To Have and to Hold (22 page)

I don’t actually have a grandma. Definitely not a teeny, tiny, white grandma. But if I
had
one, I’d like her to be like Grizzly Greta.

Greta, whose name isn’t actually Greta but Diane, is sitting up in her hospital bed. Her hair looks like dandelion fluff and her eyes are a little rheumy, but she is grinning like a fiend, because we have just presented her with a jersey with the letters GG on the back, signed by almost the whole team in fabric paint.

“Ty’s idea,” Zach says, jerking a thumb in my direction, because he is the kind of guy who never takes credit for anything if he can make someone else look good. Which is part of the reason he’s such a great quarterback and a great leader. “When you didn’t show up at the last game, Ty went on a rampage to figure out where you were,” Zach told her.

Embarrassed, I turn away, but he’s determined to tell the story. It’s true. I knew something was wrong as soon as Greta didn’t meet us after last Sunday’s away game. She’s always the first one to greet the bus, sitting in her folding lawn chair, knitting, bundled to the chin if it’s cold out. So last Sunday, when she wasn’t there, I was more freaked out than anyone else, and first thing Monday morning, I went on a quest to find out if she was okay. Through a crazy six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon maneuver, it turned out her son knew someone who knew someone who knew someone in the front office and we found out about the stroke. We heard the bad news at the same time we heard that she was doing well and expected to make a full recovery. Which was good because it would have been ugly to see a two hundred and fifty pound black man weep. Not that I would have done it where anyone could see.

“Ty,” Greta says. “When are you going to make some girl happy and marry her?”

“Never,” O says. O is short for Michael Ohalu. He’s our middle linebacker and probably my best friend on the team. “If Ty married some girl, he’d have to stop making all the other girls happy, and that would make Ty unhappy.”

I wouldn’t have said that in front of my grandmother, but O is O, and Greta is pretty spry for an eighty-year-old woman and doesn’t seem to take it amiss. Plus, by now, she knows me well enough to know it’s true, even if she feels like she has to ask from time to time if I’m dating someone special (no). I don’t mind. I don’t have family to harass me like that, so it’s refreshing every now and again.

“When do you get to get out of here?” Zach asks her.

“I could get out as early as Saturday on good behavior,” Greta says. “Might not even miss a game.”

I feel a surprising jump of anxiety at the thought of Greta, who looks pretty frail, braving Grizzly Stadium as soon as Sunday. “You rest up and take care of yourself.”

She fingers the raised autographs on the jersey and looks from one of our faces to the next. “Aren’t you boys supposed to be practicing right now?”

“Nah,” Zach says. “Coach told us this was more important.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Greta scolds. “You boys get right back there to that training center and start working on winning that next game for me. You hear me?”

We say our goodbyes and shuffle out of there and back to Zach’s A5 Cab. It’s like a clown car, with Zach, O, me, and Calder squeezing in. If you’ve never seen two-fifty, three-hundred-pound six-foot-plus guys maneuver themselves into a convertible, it’s pretty fucking funny. Unless you’re one of the guys, in which case you sympathize with sardines. Luckily, we get along okay. The Grizzlies are a tight-knit team, the four of us maybe tightest knit of all. Some might say we’re like family, but it wouldn’t be me. Friends and teammates have a better chance of not disappointing you than family as far as I’m concerned. I do make an exception for Greta, but only because I never had an actual grandma to let me down.

“Greta looked pretty good, right?” O demands.

“Tired, maybe,” I say.

Speaking of grandmas, Zach drives his car like one. We rib him about it all the way back to the facility, especially when he stops to let someone turn left out of the driveway before he turns in. We suggest some crucial portions of his anatomy are missing if he can’t drive like a man. He takes it well. Another thing I like about him.

I have to go back inside because I’ve left my duffel in the locker room, which turns out to be either a mistake or lucky depending on how you look at things.

“Coach T wants to see you.”

I can’t swear to who says this to me. The rookie place kicker, maybe, unless I have him confused with one of the other kickers, which happens sometimes. Kickers all look alike to me.

I grab my stuff and head to Coach’s office. Our defensive coordinator, Abel Cross, is sitting in there already. My heartbeat kicks up. Coach can want to see you for any purpose, but I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe I have a guilty conscience, because I haven’t been exactly the dream team member lately. Not my playing, which is fine. Better than fine. But my attitude. I know I have my reasons, but that doesn’t mean this might not be a wake-up call.

There’s someone else in the other seat, facing away from me, and since I’m busy looking at the coaches and freaking out, it takes me a minute to actually notice the person, and then to figure out that it’s not a teammate or a staffer. It’s a woman. She has short hair and she’s wearing a pantsuit, but as she turns her head to take me in, I see a flash of a dangly gold earring, a pretty curve of cheek, and a splash of deep red lipstick. She looks vaguely familiar, and now my pulse is really jumping, as I start to think about what I might have done recently to get someone in the media or personnel office riled up.

“Abe, can you take her for a cup of coffee and give us a few?” Coach asks our defensive coordinator, not helping my quiet, internal freakout.

As she stands up and turns around, I realize that I would never had made the mistake of thinking she was a man if I’d been able to see her better. She might be wearing a suit, but it tucks in tight at the waist and flares out over her hips. And the short hair is crazy sexy on her. One, because the no-nonsense, fuck-you hair makes her curves more outrageous by contrast. And two, because she’s one of those model-beautiful women with high cheekbones, big soft lips, and huge eyes, and with her hair cut short like that, I can’t stop staring at her face. Her skin is dark and perfectly smooth, and I swear my mouth waters.

I just described seeing her like it happened in slow motion, but what actually happens is more like this:

Wow.

Hot.

Want.

Followed immediately by:

Nope
.

