The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “Not anymore. Now it’s a hole,” I said glumly.

  “Remember how I wanted this place to feel like yours?” Gunnar asked me. “It was because I felt love there.” He led me into his bedroom, sat on the bed, and pulled me onto his lap, tucking a dry blanket around me. “That will go with you, wherever you are.”

  “What?”

  “It’s you, Hallie. You’re the love inside it,” he said.

  “I am?”

  He nodded, very serious. “You should bring that with you and come here.” He patted down my curls to press his cheek against my forehead. “You and Marley could come here.”

  “What?” I said again. “What do you mean?”

  “You could move into the Feeney place,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be permanent, if you don’t want to live with me. Once we get your cottage repaired, you two could move back.”

  “Or, we could stay here,” I said slowly. “We could stay with you, in the former-Feeney, now the Christensen place?”

  “Maybe it could be the Christensen-Holliday place,” he suggested. “Then you could keep your love over here, with me.”

  “Do you know the best part about love? No matter where someone is, even if they’re not on this Earth with you anymore, you still have it. That’s what my dad told me.” I put my cold hands on Gunnar’s cheeks and looked into his eyes. “But I think I would want to keep my love in the Christensen-Holliday house, close to you. I’d like to be close to you.”

  He kissed me. “I think that’s a great idea. Is that for sure?”

  I nodded. I was very sure.

  “Then I think we should get you warm, too. Your clothes are all wet.”

  “That’s what happens when you stand in the yard in a storm after your house falls down, wearing only socks and jeans and a Woodsmen t-shirt,” I explained. “And then you get wetter when you run to pull your boyfriend out of a moat where his car crashed and you trip on construction debris and fall onto your face into a snowbank.”

  Gunnar pulled the t-shirt over my head, and his warm hands took off my bra, and the wet jeans, and the underwear underneath them. He was very efficient, so in less than a moment we were both naked on his strange mattress, which I loved because it helped his back.

  “Are you going to have a hard time letting go of the cottage?” he asked me. He cupped my breasts. “I need to warm these up.”

  “Thank you,” I gasped as he pulled my nipples gently. “That’s much better, yes. You know, before I would have thought that I couldn’t ever move away from the cottage. It’s going to be difficult.”

  “We can bring parts of it over here. Like your bookcases, the quilt on your bed, anything you want. Is this cold, too?”

  “Yes, my butt is freezing. Squeezing and rubbing it like that is very helpful,” I told him and reached to touch him as well. “It’s not as hard as I thought.”

  “What?” Gunnar picked his head up from the nook of my neck and looked down at where my hands clasped his penis.

  “No, this is plenty hard,” I said reassuringly. “I meant, it’s not going to be as hard as I thought to move, to make a change. Sometimes it sucks, but sometimes change can be something wonderful.”

  “Yes,” he moaned. I moved my hands faster. “It’s wonderful. And speaking of sucking…”

  I did, and he did also to my various sensitive parts, until I was urging him to get down to business and he buried himself inside me.

  “Oh, Gunnar. I don’t know if it was clear before…could you keep touching me like that, always?”

  His thumb massaged my clitoris. “Yes, yes—Hallie, yes!” he told me, because he liked my hands on his butt, too.

  “I was saying that I don’t know if I made it clear before,” I tried to explain, as the orgasm swelled within me. “Because I never told you—oh, Gunnar, oh, Gunnar!” I arched, pressing toward him, pressing for more, for completion, for bliss. “I love you, Gunnar.”

  And there it was. We held each other tightly, like we always would, starting now and into forever.

  Epilogue

  “Hold up the bag and breathe into it. In and out, in and out. Slow down and relax—we have four quarters to get through, and you can’t deprive yourself of oxygen before the kickoff.”

  “But what if they don’t win? It will break his heart. He wants it so much.”

  “If they win or if they don’t win, Gunnar will still come home with us, and we’ll make him feel better. Our life will go on, and he’ll be ok.” I hugged Marley carefully, avoiding the brown paper bag that she now held over her mouth. “Statistically, I think the Woodsmen are going to beat the Evergreens into the ground. And even without the numbers on our side, I have a really good feeling about it, too.”

