Offside: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (25 page)

I only look down for a second, maybe even half that, but when I look up I know it’s already too late to avoid it. The back of the lorry comes towards me at what feels like a thousand miles an hour, the traffic ahead suddenly stopped.

I’m conscious when the windshield breaks, I know that because I hear it, like the piercing screams of a thousand demons. I’m awake too, to feel the engine block shift towards me and the car crumple up like an origami model. There is a trickle of what feels like water dripping down my forehead and the last thing I remember before the world closes off entirely is the name I see on my cell phone.

Dad.

J
asper

There’s nothing worse than hearing bad news. I’ll always remember the moment my dad told me about his cancer, as though it was nothing but some kind of stomach bug he was going to get over in a couple of weeks, and the way my heart dropped so far I half expected to find it lying on the floor. Even before he told me I figured something was up, and I don’t mean in the weeks before, when he knew and no-one else did, I mean in the seconds before, when he sat me down and I saw a fear in his eyes I’ll never forget to my own dying day, even if he pretended as much as he could that it wasn’t really there.

I try calling Penny a number of times during the day, but when she doesn’t answer I figure I should leave it. I worry she’s already made her decision to break it off with me because she’s been left with no other choice, and separation at this stage of our relationship makes the most sense for all concerned, but try and think positively that the reason she’s not getting back to me immediately is because she’s working out how to unclusterfuck the situation we’ve somehow found ourselves in.

What I don’t expect to hear is that her radio silence is because she’s been cut out of a car wreck on the way over here, and rushed to hospital unconscious, in a seriously critical condition.

It’s Harrison that calls me and, like I experienced with my dad years ago, I know it’s serious before he’s even spoken. I can hear the bad news in the staggered lilt of his breathing as clear as a cloudless day.

“Where?” is all I need to say to him, already on the way to my own car, hoping for all humanity that it’s not as serious as he’s making it sound.

On the journey to the hospital, I already know. I knew before, but this just reaffirms it. I’m crying. I’ve never cried before and I’m crying now. A two meter tall, two hundred and forty pound man crying his heart out for a girl he’s barely known for two months. A girl who he knows he’s going to marry one day, have children with one day and grow old with one day, hand in hand, shit joke after shit joke until the end of time, only if she has the strength to make it through this.

Harrison’s at the hospital with Penny’s mother. I’ve never seen him looking so grey, or experienced him being so silent. He looks like Penny’s already died and even though I know it’s impossible because I can still feel her inside me, I can’t help but worry.

“It’s my fault”, Harrison says. “I fucked up.”

They have her in the theatre for hours. They have her in there for so long there are moments when I think she’s never going to come out again at all. Doctors throw words at me that make little sense, that nurses translate into an English I can understand, and it makes me even more concerned than the first time I hear them. Blood on the brain. Swelling. Induced coma. Lost a lot of blood. Critical.

From Harrison I get the jist of what happened. Penny, mad at him for sending me away, on her way to me to try to resolve it.

“She was going too fast”, Penny’s mother, June, bawls.

We wait for news, bad or good, none of us in the right frame of mind to speak much. Hospitals make me feel uneasy. My dad spent a long time in one because of his illness, and as a consequence, I spent a long time in one with him too.

They are the wrong place for sick people to be, surrounded by others who walk the halls like zombies or lie in beds scattered around passageways and corridors, spilling out into entrance ways and communal waiting rooms like people who have forgotten they should already be dead.

This was not how I imagined the day to go when I woke up in Penny’s arms this morning. A fourth win for Moxlin in my fourth game, a plane ticket passed across the desk to me by a man who has resented me from my very first day here, and now Penny, the most important thing in my life, fighting for her life in this clinical, characterless, color drained building of death.

I have to go outside before I scream. I need air and I can’t cope with the possibility of this day ending without Penny in it.

My dad taught me how to win and then he lost his very last battle, fighting all the way like a fucking champion until finally it finished him off. It’s because of his death that I am the person I am. It’s because of him that I refuse to give in, and because he’s no longer here anymore that I struggle to keep the demons away outside of the game.

