Chapter 27
Blaise
I’m so fucked.
I watch the medical team leave, and it doesn’t matter. I’m happy for the quiet that follows, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m so fucked.
Tilly gives me a kiss, and it makes me feel better, even though I don’t deserve it. She tucks her arms around my back, and I lift myself to give her enough space to get back there. Pads aren’t nearly as bulky as they were in previous eras, but I’ve still got a lot of plastic encasing me.
She fists the back of my jersey and gives it a tug.
“Whatcha doing?” I ask, even though I’m happy just having her here. She’s put up with a lot of my shit. Way more than she should have. Her touches don’t have the expectations they should, that she deserves to have, but right now? I need to just take the comfort I get in there.
She smushes her face against my chest pads and gives a stronger tug, untucking most of the fabric. “Getting you out of all this crap. You’re not going back out there.”
“I have to.”
But now that it’s quiet, I can hear my ankle.
I denied anything stronger than ibuprofen in the expectations I’d be able to bully Keltner into letting me back out and I’d need to be clear-headed if I was going to get the rest of my yardage to get that 50-yard bonus.
The ice is working its magic, but without stronger drugs, the waning of my adrenaline is warming the pain.
She gets the front of my jersey untucked and realizes that it’s not as easy as just a shirt to take off.
Not with all the pads and everything. It’s more like a condom holding everything in place inside.
She focuses hard on it, and I love watching her figure it out.
I love seeing the way she glares and scowls and inspects.
She’s so goddamn beautiful.
It hits me like a ton of bricks. Like that player who took out my ankle. I don’t even know who it was. I’ve been hurt on the field before. I’ve been stuck on Injured Reserve. But none of it has felt quite like this. I can’t believe it’s not broken.
And I can’t believe how beautiful Tilly is.
When did that happen? When did she go from fascinating and unusual and intriguing to beautiful? When did she stop being someone I wanted to look at and start being the only person I wanted to look at?
“Stop,” Tilly whispers when I make a grab for the wig she has on today, but it’s not her fancy lace-front. It’s a maroon and goldenrod one to match the team colors. I’m sure it’s just pinned on.
One good tug, and it comes right off.
“Dammit,” she huffs, but she’s been doing her hair lately, making simple but clean braids in a pretty spiral.
She’s beautiful.
“And stop looking at me.”
But how can I not when she suddenly straddles me on the hospital bed, thankfully big enough for guys like Gabe, so there’s plenty of room for her, and pulls my jersey up by the collar. It pops right off along with my pads, and then she takes my white undershirt with it.
She lowers herself down, folding herself up neatly enough that she avoids touching my right leg even as she lays her calf alongside it and lays herself on my chest.
“Oh, babe, I’m all gross right now.”
“I don’t care. Tell me why you needed to get back on the field. Tell me what’s going on.”
I sigh and toss my head back, rubbing her back to make me feel better. “I’m going to hurt you.”
“Yeah, well, I think we’re both real good at that.”
I snort. “What have you ever done to hurt me?”
She shrugs and gives a non-committal, “You know.”
“I don’t.” Whatever she thinks she did to hurt me, she didn’t hurt me at all. I did it all to myself.
I have to tell her that.
“If I could go back in time to that night when I saw you in my hot tub, when I saw that tattoo snaking up your baby bump and knew you were my Trixie and that was my baby growing in you? If I could go back to that night and know in that moment that you weren’t the one who was ruining my life, it would have been the greatest fucking thing that ever happened to me. Fuck, it was the greatest—”
But Tilly is already looking up at me with dark, shrewd eyes. “Wait, wait, wait, who is ruining your life?”
“My blackmailer,” I spit out, taking that plunge.
No sense testing the water when I’ve always been a strong swimmer.
“Someone recorded us that night, Till. At the hotel. There . . . there must have been cameras everywhere. And microphones? And you didn’t know me well enough to recognize me then, but there’s no question it’s me. They’ve taken everything from me.”
I can see the moment when Tilly’s eyes fade, stuck in thought. They’re still on me, but she’s not looking at me anymore, not really. Her fingers drum a slow cadence on my chest, her nails just long enough that there’s both a dull and an acute sensation prickling me.
This is it. This is when she blows up on me.
