The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  “But it will be fun to be back playing in Woodsmen Stadium, right?” I pressed. “With all the people in the stands, under the lights at night. It’s so exciting!”

  “We don’t play there. They wouldn’t risk that expensive turf for the development team,” he explained. “We’ll play over at the field at the Woodsmen practice facility. There are some bleachers but no lights. I’ve never been to a Junior Woodsmen game because I’m usually in Las Vegas right now, preparing for the season, but I guess some fans go. People are so into the real Woodsmen that it carries over to the Juniors.” He leaned forward. “There’s the runway. We’re almost down.”

  “I was thinking we could stay with Daisy,” I said. I wasn’t sure where he was with money, since the Cottonmouths were pressing to get his signing bonus back. I had a little from my paycheck from El Asturiano but it wasn’t going to be enough for much besides a tent, and it was still really cold in Michigan. “I talked to her and she’s so happy to let us stay a while.” Her husband, not as much.

  “No, I rented an apartment. Not the house I used to rent.” Nico twisted so that he could look me in the face. “It’s small.”

  “Ok,” I said.

  “I’m not poor, not by any means, but I don’t know when or if I’ll ever play in the Confederation again,” he went on. “I have to think about the future.”

  “Ok,” I repeated. I waited to hear if he had something else to say. “Did I tell you about my plan for employment?”

  “I should have known that you had one. Is it legal?”

  “Totally!” I assured him. “Mostly, for sure. The beginning part won’t be as much but then I’ll go completely legit.”

  To my utter surprise, he took my chin in his hand and kissed my cheek, then rested his face against mine. I took a deep breath full of him and closed my eyes until he pulled away. “Thank you, Tatum.”

  “For staying away from crime?”

  “For making this trip bearable,” Nico said. “It would have sucked without you. These past weeks would have sucked without you and I’m glad you’re here, we’re here together. I’m very glad.”

  “I’m glad I’m here, too. And it does look snowy and cold down there.” I looked at his crotch. “In case you’re worrying about freezing something off…”

  “Thanks, but I’ll take care of my balls on my own.”

  “Just know that I’m available,” I generously told him, and when we landed, he was still laughing.

  ∞

  Yep, it was perfect. “I love it,” I told Daisy, and spun around with my arms wide, smiling. I was happy to be with my best friend, and I felt so lucky to have found this place. I stamped my feet to keep them warm. “I absolutely love it!” I took some more notes in my old notebook from Florida. It was hard to write with my thick gloves on, but I just had so many ideas about the building that I had to try to get them down.

  “Are you sure?” Daisy asked me, and blew on her own fingers. “It’s kind of a shack, Tatum.” She also turned, peering around the small room. “Actually, it’s exactly a shack. We’re inside and I’m still being blown to pieces. It’s so windy this close to the water.” She shivered, too.

  “Are you kidding? That’s why it’s so perfect! The summer tourists will walk right by and then enjoy eating palmeras and drinking iced cafecitos all day long! This will be a great outpost for El Asturiano bakery. I talked to Aunt Lucy already and she’s very happy about this idea. We’ll do it together, of course, because it’s her bakery and her family and her recipes and I’m just tacking on an outpost a thousand or so miles north.” I nodded. “She’s really excited.”

  “Really?” Daisy asked doubtfully.

  “Well, she sounded surprised, for sure. And if I can get some money to get this started, then she said she’s in. I’ll be a part-owner of the Michigan subsidiary of El Asturiano! Can you believe that? Me, a business owner! Then I’ll finish my degree, and Nico and I will be financially secure no matter what happens with him getting back into football. Although, I’m very confident in my image rehab plan for him. Have you been looking at his social media? Chara is killing it.” I had taken a few pictures of us on the plane, a few more of Nico lifting in the tiny gym at our new apartment complex. Those were amazing, because he looked so hot and muscled in his shorts and sleeveless shirt. Thinking about it made me start to get hot myself despite the bitter wind whipping into my future bakery.

