Chapter 13 #2
I looked at the field. “Is he having intercourse with someone else? Because I think about Damian and how much he demanded it. I have a hard time believing that someone like Callum has gone for months and months without it.”
“You’ve gone that long, too.”
Yes, I had, too. “Here they come.”
We all stood as the teams jogged out from the tunnels to their places on the sidelines, and after that, we were only talking about football and not these really hard, really overwhelming relationship things that I didn’t want to think about anyway.
But then, it was hard to even watch the game because things turned brutal.
These two teams were historic rivals, according to Anara (whose knowledge wasn’t limited to the animal kingdom).
This year, they had nearly even records, and they both wanted to win the game. A lot.
“That was violent,” she murmured as a Woodsmen defensive back flattened their quarterback. When the ball went to our offense, they apparently wanted to return the favor and—
“Oh, no! Oh, crap! Oh, my goodness!” I was saying a lot of those kinds of things and Anara had started swearing very loudly, because a fight broke out on the field between our running back and their safety.
Both guys were swinging, and I wasn’t sure how much that would hurt with pads and helmets, but then it got worse because the rest of the players on the field also raced down to the action.
It reminded me of the fight in the 20 Grand club all those months ago, when I had escaped by climbing up on the toilet and had left Millie on her own.
Callum didn’t do that. He was right in the middle of all the huge bodies but it was hard to see what was going on because it was so chaotic down there.
The coaches were trying to keep back the benches and the refs were blowing whistles and doing their level best to put a stop to it, but it was bedlam on the thirty-yard line for several minutes.
Then it took even more time for the refs to have a meeting and finally announce penalties, and a lot of those went against the home team.
The crowd started booing and the mood turned even uglier.
They threw stuff onto the field for a while as the announcers asked them to please stop and threatened to end the game.
I looked at Anara. “Should we go?”
“I think we’ll be ok if we all leave together at the end. I should probably cover up this sweatshirt,” she said, staring down at the orange knit fabric. “Demitrious did tell me not to wear it.”
“So did I. So did Callum,” I reminded her. We had been right and she picked up the coat she’d discarded and zipped it up to cover the color.
Callum started texting me almost immediately after the game ended with a Woodsmen win, which made the crowd even madder. “I can’t come up in the stands, I’m not allowed. Stadium personnel will be there soon to escort you to your car.”
“We’re fine,” I quickly wrote back. We were hanging out for a little while, waiting with the Woodsmen fans until more of the other people left.
“I knew this was a bad idea. Hell.”
I kept reassuring him that everything was ok. We went down with the Racer Stadium security people to Anara’s SUV, got in, and started the drive north and home. “We’re totally fine,” I texted again. “Totally.”
“We should have gotten a suite for you,” he wrote back, and that was a big no. Those cost thousands to rent and I wouldn’t have spent money on it. No way.
There was a pause in his messages and then he resumed texting once they were on the bus (luxury coach) and on the way to the airport. Unlike me and Anara, they were flying home. “Did the other fans hassle you?” he asked.
“People were mad but they didn’t take it out on us,” I responded. “Did they hassle you?”
“Not too bad.”
So, that meant yes. “The other fans bothered the Woodsmen. They did something to Callum,” I told Anara.
She immediately started jamming the buttons on her steering wheel and ordering her car/phone to call Demitrious, who didn’t answer.
I had to listen as she poured out her love in a voicemail and then told him that she hoped he’d gotten pictures of the hooligans but if not, she would dig up security footage and bury those people herself.
“Don’t you think it might be better to turn the other cheek?” I suggested after she hung up (after she told him she loved him a few more times).
“I don’t do that with anything regarding Demitrious. I go out for blood,” she told me. “I’ll cyberstalk them and bring them down.”
“Would you really do that over their behavior at a football game? It’s really scary for the person on the receiving end. It’s very upsetting.”
“What I’m getting from what you just said is that you know about stalking personally. Is that correct?”
“I wouldn’t call it stalking, but one of the other girls from Damian’s house was trying to get in contact. She posted that terrible picture of me to get my attention.”
