Chapter Thirty
“It’s safe to say I didn’t have the same interview as everyone else.” The day had been such a busy one that Misty and Tish hadn’t gotten to catch up until they were back in their room, well after it had gotten dark.
Tish spoke as she and Misty sat across from each other with their legs splayed in wide straddles.
The soles of their feet were touching, and Tish pulled her forward.
“They asked me what it was like growing up with my dad, how that might’ve affected my perceptions of sports and fame, and a lot of stuff I didn’t think much about until today. ”
Misty let out a groan as she felt the stretch in her back and legs. “I know what you mean. It was like I’d always known how I felt about some of this but hadn’t had to put it into words until then.”
She straightened up to pull her friend forward. “Think these talks’ll make a difference in the long run?”
“Hard to say.” Tish’s voice sounded muffled as she leaned into the stretch. “It’s obvious that everyone here takes it seriously and wants to be on the team, but maybe not everyone knows exactly what that entails.”
A phone buzzed against a hard surface, cutting into their discussion. “Whose is that?” Tish asked, letting go of Misty’s hands and glancing around the room.
“It’s coming from over there.” Misty got up and moved to the desk, where she’d actually remembered to charge her phone for once. The name on the screen surprised her.
Spencer: I was such an ass the last time we spoke, and I’m so sorry. Can we at least have one more conversation before you decide to never talk to me again?
Curiosity more than anything else prompted her to touch the button that would call him. The call bounced, and another text immediately came in.
Spencer: I need FaceTime for this.
“Tish is here.”
Misty didn’t realize she’d said her reply out loud until her friend said, “Yes, I am. What about it?”
“It’s Spencer. He says he needs FaceTime but doesn’t say why.”
Tish dug around in her suitcase. “I’ll get in the shower and leave you to it. Heaven knows I’m overdue for a wash, and a deep condition couldn’t hurt in this dry air.”
Part of her felt like telling Tish to stay because it would save the trouble of telling her everything later.
At the same time, Spencer hadn’t said why he needed to talk this way, and this could get awkward with someone else, even Tish, watching.
She sighed and accepted the request, feeling warier than the day he’d plunged her into the ice bath.
Spencer’s face popped up on her screen. He looked like he’d skipped a day or two of shaving, but he could pull it off.
However, his slumped posture and reddish eyes detracted from any sexiness.
And instead of the resting drill sergeant face she’d known so well during their sessions, his expression looked defeated, if not ill.
Apprehension gave way to alarm at the sight of him.
****
“What is it?” Misty’s eyes looked closer to gray than blue tonight, possibly because of her pajama top, and had widened at the sight of him. He should’ve pulled himself together better for this.
“I need to tell you how sorry I am for the way I acted the last time we talked. I saw how hard you worked for this during our sessions, I know how hard you’re working now, and I was way out of line. I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t look moved. “You could’ve said all this on a regular call. Why did you need FaceTime?”
“Because I always want to see your face, and so you could see my old good-luck charm. You showed me yours, I figured I should show you mine.”
Misty rolled her eyes at his attempt at innuendo but stayed on the call.
Spencer held up the small, gold-toned medal he used to carry to every event but had buried in a drawer after his injury.
One side had a Taekwondo event from twenty-two years ago engraved on it.
He turned it over to show the name, and she looked confused. “Who’s Jason Whitford?”
“Me.” Spencer brought the camera back up to his face. “Spencer’s my middle name, my mom’s maiden name, but I’ve been going by it for the past few years.”
“Why? Are you on the run?” Her words might have been teasing, but her tone was too full of concern for the joke to fully land.
“You might say that. I told you that before I got certified as a trainer, I used to be a professional kickboxer before I tore my ACL and needed surgery.” He sighed.
“What I didn’t tell you is that the experience sent me into such a depression, there were days I couldn’t get out of bed.
Not being able to compete anymore was bad enough, but the worst of it was suddenly not having any goals, losing touch with my friends, and breaking up with my fiancée because we didn’t have anything in common anymore. ”
“That’s terrible.”