  But Daisy still didn’t look convinced. “Can we discuss this inside? I mean, inside somewhere with better walls?” she asked, teeth chattering. “You’re going to need some insulation, for sure.”

  “And glass for the windows,” I agreed, and we left the future El Asturiano de Michigan (I was working on a name) and ran through the slushy snow back to her car.

  “Now on to my construction project,” she said, and we started the long drive over to her new house. It wasn’t actually very far, miles-wise, but I could have walked faster than Daisy drove. If it had been Miami temperature outside, I would have.

  “Oh, I miss my flip-flops,” I said, sighing and holding my fingers to the heat pouring from her vents. “But I’m glad to be back, too. Maybe one day in the future, Nico and I will go somewhere warm for the winter and stay in Michigan through the summer and fall for the season. Once he gets back to playing in the regular season for the Woodsmen, I mean, and not in the winter for the Junior Woodsmen. But that will be hard once we have kids, you know, with school.”

  “Uh huh,” she said. I could see that I was making her worried with all the talk about my future with Nico.

  “But first I’ll focus on the business. I have some ideas for how to get the seed money to start it up.”

  “Everything within the bounds of the law, right?” she asked me quickly.

  “Yes, absolutely. Mostly. It’s no crocodile hatchery in the basement, that’s for sure! Not this time,” I promised her.

  “What?” She pulled to a stop at the end of their long driveway and stared at me. “Crocodiles?”

  “Tell me what you and Knox are doing with the new house,” I said, instead of getting bogged down in my earlier foray with reptiles. She excitedly explained what they were planning to build, while I stared appreciatively at the hole that was what was left of the old house. What had been there before had been so ugly it had almost burned the eyes and the hole was a big improvement. Finally, even Daisy got tired at looking at the frozen hollow in the ground, and she was ready to get back into the warm car.

  “How’s it going with the new team for Nico?” she asked me as she turned to drive me home.

  “I’m optimistic that things will improve. It’s just different from how it’s been for the last few seasons for him.” His first few practices had seemed pretty uncomfortable and un-fun, but that was just me guessing, because he hadn’t complained when he talked about them. It appeared that the United Football Confederation players, the pro, top-tier players, got a lot of perks that the development team didn’t seem to enjoy. For example, how the locker room he was using now didn’t have a lot of heat, nor did the showers.

  “I’m sure there was hot water when we used to practice at that field during the Woodsmen pre-season in the summer,” he had explained when he got home after the first day, as he stood directly under the heating vent in our new living room. “Now I understand why all the other guys went home sweaty.”

  “A little chilly?” I had asked. I wrapped my arms around his waist, to help him warm up. Everyone knew that body heat was best.

  “Think of standing under a melting icicle.” He had rubbed my back, up and down.

  “Cold water is very good for the skin. And I don’t mind you sweaty, not at all,” I had said, and somehow, he had taken that to mean something sexual and tugged on my ponytail and shook his head a little, disengaging my arms and stepping away. But what I had meant was that I liked him any way he was, dirty or clean, playing for the Woodsmen or for the Junior Woodsmen. In the giant apartment in Miami, or in the much smaller one
that we were now sharing, with the one bathroom that showed me that he was a bit of a slob, really, and since I definitely was, we were going to have to work together so that we were able to see the countertop. I just liked being around him, that was all. And sure, naked and sweaty, I was down with that too.

  Daisy dropped me off at our building and I hurried up the stairs. “Nico?” I knew he was back from practice, but the living room was dark. Oh, hell no. If he was out carousing in the middle of a Friday— “Nico?”

  “I’m back in the bedroom.”

  I followed his voice into the small room across from mine. He was in his boxer briefs and lying splayed on the bed. But it wasn’t sexy at all, because he was covered with plastic bags of ice, on his arms, his legs, his stomach.

  “What happened?” I ran to the bed and jumped next to him, and he groaned.

  “Can you not shake me around? Nothing happened. Just practice.”

