by Tijan
“Sure! That’d be great. I could grab some posters, get the whole team to sign them? We do auctions here. That could help support the camp a bit more.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure.” Coach Winston urged Reese outside. “Hallway.” His eyes flashed.
Reese nodded, turning, his hand going to my hip and moving me ahead of him. Once outside, Coach said, “Upstairs. Your friend too.”
I was in trouble. By Winston Duty.
The old Charlie came to life, just a little. She did a little somersault inside me.
We went upstairs, moving into one of the sitting rooms. Once inside, Reese’s coach shut the door and shook his head. “Hell. That guy.”
“Is he for real?” Reese asked. “He wants my fucking autograph, so his son gets jealous?”
“This place was recommended by a buddy of mine, but now I don’t know.”
“Keith is usually kept away from campers. Owen, he’s the guy that’s been in the kitchen this whole time? His job is usually handling campers. He’s better at it.”
Both looked at me.
Reese asked, “Why’s he in the kitchen then?”
“Keith wanted to keep the staff at a minimum. It’s protocol if celebrities are here, and you guys are special. Keith thinks he’s a big basketball guy. He’d strut around like a rooster if more pro teams came here.”
The two shared a look.
Yeah. I doubted that was going to happen.
“That’s too bad,” Coach Winston said. “I’ve talked with Owen a few times about meals for the team. He seems like a good man.”
I nodded. “He is.”
Reese gave me a small smile. “You mind giving us a minute?”
“Actually, I want to talk to both of you.” He turned to Reese first. “She’s been sleeping in your cabin?”
Reese explained about my cabin, about the fish smell, and about how my other option would be a janitor’s closet. When he finished, the room was silent.
“Seriously?”
Reese nodded. “Are you really shocked after just hearing what he said?”
“This guy.” Winston shook his head. “Fuck.” He looked at me. “What about your friend? The motivational speaker guy? Where does he stay?”
“He’ll stay in an extra room, but it’s on the guys floor. Keith would never let me stay in a room with players on the same floor. He assumes I’d try to have sex with every single one of them.”
His eyes got even bigger, his eyebrows even higher. “Are you joking?”
“I wish. He has a history of suggesting things like that.”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw, stepping back. “This guy should not be the head of this camp. If I had known he was like this, we never would’ve come here.” His eyes rested on Reese. “If the tabloids find out about her? About her staying in your cabin?”
“They won’t.”
“None of the staff will say anything,” I said. “The few who know are good friends. Plus, we’ve all signed an NDA. That basically says we can’t say anything about anything that happened here during the time you guys were here. We can’t even say you guys were here in the first place.”
Reese’s coach continued rubbing his jaw. “Do the guys know?”
Reese nodded. “A few. They won’t say anything.”
A warning flashed in his coach’s gaze. “If an incident happens? If we have to let someone go from the team? You know things can get dirty.”
Reese grimaced, but he didn’t respond.
“Goddamn.” His coach shook his head again, gesturing to me. “She has to stay somewhere else.”
“Where? You know what that guy is like. He’ll put her in the janitor’s closet.” Reese cocked his head to the side. “Your place? You’re rooming with the other coaches.”
“We have an extra bed. You can stay with us. Leave her your cabin—”
I shook my head. “No. No way. I’m not putting a camper out of his own cabin. Juan already moved out because of me. I will figure it out. I promise.”
“Where?” Reese demanded, both of them almost glaring at me.
“I’ll—I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. Even if I have to drive to town for a hotel, I’ll do that. Or I can have Grant put a bed in Owen’s office. That’s easy. I’ll do that.”
Both of them were cursing.
“Owen offered me the guest bedroom in their house. It’s three nights. I can stay there. It’s no problem.”
No way in hell was I putting Owen out. If they had invited me as a guest, if I was here as a visitor, not staff, if Keith wasn’t such a dick and I knew he was banking on Owen and Hadley always offering up their guest bedroom—if any of those situations had been the case, I would’ve stayed there, but that wasn’t how things were. But I was no longer Reese’s problem. I knew that much too.
I would figure it out, even if I had to sleep in my car. It was camp. Maybe it was time I finally camped out? Problem solved. I could embrace my inner frozen tundra because end of October nights could get hella cold, but it wasn’t their problem to fix.
“I promise,” I said, a completely fake smile on my face.
They seemed to buy it, both nodding.
Phew.
And Reese said I couldn’t lie.
“You are really bad at lying.”
Reese found me later that night, and he spoke up as I was bent over the back seat of my car. I screamed, whirling around before clamping a hand over my own mouth. I nearly dry heaved.
“You are a man,” I hiss-whispered, speaking around my hand. Still in danger of dry-heaving here. “You’re not supposed to sneak up on a woman, in a parking lot, at night. Never ever.”
Everyone had gone to bed. I’d waited a full hour in Owen’s office before making my move for my car. I could’ve carried a mattress to his office. They were lightweight enough, but there was something sketchy about sleeping in someone else’s office and using the main bathroom everyone used—staff, campers, the random visitor, the mail guys, delivery service. Plus, I wasn’t lying when I said the basement was haunted. I thought the kitchen was haunted too. There were weird noises when no one was supposed to be around. Spooky shit.
