Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance (15 page)

“Why don’t I take a picture of the two of you?” Maddy asked.

Scarlet nodded her head vigorously in agreement, and I found that I liked the idea too. Scarlet slung her arm around my neck and smiled widely. I saw the flash go off. “I’ll text it to you,” Maddy said. Then she looked at Scarlet. “I know you still have lots of questions sweetie, but I need to talk to your daddy for a couple of minutes. Would you mind going over and swinging on the swings while we talk?”

I think that I was as reluctant to have Scarlet leave as she appeared to be, but she didn’t argue with her mother’s request. “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked me.

“Not a chance,” I reassured her.

She appeared satisfied with that answer and started skipping towards the playground. We both watched her in silence as she went.

“She’s fantastic,” I said out loud, not meaning to.

Maddy stood up and moved so that she sat next to me on the bench. She didn’t make any indication to get too close, though. “She is fantastic. I thank God every day that I got so lucky. She’s a great kid.”

I swung toward her and stared hard into her eyes. “I’m mad as hell you, Madeleine.”

I saw tears shimmering in her eyes again. She nodded slowly. “I understand that. But I hope that in time can forgive me. I think that it would be best for Scarlet if we could at least try to get along.”

“I want to see her as often as possible. I want a regular visitation schedule, and if I have to, I will hire a nanny. I don’t like the idea of her ever having to have a babysitter,” I said. I had already had these things spinning around in my head, and last night when I had been unable to sleep, I even started moving furniture around my condo to start making space for her in my extra bedroom.

I saw Maddy’s eyes widen. “I think that it would be best to ease Scarlet into this whole thing, Shane. I know you are eager to spend time with her, and I want that too. I want that for the two of you as much as anything, but this is still brand-new, and you’ve never been around a kid before.”

“Remember, that’s not my fault,” I said. I felt the anger starting to rise again, but I needed to keep my cool. The last thing I wanted to do was get into conversations about things like custody. Although I didn’t think there was a way that I would ever be able to forgive Maddy, I could tell just by my short interaction with Scarlet that she was a good mom. I only hoped that I could be half as good a parent is she already appeared to be. Of course, she was the one who had all the practice.

“I know this is my fault. I know you are angry at me, and you have every reason to be. I just don’t want us to have too many changes being thrown at Scarlet all at once. Can we just go slow? Let’s give her some time to get to know you and for you to get to know her. And then as that relationship builds, we can talk about what makes sense for a visitation schedule, if that’s what you want.”

“Of course, that’s what I want!”

Madeleine gulped hard at my raised tone. Then she looked down at her hands. “You have a busy schedule, Shane. You have practiced for hours every day and then have to watch more footage at night to prep for your games. You’re gone half of the season on the road, and you’re gone again for training camp before the season starts. That’s assuming that God forbid no injuries happen that would sideline you. We just have to take things slow.”

I sensed there was something else that she wasn’t saying but hinting at nonetheless. “What else do you have on your mind, Madeleine? What else is it that has you hesitating to let me be able to spend time with my daughter?” I saw a rise of color in her cheeks. Oh yes, there was something else that she had to say, and it didn’t take a genius to guess what it was. I knew my reputation. “Are you afraid that I’m gonna bring a flock of women around her?”

Maddy slipped her lower lip into her mouth and started to bite on it. It was ironic that I had just noted the same tendency in our daughter the day before. “I don’t want to start an argument, Shane. I just know what I’ve read in the paper. I also know how quickly things moved between you and me despite the fact that I tried to keep you at a distance. When you see something you want in that regard, you go after it. I just don’t know that that’s the best environment for Scarlet to be around on a regular basis.”

Now she really had me pissed off. “So the fact that I have a reputation as some kind of playboy means that I can’t be a good father or make commonsense judgments when it comes to the type of people I bring around my daughter?”

I could tell that Maddy was getting flustered. “Like I said, I don’t want to argue. Let’s just take things slow from here. I’m not going to deny you access to seeing Scarlet, but I think it makes sense that we should both agree on the parameters around those visits until you have developed more of a relationship with her.”

I hated this. I hated this idea, and more than anything else, I hated the fact that I knew she was right. My logical brain was agreeing with her, but every emotion inside of me wanted to rail against the idea. Still, Maddy was her mother, and she did know her far better than I did. And although that wasn’t my fault, it was still the fact of the matter.

“So what exactly are you proposing?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“At the beginning of every week, let’s just determine what your schedule looks like, and we can plan from there. I think for the time being, it makes sense if the three of us spend time together during your visits with her.”

It was so ironic that I had been trying so hard to get Maddy to spend time with me, and now that she was freely agreeing to it, I didn’t want her there. That was a lie. Because somewhere in the back of my head, I had some type of fairytale vision of the three of us walking through the park with Scarlet in between us holding both of our hands. It was the picture-perfect family that I had never had.

This thought made me angry because it made me long for something that I never thought I could have. If I’d been asked even twenty-four hours ago about the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I would have said it was Maddy. But I couldn’t trust her now. She had betrayed me.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I looked at my watch and grimaced. Time had flown by. It had already been a couple of hours, and I knew that I needed to get back to the practice field. I’d already been gone for three days, and although the coach was willing to let me take the week off to grieve for my father, I was itching to get back on the field. The old man didn’t deserve to make me miss a game.

“Okay. You know where to find me when you want to talk more about it,” she said.

