Stroke It (A Standalone Sports Romance)

by Ivy Jordan

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “So something did happen,” Pete countered, and I rolled my eyes. This was like grade-school fighting, the sort of cross-examination that would take place on a playground.

  “I don’t think I entirely appreciate getting interrogated about this,” I muttered and stood up. “I told you that nothing happened. I don’t want to talk about it. I get that everyone feels bad or some shit, I don’t know, but I’m telling you nothing happened and I am asking you to believe me.”

  Pete raised his arms in mock surrender. “Alright, shoot. I suppose that’s it, then.” I could see in his face that he didn’t believe me. In fact, through my stubbornness, I’d probably only solidified the idea that something had happened and I was being stubborn about it.

  And that was the truth, too. It would be all too easy to defend myself if the truth was that I was fine, and nothing happened, and everyone was overreacting to my behavior.

  Pete ended up letting me work a long day out in the yard. I appreciated the opportunity to take my mind off everything. He knew based on my schedule that I was missing an appointment with Quinn but he didn’t say anything about it. He must have known that I was growing irritated with him that day, and I didn’t want to be badgered about anything else. Especially not about Quinn, when I had no idea what I was going to do about her myself.

  I’d been so damn certain the day before. But now I’d made a fool of myself in front of her and solidified the notion that I was some broken soldier she needed to put back together. I wanted to be the man she joked with, the man she had a good time with, not some patient she needed to work with. I didn’t want to look at myself as a tragic hero. I just wanted to be someone’s dumb boyfriend. I wanted nothing that had happened overseas to count for anything, and yet I wanted it to count for everything, for every good change that my life had had since I’d come home.

  When I got home, Dad wasn’t anywhere to be found. That was easier than having him ignore me. As on edge as I was, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have snapped at him if I’d seen him trying to pull some juvenile evasion bullshit when he saw me come in the door. Mom was in the kitchen putting dinner together.

  “Hey, Sawyer. Grab a plate; dinner’s just about ready.”

  The thing I loved the most about coming home, quite possibly, was homemade food. I made sure to thank Mom for making something, despite her protest that it wasn’t any trouble and that really, I was too nice. Years of cafeteria food and rations made me intensely grateful for a pot of homemade chili or enchiladas or any casseroles.

  We sat down, and I poked at my food, doing my best to eat despite my tiredness and my disjointedness.

  “You know, I got a call from the therapist’s office today,” Mom said.

  I glanced up. I felt too much like she’d said she’d gotten a call from the principal’s—there was an incredibly childlike tone to the situation, and I didn’t care for it.

  “She said you missed your appointment and didn’t call ahead.” Mom poked at her food.

  Instead of irritation with my mom about bringing it up, I felt guilty. When I was young, and I got in trouble at school, she would glare at me across the table and call me ‘Sawyer Thomas Gains’ and pointedly accuse me of what I’d done wrong. Now, though, she wouldn’t look me in the face, only poked at her food and suggested that perhaps I’d made a mistake.

  “I know,” I said, and didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t offer her an excuse. I’d had plenty prepared in case she brought it up, but they all felt deceitful now.

  “Well,” Mom said, “I think it’s important that you go. Even if you want to change your schedule with her to twice a week or once a week, I still think it’s important to go. Skipping isn’t very good, anyway.”

  I forgot, also, that she was the one paying for these sessions. In skipping, I’d likely caused her to be charged a fee. I hadn’t even thought about that in my selfish need to isolate myself. I frowned and nodded. I remembered that the entire reason I’d signed up in the first place was to set my mother at ease. All of this other business could come later. The people closest to me in life needed to be taken care of, come hell or high water.

  “I won’t miss another,” I told her, nodding my head in agreement with what she’d said. She didn’t press me for an explanation for why I’d missed that one, and I didn’t offer her one. I wished she’d get angry with me, demand an answer from me. I knew how to work with angry people. I didn’t know how to work with resigned silence. It was all too much like that sad disappointment she’d had in the time before I left to go to the military.