  She nodded as she breathed more slowly. “I don’t want him to be disappointed,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by the paper. “I really want the Woodsmen to get a championship for him. And I hate the Evergreens.”

  “We all do.” Inside, I was quaking with nerves, but I was trying to be very cool and not let Marley see them. She may have gotten an inkling, though, by the way I’d been holding her hand and crushing her fingers together. However, she’d been holding mine back just as tightly, right up until l noticed that she also seemed to be hyperventilating. She and Gunnar had gotten pretty close over the last few months and if I was his biggest fan, then she was a very, very close second. She had gone from threatening to maim him if he ever broke up with me, to suggesting that we both should adopt her, if the courts would let us.

  “I think you’d have to get married,” she had said pointedly to him, and Gunnar had nodded.

  “Marriage is a good thing,” he’d said seriously, then smiled at me. I definitely agreed with that and I also got a melty, gooey feeling with how he was looking at me.

  But before anything else, we had to get through this. The Woodsmen had finished with a perfect regular season, then battled through the playoffs, and now here we were in Los Angeles for the title game. Gunnar’s last chance for it, and although he wasn’t going to tell his teammates about his retirement until after the last whistle, I thought that many of them already had a feeling about what was coming.

  Maybe it made them play harder, and fiercer, and faster. Whatever drove them that day, it was a mighty, scary force. The Evergreens were totally outmatched, especially their defensive line. Not one of them got near Davis Blake, the Woodsmen quarterback. To me, the right side looked particularly strong.

  “I don’t think he’s ever played better,” I told Marley and she was in total agreement, as were Gunnar’s parents. His dad and I had been texting non-stop.

  “If that guy below our box doesn’t stop yelling that the Woodsmen suck, I’m going to dump my pop on his head,” she remarked, and I discreetly placed it out of her reach.

  Marley and I held hands again as the clock counted down to zero to seal the Woodsmen victory, and then we stood and screamed our heads off and danced like maniacs, until I had a close call with the railing that wasn’t quite high enough and we had to calm ourselves down.

  “When do we get to see Gunnar?” she asked almost immediately.

  “It’s going to be a while. They’ll celebrate as a team, and change, and—oh, look, they’re picking him up on their shoulders!” I cried, and Marley wiped her eyes with her orange sleeve as we watched his teammates carry him, their captain.

  “He should be the MVP,” she said, sniffing. “He deserves it.”

  He was my MVP, no matter if they gave him an extra trophy today or not. But yes, he did deserve it.

  “When do we get to see him?” Marley asked again later, for the fiftieth time, as we waited with all the Woodsmen friends and families in a huge, warehouse-sized room, decorated totally in orange.

  “They’re coming. They’ll be out soon,” I said, and stood on my tiptoes to watch the doors.

  “Gaby left you another message,” she told me, my phone to her ear. “She says she’s happy, but it sounds like she’s cryi
ng.”

  I hoped they were tears of joy. She had broken off everything with Shep, and there had been a lot of tears of the other variety lately. “Wait, why do you have my phone?” I asked.

  “You dropped it in the box while you were dancing,” Marley said. “The screen’s broken again.”

  “Darn it. Oh, here they are!”

  The grinning, laughing, yelling Woodsmen players came spilling out into the convention room, but I only had eyes for one. And his blue eyes were on me, too, me and Marley, and he picked us both up.

  “I’m so glad, Gunnar, I’m so glad!” I told him, and bawled onto his broad shoulder.

  “Me too, munch. We did it. I did it.” He put us down, then picked me back up to kiss me until we were both breathless.

  “Now would be a good time,” Marley suggested, as Gunnar and I smiled at each other.

  “A good time for what?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling, too. “Like, if you wanted to do some kind of storybook ending, Gunnar.”

  “You think?” he asked her, and she nodded. And then Gunnar got down on one knee.

  Another change was coming. It was going to be a good one.

