Lizzie watched as number thirty-four faded back, looked for the opening, and like he was so famed for doing, sent the ball whizzing through the air at the last second to slam into the receiver’s waiting arms in the end-zone, just as the score board signaled the end of the game. The crowd went wild. Lizzie nibbled on the corner of her lower lip and enjoyed being lost in the celebration. She realized then how much she had missed this excitement, and for a moment she wished she had been able to say screw you to Payton and get on with enjoying her life- including her love of watching football.
Apparently that wasn’t something she had been able to do, however. It was simply too heart-wrenchingly painful to watch his long, lean body out there on that field, or on the television in her apartment, or in any of a million other places that he or his name might pop up. So, in retaliation of her traitorous feelings she had cut herself off from a sport that she had come to love dearly.
Lizzie filed out of the stadium along with the eighty thousand other spectators and made her way back across campus to her apartment. It was a night game and it wouldn’t be long before the fraternity parties would be swinging into high gear.
She heard Grace shut the door as she came in, and she purposely went to the bathroom and turned on the shower water to drown her out for a few more minutes. She didn’t want to be bothered. She just wanted to be left alone with her thoughts. Thoughts of that stupid jerk Payton and all the ways he had destroyed her life.
You’re such a loser, Lizzie. I never want to see your face again.
Amazing how words really did have the power to hurt. Well, she’d made sure he would never have to see her face again, that was for sure. She even went so far as to check the class rosters each semester before classes began so that even in her classes of hundreds of students she wouldn’t mistakenly find herself in the same one as him.
Maybe it was the game and seeing good ole number thirty-four out there on the field that had reminded her of the past. Who was she kidding? She thought of him, of them, every day of her life. Lizzie shut off the water and ran her hand down her hair to slick out the excess water. She wrapped one of the apartment’s threadbare white towels around her body and tried to block out Payton and all his cruel words.
She had been such a chicken that night, Lizzie thought as she used another towel to rub through her hair. She wasn’t like Grace, and had never been one for quick comebacks. If she shot out a zinger it was merely out of God’s good grace. It took her a week after Payton’s breakup for her to finally think up exactly which route she should have told him to take on his way to hell. She could still recall the exact words- maybe that was because she’d written them in her diary and still reviewed them quite frequently. Unfortunately, she had never been given her chance to use them.
Grace knocked on her bedroom door an hour later. “You ready to go in there?”
Lizzie opened the door in what she hoped looked like a dress that could kill. She decided on definitely so when Grace gave a playful growl and waggled her eyebrows. “Damn, girl. If I was gay I sure wouldn’t kick you out of bed tonight. Are you dressing for someone special tonight?”
Lizzie elbowed her. “Thanks. You certainly know how to flatter the ladies. And no, I just felt like wearing this dress I bought last week before it gets too cold to wear it.”
Half an hour later the two entered one of the main houses on fraternity row and made it to the back of the house where all the kegs were lined up. A DJ was set up in one of the corners and the bass thrummed through the room, shaking the windows and vibrating the floor.
Lizzie took the beer that someone handed her and made her way out onto the screened porch where a group of probably fifty people were dancing close together. She had learned her freshmen year in college that there was safety in numbers, and she knew that she could lose herself there in that mass of writhing bodies and flowing alcohol better than she could lose herself anywhere else tonight. And she knew she needed to after the crazy emotions that had been rolling around inside of her since this afternoon.
A new song, something with a rap flare, started playing over the massive speakers hovering around the house, and Lizzie pushed her way deeper into the throng of dancers. Someone she didn’t know sidled up next to her. She looked his way and smiled, letting him know it was fine with her if he wanted to dance with her. He placed his hands on her hips pushing her body into the rhythm of the beat, and she sipped some more of the beer before she let her body loosen up and start to enjoy the music.
In the world of fraternities and their parties, the guest list rules. Any woman that cared to show up at their doors was gladly invited to join the party, whereas only guys that belonged in that fraternity were allowed to enter. All guys except the select few that were universal in acceptance: the football players. In the same way that she had religiously checked class rosters, Lizzie had always selected fraternity parties carefully so as to avoid too many football players and the potential that Payton would be among them. She thought she had chosen carefully tonight, so she put her mind at ease and had let herself drink at least two or three beers during the course of the night.
Not the strongest of drinkers, she had begun to get a buzz after beer number one, and was well on her way to tipsy by beer number three. So lost in the ebb and flow of dancing and music, she didn’t notice the group of players that had entered the party. And as always, at their center, was beloved number thirty-four.
She turned and saw him, standing tall and proud- the larger than life figure he had somehow always been- and suddenly all the anger, all the rage, and the pain that she managed to bottle away for all these years came spewing to the surface like a geyser.
Lizzie was fuming by the time she made it halfway across the party to where he was. Already he had a swarm of girls trying to wedge their way through the group of ball players around him, and he looked like he was enjoying every second of the spotlight.