Incredibly hesitantly, far more hesitantly than I’d manage if the situation was reversed, she says, “How much money is it?”
I wince, like if I scrunch my face up enough, it won’t hurt as much. But saying, “Twenty million dollars,” hurts way more than a lineman to the ankle.
“Oh, Blaise.”
I struggle to hear the disappointment in her voice, but I know it’s there.
Our lives would be so different, so much better, if I hadn’t fucked this up so badly.
We’d have a 24-hour nurse just for Donovan.
She’d have had an entire team of doctors making sure she healed properly.
We wouldn’t be sharing her ancient Kia. And I don’t know how I’m going to handle her stairs.
“What . . . how . . . what did you think I did with this money?” she says, and she actually laughs, but I hear the raw emotion behind it.
“I had no idea. I mean, what sat best with me was that you had an insane amount of medical debt, both you and your dad, and between all that and his home, that ate up most of it.”
“That’s why you asked. I told you—dammit, that’s why you asked?”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t care what you were doing with that guy. I really don’t.” I’m not about to tell her that I’d understand if this was enough to drive her back to him, no way I’m going to give her that idea. But I would understand.
“Wait, but what were you thinking before you knew everything else about me?”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“I thought . . . fuck. I thought you were just a scammer when I first got the messages, and then I thought you were pulling some kind of baby trap and you were going to milk me for everything with the child support when I found out you were pregnant. Andy had me almost convinced it wasn’t going to be my kid at all—”
“Fuck Andy!” she huffs, only to sink right back down as though embarrassed when she is entitled to every rage she feels right now.
“Yep. He’s cool now, but I said that a lot, too.
” She’s about to say a lot worse about me.
“And then I saw your apartment and . . . and the only thing I could figure is you had some place set up elsewhere, and you were going to run, and I’d just messed up your plans by being there.
But I didn’t know if you were going to run off with Donovan or, with all the stuff just boxed up in the corner like that, like you weren’t taking it with you, either, like you . . .”
“Like I was going to abandon my son. Like my mother abandoned me. Like your parents abandoned you.”
I can’t say it. I can’t agree that my world is ending here. It’s a world I never thought I wanted or expected to have. A world I didn’t think I could handle if it wasn’t all structured around my life. I never thought I’d want a world that could hurt me so much.
And it does. Every day hurts me. Every day I check Donovan’s hands and feet obsessively.
Every day I calculate what I need to do to get the money to cover the blackmail along with my household expenses.
Every night, I listen for Tilly’s even breathing, just to make sure she’s still with me, that her heart didn’t just suddenly quit again, in a moment where there isn’t already of team of doctors ready to get it going before any damage happens.
And if this is how every day forward is, I’m good with that, I just don’t want to not be able to do those things.
I swallow glass as I nod.
“The whole reason you were staying with me was to make sure I didn’t run off.”
“Yeah,” I mouth, but no sound comes out.
This is it. This is when she blows up on me.
She gives herself a couple seconds before destroying me, and I respect that. And then, with a big breath, she says, “I get it.”
I freeze, expecting more. But when she leaves it at that and even has the audacity to sigh and sink further onto me, like she’s just going to take a nap right here, my brain starts to go staticky.
Sometimes in the middle of a play, there’s this opening that doesn’t make sense.
Someone went a way I didn’t expect or someone got twitchy and stalled in the middle of what they were doing.
I always get this feeling the doom is about to hit and I need to get the ball out of my hand as soon as possible, or I’m going to get my back snapped in half by a defensive end that managed to escape my peripheral vision.
More often than not, I’m right, and the only thing that saves me from getting wrecked is either getting rid of that ball or getting sacked in a professionally courteous way.
I’ve got my bonuses for winning games and scoring points, but some teams have bonuses for injuring players. Totally illegal, the NFL banned it decades ago, but we all know some coaches aren’t above doing it secretly, so I truly do play at the mercy of the opposing team.
Tilly doesn’t owe me that mercy. I’d much rather have her hit me now, right to my face, than sneak behind and end me sometime further down the road. “I was awful to you,” I say, just to egg her on. “I was a nightmare. You didn’t deserve that.”
Another slow response, but it’s still, “That’s just who you are.”
“I am not!”
“Blaise,” she chides, “I know the stories. And this shit with you and Lin? This is who you are.”