  “The day before a game, you guys practiced like this?” I ran my eyes down his body and checked under one of the ice bags on his chest. A huge bruise was already forming there. “Were you wearing pads?”

  “No, because I was told it was a walk-through. That’s what I’ve always done the day before any game, a no-contact practice.” He sighed and sat up a little and I pulled another pillow under his head. “Apparently, word came down to the coach last week that I wasn’t supposed to be hit, not right away. No one has been touching me, until today when the coach told us that we were going to ‘scrimmage’ a little and that everyone was fair game. He pointed at me and smiled.”

  “Oh, shit! He was telling them to go after you!” I took a few pictures of the bruise on Nico’s abs. “You could have been really hurt, the asshole!”

  “He’s pissed off to get saddled with me, just like Coach Cattaneo was in Miami.”

  “‘Saddled?’ You were one of the top receivers in the Confederation last season, and you always are! You caught and ran for over fifteen hundred yards! He’s lucky to have your cute little ass out on that field!”

  Nico started to laugh and then put his hand over the bruise on his stomach. “Damn. That hurts.”

  “Arnica. I’m going to get it right now,” I said briskly. “What else?”

  He gave me a list and told me to take money out of his wallet. “Be careful driving,” he reminded me. We had another rental car, much smaller than the one in Miami, but it had been hard to find a vehicle that worked for the both of us and we had ended up with one that didn’t really fit either Nico or me.

  “I’ll be very careful.” I stood up off the bed and put his phone in his hand. “You stay right here and make a list of the guys who hit you the hardest.”

  “I’m not telling you their names,” Nico said flatly. “And leave the coach alone, too.” He held up his little finger and I had to pinky swear. Damn!

  “Fine,” I huffed angrily. “But somebody better do something!”

  Nico tugged on me with my pinky, back down to the mattress. “Tatum.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re a good teammate.” He nodded. “You’re probably the best teammate I ever had.”

  That made me pretty happy. “I’m not your teammate. I’m your coach,” I reminded him, and that made him laugh and put his hand over his stomach again.

  Nico was not in a lot better shape by game time the next day. It was absolutely bitter, with a 30-mile-per-hour wind whipping across a field that had absolutely no protection, no trees or buildings to stop its course. The real Woodsmen played in what was called an “outdoor” stadium because it didn’t have a roof, and it got plenty cold and snowy in there. But the Junior Woodsmen, on a field with no roof or walls or anything, had a much more difficult experience.

  I sat on the bleachers with a blanket folded under my butt, another wrapped around my shoulders, and another over my lap. I was already freezing and they hadn’t even kicked off. The wind had blown away all the snow, leaving the frozen, brown grass exposed, as well as the faded paint stripes of the yard lines. The players huddled next to the one portable heater they had on the sidelines and wore giant football coats that went over their pads. Steam already rose out of their helmets from the warm-ups they had done.

  I watched Nico standing a little apart from the other players, on the edge of the circle around the heater. I couldn’t see his face very well with his helmet on and hood up, and I could only guess about how he was feeling. He hadn’t talked very much since I had gotten home after buying out the drugstore the afternoon before, but he had let me rub on the gels, creams, and salves. Then he had also been fine with me curling up on the bed and us watching home improvement shows together so I could get ideas for the new bakery. He had only suggested that I change into a shirt with sides and a back, or put on a bra, so he got less of a view of my boobs. I had put on one of his sweatshirts. Oh, well.

  He had (apparently) been fine with me sleeping in his bed, too. I had sacked out mid-way through a lead paint-filled Victorian renovation and had woken up with Nico octopus-ed all over me in the morning, his warm, herbal-smelling body pressed so close to mine. I hadn’t moved a muscle until he had woken up too, and I feigned sleep as he nuzzled my neck and yawned, and then slowly and carefully rolled away. I had stayed in bed until I heard the shower go on and then very reluctantly gotten out of his bed too.

