IMPACT: A Secret Baby Sports Romance

by Vivian Lux

  "Cute suit." Harlow smiled when I emerged, grabbing my arm. "Green suits you. Makes your hair pop. You should totally keep it short by the way. I was looking at old pictures of you—wait, sorry if that totally sounds stalkerish, but it was for work, I needed to find your colors—fuck, anyway, that long hair totally took everything over. You can actually see your eyes now and, bitch, those cheekbones! Don't you ever hide them again or I'll find you and cut your hair off with a beard trimmer myself."

  She punctuated this rant by grabbing a bottle of vodka off and shoving it into my hands. "I'm drunk and you're not and it's awkward. Cheers!" She tipped the bottle back against my lips and nearly drowned me, then yanked it back, looking petrified. "Shit, wait, I'm an ass. Are you in recovery?"

  I sputtered and gagged before managing to find my voice. "No, it's cool." I coughed. "Booze wasn't my problem."

  "What was your problem?"

  I felt the vodka slide through my veins and felt a rush of affection for this girl and her complete lack of normal social graces. A kindred spirit. "My brain," I told her cheerfully. "My brain was my problem. Is still my problem. Anxiety, depression, manic episodes—you name it, my brain likes to do it. My brain is the ultimate joiner."

  "You and half of this town," she sighed. "My boyfriend was supposed to be off the next three weeks, but the tour got extended. My brain's not doing so hot either. I need alcohol and hot shirtless rocker dudes to ogle."

  "That sounds like a plan." This time, I was the one who linked our arms.

  The night air kissed my bare skin, bringing goosebumps marching along my arms. Enormous spotlights lit the pool like daytime. I found a place to stash my phone over by the clump of chaises and took one more longing look at it. The producers said they'd let me know today. Today wasn't over quite yet.

  Harlow was absorbed into a clump of crewmembers passing a joint. I suddenly felt that same acute shyness that had compelled my mother to pursue acting for me in the first place. She thought it would give me confidence.

  I walked over and dipped my toe into the pool, trying to feign indifference. I bent down and scooped some water into my hands and patted my shoulders and my neck.

  Then I heard it. A whispered, "Is that Madeline Cole?"

  I stiffened and resisted the urge to look around. A disdainful voice replied, "Yeah."

  "Yo, look, it's Princess Paisley!" The chorus grew louder.

  "They let her out already?"

  "Shit, at least her hair is growing."

  "Why is she just standing there?"

  "I know, right? You'd think she'd be used to being naked in public."

  "Hey!"

  The spotlights cast a long black shadow that stretched over the pool to land on me protectively. I glanced across the water to see him standing with his feet planted and his finger pointing accusingly behind me. Rane. "Blaze! Reno! Shut the fuck up. Don't be dicks," he snarled to my bullies.

  "Yo. Sorry, man," Blaze muttered contritely as they shuffled away.

  "Thanks for coming, Maddie," Rane called over the water.

  "No problem," I said breezily. Acting. For some reason, with him watching, I felt safe. I held my breath and slid into the pool.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rane

  Blaze took his idiots and slunk away with his tail between his legs, but I still wanted to smash his fucking face in. I turned to Balzac. "Do me a favor?"

  His eyes were already bloodshot and slitted, but he gave me an upward nod. "Whaddya need?

  "That fucking waste of space over there."

  "Lazy Blaze?"

  "Yeah. Chuck him out."

  Balzac raised an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitched. "Gotta say, I've been waiting for you to say that for three long years now. That guy's a putz."

  I nodded, seething inwardly. Blaze had been making himself at home with the band, getting in the way, claiming he was our "deejay" since our debut, Blowback, first dropped. Oddly enough, it had never bothered me until right now. "Yeah, I guess we all have our limits and he hit mine."

  "On it." Balzac smiled, clapping a meaty fist into his open palm. "Keir, wanna play?"

  My brother gave me one of those penetrating glares that he seemed to have perfected in the past three hours.

  "Yeah. Sure," he said after a long, drawn out pause. He wanted me to meet his eyes.

