The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  I saw Nico watching me across the party from where he was sitting on the couch with some of the defensive players. Both he and Knox had worked out with them during the week, which appeared to have cemented them all as friends. Someone offered me a beer but I didn’t feel like drinking; I felt like hiding in my bedroom and lying down.

  This whole thing was reminding me way, way too much of Nico’s last party in our Miami apartment the night I had gone out with Galen, except that everyone here had on more clothing due to the lower temperature outside. A few carfuls of women had shown up, and when they did, the testosterone level in the room had increased dramatically until I felt like I could almost taste it. I gagged a little. It left a disgusting flavor in my mouth, but the coughing was bringing up some gross stuff, too, so maybe I was just tasting phlegm.

  I left the crowd in the living room to wander into Nico’s bedroom to find something warmer to wear. I generally felt cozier in his clothes, as mine tended to be fairly tight. I looked very cute in my outfits, but they were restrictive. I liked to wallow around in Nico’s shirts, because they were all gigantic and smelled delicious, just like the man himself.

  I opened the door to his darkened room. I knew exactly the sweatshirt I wanted, his old college…oh. A naked woman—at least half-naked, because I could see her boobs—sat up in his bed when I turned on the light.

  “Sorry, he’s already taken,” she told me, and smiled. Her skin glistened and shone, like she was a french fry just plucked out of hot oil.

  “Yes, he is taken,” I answered angrily, the old fire of possessiveness suddenly flaring. I felt in my pocket for the throwing star I had placed in there that morning in preparation for the football game. “I’m going to—” I started coughing too hard to finish the thought.

  “Oh, hey!” She hopped out of the bed, and yes, she was fully nude. “Are you ok? Come here and sit down.” She helped me to the edge of the mattress. “Want a glass of water?”

  I held my hand over my chest, where I felt like I was being stabbed with a knife. “No,” I gasped. “No, thanks. I’m ok, I just have a cold and a little cough.”

  The naked woman put her hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up. This isn’t just a cold—you definitely need to go to the doctor! I’ll walk you…” She looked down at herself. “Oops!”

  “You should put some clothes on and stay at the party,” I told her. “But Nico’s out, ok? Please don’t go after him. I would take a look at that Teddy, the quarterback. A lot of potential there.”

  “Teddy Hayes…thanks!” she said enthusiastically. “Can I find your friends to drive you?”

  “I’m going to ask someone,” I answered, and she pulled on her clothes and left, probably to look for Teddy. But I took another moment before I followed her, figuring out my next move. The doctor, that was a definite, because I seemed to be pretty close to falling apart, health-wise. But then what? What was I going to do?

  When I went into the living room, I saw him. Was it supposed to be some kind of sign from the universe? Nico stood at the front window, bending down to talk to a beautiful woman I recognized immediately. She was the Woodsmen Dame, the cheerleader that Daisy had mentioned to me before. Their heads were close together because she was so nice and tall, and he smiled at her, that old, familiar smile that had probably convinced thousands of women to immediately drop their panties. I felt the pull of it myself, and it wasn’t directed at me.

  I didn’t know if it was a sign or not, but I looked at the two of them for a moment more, and then I went back to my bedroom to pack a bag and order a car to take me away.

  ∞

  “I’m fine. I don’t need anyone to carry me!” I told Knox, and batted at his giant hands. “Stop!” I walked up the gravel driveway to their cottage instead of riding in his arms.

  “Can I get you anything?” Daisy asked me anxiously. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, I’m really fine. I’m sorry for this, but I don’t want to go home while that party is happening.”

  She batted her hands too, at my concerns. “Of course you should stay here! You can stay forever, if you want.”

  Knox got an odd look on his usually deadpan face, so I got the clue about his feelings toward her offer of permanent residence in their house for me. “I don’t need to stay forever, just tonight. I’m sure that by tomorrow I’ll have all this figured out.”

  “‘All this,’ like, your life?” Daisy asked. She had me lie on the couch and put a quilt around my legs. “I think we should talk about that, Tates. I don’t want you to make another snap decision, like how you moved to Florida all of a sudden.”

  “That may have seemed sudden, but I had been thinking about it for a long time. I knew that I had to make some changes. Now I may have to make more.” I was trying to stay awake and talk, but my eyes kept sliding closed, and before I knew it, I was lifted off the couch.

  “I said no to the carrying!” I told Knox, but he put me on the bed in their guest room anyway, and Daisy tucked me in, which felt very nice. “Thank you. I’m leaving soon,” I assured Knox, and I would have told them more, but sleep engulfed me almost the moment I closed my eyes again.

  “I’m just going to look in at her,” I heard Nico say from somewhere nearby, and I opened my eyes back up, groggy and confused about where I was. The door cracked open to what I recognized as Daisy’s guest bedroom, and Nico’s head appeared with the hall light behind it. Without thinking too much, I held out my arms and he crossed the room to me.

  “Tatum, what the hell? Honey, what happened?” he asked, and he sat on the bed and wrapped me up in a hug. “I was getting frantic when I couldn’t find you in the apartment, and the car was still there, you weren’t answering your phone. I thought you had wandered off into the cold.”