“What did she want?” Anara asked.
“I don’t know. I just ignored her.”
She turned to stare.
“You have to watch the road!” I ordered.
She did comply but had more questions. “What if she had something important to tell you?” she asked.
“Then she could have just said it,” I answered.
“She sent a bunch of messages and they all basically said, ‘Girl, let’s talk.’ I didn’t want to talk to her.
I don’t want anything from that life to come back and mess up what I have going on now.
I can’t let it.” My voice had gone up a little.
“I don’t want to connect Callum to that, not when everything is going so well for him. ”
“That’s really dumb, Rainey,” she said, shaking her head.
“Life isn’t like that. Unless you decide to be a hermit and totally cut off the rest of the world, you have to deal with the past. If you do want to become a hermit, several people have done it with varying degrees of success. Currently, in Siberia—”
“I’m not going to become a hermit,” I informed her. “Moving to Siberia is out but I can still become a new person now.”
“Sure. Yes, I absolutely believe that,” she said. “Demitrious was such an unserious student when we first met but now he’s working on his PhD.”
“A PhD? Really?”
She nodded. “It’s going to take a while because of football, but he’s very dedicated.”
“But being a bad student isn’t so awful,” I pointed out.
“Neither is being a party girl and living off some dumb musician. He really is dumb,” she told me. “I tried to listen to some of his songs but they’re one hundred percent skips. Unpleasant to the ears.”
“If you listen to his early tracks, you can see how people could have liked him, at least little. He had one certified hit and that was enough for him to think that he could rule the charts and take away Pippy Polluelo’s crown.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” I looked out the window at the cold rain falling on the freeway.
It wasn’t snowing here, but it might have been further north.
“I’m not personally embarrassed…” I hesitated.
“I keep saying that I don’t care, but I do.
Maybe I didn’t before, when I was with Damian, but the stakes are higher now.
I am embarrassed. I don’t even feel like the same person anymore and I don’t want the people around me, like everyone who came to Thanksgiving, to know about Damian and Sage and our life there. ”
“I don’t think it’s a big deal. Would it help if I told you something embarrassing about me?”
“Um, I guess. What have you done?”
Well, there were a few things, but first she had to calculate the statute of limitations in order to determine how much she could say.
“This was all in Connecticut, so criminal statues are different there,” she cautioned.
“Of course, most of it was federal.” Then came a laundry list of offenses.
Fraud, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering…
“Anara, really?”
“It happened when I was a juvenile, so my record is sealed,” she said. “I was helping my dad. Have you ever heard of Harold Hirsizlik?”
“Um, should I have?”
“You would, if you were interested in white-collar crime,” she told me. She sounded surprised by my ignorance. “He was imprisoned for several years and is currently on probation. I told you that.”
“You certainly did not tell me that!”
“I mentioned that he won’t be coming to my wedding, and that’s why. He could try to get permission to travel but he’s not interested, anyway. That’s all right because I don’t care for the ‘giving away’ tradition, so I don’t need to walk with anyone.”
We rode for a while in silence while I took that in.
Then I had questions about the crimes that had led to those charges, and she was happy to explain in a non-incriminating way.
“I don’t do any of that now,” she stressed.
“I wouldn’t. But it’s part of my past and I can’t erase it.
I don’t really want to, since it led me here.
I would have gone to a private college, an expensive one, instead of a state school.
I would have studied different things in order to join my dad’s business, which I wouldn’t have liked as much.
I wouldn’t have met Demitrious and that would have been the shittiest thing in the world.
” She shook her head slowly, marveling. “What would my life be without him? What would his be like? We both would have been despondent.”
For the rest of the trip, we switched to lighter topics than our pasts.
It wasn’t as long a drive as the bus trip that had brought me from my former home in Washington to Los Angeles (that had been about thirty hours) but it still took a while.
We had to slow down as the rain started to freeze and then turned to snow.
The largest problem wasn’t the weather, though. I found out about it when I got a call from the dog trainer at the “camp” where I had dropped off Maverick for his weekend training.