Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance

by King,Imani

  I’d always planned on telling him when he retired. When his life slowed down.

  Of course, I couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a hypocrite. Hadn’t I gone off to college and done it all? I’d had my parents to help with Scarlet. But it had still meant endless long nights. Being up with her, trying to maneuver classes along with getting her to daycare and school, feeling the mommy guilt that came from missing something important because I had a final or couldn’t get out of on-call duty. I had given up a lot, but I didn’t regret it for a second. Scarlet was my world.

  If I had given him the chance, would Shane have done the same thing? That was the question that kept me up at night. It was the question that had almost made me turn down the job at Gilmore. But I knew that this day would eventually come—Gilmore just conveniently sped up my timeline. Scarlet deserved to know she had a father. And now, having seen Shane again and feeling the depth of his feelings for me after all of this time, I knew that I had to come clean. I just didn’t know how.

  Because of all of these thoughts spinning through my head, I missed hearing the sound of the door that told me that someone else had entered the gym. As I walked out of the office, I stopped short. The young woman that had interrupted me and Shane earlier was standing there glaring in my direction. I couldn’t remember her name. I had seen her earlier in the day, but she hadn’t even looked in my direction. I assumed that she was part of the front office staff.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “I’m here to help you.” She stepped closer to me now and drew up to her full height. I could see where people would think that she was pretty. I wasn’t vain enough to think that I was the best looking woman in a room, but I thought that I held my own against this woman. Granted, she was tall and thin and blonde, but my mom had raised me to be proud of my curves. She had told me how much men appreciated a little extra junk in the trunk. Hadn’t Shane made me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world the night before? I didn’t feel any jealousy towards this woman.

  “Excuse me?” I said. I was wondering what in the world she thought that she needed to tell me. It was clear that she wasn’t a doctor.

  “My name is Olivia Watson,” she said.

  Her last name rang with a familiar note. It was the same as the general manager’s. “Any relation to Jeff Watson?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m his daughter.”

  Now I was really confused. What did the daughter of the GM want with me? “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure why you’re here. Perhaps you can enlighten me?” I tried to keep my tone friendly even though it was obvious that she had a problem with me.

  “My dad depends on me to keep a pulse on the team. I’m in charge of all the social media. That includes attending appearances and games and anywhere the players go and anyone they interact with. So if there’s someone who is being disruptive to a player that would affect his performance, it would be my responsibility to tell my dad,” she said.

  I was starting to feel less confused and more annoyed. Even a little pissed off. “It’s only my second week. I’ve seen a few members of the team so far, and all of their injuries are on track. When you say that someone is being disruptive, I’m not quite sure what you mean,” I said. I was starting to feel like this was a personal attack.

  Then it all seemed to click into place. I thought about the way that she had glared at me and Shane earlier and the rude way she had interrupted us. She had something with Shane, even though he said she wasn’t his girlfriend.

  “You are disruptive if you are getting in the way of Shane being able to perform at his best. Shane performs at his best when he’s with me. That’s something that you need to learn, and that’s a bit of free advice,” she said. Her tone had grown possessive. I distinctly felt like she was comparing herself to me and judging herself to be better.

  “I’m not sure exactly what you mean since you continue to speak in vague threats. But I can assure you that me and Shane would be off-limits as far as the topic of discussion between you and me, especially how we’ve just met,” I said. “As far as being disruptive, I think that’s a joke. I’m here, and I’m doing my job. If you have a problem with that, you can take that to your dad. I think that I will have more than proved my worth by then.”

  Despite my strong words, I felt a small nagging fear of doubt wondering if she did have the kind of influence over her father that she could sway his opinion of me despite any evidence to the contrary.

  “I can get you fired,” she said quietly. But the quiet didn’t mask the venom in her tone.

  “I don’t think that it is a good idea to threaten me,” I said. “It’s Olivia, right?”

  She lifted her chin. That was her only response.

  “Olivia, I am doing nothing wrong. The only thing that I’m doing here is my job. Shane is a man free to do whatever he wants. That is all that you need to know,” I said. That was actually more than she needed to know, but I had to put out some kind of concession so that she didn’t do something like a run off and tell her dad I had screwed something up before I had a chance to establish my reputation with the team.

  She sniffed. “We’ll see about that. Just remember what I said. If Shane starts tanking in his performance, I’m going to point the blame directly at you. Better yet, keep away from him. If you know what’s good for you.” She turned on her heel and left the room.

  I couldn’t believe what had just happened. It was like I was back in high school all over again. I let out a long sigh. It had been a long day. I’d seen patients at the clinic all morning. I looked at my watch. I needed to get home. Scarlet would already be home for school, and I promised her that I would be home for dinner after skipping out on it last night with the lame excuse that I had to work late. I couldn’t do that more than a few times without having to answer some questions that I wasn’t ready to answer yet.

  I walked out the door and headed towards the parking lot. I was intercepted by Shane before I made it ten feet. “Hey, beautiful,” he said to me. He reached for me, and I put my arm up to stop him.