No way. I’d take my car.
Reese rolled his eyes. “You’re not supposed to lie to me, and I knew you were lying. You’re horrible at it.” He motioned to his eye. “You do this little twitch up here. Do you not know that? Has no one told you that?”
I glared at him. “I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years with someone whose brain was slowly going. If Damian knew, he didn’t remember to tell me.”
The slight smirk vanished.
Reese straightened up. “Sorry. That was an asshole comment.”
I waved it off. “It’s fine.” And I was back inside my car. I’d been in the process of spreading out a sleeping bag I’d grabbed from the lost-and-found. They were always laundered before going in there.
Reese moved around the car. The door across from me opened, and he grabbed the sleeping bag. “No way. You’re not sleeping in your goddamn car.”
“Stop cursing.” I yanked it out of his hands. “And I am!”
“Why? Fuck the rules. Just sleep in my cabin. I’ll stay in your cabin. I’m a man. I can handle it.”
I snorted. “I had to go in there earlier, and I could barely manage to grab the bag you packed. I almost vomited. You try to sleep in there and your coach will be really pissed, because you’ll be in the hospital. Trust me. Stay in your cabin. I can handle this. I might be sleeping in my car soon anyway, so I should start getting used to it.”
Oh, crap.
I hadn’t meant to say that.
He went still. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. I meant for the next three nights.” Was it three, or two? I did the math. Two. Everyone was leaving on the third day, or now the second day.
“You’re lying. Again.” He reached inside, his arm span putting mine to shame. He grabbed my bag, my phone, and my keys. Shutting hi
s door, he came around, hip-checked me out of the way, and shut my door. “Let’s go.” He locked my doors.
When I didn’t start moving, he began guiding me forward. With his legs. His hips.
Good God.
He was muscled. It was surprising for how lean he was, but he was six-three and all muscle.
“How many miles do you ball players run in a game?”
We were moving past the cars.
He stepped to my side, my bag slung over his shoulder. “Is that one of your questions?”
“No. I’m actually curious.”
He shrugged. “Maybe two miles? It’s give or take per game.”
Two miles per game? “How many games do you play per season?”
He grinned down at me. “We play eighty-two games per season. You want more stats?”
“Always.” Did he not know me?
“Forty-one at home, forty-one away. We have five games this preseason. Our last two are at home.”
We were walking behind the main lodge. There was no light to show us the way, but I knew it by heart. I didn’t have a flashlight and normally, I’d have the random island invaders in my head, or a deer running at night, or a skunk even, but it wasn’t happening now. Because of Reese.
He calmed me, and he was trusting me in return. We were halfway down the path, in complete darkness, before I realized the magnitude of what we were doing. I’d never walked a path in the middle of the night, with no moon shining through the trees, no flashlight, and not been freaked out.
I bit my lip. I wasn’t about to jinx myself now.
“What’ll your coach say?”
“I’ll deal with him.”
I started to look back, but yeah. No light. Total darkness. I could only see black where he was, so I veered close to him until our arms brushed. “Are you going to get in trouble?”
He sighed. “Why are you pushing this?”
The answer was immediate. “Because I don’t want to be a burden.”
He was quiet a second. “Why would you think you’re being a burden?”
I bit my lip again, mashing them together. I tasted blood.
His voice was low. “Who made you feel like a burden?”
I remained silent.
“Charlie.”
I had to grin at that. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”
“You serious?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
He let out a strangled sound. “I feel like a dumbass. Jesus. I was calling you a gnat. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged, but remembered he couldn’t see. “We were going with the theme. Remember, I was your stalker in the beginning.”
“Don’t start—”
“I was, Reese.” That quieted him. “Damian liked you first, you know. I’ve always liked basketball. My two brothers played. One was a big star in school, and we weren’t close, but I felt close to him then. I think that’s when I really started loving the game. He didn’t give me any attention—I was a gnat to him. I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, but older brothers get caught up in being cool, you know? Except for basketball. I mean, I had to act a certain way. I could only say a couple things to him during a game, like hand him a water or give him a towel, but it meant something to me. I did stats, and he was the team’s star on passing. That’s why I started following you. Your passes are phenomenal. No one can match you in the league, and your ball handling skills are unprecedented. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that before this—before you and I became friends—you were already more than just a basketball player to me. You connected me to a good memory from my brother, and the same with Damian. We’d watch your games together, and for some reason, he was always Damian during those times. I still had him. He’d slip away later on, but I always knew he was Damian for eighty-two games a year—the ones we could watch on television, I mean.”
Reese was quiet. We walked a few feet, then, “Your brother didn’t let you speak to him?”
More lip mashing.
I twisted the ends of my sleeves into balls, knotting them together.
“To give him credit, I was probably annoying—”
“No little sister is truly annoying. They’re younger, and they just want to be loved. Unless they’re spoiled brats. Then it’s different. I have a feeling you weren’t spoiled.”