  But I was finding that I couldn't stop watching Maddie bobbing in my pool.

  As friends. Fuck. I was having problems remembering what the fuck friends did with each other. Did they swim together? Because all I wanted to fucking do was be there in the same water, her nearly naked body maybe brushing past mine as we bobbed in the night. That didn't sound exactly friendly in my mind, but I couldn't summon another thought...besides, what would happen if the delicate emerald strap of her bikini slid down her freckled shoulder.

  The blood rushing to my cock made my decision for me. I needed a cold shower.

  Or maybe a jump into a cold pool.

  "Incoming!" I shouted. She paddled in a circle and stared at me in mute horror as I dove over her head.

  Too late, I realized I dove too shallowly. I hit the water with a resounding, boner-crushing splash.

  That fucking hurt.

  I surfaced, coughing, only to be submerged under a sheet of water. "You ass!" Maddie shrieked, wiping the water from her face with one hand while she pummeled the water with her other.

  "Sorry! Sorry!" I laughed, trying to fend off her watery assault. She flipped onto her back and scissor-kicked sheets of water into my face. "Okay! I give, I'm drowning!" I panted, swimming to the side.

  "You cannonballed me," she shrieked. "My hair..."

  "You're in a pool. You're supposed to get wet."

  "I look like a drowned rat."

  Sexiest rat I've ever seen. "Then that makes two of us." I wonder how her wet thighs would feel wrapped around mine.

  She splashed me again. "That was not nice!"

  "I'm not a nice guy." I could send everyone home, right now, and we could be alone.

  "Oh, is that right?"

  "Nah. Nice guys finish last." I slapped a small splash her way. "Though, I guess I am a pretty nice guy in bed." Subtle, Rane.

  "Gross," she complained, splashing me again.

  I don't know why I cared so much. But I felt like I kept wanting to work at her. Peel back another layer and let the real Maddie shine through again. I could see these glimmers through the cracks in her facade, and they fucking fascinated me. I wondered how long it would take for the real her to be finally revealed, polished and bright in the sun. And it was unnerving to realize that I wanted to be there the day that it happened.

  Which meant I wanted to stick around.

  Which meant I needed her to like me.

  And to stop fucking trying to drown me with sheets of water.

  When she aimed another splash at my head, I had enough. "You're in trouble," I sputtered, and dove underneath the water.

  In the silence, I could hear her yelling something. She was kicking her bare feet, trying to ward me off, but I’d spent enough time breaking into pools as a juvenile delinquent that I swam like a shark. I shot underneath her and emerged behind her, grabbing her flailing arms and pulling her tight against my chest.

  "Can't splash me from here, can you, Mads?"

  She struggled a little, but not much. Her chest was heaving and mine was too, and I was aware of the fact that we were both essentially naked. The little slip of a thing she called a swimsuit was nothing more than a wisp.

  "What are you doing, Rane?" Was that a groan? Or a moan? I wanted her to say my name again. This time scream it.

  "Rane!" she screamed as I pulled us both under.

  In the silence underwater, she slipped from my grasp and spun around. Her red hair, dark as blood in the water, fanned out from her face, swirling around her like some kind of mermaid.

  I almost fucking kissed her right there.

  She shot away from me as we surfaced.
<
br />   "Yo, Maddie!" Harlow shouted across the pool. "Your phone is buzzing like crazy."

  Maddie looked at me, floating there in front of me. I almost reached for her again.

  Then she spun around and swam to the ladder, heaving herself away from me as quickly as she could.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Madeline

  I shivered, dripping water all over Rane's kitchen floor. The house was eerily silent once I closed the door on the cacophony outside, which meant I could hear everything Jonathan Neil was saying to me right now.

  I wished I couldn't.

  "We looked again. And you were very good. Almost perfect, Madeline, if truth be told. But when we were watching, we just couldn't get past the idea that we were watching Madeline Cole." He spat my name like it was something gross on the heel of his shoe. "I'm sorry, we're going with someone else."

  I was saying... something. I was walking... somewhere. But I had no connection to either of these motions until the phone slipped from my hand and fell to the floor.