  “Don’t you have practice right now?”

  “I told Coach that I needed to get something from the locker room. I knew your last appointment was at three. I wanted to catch you before you left to see if you wanted to get together tonight for dinner?”

  It had all been too much. Between Shane, the new job, and Olivia, I needed time to think and regain my sanity. Plus, before I could let anything else happen with Shane, I had to figure out how to tell him about Scarlet. Aside from that, I had a bit of making up to do with my daughter for being away from her the evening before.

  “I can’t tonight, Shane. I have plans.”

  He looked chagrined. “With who?”

  I was annoyed that he thought he had the right to even ask that question. There was nothing solid about our relationship yet, no matter what he thought about it. “I have plans with an old friend. I can’t be late. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  He was visibly annoyed, which made me even more annoyed. He couldn’t have expected to sweep back into my life and expect me to drop everything for him. Even if I didn’t have a responsibility to my job and my child, I could hardly be expected to be at his beck and call.

  “Okay then. I guess I’ll get back to practice,” he said slowly. He must have read my annoyance in my body language.

  I let out a small sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to fight me on this, which was a good thing, because I had a feeling there were going to be quite a few tense moments between me and Shane coming up in the very near future. I needed to figure all of this out, and I need to figure it out quickly for everyone’s sake.

  I could feel myself softening towards him. It wasn’t his fault that he had no idea what my real issue was. “Look, I want to see you again too. It’s just I really had plans for tonight. I wasn’t expecting all of this. Give me a little bit of space, okay?”

  His face relaxed. “Are you sure yo
u can’t cancel your plans? I feel like we have a lot more catching up to do,” he said with a sly smile.

  Damn the man. I could feel my body reacting to him already. I couldn’t let myself get taken down that path. He was so distracting. I feel felt like I was in college all over again, and the most handsome boy in the world was smiling at me. How could he make me feel like this without even touching me?

  “I will see you tomorrow. I promise,” I said gently.

  I started to turn away, but he grabbed my arm. He spun me into him, and I gasped. His lips were on mine, and his hands were in my hair. I couldn’t stop myself from opening my mouth to his hungry tongue. He pressed me hard against the wall behind me. The sensations flowing through me were intoxicating and entirely wonderful. I let myself with it, but just for a moment. Then I gently pressed my hands against his chest and broke the kiss.

  “I needed to give you something to remember me by,” he said with a wink, but I heard the panting in his voice. “There is more of that to come if you change your mind later.”

  I straightened my clothes and looked around hoping that no one had seen us. That last thing I needed was being tied to Shane before I had a chance to even say anything Scarlet. The whole situation was so delicate, and I was fumbling it completely.

  “Thanks, Shane. I’ll remember that,” I said with a short smile. I turned and walked away as quickly as I could. I couldn’t see him, but I felt the weight of his eyes on my back even as I left him standing there alone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was only one good thing about getting the shit beat out of me on a daily basis by Coach. It meant that if I wanted to have a beer with dinner, I knew that I could without it affecting too much. That was one big thing during the regular season. There was a lot of talk about treating your body like a vessel. A temple to the sports gods above. There was also a lot of superstition among different team members about what to do to ensure the win on Sunday.

  I didn’t feel like I was all that superstitious, but I knew that I had been in a little bit of a slump lately. That was evidenced by how hard Coach worked me during practice. It wasn’t just me, though; it was the whole team. We had been off our game the last two Sundays, and we needed a ‘W’ in the win column come this Sunday. I guess I should have thanked Maddy for not taking me up on my offer for dinner. I knew that she was distracting me despite my best efforts.

  I was stuck on wondering who this old friend was that she had plans with that night. I hoped it wasn’t some old flame. That thought drove me nuts. In the end, I decided to invite Marvin over so we could at least commiserate watching some of the tape from the last two games together. I said that it was for prep’s sake, but Marvin knew me better than that.

  He showed up on my doorstep with a twelve-pack. “You know we can’t drink that whole thing,” I said to him as I let him in the door.

  He brushed my comment off. “Sometimes, you gotta do things a little outside the box to change things up.” He held up the DVD that held the replay of the last two games of the team we were playing on Sunday. “We’re working. So we might as well have some fun too,” he said.

  I had dinner ready, and we started to eat in front of the TV. After about thirty minutes, I knew that something was about to burst inside of him.

  “So I expected that you’d be out with your pretty doctor friend tonight,” he finally said. “Get the brush off already?”

  Sometimes, I wondered if Marvin could read minds. It was a bit uncanny. “You’re not my priest, and you’re not my mother. So stop asking me about her,” I said. I was ornery about the whole thing. It had bled into my practice routines after she left too, and clearly, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed.

  “You gotta get that girl out of your system,” Marvin said shaking his head. “You must have it bad if she’s affecting you like this. I haven’t seen you this off your game ever.”

