He left the table and walked toward the bar where he had been waiting for Susana before.
How long had his happiness lasted? Ten minutes?
He chose a stool where neither Quin nor his wife could see him from the table and he sat down and ordered another whiskey.
There he was again, waiting for Susana, although the scenario was quite different than before. What would have happened if he had chosen another restaurant? Or if Quin and Patricia had had arrived a half an hour earlier or a half an hour later?
He grabbed his glass and took a sip.
He had to stop torturing himself like that. His relationship with Susana couldn’t be so unstable. He needed it to be solid; his feelings deserved it.
“Kev.”
He heard his name but he didn’t turn around. He knew she was behind him. He hadn’t doubted for a second that Susana would come after him. Was it to apologize? Was it to demand him to continue to remain quiet? He didn’t know why.
Susana didn’t say anything, and Mac couldn’t stand the silence.
“Why, Susana?”
“You’re Tim’s best friend.”
He shook his head and she took it as though he wasn’t satisfied with that explanation.
“It’s too soon.”
It was another excuse, and Tim shook his head again.
“Tell me one thing, Susana,” he began, not taking his eyes off his drink. “How would you feel if I had gone to the opera with another woman, or if Quin had congratulated me in front of you for hooking up with someone?”
She didn’t say anything, and Mac slowly turned around until he was facing her.
“This morning I was inside you, Susana. I made love to you, and you kissed me. And now you’re capable of denying that I even exist? You’re capable of having me right in front of you and not touch me. You let Patricia, a woman we both care about, think that you’re single and that you’re more than willing to continue seeing that Parker guy. I want to know why. I deserve to know why.”
“The press still asks me about Tim and there are people who still feel sorry for me. They don’t say anything, but I know that they think I’m the poor, unfortunate girl who was left at the altar by the handsome, rich, untouchable football player.”
“You’re not an unfortunate girl, Susana, and you know it. I’m sorry the press keeps bothering you, but I don’t see what that has to do with us.”
“If they know that we are together, I’ll be the laughingstock of the T.V. channel when you leave me.”
“When I leave you,” repeated Mac, feeling his heart split in two. Despite the fact that she had apologized for having judged him and that she had passionately made love to him, Susana had never seen the real Mac. If she had looked him in the eye just once, she would have realized that it was impossible for him to leave her.
“Yes,” she continued, oblivious to the pain that was obliterating him on the inside. “I don’t want to be known as the girl who slept with the two star players of the Patriots. My professional career would never recover from it.”
Her professional career.
“You could be known as the girl that went out with one of the Patriots and married another,” suggested Mac, looking directly at her. “Or perhaps you’ll be the one to leave me, just like you are right now.”
Susana opened her eyes and let out a breath before answering.
“That’s nonsense. You don’t want to marry me.”
Mac hadn’t thought about it until that moment, true, but the fact that she would reject the idea so quickly made him sick to his stomach. Now Susana’s behavior made a lot more sense; her reluctance to tell Tim that she was with him, all of those nights that she didn’t want to leave the house, the weekends they spent holed up in his cabin.
Susana was just having fun with him. She was doing what people do when they get divorced, or when someone gets dumped weeks before they are supposed to get married. She was having an affair.
And he, so stupidly, fell in love.
For him, falling in love meant everything. Susana meant everything to him.
Mac turned around and grabbed the glass of whiskey again. He looked at the amber colored liquid and breathed slowly. Sooner or later the pain would go away. She never said that she wanted to leave him, but he needed to be sure.
“What do you want from me, Susana?”
“Can’t we just be how we have been until now?”
Part of him wanted to say yes. He could settle with that and surely if he slept with her every night he would end up convincing her to give them a chance. However, it wouldn’t be long before they would argue. In a few weeks there would be the team dinner to celebrate the new season and he was planning on asking her to go with him. Now he knew for sure that she would say no. They would get into an argument and Susana would end up leaving him. Or worse, she would ask him to hide they were together and he would die a little more inside.
“No,” he said, basically for himself. “We can’t.”
He emptied the glass and stood up. He left a fifty next to the glass and looked at Susana one last time.
“Tell Quin and Patricia that something came up unexpectedly. Stay and have dinner, please. In the meantime, I’ll go to your apartment and get my things.”
“Kev, I… —she stuttered— I don’t understand.”
“I know,” he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll leave the key inside.”
He choked up on the last phrase. In that moment it was very painful for him to think that a few days ago Susana had given him a key to her apartment, and yet that night she was incapable of holding his hand in front of Quin and his wife.
He walked out of the restaurant without looking back.
The next day, Mac packed his suitcase and went to his grandmother’s ranch in Texas. He called his parents to let them know. They stopped by there every now and then, and he didn’t want to scare them. His mother, Meredith, asked if something was wrong, and he was able to convince her that he was fine, or at least that’s what he thought anyway. After a brief interrogation session, his mother gave up, thank God, but she told him that his little brother, Harrison, would also be there.