“Hey, Payton, you looked so hot out there on the field today. Want to come home with me and I’ll rub away your aches and pains?” Some tactless bimbo practically flung herself at him. She smiled smugly as the thought of the reaction he would have when she tapped him on the shoulder and then slugged him right in the gut. It was payback time and Payton wouldn’t have anywhere to run in the midst of all those groping, fawning girls.
She almost tackled him, and probably would have succeeded if she hadn’t tripped over a beer can someone had carelessly strewn on the floor. She looked up just in time to see that her grand entrance has just been ruined, and Payton was staring at her from across the room along with about half of the other people in the room. The embarrassment she suffered only fueled her anger. She pushed herself up and forced her legs to move her forward. She was too far into this to back out now. Her breathing was agitated by the time she reached him, and she promptly shoved a freshly manicured and rather pointed tip straight into the thick muscle over his heart through his golf shirt.
“You!” She glared at him as someone turned the music lower on the speakers. No one wanted to miss what the drunken party girl was saying to UGA’s star. “I thought I told you I never wanted to see your face again.”
The smile that had formed on his face as she walked across the room to him now faded and he looked at her dumbly. She had had this fight brewing in her head for quite some time and now was the perfect time to let it fly.
“What’s wrong, QB? Too busy thinking up new bets to talk?” The crowd looked on with baited breath.
He reached out and took hold of her arm, bruising her a little with his force. His jaw muscles strained against his cheeks as he clenched and released them. “Lizzie-“
“Don’t touch me!” She shouted as she jerked away from him. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his khaki slacks to prevent himself from doing so again.
“Let’s go outside so we can talk in private, okay?” He smiled at her but she knew he didn’t mean it. The dimple wasn’t there on his cheek and it always was when he was sincere.
“Whatever you have to say can be said right here.”
“Fine.”
He crossed his arms over his chest in a protective measure, and just like they’d been programmed to do after so many practices with him on the field, all the players behind him did the same. His hit squad behind him, and the multitude of interested onlookers began to unnerve her a touch, but she hadn’t been the biggest loser in her school growing up and not learn anything from it. She wasn’t backing down without putting up a fight.
“Well, go on, Lizzie. You started this so you must have something to say.” She thought she saw a hint of pity, or maybe it was disappointment, flashing in his eyes. Who the hell was he to judge her, she wanted to know? In her drunken stupor she overlooked his pleading look asking her stop and be reasonable.
The crowd around them had grown completely silent, but she didn’t even notice. She was focused on his face and the inner turmoil she was reliving at that moment. She watched his face fall when she said, “You are nothing but an arrogant, self-centered, self-pleasing jerk, Payton Cartwright.”
He recovered in an instant. “Aww, now Liz, I don’t think you really mean that.”
“Yes, I do, you, you prick. You’re nothing, do you hear me? Nothing! I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you!” Tears started to trickle, hot and heavy, down her cheeks. His eyes held that same sad look again, and she wanted nothing more than to swipe it off his face.
“Liz,” he whispered at her, leaning in to her just a fraction then quickly backing away as she swatted out at him.
“Don’t you dare come any closer to me.”
“But you’re embarrassing yourself.” He managed to take hold of her arm and began to steer her out the back door of the party, but the people blocking the door found no good incentive to allow the current life of the party to pass.
“No, Payton. You’re the only one who ever embarrassed me. I can’t believe I thought you might love me, too.” She laughed, a wicked gurgle at the back of her throat. “It wasn’t love you felt for me. You just wanted to use me, screw me, for a stupid bet.”
“That’s enough, Lizzie.” Payton’s voice grew hard and stern. He pulled her up close to him, daring her to try and do anything to stop him. “You’re drunk as a skunk, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me. You’ve never done it before, why would you start now?” Suddenly she felt very much like she was being reprimanded by her father, and she hated that the one person in her life who had hurt her more than anyone else was doing it again. She hated him. Hated what he’d done to her. Hated that she had never been able to forgive him for it, and that even though she speculated somewhere deep inside her that he had made that story up she still couldn’t look at a guy without wondering if he’d just do the same thing to her all over again.
Four years of torture boiled up inside her. Four years of not feeling worthy ate at her, turned her stomach to acid, and she knew that nothing, not even being embarrassed by a room full of fraternity guys and their drunken dates could stop her from telling Payton exactly how she felt.
“So what if I am lying to you, Payton? Nothing I ever did was good enough for you, Mr. God-to-be-worshipped-by-all. Why should it matter now what I do?”
She paused briefly just to catch her breath before finishing him off with one final parting blow. She was surprised, though, when the look in his eye changed, and he softly said, “That’s not true, Liz. You were always good enough for me.”
She stared at him, some of the steam suddenly out of her engine. She wanted to believe him so badly her heart ached. Just once she wanted to be able to hold on to something he said and feel like it meant something, but she knew better than to trust him now.
He was doing it again. He was just being nice to her out of pity- or worse, for exactly the reason he had said all along. On a bet. He was the star and he couldn’t stand watching her steal his thunder. Well, she’d be damned before she’d let him get away with ruining her life even more than she had that day.