I thought for a long time it was always going to be like that, a beast on the field and an animal off it, right up into I met Penny. I used to think if I didn’t go crazy on a night out it was because I wasn’t doing it right. I had to be the last man standing, the last to go to bed, the biggest drinker, the most badly behaved.

The only thing that mattered to me was winning whatever game I ended up playing. Being the best of whatever I decided to do. Now I know none of that means anything at all compared to what it feels like to be with someone you love. All of that shit leaves me empty, whereas Penny, and what we feel for each other, fills me up so much I feel like I’m going to burst.

She’s calmed me down and made me realize exactly what I want from life. I want to feel happy and whole and utterly complete, and I thought I could get that tearing up the town every weekend, hopping from bed to bed, screwing around and behaving badly. I can’t. I can’t get it without her, and the hollow sensation I have in my chest, now I know that there is a real risk I could lose her, absolutely destroys me.

I didn’t realize it before. Even with Corsham calling me back to London, the natural optimist I am thought it wouldn’t be an issue. Penny would come with me, or I would go and see out the season and then come back here, or fuck it, I’d retire completely.

With what’s happened today, I realize beyond question the absolute fragility of our relationship, the importance of taking advantage of every moment we have and fighting to stay together, because situations can change in the blink of an eye.

I still don’t know what we’ll do, but I know that whatever it is, Penny and I are going to survive this. Even if she wakes up with no memory of me, I’ll fight for her until I win her back again. Even if she has already decided to let me go, I’ll stay anyway until she can’t say no.

Fuck Corsham, fuck Moxlin too. I came here to help a team out of a tight situation and as far as I’m concerned I’ve succeeded. What I didn’t come here to do was fall in love, but now that I have, there is no way I’m going to let myself or Penny fall out of it again. Harrison may hate me, I may never be able to pick up a rugby ball again, but at least I’ll have her. At least I’ll have Penny.

When Harrison comes out to find me, my heart sinks. His grey face tells a story of a thousand words and when he shakes it and looks to the ground, I nearly drop to my knees.

When that fucker looks back up, he’s smiling.

“That’s for calling me a cunt.”

As much as I want to kill him, there are much more important things for me to do first. In close to five hundred games in a ten year professional career, I’ve never moved so fast. You wouldn’t be able to wipe the smile off my face if you tried. I literally barge past Harrison, fly back through the double doors into the reception area at a thousand miles an hour and shout at the top of my lungs like a madman for her.

“Penny. Penny Locke where is she?”

“One-o-five and please keep your voice down.”

A nurse points to a corridor, in which I find a doctor I ask for further direction. I run two halls, up and down another and back through the original entrance hall before I finally find her, a smiling face amongst a web of bandages, conscious but exhausted, as beautiful as the first day I ever saw her, as happy as she can be in the circumstances, and absolutely one hundred percent alive.

“Jasper.”

Her voice is barely a whisper.

“This is what you have to do to make sure I stay?”

“Shut up and get over here before Mom and Dad get back.”

Penny

I’m sore all over, but I’m alive. At least I think I am. This could always be a dream, of course, and if I hadn’t have woken with Dad’s ashen face hovering above me, Mom’s tears staining my arm, I might have even believed that possible. Jasper hovers in the doorway momentarily, before he deems it safe enough to venture inside. Even sexier than I remember him.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“A phone call would have got my attention.”

“You know, I like spectacles.”

“I can see. What is that, a broken rib, a punctured lung, about two liters of lost blood?”

“It was a big truck.”

“You scared me, Penny. Please don’t do that again.”

Jasper pulls up a chair but I make him sit on the bed. Even though there’s hardly any space for him and he has to perch awkwardly, I want him near me.

“I thought I was dead.”

“You’re not the only one. I thought your Dad was going to have a heart attack.”

“I don’t know if he doesn’t deserve it.”