Mac bought the first ticket he found and was bound for Texas that same night. He didn’t want to stay home waiting for Susana to show up.
And he didn’t want to be tempted to grab his car keys and show up at her apartment and tell her that he would be fine with continuing with the way things were. If he agreed to that, he would end up hating her. And if he begged her to give their relationship a chance, and she accepted because she felt bad, she would be the one who ended up hating him.
He and Susana were never going be.
She had affected him so much that he hopped a plane to Texas instead of staying in Boston taking care of business and trying to figure out how to forget her. He was furious, with her and with himself, and his rage continued to build up throughout the flight.
Why the hell hadn’t he argued with Susana? Before, they argued about the pettiest of things, from anything from the name of a color to ice melting on the poles, but last night he couldn’t say anything to her.
No, it wasn’t that he didn’t’ know what to say to her; it was that he didn’t want to say anything. What good would it do to try to convince her? If she didn’t feel the same need to be together as he did, the best thing to do would be to forget about her as soon as possible.
But did she really not feel the need to be together? Was she going to give her next lover those same kisses, that same passion? Would the next one be Parker?
The plane landed and when Mac walked out of the arrivals gate he found his not so little brother waiting for him. The two men hugged each other and Mac in that instant thought that going there was the best decision he had made in a long time.
“You didn’t have to come meet me here, Harry,” he said to his brother as he let him go.
“That’s stupid, Kev. Let’s go. Grandpa is waiting for us. I think he wants us
to have breakfast, or dinner together. I still haven’t gotten used to the time change.”
Mac looked at Harry and saw the huge dark circles under his brother’s eyes.
“How did you manage to get out of there?”
“I escaped.”
Harry worked in Washington as a political advisor, which meant that he traveled a lot and that nobody knew exactly what he did.
“Is everything going OK, Harrison?”
“I’m working it out, Kev,” he answered, while starting his SUV.
“And what about you? Are you OK?”
“I’m working things out, too.”
They didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride. They didn’t need to. Mac looked out the window at the Texas landscape and was thinking that he should call his brother more often.
When Susana walked into her apartment after Mac had left her by herself to have dinner in Paper Moon with Quin and Patricia, she told herself that she wouldn’t notice his absence. In the end, she and Tim had been together almost a year, and when he left all of his personal belongings had fit into a cardboard box, which was still on the floor of one her closets.
Mac wasn’t going to get a box.
She opened the door and had to steady herself against the wall so she didn’t fall down. She couldn’t breathe. It was as if Mac had taken the air with him. She looked around the dining room and had to close her eyes when she remembered that he had made love to her on top of that table. The kitchen was even worse. That was where he had told her how he got into playing football, and they were also there the day he left after hearing her phone conversation with Pam; the first time that she didn’t acknowledge his existence.
She didn’t feel that she could go in her bedroom or the bathroom. It was painful to look at the furniture and the walls. Everything reminded her of him.
When Tim left her and called off the wedding, Susana asked herself why she wasn’t devastated and why she didn’t feel a terrible void when her fiance disappeared from her life.
Now she knew why. Tim had never really been part of her life, and he had never kissed her or held her close enough to destroy her.
Oh, God. Her knees were giving out and she fell to the floor. What had she done?
She placed a hand on her chest to contain her heartbeats. If she felt such horrible agony when she and Mac had only been together for one month, what would have happened when he abandoned her later on? No, she had done the right thing. Sooner or later, Mac would have left her, and she would have never gotten over it.
No, Mac didn’t have a box. Mac had her entire self.
You could be known as the girl that went out with one of the players of the Patriots and married another. Or you could end up leaving me, just like you are doing right now.
She burst into tears.
Chapter 16
Sixteenth rule of American football:
When a referee calls a penalty the first thing he does is throw down a yellow flag that he keeps in his pocket.
To everyone’s surprise, Tim Delany returned to Boston four days later. He arrived with his wife, Amanda, and with his eleven years old son, Jeremy. At the airport, he let the press take photographs of him with his family, mostly because he couldn’t have avoided it anyway, but he didn’t answer any of the malicious questions they asked him about Susan or the wedding.
The day before embarking on his journey Tim called Susan to let her know that he was returning. He didn’t want the press to catch her by surprise, and it was the least he could do for her. Susan congratulated him for having gotten the woman he loved back. She seemed sincere when she said it, but Tim detected sadness in his ex-fiance’s voice.
“Is something wrong, Susan?” he dared to ask her.
She was about to tell him yes, that she was devastated because she had made the biggest mistake of her life, and she didn’t know how to fix it. She wanted to ask him if he knew where Mac might be. She worked up the courage to go to his cabin, but it was empty. She hadn’t called him. She had dialed the number hundreds of times, but she never made it to the last digit because she didn’t want him to hang up on her or to ignore her phone call.
