by Tara Wimble
There’s a scare the game after that in Washington. Jacque goes in on an aerial challenge with Stephanie Ochs and only one of them gets up.
It’s not Jacque.
Bella doesn’t let herself get too close, hovering close to the scene instead pacing like an animal kept too long in its cage. She holds her breath for what feels like an eternity before Jacque is back up on her feet. She wants to rush over there, help her off the field herself. After all, that’s what she would do if it was any other player.
But it’s different because it’s Jacque and things are weird in her head when it comes to that particular subject and she doesn’t want to face the million thoughts that rushed through her head in the brief moment where she thought, where everyone thought, that it might be something a little more serious than getting the wind knocked out of her chest.
They only draw that game and it might as well be a dagger in the back to their playoff hopes. It’s not the end yet, not by any means, but they’re sitting firmly in sixth again after all of their hard work.
Sitting in sixth having dropped eight out of nine crucial points and losing two, almost three, players in the course of a two week trip.
The flight back to Chicago is a glum one. They know just as well as Rory will remind them at practice on Monday that they didn’t get the job done.
And it won’t get any easier.
*
Bella starts to lose sleep. Hours drag on and on and rather than feel them pass by in an instant she’s rolling face first into her pillow and counting sheep in the hope that sleep will come. Her body maps out every inch of the bed as she rolls and spreads out trying to get comfortable. But she knows that it’s nothing to do with not being tired.
Rory bunches her back, near the midfield, throwing Zee alone up top, with the support of Quenby and her behind her. Bella hates being dropped back. It’s not that she can’t play the position but it stifles her and traps her between players rather than giving her an own goal in front of her. She doesn’t even play this for the National Team. Yet losing Boxxy and Mautz has forced her coach’s hand. They need her support.
The next trigger is the fact that this movement forces her to go scoreless for three consecutive games. Chicago drop another two and draw one, clawing back thanks to Quenby, and she starts to go home and sit up in the living room watching TV until everyone goes to sleep. Just so no one notices that she can’t sleep.
It gets worse because Bella realizes why it’s happening. She can’t eat because she can’t taste her food with the worry that’s building in her mind. She’s playing worse because she’s so tired from not sleeping and not getting enough energy. And she can see the shooting worried looks everyone is giving her, no one more than Jacque who actually had to remind her they had an Bella and Jacque show to film rather than the other way around.
It comes to a head during practice on the field when Bella breaks out in a sprint for goal, against defenders that fall away, and a resilient Sadie Marsh that rushes out at her taking the ball and her feet from under her.
The next thing Bella remembers is looking at the fuzzy outline of Quenby’s face wondering why she feels so hot.
“Bella, breathe in for me.” The trainers are all around her and just over Rory’s head she can see Jacque. “And out-”
Someone brings water over and it’s poured on the back of her neck. “God,”
“Bella, how’re you feeling?”
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Sick.”
“Lie her back down on her side for a second.” Her body is moved for her and she feels better supported on the turf.
“Whoa, dizzy.” Bella mutters.
“Okay, we’ve moved you to the sidelines-” It’s Rory again. “The rest of you go back to practice- run through the drill again. Quenby take them through it.”
Now that she’s free of the circle of teammates Bella can feel the turf burns on her knees and elbows. “What happened?”
“You blacked out.”
“Before that.” She can’t piece it together in her head. She’s dizzy and uncomfortable and her skin burns.
“Sadie ran out. You didn’t stop.”
“I was trying to score.”
It’s Jacque that places a hand on Bella’s forehead. “You’re burning up.”
“Aren’t you practicing?” Bella opens her eyes again. Jacque is sitting beside her.
“No.” Jacque says. “I’m going to take you home and you’re going to eat something.”
Bella’s tongue feels swollen at the thought. “I’m not-”
Jacque’s reaction is a lashing anger. “Don’t lie to me.” The hand on her head stills. “Not to my face.”
Bella breathes in and out. Trying to get rid of the wheezy feeling in her head and in her chest. “Sorry.” The hand starts moving on her head again and she relaxes. She feels drowsy for the first time in weeks but keeps her eyes open as the Red Stars trainers come back and check her out. Stupidly she spots one of the interns in the back with her phone out and hopes she’s not tweeting about this.
Jacque remains with her on the sideline, pushing water on her and some fresh fruit that Leslie brought with her for after practice. It’s hard for her to eat after not being able to keep anything down but it’s easier to manage when Jacque puts a hand on her back. “I’ll drive us home once you finish.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Unless you’re gonna tell me why you’re sorry, don’t apologise.” Jacque says. “Just eat. And don’t scare me for the rest of the day, alright?”
“I scared you?”
Jacque’s face is starkly sober. “You went down hard.”
Bella can tell by the spotted blood and burns on her knees. She pours more water on them. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”
There’s something to be said. Something that has to be said because if the looks on Jacque’s face, as well as the rest of their team, are anything to go by she can’t let this get any worse.
Jacque takes the decision out of her hands. “We’re going home and you’re going to bed. I’ll take care of your gear and stuff but when you wake up we’re gonna talk about this.” There’s no room for argument.
