by Hannah Ford
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just how weird this is.”
He laughed. “What’s weird?”
“Ummm…you showing up where I work out of nowhere, getting me fired—“
“You didn’t get fired, you quit,” he said.
“No, you quit for me,” Faith corrected him. And that reminded her—what was she going to do now? She needed that job and that money. As it was, she’d barely been keeping her head above water, and now things would be even more dire.
“You don’t need to work for an asshole,” Chase said. “I should’ve slapped him around a little bit.” He grinned.
Thinking about slapping around her old boss seemed to make him happy.
“I wasn’t working there for fun,” she said. “I needed the money. I still need the money, actually. Only now I won’t be getting any, and it’s going to be a big problem.”
She shook her head in dismay. The last thing she wanted to be doing was whining about money to Chase Winters. She wanted to be kissing him, to feel him inside of her again. That’s what she wanted to be doing—and if not that, at least flirting and being appropriately sexy. But somehow she was bitching about her finances to him instead.
Complaining about money is definitely not hot, she decided. I need to step up my game.
But Chase didn’t seem to mind. “I learned something a long time ago,” he said, continuing to maneuver in and out of traffic like he was in fast motion and everyone else was in slow motion. And maybe that was entirely the case.
She hoped she wasn’t in slow motion like the rest of the world.
“What did you learn?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“I learned that it was never a good idea to just settle for the easy road.” He gave her a meaningful glance before looking straight ahead once more.
“You’re saying I was taking the easy road by working a temp job to pay my bills?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“That’s not true. The easy road would have been for me to live at home like my parents wanted me to, and to work nearby, and hang out with the same people and date the same guys—do all the same things everyone I knew was doing. That would have been the easy road.” She felt her stomach tensing as she tried to defend herself, not even knowing why she was so offended by his rather innocuous comment.
“If you say so,” he replied.
“You’re judging me.” She shifted in her seat, trying to relax but not succeeding.
“I’m giving you some helpful advice that I wish someone had told me when I needed it.”
“Well maybe I don’t need your advice. You barely even know me.”
He smirked. “I know a lot more than you think I do, girl.”
She glared at him. “What is it you think you know?”
He laughed. “I’m just saying—I think you could be doing a lot more than slaving away at some cubicle farm for a jerk that makes you scrape and beg like that.”
“Not all of us were blessed with the natural gifts that you have, Chase. I wasn’t born a boy who’d grow up to be six foot five and two hundred and fifty pounds, with speed and reflexes and abnormal strength. I’m just a regular girl, and you have no idea what I had to do to get that job at the cubicle farm and keep it.”
“Fine, if you want to believe that, I won’t stop you,” he said.
What she couldn’t believe was the tone of his voice, the arrogance. It was so incredibly frustrating to her, and she tried to remember how they’d gotten into this silly argument in the first place—and she wasn’t able to. Somehow, here they were, and she couldn’t let it go.
“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” she told him.
He shook his head almost indiscernibly. “I never called you stupid.”
“But you’re acting like I’m an idiot. I can’t believe you think you can give me advice when you basically had every physical advantage handed to you on a silver platter.”
He snorted. “I did, did I?”
“Maybe if you were five and a half feet tall and somehow played in the NBA, I’d be more inclined to listen to your theories about following your dreams. But you’re a freak of nature, and you don’t even seem to realize it.”
“A freak of nature?” he said, chuckling.
“Nobody is like you, Chase. Football is the easy road for you. If you looked like this and you were a heart surgeon or a mechanical engineer—that would blow my mind. You being a professional athlete is like, the most sensible thing in the world.”
She saw his shoulders hunch a little as he took in her words. “I get it,” he said, nodding. “So you think every guy over six foot tall plays pro football?”
“No, obviously not—“
“Then you must think all these fat fucks who are like six foot tall and weigh in at three hundred pounds scarfing down Big Macs everyday could play in the NFL. Right? Because that’s what you’re telling me, Faith.”
“Obviously not. But you can’t deny that you were born with some genetic gifts.”
“Yeah, I happen to be tall,” he said. “But there are a lot of tall dudes out there. There’s a million guys with size who can’t come close to doing what I do.” He shook his head. “You don’t get it. You have no clue, and that’s why you’re in the situation you’re in, baby.”
She almost told him to fuck off. Almost. The words were perched on her lips, but she held her tongue. “That’s incredibly rude,” was all she said, and then her jaw was locked and she licked her lips, trying to remember why she was here and how they could somehow come back from this insane argument.
“It’s not rude. It’s just the fucking truth.” His hands gripped and then re-gripped the steering wheel. “You know, there’s a reason that I got to where I’m at.”
“I know that,” she muttered.
“And you think I haven’t heard your theory before? You think people haven’t constantly said that if they looked like me, they could be a star athlete too?” He smiled as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever thought of.