  I would not cry.

  I knew I hadn't gotten it. I knew the second I walked out of there. I stared as hard as I could at the spattery picture, willing myself not to cry about it.

  Why was I crying?

  "We were watching.... Madeline Cole."

  Well, who the fuck else would I be?

  I could change my hair, my body, my posture. Fuck, give me contacts and false teeth and I could change my face. I could change my accent, my pitch, my mannerisms.

  But I couldn't change being Madeline.

  I was still...always...me.

  It wasn't fucking fair.

  "You okay?"

  Rane blocked my view of the spattery picture and I stepped back involuntarily, blinking hard.

  He extended a towel and I slung it around my shoulders, clutching it like a lifeline. "I'm fine."

  "Yeah?" He looked over his shoulder at where I was staring. "Does that picture piss you off or something? You look like you want to smash it."

  "It...reminds me of something."

  Rane grinned. "It's a party, Maddie. This is rock and roll. Smash my picture, I've got more."

  I gaped at him. What the hell was he talking about? "It's probably some priceless piece of art, you idiot."

  "Probably," he sighed. "I actually have no idea. Never really liked it. Go on." He leaped up on the couch, oddly graceful for such a big man. "Get it out."

  I was stuck somewhere between irritation and amusement. I just wanted to go and hide and console myself with a vodka gimlet, but Rane was perched like a mountain goat on the back of his pristine white sofa and I kind of wanted to see what he would do next.

  What he did next was wrench the moody red painting from the wall with a triumphant karate yell. "Hi-YAH!"

  An unplanned giggle escaped my lips. He heard me and grinned back, jumping down and trotting over like a proud dog retrieves a ball.

  "Here. You want to punch it, Mads?"

  I kind of did. "No, it's okay."

  He set it down on the floor in front of me. It really was godawful ugly up close. "Kick it then. Don't ruin your manicure."

  I held up my ragged nails and reddened cuticles. "And what manicure might that be?"

  "Weren't your nails painted yesterday?"

  "You...noticed my nails?"

  "I noticed a lot of things." The way he dipped his chin down after saying that made my stomach clench with an emotion I dared not let rise to the surface.

  "It was for the video," I explained. "Fake nails. They ripped the shit out of my nailbeds, too."

  "All the better reason to kick my painting instead."

  "Why are you doing this?"

  "Because it's a party and you look pissed off and sad." He touched my wet head. "And like a drowned rat, too, though I suppose that's my fault." I scowled at him. "I'm a legend-host. I can't have this kind of moody, broody shit in my house during a party."

  "Oh, so you're not just being nice?"

  "I'm never just being nice. I always have an ulterior motive." Acid dripped from his words.

  "Okay, well, I am only doing this to help you preserve your reputation."

  "Good." His lopsided grin said more than I could possibly understand right now.

  I stared down at the ugly painting. The red, angry swirls formed and reformed into the faces of the directors, the producers, the tabloid photographers and grasping ex-boyfriends. The shrinks, the group therapy leaders, the robotic meeting attendees with their judging faces and red, weepy eyes and willingness to let others define them. I saw the fans, the fickle fucking fans who loved me until the moment they cast me aside, and then hated me with a vitriol I could never understand. Once I was America's princess, and now I couldn't even find a job and....

  "Fuck!"

  I hopped on one foot, startled tears collecting in my eyes. That fucking painting was stronger than I had expected.

  Rane looked from my plaster-dusted foot and back to the dented painting. The canvas had peeled back in a perfect toe hole. "Nicely done," he said mildly, as if he hadn't just watched me disintegrate in front of him. "Now I'm gonna go get you a drink. Have a seat."

  "I'm going to get your couch all wet."

  He cocked his head. "Water is hardly the worst liquid that has hit that thing."

  I wrinkled my nose, but my toes were starting to throb. I hopped over to the couch to elevate them and wonder what the fuck I had just done. Since the...incident— the hair on the floor, the wind on my skin—oh fuck it, since I shaved my head and ran out of my old house naked into the nighttime. Yeah. That. Since that happened, I had kept myself deliberately in check. The second I felt that anger start to rise, I always squelched it.