I stood up, and she stood up with me. Scarlet ran over to us immediately with a concerned look on her face. “Daddy? Are you leaving?”

I didn’t hesitate in reaching down and pulling her up into my arms. She was so light that she weighed barely more than a feather. I loved how she innocently threw her arms around my neck to give me another hug. “I was just going to ask your mom if she might think about bringing you to work with her tomorrow. You can see the stadium and the locker room and everything behind the scenes.”

“Oh, that would be awesome!” Scarlet said.

I saw Maddy had a look of chagrin on her face, which was partly the reason I hadn’t asked her before suggesting it to Scarlet. If I was going to see my daughter on a regular basis, I wanted to start tomorrow. Hell, I wanted to start today, but I knew that I needed to get to practice.

“I guess I can make arrangements for that to happen,” Maddy said.

“Yeah!” Scarlet said. I set her down, and she clapped and jumped up and down. That made me laugh again.

“I guess we’ll see you tomorrow then,” Maddy said. I could see again that there was something more than she that she wanted to say. I knew that there was another conversation to be had. Things had been left open between us, and then this had happened. But I wasn’t in the right headspace to be able to give her anything. For now, I was focused entirely on Scarlet.

“See you later, alligator,” I said to Scarlet as I swiped a finger across her nose. She laughed and waved to me.

It was harder than I ever imagined to walk away from her. And even as I missed her, I felt the tug of missing Maddy as well.

Shane hadn’t been the only one that needed to get back to work. Considering I had just started my new job and then asked for three days off, I was amazed that they had let me go. Now I was back to work and back in the field. I had to ask my mother to bring Scarlet to the stadium during after she got out of school.
 

Scarlet had been so excited about the visit, and it had been difficult for me to convince her that she shouldn’t go to school and start telling everyone about Shane being her dad quite yet. It was still all new, and I didn’t want anyone telling her that she was fibbing and making up some big story. I thought that would have been devastating for her.

I still wasn’t quite sure how Shane was going to handle things from a media perspective, but the fact that he wanted to bring Scarlet to the football stadium indicated to me that he was more than okay with people knowing about her. That was a big relief when it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at all. There been a part of me that had been concerned that once he found out, he would try to bury her like a dirty little secret.

Why couldn’t he understand that this—all of this—was part of why I’d kept Scarlet to myself all these years?

But watching him with her at the park had been magical. I had lain awake the night before, kicking myself over and over for the poor decisions I had made back then. If I hadn’t have done that, things might have been different between us. The ‘should-a, would-a, could-a’ thoughts running through my head were going to be my undoing.

It didn’t help that my body ached for him. Even in those few short days preparing for the funeral, we had found a rhythm in our nights together. We reached for each other as soon as we were back in our room, and it had been so easy for the rest of the world to slip away. We had been free to explore each other in every way possible.
 

I shook those thoughts from my mind. They didn’t do me any good. They only made me feel worse.

When my mother arrived at the front gate, I went down to meet them. Scarlet’s eyes were as wide as saucers as I saw her taking in the huge building around her. “Thanks for bringing her over, Mom,” I said.

“Your father should be here this evening.” My father was coming up that evening to have dinner with my mom.

“It’s okay if you want to head back right away. She can stay with me for the afternoon,” I said.

My mother gave me a concerned expression. “You just have to give him time, sweetie.”

I looked away from her then. As frustrated as I was with my mother, she still knew how to read me like a book, and she could tell I was upset. “I know.”

She gave my shoulder a small squeeze. “Things have a way of working out the way they’re supposed to. You just have to trust in the process.”

I wondered if she was talking about me or herself then. I knew I had been incredibly self-centered lately with everything I had been going through with Shane, but I had heard the low tone of anxious conversations happening every night when she talked to my dad. They were trying to figure out the best way to liquidate all of their assets so they could pay off the enormous amount of debt that they had in front of them. What I was able to help them with was barely making a dent. I knew she was worried, and I can see the bags under her eyes that told me she hadn’t been sleeping well either.

“We’ll figure it out. We always do,” I said.

She smiled indulgently at me and nodded. Scarlet put her hand in mine as I led her back towards the gym and my office. Several times we passed players in the hallway, and she walked up to each of them to say hello. I couldn’t help but smile. Football players would seem enormous to an eight-year-old girl, but she wasn’t letting their size intimidate her. I got plenty of curious looks, but mostly they just waved at us in a friendly kind of way that I appreciated. So far everyone I had met on the team had been great. Everyone except for…

As if my thoughts had conjured her into being, Olivia Watson appeared in front of us. She looked at me and then look down at Scarlet with a look of distinct disdain on her face. “You can’t have kids here. You gotta have a waiver signed and have it cleared by the front office.”

I didn’t comprehend why this woman continued to choose to be so despicable to me. Then I had to remember that she had warned me to stay away from Shane because she believed that he was hers through some kind of some misplaced possessiveness. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Shane about what Olivia had said to me the week before with everything that had happened, and I figured now wasn’t exactly the best time to address it either.

“My daughter has just come for a visit.” Man, was she going to be surprised when she found out exactly who Scarlet was. There was kind of gleefulness inside of me when I thought about it. That would take the bitch down a couple of notches.

Olivia sniffed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. If it gets back to my father, it’s your funeral.” Then she moved around us and strode away from us down the hallway.