“Well, it’s kind of true,” she said.
He took a deep breath. “When I was in high school, I was tall for my age—but I wasn’t jacked. I wasn’t some huge dude who crushed everyone that came near me. I was skinny, tall, and not all that fast. But I had some talent, yeah.”
“Obviously,” she muttered, but lower this time.
Chase went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “But I still remember, a scout from one of the D1 colleges came around my sophomore year of high school, and he told me that I wasn’t going to make it to the big leagues. He said that I didn’t have the speed or the size to play D1 college ball. In fact, he told me I should focus on getting a scholarship to an Ivy League football program, because maybe they’d take a flier on someone like me.”
Faith turned her head and looked at him, seeing him differently somehow. “That really happened?”
He glanced over at her, smiling, but his eyes were hard. “Yeah, it really happened. You think I had such a cushy road to the NFL. You don’t have a clue what I went through.”
“I guess I don’t.”
He sighed. “That scout lit a fire under my ass, because I realized that he was right about me. I wasn’t that strong or that fast. Not compared to the guys who were heading to the top colleges. So I started working my ass off—going out of my comfort zone. I found a strength and conditioning coach to work with me. I had to pay this guy to come and kick my ass every day—to break me down and build me into a football-playing machine. I did what I needed to do to better my situation, even though there were no guarantees it would even work.”
“That’s remarkable,” she said, meaning it.
“And it didn’t end there, either. Every year, every season, I had to get better and work harder and find ways to switch shit up so that I’d be at the top of the mountain,” Chase told her. “Waking up early, working hard when I was sick, when my ass was dragging—skipping parties, saying no to the cute gir
l that wanted to hang out, refusing to play video games with my buddies, and all of that shit that made college so much fun for everyone else. I wasn’t the most naturally gifted. I just worked so damn hard that people assume I was.”
She wasn’t prepared for his vigorous defense of what he’d done to get to the top of his profession, and Faith realized that she’d been wrong about him. And not only that, but she hadn’t realized how smart he was.
His passion had somehow managed to turn her on. She felt excited, sitting so close to him, feeling the burning sense of need and intensity that Chase Winters brought to every facet of his life. She’d never felt so alive as she did when she was near him.
“I was wrong,” she said, after some time had gone by since either of them had spoken.
She saw his thick shoulders slowly drop a fraction, and his hands lightened their grip on the wheel. “My past might have been different from yours,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance. “But nothing about my life was easy.” The final sentence he spoke was choked with emotion.
Faith swallowed, her heart beating fast.
Chase had never sounded this raw, this vulnerable. And she loved that he was sharing this side of himself with her.
Her expression softened. “I made a bunch of assumptions about you and I’m sorry.”
Chase nodded. “It’s okay. Everybody does it.”
“I don’t want to be like everybody.”
He smiled. “You’re not. Far from it.”
Now Faith was smiling too. She loved that he’d set her apart from the crowd. She wanted to occupy a special place in his heart more than just about anything.
“I’m glad you gave me that advice about not taking the easy road,” she said, deciding it was true. Now that the harsh sting of his judgment had worn off, she realized that it had been pinpoint accurate.
Chase was right about her.
She’d been taking the easy path in a lot of ways. She’d been scared, and so she’d made excuses.
“Yeah?” he said, seemingly pleased with her change of heart.
“Who knows, maybe you’ll rub off on me.”
They were in Beacon Hill now, which was Chase’s neighborhood. The elegant brick buildings and homes were somehow reassuring to her. She felt a little bit like a princess being carted around by her prince in his chariot.
“I don’t know if you want me rubbing off on you,” Chase said. “Right about now, most people don’t think I have much right to be telling anybody how to succeed.”
“Why? Because of one game where your team lost?”
He laughed cynically, as they came to a stop and parked outside of his building. “There aren’t all that many games in one football season,” he told her. “And that was an important one.”
She stared at him, worried for him in a way that she hadn’t anticipated. “You shouldn’t listen to the critics, Chase.”
He smiled softly. “I don’t really. I mean, yeah, it burns me a little that people are so quick to write me off because of one bad performance. Shit, I’ve had plenty of bad games since I started playing football. If I took every loss to heart, I’d have quit a long time ago.”
“So you’re not nervous about your next game?”
“The other guys are the ones who should be nervous,” he said, his eyes locking on hers intently. “Because now I’m going to make them pay for what everyone’s been saying about me.”
* * *
It was strange being back inside Chase’s Beacon Hill home once again. As he led her inside, she looked around at the familiar surroundings and reminded herself that this was real.
You’ve been here before. And it was a lot of fun.
It caused her to smile a secret grin.
“What’s so funny?” Chase asked, glancing over at her as he went to the refrigerator.
“Nothing,” she answered, her cheeks already flaming from embarrassment over what she’d been remembering.
