Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
CLAY
“ I ’m fine. Really.”
Ally was not fine, as evidenced by the fact that her words came out like, “Fie. Rull,” as she tried to form them around a tissue held against her lip, which hadn’t stopped bleeding.
I’d looked down at her prone body in horror after she finally came to rest in a heap on the track. Her black workout pants were covered in brown dust, her knee bent to one side, the other leg bent so her foot stuck up in the air. One of her brand-new white tennis shoes had a dangling shoelace which was probably the culprit for her fall.
“Alexandra!” I’d dashed over as soon as she hit the ground, mostly to shield her from what I knew would be embarrassment. No adult wanted to eat dirt in front of a bunch of teenagers, let alone the ones she had to teach the next morning.
Between us, we did our best to downplay her fall and get the kids moving off to start a drill. But that didn’t mean I took her fall lightly. As soon as I’d handed off the practice to the team captain, I helped Ally to a sitting position. Fearing the worst, I bent down to check her for scrapes.
Track dirt was no friend to bare skin, and I’d gotten my share of road rash over the years, mostly from falling off my mountain bike. Other than the fat lip, she didn’t look like she’d taken a blow to the face, but she had abrasions up and down her arms. Those would hurt like hell in the morning.
I’d been about to ask who I could call to drive her to a doctor’s office when she shooed me away and said I was being silly. Then she wobbled to standing, like a drunken sailor on stormy seas.
A drop of blood from her lip hit the track, and she dabbed her lip with a finger. “Jussa Sue.” Somehow, I translated that as her needing a tissue, and I grabbed a few from my workout bag, along with the first aid kit we brought to meets. Cracking one of the ice packs, I got the cold flowing into the bag and handed it to her.
She winced when the cold hit her lip. And then she started walking away.
“I’m fine,” she insisted again.
“Hold on. Let’s get some bandages.” I gestured in the direction of the main school building because there was nowhere near enough gauze in my little kit.
“I don’t need. It. I’m fiiine,” she enunciated.
She was so not fine that she actually thought she could walk away from the track, get into her car, and drive home. There was no way I could let that happen without bandaging her up and making sure she hadn’t done damage someplace where I couldn’t see it.
“Stop. Saying. That.” I may have sounded like a bossy jerk, but after she protested for the tenth time, I could see she wasn’t listening to my kinder words. Words like, “Come on, let me help you.” And, “Let’s just check out these scrapes.”
Finally, my words sunk in enough to earn me a glare. That was better. I’d take a glare from her over stubborn insistence that I mind my own business. There was no way in hell I planned to do that, not when she was listing to one side as she walked with a streak of blood dripping down her chin and a dazed look in her eyes.
“We should run concussion protocols,” I said as we took slow steps around the track toward the school nurse’s office.
“I don’t need that.”
I huffed my disapproval at her. “You can protest all you want, but if you don’t get checked out here, I’ll drive you to the hospital instead.”
“Geez, you’re annoying when you’re being re-thponsible,” she griped. She shook her head, but I saw the tiniest hint of a smile in her scowl. Along with some dirt from the track.
Loretta was out with the stomach bug, and the school didn’t have a backup nurse—budget cuts did away with that—but we did have someone trained in first aid who could pop in and out of the nurse’s office when needed. Unfortunately, that person was limping along next to me.
Slowing my pace a bit, I watched her stride ahead of me and checked out her gait. No, I was not checking out her ass.
Yes, I was also doing that. The tight yoga pants made my hands flicker with the urge to wrap them around her ass and squeeze the perfect, round cheeks.
I forced my eyes lower, just as she whipped her head over her shoulder, eyeing me accusingly. “You having trouble keeping up?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m watching your stride. It seemed like you were favoring your right side, and now it seems like you’re favoring your left. What hurts?”
We still had to cross the large grass field before we made it to the administrative building, and at the slow pace she was limping along, we’d make it a little before sunrise. She stopped walking and turned to face me.
I saw the feisty sparkle in her eyes as she readied herself to lob a sarcastic jab my way. She put her hands on her hips but cringed once they got there. Lowering them, she shifted from one foot to the other. Her forearms were scraped from wrist to elbow, and as she gingerly dropped them to her sides, I noticed how she held them slightly away from her body.