“No, I’m fine. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“I’ll give you a call when we get settled in. I’d like for you to meet Amanda.”
“We’ll see, Tim,” she sighed. “Thanks for letting me know you were coming back.”
She hung up before he could ask her if she was OK again.
Tim returned to Boston because practice started for the Patriots in a few days, which meant that Mac would also be returning to the city.
And maybe then she would be brave enough to go after him and ask him for a second chance.
Mac was in the kitchen looking at the images of Tim at the airport with Amanda and Jeremy. Amanda hadn’t changed much over the years and there was no denying that Jeremy looked exactly like Tim did when he was that age. Obviously, after airing those pictures, Susan’s picture popped up on the screen. The journalists followed her to the door of the T.V. station to see if she would say anything. She didn’t answer any question, and he observed her, fascinated, as if he had been shipwrecked and had just seen an island in the middle of the sea.
He had his cell phone in one hand and he moved his thumb over the digits that formed her number. She hadn’t called him.
It’s true that that wasn’t the phone he normally used; he had left that one in the city so that he wasn’t tempted to call her, but it didn’t matter because he knew her number by heart, just like he knew everything about her.
The device he was holding in his hand was the phone he used for the foundation. If Susana wanted to get in touch with him, she could have find a way, but she didn’t, which proved even more that she didn’t miss him and didn’t want to be with him.
“Call her,” said Harrison.
“She hasn’t called me,” answered Mac, defensively.
“Oh that’s right, your stupid phone test. Come on, Mac, don’t be an idiot. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe. You and I are living proof that love turns even the most intelligent people into idiots.” His brother sat down in front of him. “Come on, call her, I’m sure she needs you.”
Mac set the phone on the table and pushed it away with his fingers.
“I’m going back to Boston tomorrow. Practice starts in a few days,” he explained to Harry, finishing the conversation about Susan.
It was better that way.
“I’ll take you to the airport. I’m going to stay here a few more days.”
“You never told me what it was that you had to fix,” said Mac, frowning.
“No, I haven’t —he stood up— come on, if you’re leaving tomorrow why don't we ride the horses one more time?
Harrison went out the back door of the kitchen and stopped to pet one of his grandpa’s dogs. When he stood up, his back became tense and Mac looked at him worried. It was obvious that Harrison’s left shoulder hurt him a lot. As if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, the fact that he had to hide it was.
If Harry had had a car accident or if he had hurt himself at the gym, he would have told him.
Why the hell hadn’t Harrison told anyone that his shoulder hurt?
Mac half closed his eyes and did a mental check of the various things that his brother had done during the days they had been there that were out of the ordinary, such as the calls he received in the middle of the night, which he denied when Mac asked him about them at breakfast. Under normal circumstances, Mac probably wouldn’t even have found out, but thanks to Susana he couldn’t sleep, and he heard the calls perfectly.
Harrison had locked his bedroom door. All the doors at the ranch had locks on them, but his grandmother had always insisted that it was silly to lock them, and every time they went to visit her when they were little, she didn’t allow them to keep the doors locked. Their grandmother was no longer with them, but Mac and his siblings s
till honored her wishes whenever they visited their grandfather; except Harrison, who had locked his door this time.
Mac stood up and went after his brother. He found him in the stable. The shouting that was coming from there could probably be heard from several miles away. Harrison was arguing with someone on the phone, but he was speaking so quickly and above the noise of the horses, that Mac could barely make out anything he was saying. He could only tell that he was furious. Harry hung up suddenly and threw his phone to the ground. Not realizing that his brother was there, he ran his fingers through his hair like he was seriously thinking about ripping it out, and he let out several swear words.
Then he did something that left Mac completely shocked; he took a gun out of one of the saddlebags that was hanging from a hook. He checked to see if it was loaded, and then he put it in the waist of his jeans…as if he’d been doing it is his whole life.
“You have a gun,” said Mac, stunned. He couldn’t piece together what he just saw. To him, Harrison, Harry, was a kind person who loved books, European movies, and to travel, and the only athletic thing he did, besides riding, was going for runs in the city. Mac couldn’t believe that Harry had a weapon and knew how to load it and tuck it under his shirt.
“Mac,” said Harrison, turning around. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You have a weapon.”
“Yes,” he admitted, without saying anything else. He moved about silently and started saddling up two horses while Mac stood there watching him.
“Why the hell do you have a gun, Harry?”
Harry stopped and tugged on one of the bridals. Mac didn’t say anything else. He could hear his brother thinking from where he was.
“Because of work.” He moved away from the animal. “Don’t worry, I know how to use it,” he added, with a scary sense of humor, turning around to look at Mac.
“Did you get shot in your left shoulder?”
“Yes, but it’s better now. Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“Shit, Harry,” exclaimed Mac. “Fuck! How can you tell me that they shot you as if it was nothing, and then tell me not to tell our parents as if we were in high school? What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
Just Rules Page 17