“Want a beer? I’m having one,” he told her, pulling a Budweiser bottle out of the stainless steel fridge.
“Sure, why not?” she said, agreeably shrugging. At this point, any resistance she might’ve felt about doing this again was gone.
I’ve been fired, I’m probably going to be homeless soon. But right now, there’s no place else I’d rather be.
She laughed a little at the thought, and as Chase approached with the bottle of beer, he regarded her with a bemused look. “Come on, Faith. Penny for your thoughts.”
She took the ice-cold beer and sipped it, noting that it tasted smooth and good. “I was thinking that I don’t quite mind being fired right about now.”
Chase grinned as he took a long swig from his bottle, looking at her as he did so. He swallowed and nodded. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he told her. His grin faded as he stood in front of her, his hulking, masculine presence both intimidating and exciting all at once.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” she said. “You could’ve at least texted me after the last time we hung out.”
He took another swig from his beer. “Truth is,” he said, sighing, “I was hoping to forget about you, Faith.”
“Why?”
“Because, I don’t need any more complications in my life right now. I’m trying to keep shit simple.”
She watched him as he paced in front of the table—the table upon which he’d so forcefully screwed her the last time they were together. Her nipples stiffened just remembering it.
“Well I don’t want to complicate your life, Chase.”
Was that true, though? Maybe she did want to complicate it. If she wanted anything, it was to be a part of his world, his thoughts, to be one of the few things he truly cared about the way he cared about football.
“You might not want to, but women always complicate things.” He stared at her, challenging her to deny it.
“What if I’m worth it?” she asked.
His nostrils flared. “What if I’m not?”
“I’m not sure what would even make you say that.”
“Because, I know who I am. You don’t know anything about my life and the things that I deal with.”
“But you could try trusting me enough to tell me a few things,” she offered.
“I don’t know about that.” He suddenly put his beer down and then pulled his sweatshirt over his head, dropping it on one of the hard-backed chairs. Now he was in a tight, frayed white t-shirt that displayed his arms, his chest, and she could see the tattoos even through the thin material—just faint shadows for now.
Faith could hardly stand to look at him without feeling like she was being overcome with the need of him, the desperation for him. She didn’t want him to sense it, so she turned away and went to the leather couch, dropping into it and sipping at her beer.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him walking towards her. “During the Green Bay game, I was out there getting my ass kicked,” he said, as if she’d asked about it and he was only now answering her. “I was getting knocked around by these fucking animals, hitting me from all sides. And you know what I thought during the worst of it?”
She finally looked up from her beer, forcing her eyes to meet his, even though it made her chest ache and her belly fill with butterflies. “What did you think?” she said.
He didn’t break eye contact with her as he responded. “I thought to myself, I just want to go home and have Faith waiting there for me. I want to say fuck it to this crazy sport, and fuck all the people trying to take shit from me, all the people who want something from me—and to go and be with the one person who actually seems to want to give me something.”
His eyes were so intent on her as he stood there, the most physically stunning man she’d ever seen in her life. And he was looking only at her, and he’d just told her things that couldn’t be true. It must have been a dream, or she was actually insane and drooling in some loony bin right now, having a hallucination about the most famous football player in the world saying these t
hings to her.
“I don’t even know what to say,” she finally gasped.
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I’m just confused.”
“This thing with you isn’t supposed to be complicated,” he said.
“So this is a thing?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “What kind of thing is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. And then he moved to the couch and sat down next to her, and she slid over to make room for him.
His massive body nearly took up every spare inch, and his legs were touching hers. She felt her skin break into goose flesh as he made physical contact.
“I feel like maybe I’m losing my mind,” Faith admitted, laughing a little.
“Why?”
“This just seems surreal. I mean, you’re—you’re you.”
“Last I checked,” he grinned, his eyes burning into hers as she looked away.
“And I’m just some average girl. I don’t know why you’re with me.”
“Don’t say that,” he told her, reaching out and touching her face gently, causing her to look at him again. His hand was so large that she couldn’t even fathom how he could touch her so softly, so kindly.
“Is it wrong that I care about you already, when we hardly even know each other?” she asked him, finally meeting his gaze.
“I like that you’d even say that to me,” he told her, sliding closer. His hand dropped to her leg and slid up and down on her thigh. “Say it again.”
“What? That I care about you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Say that again.”
She smiled, blushing. “I care about you.”
He moved forward, leaning towards her now. “Say it again.”
“I…I care about you, Chase.”
“Again.” Now his lips were almost touching hers, and she could see clearly the bruising and red scratches around his eyes, the split lip that was somehow sexier than anything she’d ever seen.
“I care about you,” she whispered, her heart beating so fast, as his lips pushed against hers, and his tongue entered her mouth.
She moaned, having wanted this so badly, having thought about him almost nonstop since the moment they’d met.