Grudgingly, her face fell, and seeing the fight leave her nearly crushed me. “Everything,” she muttered. “At least, my whole front side.”
Nodding, I reached her in two strides and slipped an arm beneath her knees. She yelped when I drew her up, carefully sliding my hand around her back and balancing her weight against my chest. “What are you doing?” Her hands flailed about, looking for purchase. She finally settled on resting her fingertips against her stomach while I easily shouldered her weight and trudged across the grass.
“If it hurts to walk, you shouldn’t walk.”
“I need to walk. Walking is part of my daily life.”
“You don’t need to walk right now .”
Dammit, this woman was stubborn. I’d known this for most of my adult life, given that we’d been friendly for years. Mostly we passed each other in the hallways and said our hellos and goodbyes without extensive interaction, but I’d seen her dig in her heels at a faculty meeting when she advocated for healthier school lunches even though they cost more. “We’ll fundraise. I’m sure the folks in Green Valley would be happy to contribute to the good health of their young residents.” No one dared shoot down an idea of hers after that.
I respected her enormously for championing what she thought was right and staying at the table until she saw results. Who wouldn’t love that kind of grit and determination?
But I didn’t love it when it was directed at me.
She wriggled against my chest, and I fought against the feeling that I liked carrying her more than I should. The warm weight of her grazing my chest was making me imagine doing this again—shirtless, with her in only the lacy pink bra I could see peeking out at the neck of her tank top.
Stop looking.
I snapped my gaze upward and walked a little faster. The sooner we made it to the nurse’s office, the sooner I could put her down before I had full-on wood, which would be pretty hard to hide in my track pants.
“What’s the rush, cowboy? Those brawny biceps getting sore?” she teased as I practically ran across the last few yards of the field and kicked open the auditorium door with my foot. She must have been half-loopy from the fall because she never talked about my body. At all.
Scooting up the auditorium aisle would get us to the nurse’s office in half the time it would take to walk down the hallways of the main building.
“Not at all. You weigh less than the bowl of oatmeal I ate for breakfast.”
Her laughter vibrated from her body, and it warmed the blood in my veins like she’d wrapped her arms around my heart. I pushed away how good it felt. What was the point? This was the first and last time I’d hold her like this. No sense getting attached to a feeling that couldn’t last.
Shifting her in my grip, I held her a little farther away from my body and strode up the aisle between padded wooden chairs.
Flyers from last night’s production of Annie Get Your Gun littered the floor. Fortunately, no one was rehearsing. I hadn’t thought through the optics of racing through the auditorium carrying the art teacher like a new bride. But the place was vacant, and another kick with my foot got us through the back door, right near the teachers’ lounge and the main office.
The staff hightailed it away from campus as soon as the bell rang, so we had the place to ourselves. Gingerly, I set her down on the cot in the nurse’s office and surveyed the room. I didn’t normally spend much time in here, so I didn’t know what the place had in the way of bandages, but I felt sure it had something.
As I started rifling through drawers and pulling out gauze pads, I heard Ally chuckling behind me. “Is something funny? Or do you have more comments on my workout routine?”
“Oh, I always have comments on it. You know that.” It was true. She liked to give me shit about how runners, and therefore track coaches, don’t acquire the bicep and shoulder strength I have from running. Ergo, I must be a gym rat. Ergo, she must make fun of me.
“I do.” I searched another drawer but found only more gauze and no tape. “How’s a person supposed to secure gauze without any tape?”
Before I opened another drawer, she slipped off the table and came to stand next to me. I felt the temperature in the room rise with her proximity.
“Here, let me help. I stocked the place, so I know where everything is.” She opened a mirrored cabinet I hadn’t noticed and removed some antibacterial wipes and a box of some kind of bandages.
I pointed at the cot. “You’re the one who’s injured. Sit. Tell me where stuff is, and I’ll get it.”
Blowing out a frustrated breath, she limped back to the cot and pointed at a cabinet across the room. “In there is a basic first aid kit. It has pretty much everything. I don’t think I need all that much bandaging.”