Bella has a fearful flutter in her chest. “Okay.”
End of story. Jacque sits with her in silence as everyone continues practice. They have a week until their next game so Rory doesn’t mention her performance or the possibility of her not playing. He can’t really afford to sit her out either. Bella is grateful that she has an apartment full of friends who are willing to vouch for her to him and promise to keep an eye on her for the rest of the night. A duty, that Jacque explicitly states, she’ll be taking seriously.
After practice she manages the walk to the car and out to their apartment when they get back. Jacque makes sure she marches straight to her room, closes all the curtains and watches her get into bed. It’d be stranger than usual but Bella doesn’t say a word because she’s going to have a lot to explain later.
She’s halfway through thinking when the lights go out and somehow, she manages to fall asleep.
*
She sits in the kitchen staring out at the hallway where Bella is hidden in her room hopefully sleeping off whatever stresses she can. Sadie wanders in, showered from practice and starts bustling about in the kitchen with an easy smile.
“How’s your back?”
Sadie jokingly looks over her shoulder to make sure Jacque is talking to her before grinning and continuing to fill up her water bottle. “One of her cleats nipped my side when she went over me. It’s alright. Not bleeding or anything.”
Jacque breathes a sigh of relief.
“What the hell is going on with her?”
“I have no clue.” Jacque spills. “She’s been distant for weeks.”
“I thought if it was serious that she’d have told you.”
“Nothing. Is it bad that I thought she was just getting sick?” Jacque asks. “People can lose their appetites and stuff but-”
<
br /> Quenby wanders into the kitchen looking for her own post-practice snacks. “Eavesdropping but you both know she’s been crashing on the couch most mornings? If sleeping at all.”
It seems to make her case worse. “God.”
Sadie stares at Jacque. “Do you want me to talk to her when she wakes up?”
“No.” Jacque says. “She’ll see it as too much if you’re there as well.”
She’s going to usher everyone out of sight and get Bella eating something before she starts the interrogation. The others agree and promise to be out of sight and out of mind when Bella came out.
There’s not a lot to choose from to make for Bella considering she’s unlikely to eat a lot after the knock at practice. Jacque picks a soup packed with vegetables and slices thick chunks of bread to go with it. She prepares enough for two or more in the hope that Bella will continue to eat out of peer pressure. While she cooks, Jacque snacks on some of the coffee chocolate pieces that she hides in the back of one of the cupboards and worries.
She’s had teammates blackout before but the trainers had decided it was down to Bella’s poor physical state. Not eating, not sleeping as Quenby had revealed and the fact this had gone on without her knowing frightens her. What the hell was she doing?
Jacque loses some of her mature composure as she stirs the soup around bitterly muttering about Bella not being able to confide in her. She’d thought they’d gotten past all the secrecy that drove them apart last time.
So she waits a few hours, with the soup ready to be heated up, for Bella to have regained some energy. Quenby, Lexi and Sadie all come in the meantime to cook and eat and talk to her. They all offer up their own guesses as to what’s wrong but Sadie keeps quiet even when Jacque asks for her opinion. “Honestly, I don’t think you should get into this with pre-formed ideas. Just talk to her.”
It’s a sensible idea and one that Jacque keeps in her head when Bella pokes out of her room around eight at night to seek her out. The rest of their roommates have gathered in the American apartment to watch Scandal or something.
Seeing what a few hours has done for her makes Jacque wince at how she was able to avoid confronting her about all this. “Hey, you’re eating soup.”
Not a question so wrapped up in a hoodie, Bella sinks into the chair at the table and watches Jacque heat up her meal and set a plate of buttered bread in front of her. There’s an implication that she’s not leaving until everything is gone. Thankfully when she puts the meal in front of her, mirroring it with her own bowl, Bella starts eating.
She eats slowly and doesn’t mind that Jacque watches her more than she eats her own meal. By now the rest of the apartment is quieter with only the faint sounds of a TV in the background.
Bella has faded lines on her face where she’s been pressed into a pillow, sleeping. Her hair is mussed up and Jacque experiences a spike of affection for her aside from the usual. They keep eating in silence until Bella is dabbing the last bit of bread into the soup and finishes it. Then the polite restraint is up.
“Are you gonna talk to me about it?”
Bella doesn’t insult her by avoiding the question. “I’m not sure if I even know how to.”
“I can talk you in circles about all this-” Jacque rubs her hands against her jeans. “Are you stressed over the team? About soccer? Because we’re just going through a slump and we’ve got some solid chances coming up against New York and Boston.”
Bella kneads the back of her neck. “I guess that’s one reason.”
Jacque takes another stab. “John isn’t going to not call you up just because you’re having a bad time. Everyone can see you’re trying. We’re just unlucky at the moment.”
Unlucky to have lost one of their US allocations and one of their main attacking players within the space of a few games. They’re struggling but they’ve got to pull together, not fall apart.