  The Characters and the Books!

  About the Author

  Jamie Bennett (that’s me!) is the author of a bunch of super great books, including more about football (and one about Jory and Meredith, Defending the Rush). You would really like them. In fact, you should probably read them right now, immediately.

  Seriously. Go find them on Amazon.

  You can reach me via Instagram and Facebook (where you’ll find the recipe for the pie crust mentioned in chapter 10) @jamiebennettbooks (and join the Rocinante group for extra updates).

  Learn about the real Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, by clicking here.

  Thanks for reading. And if you enjoyed this book, please leave a review!

  More about Jory and Meredith: Defending the Rush

  This had been a big mistake. Like, huge.

  “Help,” I said to the empty room, and waited for a response. The only answer I had was the quiet hiss of the air conditioning. “Help!” I called more firmly, then waited again.

  Of course, no one answered. The room was empty except for me and the giant exercise equipment. The whole, enormous stadium was empty so early on a Saturday morning—eerily vacant and quiet for a place that should have teemed with fans there to cheer on the Woodsmen, northern Michigan’s one professional football team. The emptiness was why I had come to the weight room now, so I wouldn’t run into anyone. Great thinking, Meredith.

  “Help?” I asked it this time, kind of begging, and waited again. “Help! I’m stuck hanging upside down in the gym! This isn’t a joke, I really mean it!” Still no answer back. Ok, no one was coming.

  I tried once more to free myself, doing a partial curl in midair with my body to reach up to my ankles, to where I had hooked them on the exercise bar ten or so feet off the ground. “Come on!” I yelled, exhorting myself, but for what seemed like the millionth time, I just couldn’t make it. I flopped back down to dangling, panting and furious. Unbelievable! Was I seriously stuck like this, suspended here by these stupid boots? I rattled my feet in the straps and then tried another curl. Almost—almost—I held my breath and stretched—my fingertips brushed—no. I hung upside down again, defeated.

  I waited for a moment to gather my strength and calm myself down, but all the blood rushing to my head was making me dizzy. Humans were just not meant to be inverted for so long and I was going to have to get myself out of this somehow, and fast. First, I tried to reach my fingers out for the stool I had climbed on to get to the high bar, but it was just beyond my grasp. Then I strained up again, gasping, clawing at my own legs to try to grab my feet. I couldn’t get above my knees and I collapsed back down—again. My hands hung uselessly about a yard above the floor.

  Was I going to die this way, hanging like a bat by my ankles in the Woodsmen weight room? Would I meet my maker in the spandex pants that I could now see had a hole in the crotch, with me all sweaty and red and angry-crying? This was not the way I had thought I would go. But did anyone think she would die like this, suspended by gravity boots from a bar in room that smelled like a thousand years of sweat and male hormones, just because her stomach muscles weren’t strong enough to pull up one last time to unhook and jump down? I moaned a little, overcome with sadness for my wasted life and my weak abs.

  “What are you doing?”

  I had been so involved in the vision of my approaching demise, I hadn’t even heard this guy come in. “Oh, thank God!” I said. I reached out my hands toward him. My vision was getting blurry from being the wrong way up for so long. “I’m stuck hanging by my ankles from this bar! I can’t get down!”

  He stared at me. “Do you need help or something?” he asked.

  My mouth opened and closed. Was he kidding? “No, I’m really enjoying this. I wanted stay upside down forever,” I answered sarcastically.

  “All right.”

  And he walked away, back toward the door.

  “No, wait!” I yelled desperately. “I do need help! I really do! Can you get me down?”

  He ambled over, in no particular hurry. “All right,” he said again. He pushed aside the stool I had used to climb up on, apparently not needing the extra height himself.

  My face smashed into the front of his shorts as he put his arms around me. “What—” I yelped, but my words were muffled by his crotch. He lifted me up so that the hooks on my ankles could detach from the bar, and then he spun me around like a pinwheel so my head was back pointing to the sky. My face yanked free of his shorts and he put me on the ground and let go of me.