  “I’m not a wayward pet,” I said sulkily, but anything else I was going to say got lost in a coughing fit. Nico handed me a glass of water and then helped me hold it, because my hand shook a little. “I had to go to the doctor after I found the naked woman in your bed.”

  “What?” He looked honestly shocked, like he hadn’t asked her to be there. “What did she do to you?”

  “Are you kidding? I could have taken her! As greased up as she had herself, it would have been hard to get a hand-hold, but I—”

  “Tatum, please. Did someone hurt you?”

  The way he was looking at me, so worried and with his face so open, it was hard to believe that just a…was it hours now? Just a few hours before, he had been smiling at that Woodsmen cheerleader in our apartment.

  “Of course no one hurt me. I started coughing pretty badly, and the naked woman felt my head and said I had a fever. And it turns out I did, and it’s pneumonia, so luckily she wanted to have sex with you. In that sense, it was lucky.”

  Nico shook his head. “I don’t understand. This isn’t making sense. How high is your fever?” he asked, and put a hand on my forehead like his would-be sex partner had.

  Daisy stepped into the room and turned on the light next to the bed. “Tatum called me from a walk-in clinic to say that she had gotten a car over there and I went to pick her up,” she explained to Nico. “A woman who you were going to, um…a woman in a state of undress in your bedroom suggested that she go to the doctor.” Her voice turned angry. “Of course Tatum didn’t want to go back to your apartment with everything you had going on there!” I had explained about him, the naked woman, and Samantha, the cheerleader, in the car on our way to Daisy’s cottage. “If you want to hurt him, I’ll help you,” she had offered. She was really my best friend.

  “I would have made everyone leave. I did, when I couldn’t find you,” Nico told me. “Can you come home with me now?”

  “I don’t want to,” I said, and I pushed at his arms until he let me go. “I’m tired and I want to go back to sleep. Here, with Daisy, not in your apartment.”

  “Ok,” he said slowly. “Ok. Is there anything I can do?”

  “You’ve done plenty,” Daisy said. S
he gestured to the bedroom door. She didn’t get mad too easily, but she could bring it, especially for the people she loved. The story of the oily, naked woman and Nico chatting again with the cheerleader had pushed all of Daisy’s protective buttons.

  “Can I stay until you fall asleep again?” Nico asked me.

  “Well, I guess,” I said, and I spotted Daisy shaking her head behind him. “It’s ok, this will help me think,” I told her, and I lay back down in the bed as she left, still shaking it a little.

  Nico rubbed up and down my arm. “I knew you were sick, but I didn’t think it was this bad. I wish I had taken you to the doctor myself.”

  “You were busy,” I tried to say pointedly, but I started coughing again, and then I was too tired to argue about women and parties and acting single.

  He rubbed my back, now. “Damn, Tates, that sounds awful. And I made you go to the gym on Friday, and you sat outside at the game. I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged that off, because neither of those things was actually his fault, and the back rub felt good.

  “My mom used to sing us to sleep. Want me to sing to you?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered quickly. “I want to sleep, not laugh.”

  The bed shook a little as Nico laughed instead of me.

  “You’re getting interviewed tomorrow, right?” I asked. The rubbing was working, making me tired.

  “Yeah. My agent and the lawyers all got here today. I’m meeting with them…” There was a little silence. “I should be meeting with them right now. I’ll let them know I’ll be there soon.” I heard him typing on his phone.

  “They didn’t come to watch you play,” I pointed out. I would have seen them there.

  “No, they don’t care too much about that. Ethan probably looks at my stats afterwards or has some assistant do it, to make sure he still wants me as a client.”

  “Dropping you would be the dumbest thing he ever did. You’re going to make it back on top, and he’ll still be clinging to your coattails,” I noted.

  “Not his biggest fan, are you?”

  “I didn’t like how he thought you were guilty,” I said. “He just assumed you were. All of them did when we were in Miami, like you were the kind of person who could have done something like that.”

  “You didn’t think so,” Nico said softly.

  “No, of course not. You do plenty of dumb things, like Samantha, but I knew you weren’t guilty when you got arrested.” I yawned.

  “Samantha?” he asked, but I shook my head and said no. I was too tired, and a second later, I was asleep.

  “Nico stayed for a while,” Daisy told me the next morning. “He wanted to talk to me about you, and talk to Knox.”

  “What about me?” I asked curiously.

  She removed the thermometer from my ear and looked at the number. “It’s almost back to normal,” she said with satisfaction. “He wanted to hear what the doctor said, and ask why you hadn’t told him that you were leaving the party. I said you were an independent woman who did things on your own, that was why you had left without telling him, and I also said that when people are sick, they need to be with people who will take care of them, people who don’t have oily, naked women in their beds and Woodsmen Dames hanging around their necks.”

  “Daisy got a little heated,” Knox put in.

  “What did Nico say to that?” I now demanded.