Because if she’s anyone who has anything remotely to do with the team, she’s off-limits. Especially media or personnel.

Which is a huge bummer because my mind has gone on a pornographic flight of fancy involving my hands and her curves, and I have to rein it back in.

Coach Cross says, “We’ll be back,” and the two of them step out of the office. I hesitate for a moment, then sit in the seat vacated by Ms. Hotness. It’s warm, and for some reason, that gets me going a little. Maybe it’s been too long since I—to steal O’s term—made a woman happy.

“I know you haven’t been entirely pleased with the way things are going lately,” Coach T begins.

I’m not an idiot. I jump in right away and start making noise about how much I love the Grizzlies (true) and Seattle (I can take it or leave it) and Coach T and Coach Cross, but Coach T cuts me off. “Specifically about the linebackers coaching.”

That shuts me up, because I’m not going to argue. I fucking hate the new linebackers coach.

“We let Dave Brogan go this morning.”

I school my face and don’t let my joy show. It took me awhile to figure this out, but in the pros, it doesn’t pay to have an opinion unless you’re asked.

“Mack’s death was a big loss for all of us,” Coach T says.

Yeah. Well. Mack’s death may have been a big loss for “all of them,” but it leveled me. Mack is—was—James MacKenzie, the late, great linebackers coach for the Grizzlies, who died of a heart attack in the wee hours of the morning alone in his house in July, three days before training camp was supposed to start. He was also the coach at UCLA who recruited me to play there, the coach who gave me my shot in the PFL when no one else wanted to take a chance on me, and the guy who pushed me to do my best almost every day for almost twelve years.

You hear people say how coaches have an incredibly unhealthy, stress-filled lifestyle, but you don’t want to believe it until something like that happens.

“It’s no secret you had issues with Dave.”

“I liked Dave just fine.”

That’s a gigantic fucking lie, by the way.

“You were all over Dave’s ass,” Coach says.

He gives me his patented don’t-bullshit-a-bullshitter look, and I crack. I don’t even try to hang in there. Partially because I am actually kind of relieved to have it out in the open.

Coach lets me off the hook. “Let’s just say that Dave’s style wasn’t a good match.”

Thank you, Coach T, for your understated truth-telling.

Dave is of the tear-you-a-new-one school of coaching. It’s like he’s training horses or something—he has to break a guy’s will first. It might not have bothered me that much—because usually that kind of shit rolls right off me—but I don’t like the way it affects O and makes the rookies skittish. You can’t play good defense, or any kind of football, really, if you’re intimidated.

So, yeah, I’ve been up in Dave’s business a lot, trying to get him to calm the fuck down.

“We know no one can replace Mack and what he meant to you,” Coach says. “We hired Dave because he supposedly shared Mack’s philosophy and we thought the transition would go easier, but we were wrong.”

Coach T is the youngest head coach in the PFL. He’s been here less than a year, and at first I wasn’t inclined to think he knew what he was doing, but the more I got to know him, the more I respected him. It helps that Zach thinks the sun rises and sets on him. But it’s also rare to meet a guy who’ll say that straight out,
We were wrong.

“Look, Ty, I’m going to level with you here. There are some people who think your problem with Dave was actually a problem with you. I’ve told them I think you deserve some slack, given the situation. I said given how long you’d worked with Mack, and given how much of a shock his death was, we couldn’t judge you too much by these last few months. But I need you to show me—and them—that I’m right. That you can get along with the next coach and demonstrate the level of professionalism we know you’ve got in you.”

Ouch. I think about how pissed Mack would be at me right now. Because if there was one thing he cared about above all else, it was being a professional. Even when I was a high school player, he emphasized that.

And I hear the threat behind Coach Thrayne’s even tone and pleasant words. Everyone in the PFL is dispensable. For every guy playing pro football, there are hundreds waiting to take his job if he can’t pull his weight, not just as an athlete but as a man.

I’m opening my mouth, getting ready to tell him what he wants to hear, when he says, “We hired someone new. It’s a little bit of an unconventional choice.”

I don’t like words like “unconventional.” They can mean just about anything. The media used to call Mack’s approach unconventional, and that for sure wasn’t a bad thing. But I get a bad feeling about the way Coach is looking at me while he enunciates the word. Like,
Don’t freak out yet, dude
.

“We’re doing a press conference Wednesday morning….” Coach picks his phone up from his desk and taps out a text. “You’ll have to keep this under your hat until then. But we wanted to give you a heads-up so you could have some time to prepare a reaction. We don’t want anyone in the linebacker corps looking shocked in a room full of media.”

Oh,
shit
. So basically what he’s saying is that I’m not going to like this hire, and my job depends on my pretending I do. Now I’m thinking about who he could have hired that would shock me. I start cataloguing coaches I know who’ve gotten bad press for stuff—drinking, abuse, general suckage—but still can’t think of anyone genuinely
shocking
.

“—the best,” Coach is saying—apparently I’ve missed a sentence or two. “The very best. I wouldn’t have brought her in if I didn’t believe that. And if I didn’t believe she’d be good for your career, in particular. I worked with her in San Fran, and if it had been my choice, I would have hired her then.”

Her. She. He did just say that, didn’t he? I didn’t hallucinate.

Holy fucking shit.

“Her?” I repeat stupidly.

I feel a little like I’ve had my bell rung by a hard hit. The world gets a little silent and buzzy, then suddenly too big and bright as it reorients around me.

“You ready for us, Coach?”

It’s Coach Cross at the door, someone in tow behind him, and all at once, I realize where I’ve seen the beautiful woman sitting in Coach’s office before.

Love stories you’ll never forget

By authors you’ll always remember

eOriginal Romance from Random House

randomhousebooks.com