  Except...with Rane. I had let it out with him...twice now. Twice today, even.

  I cowered into the couch, afraid to meet his eye when he came back into the room. Mad Maddie had reared her ugly, bald head again, and this time, I didn't have a camera trained on me to give me an excuse.

  "I didn't know what you drank. So I brought them all." Rane stood directly in front of me, forcing me to look up.

  Then I laughed. "You look like you robbed a liquor store."

  "All bought and paid for, I assure you." He deftly untangled himself and lined up the bottles. Whiskey, vodka, rum, a can of Bud and a bottle of expensive looking Chardonnay. I looked at each one of them, then back up to him, confused.

  "Did you bring glasses?"

  He slapped his forehead dramatically. "I knew I forgot something."

  I laughed again. I had laughed more times in the past hour than I had in the past year.

  "Well, you're being awfully nice, and I know that's hard for you. So I won't push my luck." I grabbed the bottle of Grey Goose by the neck. It was perfectly cold. "Cheers?"

  He smiled and grabbed the bottle of Maker's Mark. "Cheers."

  We clinked bottles. I let the welcome vodka slide down my throat like water, then set it down. It was too easy to drink too fast. I needed to keep my wits about me.

  Especially with Rane giving me that look.

  "What?" The vodka settled into my limbs and I sagged back into the couch.

  "I was thinking about kissing you."

  "What?" I stiffened.

  He waved his hand, irritated. "Yesterday. For the shoot." He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "You're a really good actress. I honestly thought you were into me there for a second."

  I reached for the bottle, thought for a second, pulled my hand back, then thought again and grabbed it like a life preserver tossed into stormy seas. Stormy seas the color of his eyes.

  What the hell?

  "You sound surprised." I sounded angry. I didn't mean to. That made me angrier. I took a quick, fortifying sip.

  The corner of Rane's lip twitched. The scarred corner that I couldn't stop staring at. "Not going to lie," he said, spreading his hands.

  "Well, fuck you then. I've been an actress almost as long as I've been alive. There's a reaso
n for that."

  "Okay, sure, but...."

  "No." I held up my hand. My so carefully bottled feelings seemed to come all loose when I was with this man. I felt like I was tossed around in the ocean with no land in sight. A stormy ocean with clouds roiling above, the same threatening gray as his eyes and… "Fuck," I said out loud. "What exactly do you think you know about me?"

  If I thought he would apologize, I was sorely mistaken. "I could ask you the same fucking question, you know."

  "Not really."

  "Yes, really." He was calm, but dangerously so. The eye of a hurricane. God, I was really drunk coming up with all these cheap weather metaphors. "What do you think you know, Maddie?"

  "You're...." The vodka was working fast. I waved helplessly in his direction, summoning the words that refused to come. "Rockstar. Guitar guy. Bad boy. You're... you," I finished lamely.

  "Yeah. No fucking shit." It wasn't a growl, but it was definitely a warning. He looked away, swiveling his body away from mine. I swear I got colder for a second, though maybe that was the alcohol. His shoulders lifted, tensed for a moment.

  Then he dropped them and turned back. "Hi," he said, gravel-voiced, extending his hand. "I'm Rane Michael Wilder. What's your name?"

  My hand slipped into his and I looked down at it, surprised at its treachery. "Madeline Avery Cole." I swallowed.

  "Pleased to meet you, Madeline." His hand was warm and dry and strong. There were calluses on his fingers from playing guitar and they brushed electrically across the back of my hand.

  I had to stop touching him. I pulled my hand away. "Please call me Maddie," I told him. "All of my friends do."

  Friends. I needed to say that word. Put him firmly in that category. There could be no more of these flashes of static between us. His dad, my mom...no. We were friends. Siblings.

  That's it.

  His eyes glimmered, and somehow I knew the same wheels were turning in his head. "I'd like to be your friend, Maddie. You've given me the most interesting twenty-four hours I've had in a long while."