I turned and looked at her, dabbing at her split lip with a tissue and contemplating me so seriously I felt like I was the one with dire-seeming injuries. “Yeah,” I said, crossing the room to where she sat. “You don’t think so because we haven’t really looked.” Giving her a once-over, I noticed that her pants were torn at the knee. An angry-looking gash contained a combination of blood and dirt. She followed my gaze and seemed to notice her knee for the first time.
“Oh. That.”
“Yeah. Where else does it hurt?” Gently, I ran the pads of my fingers over her hip bones and watched as she winced and pointed.
“Just this side. I think I fell on one of the starting blocks.”
Those things are hard metal with awkward pieces that wouldn’t make for a soft landing. “Ouch. Okay, so could be a deep bone bruise. That’s why you were limping.”
“Plus this knee hurts.”
“Yeah. Not surprised.”
She bit the part of her bottom lip that wasn’t bleeding and looked concerned. Then she nodded and slipped off the table. “You know what? I can deal with all of this when I get home. Really. I have supplies and I can clean everything off in the shower. You’ve done more than enough.” In three seconds she’d scooted past me and was halfway out the door.
“Hey.”
She stopped moving but didn’t turn. “Yeah?”
“Let me run the concussion protocols before you get into a car and drive.”
Her shoulders slumped, and she shook her head before turning around. Stubborn or not, she knew I was right.
“Fine. But I’m pretty certain I don’t have a concussion.”
“Uh-huh. Well, ‘pretty certain’ isn’t one of the boxes you’re allowed to check. You either do or you don’t. So get your ass back on the table, Alexandra.”
She pressed her lips together and sulked back to the cot but didn’t sit. A test of wills. I moved closer, taking all of her in now.
I hated seeing her hurt, bleeding and disheveled. Gently, I lifted her onto the cot. Her eyes went to where my hands wrapped around her hips, which looked small beneath my large palms.
Legs parted and dangling off the side of the cot, she looked dazed. Our bodies were nearly flush against each other as I moved my hands to her head, checking for lumps. I heard her take a sharp inhale as the sleeve of my shirt brushed against her skin.
“Did I hurt you?” The last thing I wanted was to make it worse.
“N-no.” She choked out the word, then swallowed hard.
“Tell me if I do.” My eyes bored into hers, searching for signs of concussion, but her gaze followed mine steadily as I moved. I felt a small measure of relief.
“You could have really hurt yourself. Promise me you won’t try anything like that again.” I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice, and seeing her hurt made my blood boil.
She let out an exaggerated exhale. “Yes, Sir Snarlypants.”
“Thank you.” I meant it sincerely, and I caught a hint of a smile as she nodded. As her lips pulled to the side, it was like the sun moving from behind a cloud, lighting up her pretty heart-shaped face.
“Now let’s rinse this track dirt off your arms.” She nodded and didn’t push back as I ran through the various tests and concluded she likely had a mild concussion. Not serious enough to warrant a trip to the hospital but enough to force her to take it easy for the next twenty-four hours. I wasn’t sure she was capable of doing that.
“You know the danger is if you get hit a second time. That’s where you’re at a real risk of brain damage,” I reminded her.
She snickered. “You gunning for my job as fill-in nurse? I won’t go quietly, you know.”
“Hardly.”
“You just happen to know about concussion protocols?”
“I’m a track coach, remember?”
“Exactly,” she shot back. “I could see if it was soccer or football, where concussions are more common, but how many two-hundred-meter-dash runners end up with concussions?”
I bit down hard on my bottom lip to tame my laugh into submission, but I couldn’t stifle it as I tipped my head and waited for her to see my point.
“Oh, fine. Laugh. But I never said I was a runner, so it still doesn’t make sense for you to know concussion stuff.” She searched around her but didn’t seem to find what she was looking for. “Did I have a bag with me?”
“What kind of bag?”
She looked behind her on the cot, but it sat just as empty as it was a minute ago. “My gym bag. It has my purse in it. Did we leave it on the field?”
I studied her face for signs I missed something. Maybe it wasn’t such a mild concussion after all, because she wasn’t making sense. “I never saw a bag. Do you remember holding a gym bag while you were sprinting around the track?”