  He was right. Just because I had a reputation of chasing skirts didn’t mean that I wanted to take any of them home to meet the family. Not like I had any family to take them back them back to anyway. I had left Rosewood in the dust when I turned eighteen and hadn’t looked back.

  I barely spoke to my father. Most of the time it was only when he called to ask for money. The money was to buy more booze because he ran out of his pension check already for the month. The man was reprehensible. I hadn’t seen him since I left Rosewood, and I had never invited him to come see me. He had even missed my college graduation. I don’t know why I had even invited him to that. We were the epitome of estranged relationships.

  “I’ll be fine tomorrow,” I said. “You can stop worrying now.”

  “I’m not worried. I’m just hate seeing you all spun up like this,” he said. He hit pause on the tape. “If it helps you to talk it out, you know I don’t mind.”

  This was the thing about Marvin. He was clearly using one of his paternal tactics tonight. We both knew that I needed to be on my game on Sunday. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to talk about it.

  I shifted back in my seat and let my head fall against the back headrest of the couch. I looked up at the ceiling because it would be too embarrassing to say these words out loud when I was looking directly at him. “I think she’s the one that got away.”

  Marvin whistled in low appreciation. “I was right. You have it bad. Too bad she’s not the kind of doctor that heals broken hearts.”

  I rolled my eyes but still didn’t look at my friend. “She’s the one who broke it. So I guess that would mean she’s probably the only one who can put it back together too. I had no idea that I still felt this way about her. Sure, I thought about her every now and then and wondered what she was doing, but I thought that was all part of my past. The high school years weren’t that great. The only thing I was good at it was football. Even then my dad still treated me like an asshole.”

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?” Marvin asked.

  I closed my eyes and thought about the question. It felt like it was just a month or two ago. But as I started putting a timeline together, I realized it had been far longer than that. “I don’t know. I think he called me when we were on the road playing Pittsburgh. Maybe two years ago?” I couldn’t believe it been that long. But my father was a pretty irrelevant part of my life now despite the fact that he had been such a large part of it earlier. It just went to show that just because someone was a parent, that didn’t mean they were good at it. He lost every bit of goodness left in him the day my mother died.

  “So you met this girl back when you were still living at home with your good for nothing father. You said the only thing you are good at was football. Sounds like you must’ve been pretty good at her.”

  I sighed. Sometimes it was nice to talk to Marvin, and sometimes, it wasn’t. I never knew which side of Marvin I was going to get, the sarcastic one or the understanding one. I guessed it was probably because guys didn’t normally talk about stuff like this. It still felt strange. I was used to keeping everything bottled up inside, but my therapist said that it was good for me to talk about my feelings with someone that I felt safe with. Marvin was the closest thing to that kind of person I had in my life.

  “We were best friends, so it wasn’t like that. Well, except for one night. And then the next morning.” I gave Marvin a look. “So when I saw her yesterday, all of these feelings came back. I knew immediately when I saw her that she was the one for me. It sounds stupid. I should be in some romantic comedy chick flick. The crazy part, though, is I thought for sure she felt the same way. But already she’s been running hot and cold on me.”

  “So why did she leave? Why wasn’t there another night—and another morning?”

  I shook my head. “She didn’t want me to feel trapped in a relationship in case my career took off, I think. She said I had this bright future ahead of me, and she didn’t want me to feel like I was being held back in any way from enjoying my life. And she had to leave school to help her parents. As soon as it start
ed, it was over.”

  “Sounds like she was just trying to save you both a lot of heartbreak.”

  This was frustrating. I hated being judged by the standards of “everyone else.” I wasn’t like everyone else. Wasn’t the fact that I was an elite NFL player proving that? “I don’t know. What I do know is that right here, right now, I want to tell her how I feel. I want to try again, for real this time. We’re both here in the same city now, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to pursue what we could’ve had all that time ago. We’re both grown up so we know what we want. The excuse of why we broke up doesn’t make sense anymore.”

  “So did she get married or anything during all this time?”

  I sat up on the couch with a start. “She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She hasn’t mentioned a husband. Or a boyfriend—or—”

  Maybe I haven’t asked.

  “You didn’t think to ask her that question?” Marvin asked. I growled at him, but he continued. “Didn’t I teach you anything? That’s always the first question. Just because somebody isn’t wearing a ring doesn’t mean they’re not married or spoken for.”

  This was something that had never occurred to me. But we had made love the night before. Then I remember the early morning shake-off. She has been so eager to get out the door, as if she was running to someone else. “I can’t even think about that,” I said.

  Marvin put his hand on my shoulder. He gave it a short squeeze before taking his hand away. Too much touching between dudes would have been weird. “I know what you need,” he said.

  I looked over at him expectantly. He picked up the remote and shook it at me. “Getting back in the game is how you are going to get your head straight. You’ve got five months of this, my friend. You have to pull your head out of your ass otherwise, you’ll be finding a new job with a new team next year. You have come too far and worked too hard for some girl from your past to spin you off the rails. Focus on the game. Focus on your technique. Put a W in the win column. You’ll feel better.”