It hurts to talk even with the pain killers they’ve given me. With the arm that’s not bandaged up I reach out and find Jasper’s hand.

“What were you doing?”

The look he gives me is coupled with a smile. He’s relieved not angry and it makes me want to laugh with him. This situation is so ridiculous there’s nothing else left for me to do. I’ve cried enough, and even though laughing hurts all over, I can’t help but do it.

“I was worried you’d get away.”

“I already told you, I’m not going anywhere.”

“What about home? Rugby? London? You’re family?”

A sudden sharp pain cuts through my side and it throws me into a coughing fit.

“I’ll quit.”

“You don’t want to.”

“I may have no choice.”

I’m tired and I don’t want to think about it now. I want to sleep with Jasper alongside me and not even think about tomorrow.

“Talk to Dad.”

“I already tried that.”

“Talk to him again, I have a feeling he might change his mind.”

I can feel sleep dragging me under, and I wonder if the medication they’ve given me is suddenly kicking in. Jasper’s voice brings me back and I have no idea how much time has passed.

“I’ve got a joke for you.”

“It hurts when I laugh.”

“Then you’ll be absolutely fine with this one.”

I can’t help but laugh a little, even though I’ve hardly got enough energy to breath in and out.

“A doctor calls up his patient.”

I roll my eyes, but only in jest.

“Come on, it’s topical.”

“Did you look this up especially?”

“I’ve had a few hours to kill.”

“A doctor calls up his patient?”

“Says, I have some bad news and some worse news.”

I can feel my eyelids closing and I fight against it while Jasper continues.

“The bad news is that you have twenty four hours to live, he says.”

I know the joke, but I don’t let on. I don’t want to ruin his moment. Instead, I hold onto him as tightly as possible and pull him towards me so he can whisper the punchline into my ear. I’m going to be asleep in hardly anytime at all. I’m exhausted and bust up into a million pieces, but despite all that, I’m happy.

Dad did an about turn. He said he’d do everything he can to keep Jasper here. If he can’t help directly, he’ll do everything he can to support my decision to leave with him if I have to. None one of us know what’s going to happen in the future, but we’re going to do as much as we can to make sure we don’t fuck it up right now.

Jasper folds himself into me.

“That’s very bad news the patient says, what could be worse than that?”

I nod, seconds away from sleep, the punchline on the tip of my tongue.

“Well, the doctor says, I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”

Jasper kisses my cheek, the lightest of softest of touches with the plump fullness of his lips, and I fold away from the hospital, the car crash, the contract termination, away from Moxlin Tigers and Topher and the turmoil I’ve been lifted out from by the baddest of british bad boys, and into a dream of him, the warmth of the real Jasper by my side, a Tiger tamed and now mine, definitely, to keep by my side forever.

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J
asper

Penny’s in an induced coma for two weeks.

Flat out, pipes poking out of her body like plumbing, none of us know when she’s going to wake up again. I’m by her side pretty much all the time, but there is nothing I can do. It’s in the hands of the medics, and I’m assured that if she’s going to come out the other side at all, I have to leave them to do their job.

It isn’t easy. I saw my father going in and out of the hospital for chemo with smiling doctors that promised the best even up to the point he was nothing but skin and bones, but this isn’t my country, and it isn’t my decision, so all I can do is sit by her side, hold her hand and hope.

That Casablanca style airport scene I have it my head with Penny stopping me as I board for London doesn’t happen. Needless to say, I don’t take the plane at all. It isn’t because Dougie gives me compassionate leave, or because Alex agrees to some kind of cross country compromise, it’s because the contract was never reneged at all. Harrison was bullshitting us both all along, just to see if I was serious about Penny. I’m not even joking.

That motherfucker put us both in a situation in which I thought I had to leave and Penny ended up in hospital because of it. The ban had been lifted, but the decision hadn’t been made. Harrison was sitting on it, trying to work out what was best for his club, his daughter and everyone else involved. Alex bought the plane tickets, but Harrison was stalling until he was absolutely sure.