  Even as I told her that I wouldn’t miss another appointment, I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to lie to my mother, but I didn’t know how I could face Quinn again.

  Chapter Twenty

  QUINN

  I sat clicking my pen in my chair and staring at the clock above the door. It was Friday, and slowly but surely, the clock showed that Sawyer’s appointment was over. When he missed Wednesday, I considered that maybe he’d just been exhausted. I didn’t even charge the missed appointment fee because I got the feeling it was his mother paying the bill, not him. I called her to let her know and counted on him showing up on Friday.

  But Friday came and now his appointment time was over. I hadn’t gotten any kind of phone call to let me know that he wouldn’t be there. I thought back to Wednesday morning when he’d woken with that nightmare, and I got the feeling that that was what this was about. He felt embarrassed, or at least uncomfortable knowing that I’d seen that.

  I needed to make things right with him. I had some appointments later in the day, but none of them were pressing and important. I decided that I needed to tend to this problem with Sawyer first, especially if he had friends in the area who had drugs. It was hugely unlikely that that was the case, but my mind was operating in full panic mode thinking about what he might be up to because of my reaction. We’d had such a nice night out, and I’d fallen asleep against him, and everything seemed to be going perfectly. When he woke up, I’d almost thought that he’d hurt himself. Part of what had gone on, why he’d left so quickly, had to do with my reaction, I was certain.

  Had I reacted poorly? I’d been a bit afraid, sure, but I’d known what to do. I knew better than to try and hold him and shake him out of it. Maybe he’d wanted to be held, and I’d been cold and distant. I’d drive myself crazy trying to find out without talking to him. Appointments finally canceled, I picked up my purse, deciding to leave my papers at the office. I wouldn’t need them over the weekend, anyway.

  I began to leave my office when, in the waiting area, I saw someone sitting down. I worried that it was one of my patients and that I was going to have to awkwardly explain to them that I couldn’t see them that day, but it was somebody else.

  Stacy was skinny, especially when she wore baggy sweatpants and a loose sweatshirt. Her hair hung down flat and dull off her head, the brown in it matching the brown in her eyes. She had a pointed face with sharp, almost harsh features, made all the more harsh by her drug use; she’d grown skinnier as she’d grown older, the hollows of her cheeks a bit more pronounced. The only signs of youth she still had were the freckles on her cheeks, and the slight color that sometimes rose to them.

  She looked nearly like a skeleton sitting in the chair, not because of her weight, but because of the vacant expression on her face. I wondered for a moment if she was even there to see me, or if she was there to see somebody else. The last I’d heard, Stacy was in a rehabilitation center. She’d been arrested for drug use, and the judge offered her rehab instead of jail. It was incredibly rare for that to happen, and yet it tended to happen to her quite a lot—the family suspected it was because the Black family had friends in the local court office.

  I almost walked by her, but she looked up at me when I started to walk past. I couldn’t miss the piercing glare of those sharp brown eyes, set deep into her pale, freckled face.

  “Quinn, hey, are
you busy?” she asked. Her voice was raspy, a smoker’s voice. She tended to smoke cigarettes when she wasn’t doing drugs. I wished sometimes that I could have her as a patient—she would be absolutely fascinating to evaluate, even if I knew that that wasn’t the best way to look at people, let alone my cousin who was dealing with very serious drug problems.

  “Hey, Stacy.” I didn’t want to ask right out of the gate whether she was supposed to be in rehab. “Did you need to talk?”

  “Yeah, kind of,” Stacy said. “If you’re not busy or whatever.” She raised an eyebrow like she was daring me to tell her that I didn’t have the time to see her. She had a way of being commanding without even making demands.