  Blood rushed back out of my brain and arms and I lurched forward, my body smacking into his. He didn’t reach for me, or steady me, but he did let me lean there, my forehead resting on his t-shirt.

  I stood back up, blinking as I looked into his face. “Thank you.”

  “You’re all red,” the man pointed out.

  “That’s what happens when you hang upside down for too long,” I explained. I still felt a little dizzy and a lot like I was going to throw up, but that might have also been because he swung me around so fast. I had been like a baton he twirled. How had he picked me up like that? I wasn’t exactly light.

  I bent to get those boots off my feet and the man stepped away. When he did, I realized that he was, by far, the biggest human being I had ever seen. It looked to me like a fairy tale had lost its giant, that was how large he was—like a foot taller than I was, and I didn’t count myself as small. But he wasn’t just extremely tall, he was also enormously broad across the chest where I had just been temporarily leaning. His tattooed arms in the sleeves of his t-shirt were as large as my thighs, and I didn’t count those as small, either. He had a bushy black beard, and crazy, long, wavy black hair, a sharp nose, and dark eyes, but I couldn’t tell the color because his baseball hat was pulled low, so that the top of his face was in its shadow. He was obviously one of the football players, because no normal human would have been so large, and also, only the Woodsmen players were supposed to be allowed in the stadium’s gym.

  Which was what he told me next. “The cheerleaders don’t work out in here,” he announced.

  “Oh, you mean me?” I was extremely flattered, because I had seen the Woodsmen cheerleaders. They were generally gorgeous and very toned. “You thought I was a professional cheerleader? No, I’m—”

  “You look like one,” he stated.

  I got flustered. “Thanks, I—”

  “They wear those bra shirts, too,” he said.

  I tugged at mine. It was a tank top, not a bra, but it was tight and it was short enough to show off the hole I’d spotted earlier in my pants. “Well, I’m not a cheerleader. I’m—”

  “Also, no wives can work out here. Or girlfriends,” he told me.

  I shoo
k my head. “I’m not with one of the players. My dad works for the Woodsmen. He’s—”

  “Daughters aren’t allowed, either.”

  My dad was the new Woodsmen head coach, I had been about to say. “I know. I’m Meredith Rob—”

  “Football players only,” he concluded.

  I stared at him. If he interrupted me one more time, we were going to have a problem. “Fine,” I retorted angrily. “I was going to leave, anyway.”

  “You were going to leave? Then why did you hang yourself from that bar?”

  With all the hair on his face, and with his hat pulled so low, I couldn’t tell his expression. I also couldn’t tell from his voice if he was joking, or teasing me. “I wasn’t hanging from there on purpose. I wanted an ab workout and…and I couldn’t get back up.” I hadn’t been able to reach the boots to get my feet out of them, and I hadn’t been able to grab the bar to unhook them and jump down, despite many, many long minutes of trying.

  He nodded and tilted his chin up and down, like he was giving me a once-over. “There’s a big hole in your pants,” he noted, and pointed at the juncture of my legs.

  I crossed them. “Thanks for noticing.” The jerk.

  “Anytime.”

  “And thanks for lifting me down. Goodbye.” I made it halfway to the door when the giant spoke again.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home, to make breakfast,” I said. Why did he care?

  “Do you make a lot?” the guy asked, angling his head thoughtfully. “I need big quantities.”

  “What?” I asked back, totally confused. “Well, yes. I make plenty.”

  “Sounds good.”

  What did? I stared at him, but he didn’t speak again, and it was just so odd.

  I really shouldn’t have come here, to Woodsmen Stadium. My dad had been trying to get me to visit his new workplace since I had finally given in and moved with my brother to northern Michigan about a week before, but I had told him no, I didn’t want to go to the stadium, I didn’t want to go anywhere. “I’m not interested,” I had mumbled over and over as I stared at my phone and checked on what my friends were doing back in California. I had said the same thing when he wanted me to go to the beach, to the sand dunes, on hikes, waterskiing, golfing, winetasting, and the million other activities that he had explained there were to do here. He sounded like he worked for their tourism board.