  “He said he hadn’t invited that woman to his bed, and he had already changed the sheets,” she answered. “And I asked him about Samantha, the cheerleader, and he said that she was a friend. And then Knox said, ‘Friend?’” Whenever Daisy repeated what her husband said, she dropped her voice to imitate him, and he always smiled at it. But he smiled at her for almost everything she said and did, for that matter. “And when Knox asked that, Nico just nodded and said that they were friends, that was it.”

  “And Daisy told him very politely that was late and we were going to bed, even though it was only seven-thirty, and he left,” Knox finished.

  “Hm,” I considered, spooning my cereal. “Daisy, this is so tasty. I never ate anything more delicious in my life.”

  “It’s only oatmeal,” she said. “I think the antibiotics must be kicking in and you’re feeling better. Have you eaten very much lately?”

  I hadn’t. It could have accounted for my fairly low energy level and indecision of the past week. Of course, the pneumonia couldn’t have helped, either.

  “So,” Daisy said. She waited a beat. “I was thinking a lot about you and Nico last night.”

  “I know, you want me to move in here and break up with him. No, you don’t even think that I’m together with him in the first place. I know—”

  “No,” Daisy said. “No, and that’s what I wanted to tell you. I will admit, I thought you were wrong about Nico, but seeing him here with you, it gave me a little pause. I’m not sure if he’s just the empty-headed, slutty kind of guy that Knox and I thought he was.”

  “Hey!” I protested.

  “I always thought he was a great football player,” Knox assured me. “But he did go out too much, self-promote to an extreme, have too many women around, that kind of thing.”

  “The self-promotion is over,” I told them. “He hasn’t even looked at any of his social media since Miami. He has no idea what’s being said about him, and he says he doesn’t care. And as for the women, well…” Well. That was still the issue. I harkened back again to what I had said to Chara about her crappy boyfriend. One of the many things I had said, which was, “If he’s with other women, do you really want him?”

  “I do,” I told Daisy.

  “You do what?”

  “I do want him. I still know it, Daisy. All the microbes in me were clouding my thinking and preventing me from action, but as soon as I’m back to my regular self, things are going to go down.”

  “Uh, in terms of what that means about Samantha and the other women…” Daisy started nervously.

  “Oh, I’m not going back to jail! Don’t worry about anything happening to them. Or, if it does, you won’t know it’s me.”

  “Tatum! Promise, right now.” She held up her little finger, and I sighed, but swore that I would leave them alone. I understood, after all, how they might not be clear about the state of my relationship with Nico, since he appeared to remain confused about it himself. And I couldn’t blame them for finding him overwhelmingly attractive, since I did, too.

  “I promise to leave them alone, if he does,” I clarified. “It’s a two-way street.” That was the best she was going to get from me. I took another giant bite of her oatmeal, then unfortunately went into a coughing fit that made everyone else’s breakfast a little unpleasant, and Daisy sent me back to bed. I wasn’t totally better yet.

  But by Monday, I felt well enough to do something I knew I had to. I left Daisy’s cottage while she was at work and Knox was checking on their new house, and I took a car over to my dad’s office. I pushed open the glass door to Con-Nar Construction and walked into the unfamiliar lobby. I had never been there too much and it had been remodeled just like my old house, probably by my father’s new fiancée. I recognized her signature fleur-de-lis stencils on the wall. Ugh, her taste was as bad as the taste of the phlegm I had been coughing up lately.

  “Ragnhild Reglas for Conrad Smith,” I told the receptionist briskly, rolling my R.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. I recognized her bored voice from the phone.

  “I don’t think anyone from the county Code Office needs an appointment.” I pulled out my notebook and a file of papers and put my reading glasses on my nose. “There are several instances of blatant violations in five separate projects that Mr. Smith and I need to discuss. Immediately,” I said, looking down at the words on my application for a food service license, which the glasses made into blurry, wavy lines. I removed them. “This is potentially a criminal investigation, miss.”

  “Just a moment, Miss Reggae.” She didn’t bother to pag
e anyone, but stood up and hurried down the hall.

  I followed her, smiling politely at the other employees. “Don’t worry, we would only arrest the highest-ranking people here, like the guys with their names on the sign outside, Conrad and Narciso,” I told them. “Your jobs are safe.” They stared at me. “Hi, Mrs. Pedersen,” I said to an older lady I recognized. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Hello, Tatum,” she called. “Why, it’s been years since you’ve been to our office! I did see some lovely pictures of you with Nico Williams on all the Woodsmen gossip websites. I’m very happy for you, dear.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Chara and I had been leaking things regularly, all the good news we could think of.

  “My husband and I are going to the next Junior Woodsmen game. I miss football so much in the off-season and I do love the look of Nico Williams in those tight little pants,” she said, just as the receptionist reached the big office at the end of the hallway. “What an ass on him.” I nodded in agreement and waved goodbye.

  “Mr. Smith, there’s a lady here to talk about building code violations,” the receptionist said, but I just stepped past her.

  “Hi, Dad,” I told the man behind the desk. It was funny, because it hadn’t been too long since I’d seen him, but he looked different to me. Smaller than I remembered, maybe older, too.

  “Tatum,” he sighed.

  “Who is this?” the receptionist asked. “You’re not Rainy Reggae from county code enforcement?” she asked me.