She blinked as though shuffling off the confusion and scooted off the cot, rising to her feet. “Right. Of course not. I left it in my car. That’s what I meant.”
“Are you sure you feel okay? Do you have someone who can keep an eye on you tonight, make sure you don’t need anything?”
She waved a hand. “I’m fine . I told you I was fine. You just scrambled my brains with all your inappropriate concussion knowledge.” She started again for the door.
“Alexandra.”
She stopped. Turned. “You don’t need to use my full name. ‘Ally’ will do just fine.”
I liked saying her full name. I knew she didn’t use it, and I’d always thought of her as Ally, but seeing her injured had brought out a stern, possessive side of me that wanted to lay claim to her well-being by hearing her gorgeous given name on my tongue.
“What was that, anyway?” In all the hubbub of getting Ally onto her feet and sending my track team captain off with instructions to finish up training for the day, I hadn’t asked why she’d hurdled past my team in the first place. Sometimes faculty members used the track to work out, but generally not during team practices. And Ally was never among them.
“What?”
I pointed in the direction of the track. “You out there trying to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
“I’m Wonder Woman. Didn’t you get the memo?” she said dryly.
“Wonder Woman had an invisible plane. And a lasso.”
She shrugged. “I heard you were having tryouts.”
“Uh-huh. You didn’t make the cut.”
She stared back at me with her large blue doe eyes and offended pout. “Wow. Give a girl a chance.”
It was my turn to stare back. I could wait her out. I taught high schoolers, for fuck’s sake—I was made of patience. Finally, she rolled her eyes.
“Fine. I was trying to make a big entrance before telling you some stupendous news.”
“Stupendous? This sounds serious. Did someone tell you I’m being fired or something? Stupendous like that?”
“Clay, of course not.” She glanced around the room, thinking. “Though it would be a good new tradition to sneak up on people when they are being fired.”
“Yeah, except I can’t remember the last time anyone was fired around here.”
“Exactly, so why was that your go-to thought about why I’d come dashing around the track to find you? Glass half empty, are we?”
She had no idea. We’d known each other for half our lives but we didn’t really know each other. There had always been parts of myself I didn’t share with the people closest to me, and she and I were more colleagues than friends. I never saw us as anything more than that. At least, that was the lie I’d had playing on repeat in my head. And it would continue playing until the end of days.
It was how things had to be. I was broken in ways I didn’t want Ally to understand. I felt certain there were pieces of me that would never be fully mended. Any fantasies I harbored about the two of us were simply that—fantasies.
“I’m a closet optimist.”
“Ha. I think you can do better. Your life looks pretty rosy.”
Again, she knew nothing about my life. That’s why we remained colleagues rather than crossing the barrier into friends. Friends would ask questions and expect answers from other friends. I wasn’t willing to go there with her.
“So your grand entrance was supposed to be more like a bucket of water dumping on my head when I walked into a room?”
She held up a finger as though an idea had been hatched. “That would have been a much better plan.” Looking down at the abrasions on her arms, she winced. “And saved me an evening extracting bits of dirt from my various parts with tweezers.”
It felt wrong to let her tend to her wounds herself, but there was a limit to how pushy I could be without seeming overbearing. She was better trained than I was at knowing how to treat abrasions. Maybe that’s why she was so eager to get away from me.
“I’d like to help you,” I offered. “If you tell me you have someone to look after you, I’ll leave you alone, but otherwise, I’d like to follow you home, or better yet, drive you.” I didn’t want to do these things at all. The longer I spent playing nursemaid to her, the harder it would be to stop.
“Drive me?” She stared at me aghast as though this were a fate worse than death.
“Yes. Someone with a mild concussion shouldn’t get behind the wheel of a car.”
“I’ll Uber.”
“No you won’t. I’ll drive you,” I fired back at her.
“I need my car,” she insisted.
“For what?”
“To get back here in the morning.”
“I’ll come pick you up.” This was not the insurmountable problem she was pretending it was.
“No you won’t.”
“Why are you so stubborn?”
“Why are you?” Her voice went up an octave as she vented her frustration at me. Her shoulders drew up near her ears and she blew out a breath that did nothing to reduce the tension in her body. I had no idea why she felt so resistant to having someone help her, but the more she resisted, the more I needed to understand why.