She glanced around the silent crowd and took the closest person’s cup. She mustered up all the energy she had in her spent and weary body. From the very bottom of her badly bruised and battered heart she ground out her final, damning words.
“I hate you, Payton Cartwright. Until the day I die I will never forgive you for what you did to me. I hate you with every ounce of my will power.” And as if by repeating his words back to her she could somehow lift the damage he had done she said, “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”
Lizzie turned on the bed and fluffed the down pillow into a better position, remembering the way Payton had jolted when she’d tossed the foamy remnants of that beer cup into his face. It had taken her so many years to forgive herself for that stupid night, but she wondered if Payton remembered it and if it still seemed to bother him as much as it did her.
On her next day off from the hospital Lizzie met up with Grace at the pharmacy for a milkshake. She sipped her shake through a straw like she was a kid again, and they watched the cars amble down Main Street from their spot at the counter. When she spotted a familiar figure walking down the strip she felt even more like a kid. She smacked Grace’s leg and started chanting, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
“Land sakes, Lizzie, what has gotten into you?”
Lizzie sucked in her breath and pointed. Across the street, dressed in an old, well worn pair of jeans and an ancient t-shirt, Payton laughed at something Lou Ann said. Lizzie narrowed her eyes at them and wished she could shoot laser beams at him through her eyes. At Moe’s the other night she had just thought he was fooling around trying to get her riled up with jealousy. In the past few days, though, she’d seen or heard rumor of Payton and Lou Ann getting a little too buddy-buddy for her comfort. She was starting to get worried that this wasn’t just some strategic tactical play that the coach was pulling out of his playbook. Maybe he really was interested in Lou Ann, but she hadn’t the foggiest reason why.
“Stare any harder at those two and you’ll give yourself a headache.”
Lizzie rubbed her thumb down the bridge of her nose. “I think I’ve already got one.” She tried to sip some more of her shake but her stomach was suddenly too queasy to handle it. She glanced back out the window. “What’s his deal with her anyway? Doesn’t he know she’s just rebounding?”
Grace slurped up the remnants of her shake. “Maybe that’s his deal.”
Lizzie swiveled on her seat so she faced Grace. “What, you think he’s purposely using her for something?” She thought about it while Grace shrugged. “Huh, maybe you’re right. Seriously, though, if it’s sex he’s after I know of at least ten women between here and Clarkston that have been making him casseroles for months just to get a peek at his boxers.”
Grace crinkled up her nose. “Boxers? Really? I’d have taken him for a briefs kind of guy.” She shook her head to remove the image. “Anyway, I’m sure the list far exceeds ten. Twenty, easy.”
“Yeah, well, if you’re counting me, you can just take my name right off.”
Grace watched Payton out the window and stifled a smile. “I wouldn’t dream of putting you anywhere near that list, Bean.”
“Good.” She stirred the clumps in her shake with her straw and worked on her lower lip with her teeth while she thought. “So what are you saying,” she added after a brief pause, “you don’t think I want to shag him or you don’t think he’s interested in shagging me?”
“Does it matter?” Grace knew she had her cornered.
“No.” She glanced out the window for the twentieth time and cringed when she saw Lou Ann stare up into that pair of eyes that should have been watching her. “Yes.”
“If it helps I don’t think there’s much question about whether he wants to shag you or not,” Grace added in a noncommittal kind of way.
“Thanks, Grace. You sure do know how to be straight to the point when a girl needs it. Seriously, is he interested?”<
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“I’m not answering that. If you really want to know you’ll have to do the asking yourself.”
Lizzie debated the pros and cons of asking him all afternoon, and was still mulling it over as she walked up the stadium stairs for the high school football game that next Friday night. She spotted the gang seated a half dozen rows above the student section and waved back as the group spotted her.
She had purposely arrived after half time just so she wouldn’t have to listen to Lou Ann ramble on and on about how fantastic her date with Payton had been last night. Somehow her nemesis had managed to finagle a way into the mix of their friends when she’d shown back up in town, and the gossip mill was only too happy to spread word that she and Payton had become a new item.
Lizzie felt confident she was developing an eye rolling twitch she had done it so much in the past few days.
From their spot in the crowd Lizzie watched as Payton directed his players through the plays of the game, noting that he looked good in his coach’s jacket and headset. Although she called herself watching the game as she stood there sandwiched between Grace and Jade, she couldn’t help but let her eyes drift to him occasionally just to see what he was doing. She didn’t miss that she never once caught him looking her way up in the stands.
Lou Ann made a big show of pushing down the row and racing down the steps of the stadium when the buzzer sounded the end of the game. Lizzie looked on with disgust as the bimbo- as she liked to refer to Lou Ann these days- threw herself into Payton’s arms for a grotesque display of PDA that she was certain had to be strictly against school policy for the coach.
“Oh, give me a break. Do you see what that woman is doing to him?” Lizzie glanced at Grace for back up then out to the scene on the field. Grace didn’t turn out to be much help.
“Ah, well, yeah, but judging by the way he’s reciprocating that kiss I don’t think he minds half as much as you want him to.”
The Heart Will Lead You Home Page 33