“I’m not worried about the soccer-”
“I’m worried about you.” Jacque fires back. Bella stares down at the empty bowl and she has more color in her cheeks after eating something. “Are you sick or has something happened-?”
Bella darts her eyes up at her then down again. “I’m not sick. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve just got a lot on my mind and it’s getting me down.”
“You said you’d tell me.”
“It’s more difficult to explain than I thought it’d be.”
Jacque wants to reach out for her but Bella seems ready to leave the table if anything happens. “You can tell me anything, y’know? That’s what I’m here for.”
“No. It’s not.” Bella covers her eyes in frustration. “It’s not what I want you to be here for.”
She dodges again and Jacque can only dance around her own theories for so long before she needs something solid. “Look, I’d rather you just spit whatever this is out because I’m getting freaked out that you’re about to up and disappear on me-” Jacque stresses. “I haven’t seen you eat anything in days and today you blacked out during practice- Bella, talk to me.”
She’s not sure if it’s the reminder that she blacked out or something else in that plea but Bella clenches her fists tightly and steels herself.
“Did you know in math- zero is the only number that doesn’t work to the power of one?”
When she has Jacque’s full attention her confidence in confessing plummets and somehow the only way that she can start to describe what she’s trying to say comes out as math. And probably not even correct math.
“Like everything makes sense. If everyone’s a number other than zero then we’re great. Power of one and it works out.” Bella fumbles. “But you’re the zero and it doesn’t work the way you think it will but then you realize in its own way that it still makes sense and still follows a rule-”
“Bella,” Jacque stops her. “I have no idea what you’re saying. I’m pretty sure metaphors have no place in math.”
Bella confuses herself and tries to think of another way to put this, any other way to put this that isn’t blunt and without tact and in the end there’s nothing she can say other than-
“I’m straight.” Bella blurts out.
The humour had the potential to crack there. Bella’s statement was half ridiculous and so half charming that Jacque could have laughed and Bella would have laughed too.
“-and what I’m trying to say is, that you’re the exception to that rule.”
But Jacque isn’t laughing because she didn’t expect this at all.
The silence stings in the way that Bella thought her metaphor would smooth over and all of a sudden she’s starting to regret coming to Jacque with this in the first place. Maybe it’s actually too soon? Maybe it’ll always be too soon and it’s thinking stuff like this that makes her want to retreat from the room.
“I don’t know how to feel about this.” Jacque finally says, her voice flat in a way that Bella recognizes is completely measured. She’s purposefully remaining balanced. She’s not giving anything away.
Her heart is pounding because the last time either of this came this close to saying something like this was when Bella was sobbing on the floor in the Red Stars Office and Jacque danced around those three little words. “I’m--.”
She’s always dangled those words just when Bella needed them in the last year and even before that. But now she has no words to give her.
“No,” Jacque cuts off her gently. “Just--let me figure out how I feel about this before you figure it out for me, okay.” And it’s not a question, it’s a statement. She’s asking for a moment to think, to process this admittedly loaded statement.
Silence lasts for a few more full minutes, they just sit there and Jacque looks, at some points, like she’s studying her like a foreign object. Like something that just fell out of the sky and into the room. But it’s not a critical study it’s, well, it’s contemplative and full of a certain note of wonder and even in the silence Bella knows that it means something good.
Finall
y Jacque looks up into her eyes and Bella’s breath catches in her throat.
“I can’t do this tonight.”
There’s no instant rush or ‘let’s talk through this a million different ways’ or that trigger that Bella thinks is going to go off. Jacque raises her hands up, as if she’s surrendering, and asks Bella to come closer.
“I know that this is going to change a few things, and god knows we can’t leave it like this-” Jacque says. “But tonight isn’t where we should try and wade through it so, I’m going to ask if we can sleep on this.”
Bella nods. Something tapes up her insides quickly because Jacque hasn’t given her a reason to let things fall to pieces nor has she glued things solidly together.
Jacque gets to her feet and let’s Bella come into her open arms. Bella hits against Jacque’s body with a tiredness that the nap she had didn’t take away. Jacque might not be able to say anything but she knows that Bella has handed the ball over to her and it’s for her to take the time to think of what she has to do.
She’s tucked away into the embrace when Jacque next speaks. “I’m gonna go to bed, okay? Do you want me to stay up or-?”
“No.” She thinks that she’ll sit in the living room for a while and maybe watch TV but Jacque is too smart to let her carry on damaging her body.
There’s a stall in her voice like she was about to say something else. “Do you want to come to bed with me?” Bella’s arms stiffen around her waist but Jacque waits a beat to refute what she’s thinking. “Just so you’re not alone out here, I promise, you need to get some undisturbed sleep.”
“Okay.” Bella lets Jacque lead them back to their shared room, being careful not to wake up any of their roommates who might ask questions now that they think they can.
Bella is already in pajamas so all that’s needed is for Jacque to get changed and get under the covers to let sleep take them away for the night. Bella instinctively turns away from Jacque, like she used to, and Jacque has to ask because Bella’s quieter than usual. There’s no doubt she’s asked because Bella has just dropped a bombshell on her like this.