I took a step back, sensing I needed to give her some physical space or she’d just back up and go for the door again. Her shoulders dropped a few millimeters, but that was it. Then I took a second step back.
She exhaled. The scowl on her face melted away, and her glaring eyes returned to their normal blue innocence. But her cheeks stayed pink, the combination of her creamy pale skin and her fiery disposition.
There was no disputing Ally’s beauty. Shorter than me by nearly a foot, she had curves that I’d tried to ignore when I carried her from the field. Tried and failed.
Her blond hair, golden in the sun, offset the deep pink of her plump lips and a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks. My hands itched to reach out and trace a finger along the round contours of her face, the apples of her cheeks, the dip of her chin that gave her face its heart shape.
Blinking a few times, Ally swallowed hard. I stuffed my hands into my pockets.
“I don’t know why I’m stubborn. I just am,” she admitted quietly as though it cost her something she held dear.
Leaning toward her without taking a step closer, I tried to comfort her without triggering the fight-or-flight response I could see running hot in her veins. I wanted to understand this too.
“I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing,” I reassured her.
She almost laughed. I saw the muscles in her cheeks twitch and pull upward, but she schooled her expression immediately. Like it had betrayed her by almost giving something away.
I wanted to push that button again. Something in me was hooked in getting a response, like a rat pressing a button in order to get a treat. I knew in that moment that I’d do it over and over again, even if it was unhealthy for me.
“Ha. Spoken like someone who’s either equally stubborn or who just isn’t afraid to lose a grudge match.”
“Maybe there’s a third option.” Slowly, I’d nudged her to turn around and move with me toward the door of the office. She didn’t resist, so I continued our walk down the hall.
She was still limping, which made me double down on my theory about a deep bone bruise. If I was right, the initial pain would go away in a few days, but it would still hurt if she tried to run around the track. Probably a good thing if she had any designs on making another grand entrance.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
Making our way toward the teachers’ lounge, we walked slowly. Ally blotted a fresh tissue against her lip a few times and saw that it remained dry, so she tossed it in a trash can.
“I don’t consider being stubborn a bad thing because often it’s how people accomplish great things. By not taking no for an answer, even when the odds are stacked against them,” I told her.
I watched her process my words with the hint of a smile. It’s a good thing we were walking slowly because I wasn’t watching where we were going, not when I had the choice of looking at her instead.
“I often feel like I’m bucking the odds. And you’re right, it motivates me. I’ll take Door Three, if you’re offering.”
We each grabbed a cup of water from the teachers’ lounge and then went out to the parking lot. “My purse is in there,” she protested when I walked past her car. She popped the lock and retrieved her purse while I opened the passenger door of my truck. “I’m glad you’re giving in to reason.”
“You’re right about driving. But I’m not going to the hospital for a few scrapes and bruises. Let’s not be crazy.” She surveyed the step up to the bench seat and hesitated. Without further thought, I scooped her up and placed her on the seat. Once again, our faced were inches apart as I reached across her body to fasten her seat belt. I expected pushback—insistence that she could buckle her own seat belt—but her gaze met mine and stayed there, those blue eyes watching my every move.
For a moment, it looked like she’d stopped breathing. Only the fluttering pulse at her neck offered the proof that settled my nerves.
The scent of her tickled my nose, and I fought the urge to close my eyes and inhale more deeply. Instead, I closed the car door and clenched my fists, taking a deep breath of reality before making my way to the driver’s side.
“I’ll only let you drive me if you promise not to tell the rest of the faculty about my big splat.”
“I won’t say a thing, but I can’t promise half the teachers don’t already know. Word spreads fast.” I chuckled at her constant pushback. “You missed your calling. You’d make a great negotiator.”
She nodded, head resting back against the seat. “Not the first time I’ve heard that. Or just that I’m stubborn.” An odd feeling of possessiveness set in as I wondered who else had said it. I quickly tamped down the surge of jealousy. I had no claim on her. The rogue feeling was absurd.
I closed my door and focused on putting the key into the ignition. Feelings had no place here. I was a colleague offering her a ride because it was the right thing to do.
Nothing more.