young told me to take a break.” I grinned. “I follow orders.”

  “I was watching you earlier. I have to admit you’re looking halfway decent out there, better than I expected after last season,” Coach said, eyes still trained on the action on the field. “How’s the knee feeling?”

  I ignored that he’d just called some of my best work “halfway decent” and focused on the positive. “Pretty good. I’ve almost got full range of motion back.”

  His gaze flickered over me like he expected a more enthusiastic response, but I wasn’t overselling it. Ever since I’d started working with Kai, my physical therapist at the rehab facility, and taking my pain-management therapy seriously, I was doing better than I ever had.

  That still meant that my everything hurt sometimes, but I was stronger and faster than the year before. Sitting out the rest of the season had been the right decision, despite the fact that Coach Maxwell and Coach Young alike had fought me tooth and nail. In the end I knew what my body was capable of, and I made an executive decision to extend my career. But that didn’t mean they’d forgiven me for it.

  Coach Maxwell grunted. “Are you still working with your therapist?”

  He almost managed the word therapist normally, but I caught the subtle twist of his lip. Ever since Kai had refused to clear me to return to active roster last season, Coach disliked him with the fire of a thousand suns.

  “I am,” I said. “He’s making a real difference.”

  “That’s good. Hard work is the key.”

  “To winning? Or keeping the young guns off my back?”

  His weathered face crinkled into a rare smile. “You feeling the pressure?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.” We watched McAdams together as he ran drills in the heat of the midday sun. “He really knows how to handle himself.”

  I could f
eel Coach’s eyes on my face, but I didn’t turn. “You’re not trying to quit on me, are you?”

  I smiled. “Just making a comment.”

  “Nothing is ever just a comment, I suspect.” He scratched his head and put his cap back on. “If this is a contract negotiation tactic, it’s working.”

  This time I laughed. “Paranoid much?”

  “I just don’t want you buying into all the retirement hype,” he said with a grin—a slash of teeth in his overly suntanned face. “Sleeping in and relaxing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “I bet.” I kept my tone light to show him I thought it was as much of a joke as he did.

  If he really knew how appealing that sounded to me right then, that smile on his face would have dropped like a ton of bricks. He’d probably blister my ears about quitters and losers and how I might as well walk off the field now if I didn’t have the heart to play the fucking game. In short, he’d go apoplectic.

  He probably didn’t want to hear how my boyfriend liked to quote statistics to me about football players getting injured. One mention of the word concussion or CTE, and there went at least an hour of my life and a lot of my patience. Coach probably didn’t want to hear how sometimes I wanted to spend my mornings in bed, cuddling with Kelly instead of working out, or that I was pretty damn certain Kelly would love me anyway, even without a six-pack and sharp V-cuts.

  Hell, who was I kidding? Coach probably wouldn’t want to hear how I had a boyfriend at all. Luckily for him I was such a coward that he didn’t have to.

  I took a deep breath and gave all non-football-related thoughts a shove to someplace down deep. But I knew no matter how deep I shoved them or how many proverbial anchors I weighed them down with, those thoughts would always float back to the top.

  The truth was kind of stubborn that way.

  LATER THAT afternoon we had several team meetings and an hour-long Q and A session with the media before they finally let us go back to the hotel. As I rode the elevator up to my floor, I was never more glad that we weren’t staying in those antiquated, smelly dorms we used the year before. A couple of guys on special teams were kind of chatty on the way up, but I didn’t really listen or participate. When we got to my floor, I was too tired to manage more than a fist bump before I got off.