  She hadn’t lost her flippant way of talking. I turned around and led her back into my office, closing the door behind us. We were roughly the same age, but I somehow felt much older than she was—not superior, or smarter, but older, because I’d watched her grow up from an outsider’s viewpoint and heard everyone else talk about me like I was older than her. It was awkward for both of us to be so different in the family. We got compared and contrasted in ways that were unhealthy.

  “To answer your question, no, I’m in not in rehab anymore,” Stacy said.

  I didn’t remember asking, but I supposed that that wasn’t the point.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, um…. why not?”

  “Because rehab is bullshit,” she informed me. “All that the fuckin’ therapists do is bullshit. I don’t know if you do the same thing, but they all preach and preach about independence and how bad drugs are for you. Most of them haven’t even done drugs. They don’t get it. They don’t care. They’re just there to cash their checks.” She almost started to raise her voice. I’d heard this before from her, the notion that all doctors were businessmen and none of them cared, and that that was why she should be allowed to do drugs. In her mind, drugs weren’t nearly as bad as cheating people to profit off their health disorders—of course, she couldn’t see that she actually did have a health problem that those doctors could arguably help her with if she would let them.

  “Well, you don’t have to do drugs to know that they have a detrimental effect on the brain,” I reasoned. “The science behind it is solid enough to tell without actually doing them. And the rehabs here are some of the best in the state. I think those programs are really worth your time.”

  “Of course you do,” Stacy said. “You’re a part of the system.”

  “I’m not part of that system.” It was strange that she’d decided to come here just to nag on me about my job. “Did you tell Janet and Jesse that you’re back yet? They’re probably worried about you.” They worried endlessly when she was gone because sometimes, even when she got out of rehab, she wouldn’t tell anyone for weeks.

  “Janet and Jesse aren’t my fucking problem,” Stacy said. It made me cringe to hear her call them by their first names and speak as though they’d wronged her. I’d watched Janet and Jesse do everything in their power to keep her on the right track, and she’d spit in their faces time and time again. Still, they gave—I got the feeling they would never turn her away.

  “I can do what I want. And I found out that rehab is just where they put me so they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Stacy sniffed when she talked, though she certainly didn’t speak with a defeated tone.

  I was beginning to remember why I refused to see Stacy. It had less to do with the fact that she was in the family and more to do with the fact that I couldn’t stand her attitude. Sawyer had dated this girl? I shuddered to think of the type of guy he was to put up with someone like this. It didn’t matter now, of course; he’d changed for the better. But I still had to wonder what he’d been like before he’d gotten his life in order.

  As if she could read my mind, Stacy said, “I heard Sawyer got back from wherever the fuck he was.”

  “He was in the SEALs, so he… he never really says where exactly he was,” I said. “Not sure if it’s confidential or if he just keeps it to himself.”

  “You spend a lot of time with him?” Stacy sounded almost sarcastically interested in hearing an answer.

  “Well, since he got back, I…” I trailed off. I didn’t want Stacy to go after Sawyer. If she thought that he was available, it would be all the more likely that she would do that. I needed to do something to protect him, or at least to sway her from finding him when he was vulnerable and bringing him back down with her.

  “We’ve been seeing each other,” I said finally. “Not anything really serious, but, you know.”

  Stacy snorted. “You’ve been sleeping with each other. Cute. I always knew you had some slut in you.”

  I didn’t appreciate the derogatory term, but Stacy didn’t look like she’d meant it as an insult. That, or she really didn’t care that she’d insulted me. I blinked, unsure how to respond.

  “I mean, I don’t care,” Stacy said. “I have a boyfriend and shit to do in town. Sawyer hasn’t talked to me in five fucking years. I don’t give a shit what or who he’s doing.”

  I colored a bit at the mention of ‘who’ he was doing, but I couldn’t help but find it reassuring that she had other goals in mind. Still, I didn’t understand why she’d turned up at my door. Perhaps to gather information—I also expected her to ask for money or a place to stay. She might not be able to go to her parents. I would rather give her money than have to watch those sweet people dole out another dollar to her nonsense. She’d stolen from them, too, and would probably do it again.