He couldn’t acknowledge her sympathy if he wanted to go forward with this.
“I wasn’t world-famous, but enough people knew my name that they wanted to ask about my glory days, and it hurt too much to relive them.
So I deleted all my old social media accounts and asked my family and remaining friends to call me Spencer, but the fresh start and new job didn’t help.
I was so miserable without this and in that office that I could barely function.
“I had to go on meds just to go about my days and spent some time in therapy, but I let it all drop after I got certified as a personal trainer and got my first gym job. I felt so much better after not having to be at an office anymore, and especially after I used my winnings to move to a new city where I could introduce myself to everyone as Spencer, that I didn’t think I still needed help. ”
He paused to take a breath, leaving room for Misty to speak. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the past few weeks brought me back to that time. When you left for the combine and told me about how you spent your days training for this once-in-a-lifetime event, it was a little too much like when everyone I was close to was on the competition circuit and I was languishing at home. I could feel myself falling back into old, bad feelings.”
“And you’re blaming me for your problems?” She looked semi-outraged, and he couldn’t say it wasn’t justified.
“I’m blaming me,” he said firmly. “My first therapist promised that nothing I said would leave that room, so I used our sessions as a forum to vent about everything I hated about my office job. I always came away feeling a little better for getting all that crap off my chest, and we talked about what I could do instead that didn’t involve the worst parts of that job.
But I never talked about what sent me there in the first place. ”
“You told me a friend asked you to help train his brother.” Misty looked suspicious.
“That really happened. My therapist encouraged me to go for it, and the experience made me realize there were options for me outside the corporate environment. But now here I am in my element, and this still happened to me, which goes to show that I wasn’t all the way in before.
If any of my clients did something similar—half-assed the program and quit as soon as they started to do a tiny bit better—I’d smack them in the head.
And when you get back to New York, I invite you to do that to me for being so careless with my mental health and for the way I treated you.
I should be cheering you on instead of dragging you down. ”
“Yeah, you should.” She still looked furious.
“I know. I’ve been way out of line, taking my own insecurities out on you. I was afraid you were going to see how much better you were than I am and would drop me over it.”
“I didn’t drop you because I thought I was better than you. I did it because you were acting like an ass, and look at that! The thing you were worried about still happened.”
“I told you what I was thinking, not that it made sense.” As so often happened with Misty, he felt his lips quirk up. “That was one of the first things I talked about with my new therapist.”
After the way he’d treated her, she would have been well within her rights to tell him he sure needed therapy. But she didn’t. “How did it go?”
“It was pretty much an hour of me talking about why I wanted to come back to therapy, why I went into it the first time, and what I’d been up to since my last session. I said I liked working at the gym but was still sad, and I told her all about how I’d gotten to that gym job in the first place.”
He took a breath. “I also said I’d met someone I really liked and that things were going well physically, but that I was having a hard time talking without accidentally touching on something I might’ve preferred to keep buried.
I mean, by the end of the day we first met, I knew everything about you from your nickname to how you feel about cilantro, but I was such a closed book.
And I don’t want to be anymore. Remember what you said at the restaurant that night? ”
She seemed to be thinking it over. “You’ll have to be more specific. We said a lot of things.”
“I said you made me think so far out of the box that I don’t know how to get back in, and you said, ‘So maybe you don’t.’”
Misty looked so surprised that this one line had made such an impression that she seemed unable to come up with another one.
He kept talking. “And it’s true. After my time working with you, I’ve got people coming to me with more interesting goals than running a marathon or improving their form on certain exercises.
My time with you tells them I’m the right man for the job, and the fact that you went to the combine says that I can help them achieve those goals.
Because of that, I got a promotion with a higher hourly rate and better benefits. ”
“Congratulations!” Her voice sounded authentically happy, and a smile burst across her face to light up her features. This was who he’d wanted to see.