I wasn’t. Ignored? Forgotten? Yes. Not spoiled. Definitely not that.
“Did your family help with Damian?”
It hurt to talk about it. My insides were being stretched until I felt they were going to break apart.
“I tried to tell them once, but they didn’t want to understand it.” My stomach twisted, remembering. “They wanted to think I was lying, making it up. My mom got on the internet and tried to look up proof that no one in their mid-twenties could get early-onset dementia, especially not something that progressed the way his did. So I stopped trying. It was too much work to try to convince them.”
“That’s shit.”
Yeah. It was. “I think it’s easier for people to deny something than learn and change.”
“Still shit. Your family was shit for doing that to you.” There was an extra edge in his tone. “And his family? Did they step up?”
Tears fell down my face.
He didn’t know. He didn’t see. I wasn’t making a sound.
My voice was normal. “At the end. They took over conservatorship of him. He’s completely reliant on them for everything now.”
“Did they know before the end, though?”
My throat spasmed. My hands trembled. My knees almost buckled. But my voice—it was normal. Maybe I couldn’t lie about some stuff, but other things, I didn’t give a damn thing away. And for the moment, walking that dark path, I let myself fall apart, except the part he could hear.
“His dad had passed from dementia, and there was some violence that came with it before he went into a facility. Damian blamed his mom for letting it occur as long as it did, so there were problems between them. They didn’t talk.”
“Did you reach out to her?”
My voice dipped, a small chink in my armor. “Yes.”
He paused. I knew he heard the small crack in my voice.
He asked, his voice low, “And he didn’t want you to?”
The chink grew. “No.”
“I will never forgive you if you go to her about this. I’ll never forget, even with my brain. I won’t forget. It’ll be the one thing I remember about you: that you betrayed me.”
“She’s your mom, Damian. She can help.”
“No, she can’t! I don’t want her to know.”
Reese was quiet again. We walked a few more yards. My heart felt like it was down there with my feet, like I was walking on top of it.
I was whispering now, and Reese had to know I was faltering. “Sometimes the hardest part of having a disease, or having something happen to you, is acknowledging that it’s happening. Once you do, your life is never the same. You’re never normal again. Once you acknowledge it and ask for help, you’re never the same person again. You cease to be you, and you become the you with the problem. He’s no longer Damian. He’s Damian who has dementia. Pride can sustain a person for a long time before they have to break.”
I sank to the ground.
I couldn’t go any farther, and I was cracked wide open again. I couldn’t keep the sobs to myself anymore.
Reese sat beside me, his feet coming around both sides of me. His arms slipped under me and he scooped me up, pulling me onto his lap. So simple a movement, but it meant so much to me. He cradled me, his hand smoothing back some of my hair.
“Was he a good guy?”
I grabbed his shirt, fisting it. “He was the best kind of guy there was.”
He got it. A small weight lifted. He understood. The dementia wasn’t Damian. The disease didn’t define who he was. So many didn’t see that. They just saw the disease. And if they couldn’t see the disease, they didn’t think it existed.
Reese’s arms closed around me, his forehead resting on my shoulder for a moment. “I wish my brother—I get you. I get what you went through, but Damian didn’t want to suffocate you.”
“No.” I sniffled. “He did at the end. He couldn’t help it. He was too far gone, too much in denial of what was happening to him.”
“My brother thinks I owe him. My lifestyle should be his. Hell. He kinda looks like me, so he tells people he is me, and he gets all this treatment because of it. Penthouse suites. Comped meals at restaurants. He tries to get free shit. Women. I’ve had so many women claim I got them pregnant; then they realize it was my brother who fucked them, and suddenly, it was a false positive.” His voice was laced with disdain. “He was using my name at a club, and a girl thought she was going to sleep with me. She found out during the act that he wasn’t me. She tried to say no. He didn’t stop. He just…” His arms tightened around me. His voice was anguished. “Didn’t stop.”
I felt hollow at times. I recognized the same in him.
I felt it, and I understood.
Letting go of my sleeves, I slid my hands over his arms, moving to face him. I twisted around, my forehead pressed into his shoulder as I tried to grip him back.
I wanted to soothe his pain, to shield him from the harm his brother could do, to take away the damage his brother had already done. I knew in that instant that these were the same feelings I’d had for Damian, all over again.
But this was different, because Reese didn’t need me to breathe for him.
I just needed to sit alongside him.
He could breathe on his own.
After a beat, I lifted my head. “I know why we’re friends.”
He grunted, sliding his hand up my back, curling it around my shoulder. “Please, enlighten me. This should be good.”
I paused, my hands falling to the bottom of his sweatshirt. I tugged on it. “You want serious or the joke response?”
His chest rose, pausing, and his forehead came down to rest on mine. “I think I need the joke now,” he murmured. “That’d be helpful.”
The joke. I could do that. I was good at that.
“Well, we’re friends because we’re both ridiculously good-looking.”