  “I’m glad you’re alright with it,” I said. It was for the best that we could be civil about this. I’d seen Stacy act as a vengeful ex before, and I wanted no part in that. I really didn’t want her on my bad side at all. We resented one another because of the positions that our family put us in, but there was a common enemy there that kept us from really and truly going after each other. We only argued at opportune moments, and even now, when the moment was opportune, we were speaking civilly.

  Still, there was the damned question of what she was doing in my office.

  “Of course,” Stacy said. “We’re all fuckin’ adults here.” She smiled, probably at the small innuendo she’d made, and then she stood up and walked out without another word. There was no malice in her voice, and she didn’t glare at me, and Stacy had always worn her emotions on her sleeve. I had no reason to think that she wouldn’t tell me if she were angry.

  So she wasn’t angry, then. That’s what she’d told me, that’s what her expressions led me to believe, and that’s what I had to infer based on all my previous experience with her. But I still couldn’t come up with a good reason for her to stop by, ask a few questions, and then leave. Not unless she was upset about something, and not unless she wanted something from me.

  Stacy only talked to people when she needed something from them. It was the reason her relationship with her parents was so toxic, and it was the reason why I was suspicious now. I even went through my office briefly to check up on all my belongings. She hadn’t taken anything, though.

  She’d told me she wasn’t angry. I wasn’t so sure that I could, all things considered, believe her.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SAWYER

  When I woke up on Saturday morning, I could smell breakfast—eggs, pancakes, bacon, all of it, hitting my nose in a fantastic moment. As I began to get dressed, I heard voices—women’s voices, chattering at a normal tone. I could make out my mother’s, and not quite the other. I took about fifteen minutes to shave before leaving my room and going towards the kitchen.

  The sight of Quinn, relaxed against the counter with a coffee mug in her hand, talking to my mother as she flipped pancakes caught me by surprise. I hadn’t been in touch with her since the last time we’d slept together, and though I certainly wasn’t hostile towards her, I had some things I was trying to work out on my own. Still, I could hardly duck back into my room and pretend I hadn’t seen her. She smiled at me and waved me over.

  “Good morning,
” she said.

  I offered her a smile in return. Did my mother call her over? The more disturbing thought was that she’d hunted my address down to talk to me. Mom was making pancakes, though, not asking questions as I knew she would if Quinn had sought her out.

  “Sawyer, aren’t you going to say anything?” Mom squeezed my shoulder.

  “I…”

  “He smiled,” Quinn defended. She handed me a mug of coffee. “Is Sawyer always quiet?”

  “We thought he was mute for a time,” Mom said.

  “Mom,” I protested. I carried a platter of pancakes to the table and mentally prepared myself to be ruined for ever being taken seriously by Quinn again.

  “It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption,” Mom pointed out. “You didn’t say anything until you were almost two and a half. And then you spoke in complete sentences!”

  “What?” Quinn raised an eyebrow.

  I wondered if there was some sort of psychology that revealed itself to her when she learned that. If, by knowing that I was a late talker, she could deduce everything about my personality. I frowned and began to serve myself as everyone sat down.

  “It was the darndest thing!” Mom exclaimed. “One day we were all sitting around the table, and Sawyer looked up at me and said, ‘May I be excused?’”

  Quinn laughed as she served herself a pancake.

  “Scared the devil right out of me and his father both.” Mom shook her head.

  I didn’t see Dad around. I presumed he’d gone to work early. Being an accountant, I imagined, was a terribly high-stress job that demanded intense hours on the weekends—that or he was avoiding me again.

  There was a slight lull in conversation, so I thought to ask the question that bothered me most.

  “Quinn, what brings you by?” I asked. I tried not to be too point-blank about my questioning. I knew I tended to be too blunt and I didn’t want her to think I didn’t want her there. Although, part of me didn’t.