Eleven #3
‘For—’ Disbelief splutters out of me, staining my skin with a hot flush. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’
‘I let you get away with not being a team player, Dani, but you’re not above the rules. You can’t punch your teammates.’
‘He—’
‘I don’t care what he did,’ Coach snaps, and it hits me with this weird, jarring clarity how true that is.
He doesn’t care. I could tell him anything, I could detail the entire conversation, every conversation I’ve had with Ben since we broke up, and it wouldn’t matter.
He wouldn’t fucking care. ‘This hostility, Dani? I’m sick of it.
We have a code of conduct. You broke it.
You’re suspended from the team for a week—’
‘A week—’
‘—but if you stop talking back to me right now, you can join us at the meet this weekend.’
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Not because I’m heeding his warning, but because I’m genuinely speechless.
Thoughtless too. Emotionless, I wish; a whole lot of emotion clogs my throat as I watch my coach walk away without another word, without a damn care, and herd the rest of my team inside; my parting gift is snickers and smug looks and a complete lack of anything close to sympathy.
I’ve never missed a practice in my life. Not once. I don’t miss anything. I don’t get suspended. I am freaking model in everything I do. I . . .
I swallow thickly. Palm the base of my throat like I can pluck the lump there right out, toss it away. Rake my nails across my chest until I find my erratic, sore heart, and spend a moment wishing I could rip that right out too.
‘What happened?’
My sharp inhale hurts. My embarrassment hurts. I feel teeny-freaking-tiny, too small to possibly meet Heath’s gaze, so I evade it. My head hangs low as my unsteady feet carry me toward the parking lot exit, by-passing the car.
‘Where are you going?’
The question has me coming up short; I don’t know. Hands fisting and flexing repeatedly at my sides, I try to think – I try harder not to burst into fucking tears.
‘Baby.’ Warm fingers twine with my twitching ones. ‘What the hell just happened?’
I sniff. With my free hand, I swipe roughly at my eyes; I’m fucking horrified when my knuckles come away wet, and even more so when my voice breaks as I spit, ‘He suspended me.’
Heath goes so still, it’s almost alarming. I swear he short-circuits for a moment, expressionless and silent and not even breathing, I don’t think, until his lungs empty with a disbelieving, ‘What?’
‘Ben told Coach about the other night, so he suspended me.’
‘Did you tell him—’
‘He doesn’t care.’
Still holding my hand, Heath tries to turn around, to storm toward the pool complex. ‘I’ll tell him I punched him.’
It’s my turn to yank him to a stop. ‘He won’t care.’
‘How long?’
‘A week.’ God, my chest hurts. ‘But I can swim at the meet.’
‘You shouldn’t. Teach them a fucking lesson.’
The most resentful parts of me consider it. They beg for it, turn red with glee while the rest of me is scarlet with pure fury. ‘Esas son mamadas.’
‘This is bullshit.’
I jerk – out of my head, away from the present, toward Heath. ‘You speak Spanish?’
‘Claro que sí,’ he croons, like an asshole. ‘You didn’t know that?’
‘Why would I know that?’
‘Because I’ve literally spoken to you in Spanish before.’
He has? I frown, wracking my brain and coming up empty, except for little snippets of guapa and linda and mi amor that were cast out playfully, teasingly, meant-to-inspire-jealousy-ingly, that I thought were the extent of his knowledge, that do not a hispanophone make.
Something I start to point out until a different occasion suddenly comes to mind.
It was over a year ago, I think. At a meet.
Ben had just lost his heat pretty spectacularly and wanted comforting, but I was trying to get in the zone and he was being a dick – he called me a bitch, so I walked away.
I remember him yelling after me, calling me a robot.
I remember muttering nonsense to myself as I recited the words to the book my mom read to me the most when I was a kid – I guess El Principito imprinted on me as a source of comfort or something, because it’s what I’ve always turned to when I need to self-soothe.
And I remember Heath being there. Appearing out of nowhere. That deep voice lowering to match my mumbling as he asked, ‘The Little Prince?’
I had grunted. Snapped at him, told him to fuck his pretty ass off, not in English, and it didn’t register at the time that he had understood. Laughed. Quipped, ‘I knew you thought I was pretty,’ in the same tongue.
It does now. ‘I forgot about that.’
‘Yeah, well, we’ve established I’m not particularly memorable to you.’
I open my mouth to argue – if I even have an argument, I don’t know, and I don’t find out, because Heath hushes me, holds me, guides me back to his car. ‘I’ll drive you home.’
My body revolts at the mere suggestion. ‘I don’t wanna go home.’
‘Then I’ll drive you somewhere else.’
‘You have practice.’
‘I’ll skip it.’
‘I don’t want you to skip it.’
‘Well, as The Rolling Stones once said . . .’
I don’t laugh. I don’t smile. I don’t have the capacity to find him even remotely funny – I don’t have the capacity to stop myself from sounding quite so harsh as I grumble, ‘Just leave me alone, Heath.’
‘I don’t wanna.’
‘What was that about a song?’
‘Compromise – I’ll leave you alone if you let me drive you wherever you wanna be alone.’
Even through the stubborn, infuriated lens clouding my senses, I recognize a losing battle. I grumble and I scowl and I pout a little, but I concede. ‘You can walk me to the library. And then you go to practice.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Playfully, he salutes me. Sweetly, he lifts our entwined fingers to his mouth and kisses the back of my hand. ‘They don’t deserve you, Dani.’
I don’t know what to say to that. I just sigh. As we walk away from the building where my team happily practices without me, where they freaking celebrate my absence, I feel like I leave a little piece of me behind.
I feel like it isn’t the first time I’ve felt that way.