  Now I sat a little apart from the other fans. I had tried to talk to some of the other spectators, women mostly, who I guessed were the players’ wives and girlfriends. They were huddled together chatting and giggling, and when I had said hello, they stared at me like they smelled something bad and pointedly returned to talking. I had gotten the message pretty clearly. Just like the coach and the team were apparently pissed that Nico was there, their wives and GFs felt the same way about me.

  That was fine, because I would win them over, just like I had the Federal Police all those years ago when I had the problem in Guadalajara, and that was before I even spoke Spanish half as well as I did now. I wasn’t worried about them, but I was worried about Nico playing today. I had heard him groaning through the bathroom door, and not like there were good things going on in his downtown area, things that I myself might have wanted to get involved in. It had sounded like he was in pain.

  There was nothing I could do about it but watch, because he had absolutely forbidden me from running out onto the field, no matter what happened. I’d had to swear up and down on pain of death that I wouldn’t go after any opposing players or ones on the Junior Woodsmen who were assholes to him, either. We both knew that they would all be gunning for him, wanting to take out the former pro. The guy who had more talent in his little toenail than all the other men out on the field put together, I wanted to yell over at the gang of women who had ignored me.

  Instead, I pulled my blanket up more closely around my head because I had given up on the notion that I was going to be one of those fashionable football wives, at least, not while he was playing outside at this field. That was going to have to wait for an indoor stadium. Right now I was more concerned about frostbite: my own, but also Nico’s. I watched him jump on the balls his feet to stay limber.

  I was also concerned about getting some good pictures of this game, with Nico’s phone that he had loaned to me. Well, that I had taken out of his pocket, but it was necessary because mine still sucked and I had to get some shots to send to Chara. I was sure that he would be pleased with the direction of his social media when he finally looked at it. So far, he was refusing to take one single peek, even though I had explained what a good job she was doing with it. She had taken down all his lame, slutty pictures and what was going up was great. But Nico said he was done with all that, and he didn’t want to see himself anymore, or read a word of what was said about him. Luckily, from the comments and interest that Chara was generating, it seemed like other people did.

  His phone rattled in my lap underneath my coat and the blanket, and I carefully fished it out. It was Nico’s mom, calling again. We weren’t toget
her 24 hours a day, but I was pretty sure that he still wasn’t talking to either of his parents, and maybe not his six brothers and sisters, either. I still needed to work on that…

  But not right now, because the referee was gesturing the team captains out to the 50-yard line for the coin toss to start the game, and the starters were taking off their big coats to get ready to play. I swallowed hard. Ok, let’s go, Nico, I messaged to him with my mind, and also that I was there, always. Unless the bitter wind blowing across the field really did take me away, Mary Poppins-style.

  Chapter 11

  Ahhhh! Can you feel it? Spring is in the air and Mother Nature begins anew. You can, too! Open your heart and mind to new things, like friendships, ideas, and even love!

  And speaking of renewal, subscription fees for Mysti’s Morning Musings™ are due by April 1st.

  Yours in rejuvenescence, Mysti

  Do not run onto the field. Do not run onto the field.

  “What?”

  I looked at the woman next to me as the defensive players trotted off the sidelines and back into the game. They had been getting a lot of minutes today. “What?” I asked her back. I hadn’t even noticed that she had sat down there. I thought she was probably using me as a windbreak, because the arctic gale hadn’t let up yet, even as the sun lowered and the temperature also dropped.

  “You keep muttering under your breath,” she said. “Are you saying that you won’t run out on the field? Why would you do that?”

  “I’m tired of watching my boyfriend get beat up because…” No, ripping the other players on the Junior Woodsmen was not the way to make friends here. “I’m don’t like watching him get hurt.” The only silver lining to the offense being so inept was that there had been a million turnovers so far in the game, which meant that Nico hadn’t spent very much time playing. But despite his limited presence through the first three quarters, every time he actually had stepped out between the yard lines, someone had hit him hard. If he had the ball or not, someone was trying to knock him into next week, both his opponents and in a few cases, guys from his own team.