Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance (9 page)

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 started, 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.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. He was right about one thing. Winning would make me feel better about at least one part of my life. I would let Maddy have her space. Wasn’t that what she wanted after all? I could wait. Marvin was right. Rushing headlong into something right now, especially with so many things in the air with the team, wasn’t a good idea.

I took the remote out of his hand. “Okay, you win. Focus on the game.”

Marvin looked at me and smiled a wide grin. “They should start calling me Doctor Marvin. Remind me to send you a bill.”

I pretended to smack the remote against his head. Then I flipped the button to play. I had something else to focus on other than the confusing situation with Maddy. Shoving all thoughts of her way, I focused on the game.

It was my first Sunday acting as the Washington team physician at an NFL game. There was a kind of strange excitement that came with it. This was the kind of elite medicine that I had aspired to practice my entire career. I was finally doing exactly what I loved to do. The ironic thing was that I was on the sidelines watching the man that had shaken my world when I was in college by beating everyone on the field, drive after drive, ten grueling yards at a time. He was amazing to watch.

Granted, when I watched him on TV, I had found him at every opportunity when he was in the camera’s focus. Being up close and personal next to the field was a completely different experience, though. My eyes never left him. He was so intently focused on every play of the game that it was as if the rest of the world seemed to disappear around him. It was something he seemed to have fine-tuned over the last few days.

It had been on Wednesday when I had rejected his invitation to come over for dinner. Since then, he had been friendly but not particularly warm to me on the few occasions when we had run into each other in the hallways. It had been unexpected given his original hot and heavy pursuit. I was starting to wonder if I had completely messed up the situation again.

I had finally worked out a plan. I was going to invite him out for dinner so we were somewhere public for my revelation. That way when I broke the news about Scarlet, he couldn’t fly completely off the handle without causing a scene. I thought that would give me ample opportunity to explain to him why I had done what I had done without things getting heated right away.

“If you think that’s going to stop him, you’ve got another thing coming,” my mother had said when I described the plan to her. She had not been a fan of it at all. But of course, I felt like it was a minor miracle that I have managed to keep her fingers off of the telephone touchpad to dial him and tell him herself at some point over the last eight years. She was firmly in the camp that Scarlet deserved to have her father in her life sooner rather than later.

I knew she was right, but I still found myself procrastinating. Scarlet was just finally getting settled in D.C. I felt like things were really hitting a groove for her. She was doing well in school, and she was making new friends every day. I was unsure about upsetting this uneasy balance in her new life. Still, every time I saw Shane, it ripped a tiny little piece of my soul apart. I felt the weight of the truth crushing me. Especially when every day, it was as if I could see a little more of him coming out in our daughter. He needed to know the truth. They both did.

But now that he seemed intent on keeping me at a distance, I wasn’t sure of the best way to cross that gap between us. For now, I figured we would get through the game today, and I would approach him afterward. If they won, which the team seemed poised to do, he would at least be in a good mood.

I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I quickly glanced at it. It was my mother’s face on the screen. I thought about letting it go to voicemail, but she knew that I was at the game. The only reason that she would call would be if it was an emergency. My heart started to pound against my chest.
 

I did a quick signal to the other physician on the field and walked quickly towards the locker room. I hoped I was only gone for a few minutes. The game-winning drive was coming up, and I knew the quarterback would be throwing to his most trusted receiver. The game was close, and there was a good chance that Shane was the one who would get the nod to win the game for them.

I tapped the screen to answer the call and put the phone against my ear plugging my other one to attempt to hear better over the noise from the crowd. “Mom, what is it? Is something wrong with Scarlet?”

“Maddy, I’m glad you answered. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but I thought that you should know. Your dad just called.”

Now new possibilities of why she was calling raced through my mind. “Is he okay? What’s wrong?”

There was a short pause. “He called because he wanted to let me know that Bob Wright was in a car accident last night. It was apparently after last call down at Woodie’s. He was driving, and it doesn’t sound like he should have been.”

I paused at the entrance to the locker room. I felt as if I was frozen in place.

“Is he all right?” Although I barely knew Shane’s father, I knew that he and Shane had a long and rather sordid history.

“No. He… passed away after they got him to the hospital,” my mother said.

I felt myself sink onto the closest bench. This was going to be devastating to Shane. “Oh. Okay.”

“I’m not sure who will be calling Shane. It’s just gotten out now, and I know he’s playing right now. I thought you might want to know first so maybe you could be the one to tell him,” she said. “I’m sure he’d appreciate hearing it from someone closer to home.”