When I Need You

by Lorelei James

  “What areas were you planning to work today, Lund?”

  “Chest and arms. Abs. Balance ball. Why?”

  Devonte’s composure remained cool. “Because there’s a change in plans.”

  “Yeah? Says who?”

  “Says me.” He flashed those pretty pearly whites. “Soon as you’re warmed up with cardio? You’re runnin’ a dash check.”

  I started to say, “Try and make me,” but as I inventoried the room—eight of us in all—I realized I had no choice.

  Jesus. My protein shake threatened to come back up. It was one thing to worry about failing on my own; it was another thing to fail in front of a damn crowd.

  “Ain’t no one here gonna blab the results to the front office,” Devonte assured me.

  Wrong. Either way what happened on the track wouldn’t stay on the track.

  Reckoning day had arrived.

  “Whatever. Give me twenty to warm up.”

  “I’ll warm up with you,” Mitchell offered.

  Yeah, they were making sure I couldn’t sneak out. “Sure.”

  Most guys tuned out the world during cardio. I didn’t listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. Instead I focused on the cadence of my steps on the treadmill as I started out slowly and gradually picked up the pace. When I hit the full-run stage, I focused on my breath and keeping my body loose.

  Mitchell turned everything into a competition with me—or at least he tried to. Whenever I sped up, so would he. If I wasn’t concentrating on form I’d fuck with him just because he’d expect me to.

  Ten minutes into the warm-up, I did a quick mental inventory. Heart rate good. Respiration rate good. Pace . . . faster than normal. Just a twinge of pain in my knee. No pain or strain in my Achilles. No tension in my shoulder—either the right or the left. Jaw relaxed. Abs tight; hands loose. Today my body felt more in tune physically than I had in several weeks since before my checkup. I took that as a positive sign that I was up to the task of pushing myself just a little further.

  I kept up the full-out running pace for six more minutes and used the last four minutes to cool down. When the machine shut off, I snagged a towel, mopped my face and headed to the track.

  Several guys were parked on the turf “stretching”—aka sitting on their asses pretending to work out as they waited for the show to start. They eyed me with speculation and I literally had to shake off the fear pulling my guts into knots. I rolled to the balls of my feet and bounced a couple of times. First, arms above my head as if I were trying to launch myself into the sky. Then I jumped and pulled my knees into my chest.

  “Do the running-man dance move next,” Richards called out behind me.

  A spinning back kick to his jaw would shut him up, but I knew better than to take a chance with a twisting maneuver—even in jest.

  I wandered over to the stretch of the track where three lanes were marked off for the forty-yard dash. Thoughtful that Devonte had supplied me with a starting block. If I saw him holding a starter pistol, going “thug life” on me, I’d be laughing too damn hard to run. The massive African American defensive end might act like he’d just wandered out of an urban housing project, but the man’s family owned a multimillion-dollar shipping company that stretched along the East Coast from South Carolina to Maine.

  “You ready, White Bread?”

  I snorted. That wasn’t a racist comment. My wise-ass friend called me White Bread because the Lund family had gotten its business start in the grain and flour milling industry. I grinned at him. “Just watch the damn timer, Black Sails.”

  Devonte leaned closer. “Getcha head in the game, brother. We got us a few gate crashers.”

  “My head is there, D. Let’s hope my body is.”

  He nodded. “Hit the block. Leon is timing you.”

  Good. That way there’d be no accusations that Devonte had rigged the timer.

  I addressed my teammates standing around. “Do I get one shot at this? Or you gonna let me run it more than once?”

  Bob “Bebo” Johnson, one of the special teams’ trainers I hadn’t noticed, stepped forward. “You gotta run it three times, Rocket. A ninety-second break between heats. There’s a block at the other end and Ray-Ray is timing you from down there. He’ll cue you when your break is over and when to line up.”

  “Cool.” I took a swig from the bottle of water Mitchell held out to me. “You gonna announce my official time after each run?”

  “Up to you,” Bebo said.

  Giving him my trademark cocky grin, I sang, “Shout it, shout it, shout it out loud,” complete with air guitar.

  Laughter echoed around me.

  “Hit the block, smart-ass.”

  As soon as I got into position, my focus became absolute. I willed my body to work, to do the job I’d spent years training it for. This time it wasn’t about anything but speed.

  I heard the crack of the starter pistol and I was up and gone. Arms pumping, legs churning, heart racing, eyes homed in on the finish line. I blew past Ray-Ray and kept going another ten feet. I rested my hands on my knees to catch my breath for a moment, waiting to hear my time. The run had felt fast. But at this point felt didn’t mean squat.

  Ray-Ray shouted, “Four point nine seven, Rocket.”

  Fuck. That was too damn slow. My team record was 4.59 my rookie year—which was the same forty-yard dash time as our star running back.

  What did I need to change?

  React no differently than when you’ve got the ball in your hand. Burst of speed at the beginning to deflect the defense; additional burst at the end to score.

  “Fifteen seconds, Rocket,” Ray-Ray said.

  I dropped into the starting block.

  You got this. Nothing hurts, hit it hard.

  The pistol went off and so did I. My existence boiled down to the air billowing in and out of my lungs, my steps eating up the blacktop and the fast thud of my heartbeat in my ears.

  Whoosh, right past Devonte and Leon.

  Leon yelled, “Four point seven four seconds!”

  Okay. Better. That’d been my preinjury speed average for all four seasons.

  I cranked my neck side to side. Swung my arms around. Did a couple of vertical jumps.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Leon warned me.

  One more. That’s it. I blew out a long exhale as I set my feet in the block. Head up, eyes on the prize, body pumped with adrenaline.

  Same drill. Put those motherfucking doubts to rest for the last time today.

  It seemed my feet barely touched the ground after the pistol popped and I was racing past Ray-Ray.

  I spun around.

  Ray-Ray whooped. “The Rocket is back! That last run was four point six two, my man!”

  I quickly did the math in my head. That averaged out to 4.77—which was an excellent percentage for a guy my size with my recovery history. Chances were good with more sprint training I could lower it by a tenth of a second.

  Almost before I could catch my breath I had teammates surrounding me, clapping me on the back, slapping my ass.

  Bebo gave me a chin dip and returned to texting on his phone.

  One guess that he wasn’t in contact with his wife at this time on a Sunday morning.

  But I couldn’t be unhappy about it.

  “Word’s gonna get out about this, White Bread,” Devonte said.

  “If it had gone the other way?”

  He shrugged. “Word still would’ve gotten out. The front office knows how to spin. Let’s just be glad this is one thing they ain’t gotta put a shine on. The shine is all you, Rocket.”

  And it’d keep the media’s interest off some of the other stories we’d managed to keep on the down-low.

  “Now that you’ve proven you still got prime jet fuel in those legs, let’s hit the weight room.”

  • • •

  I must’ve mixed up the times for the brunch because the servers were tearing down the buffet when I arrived. I managed to heap two plates with food and co
nsidered my mother’s point about me needing an assistant to keep track of this kind of stuff because apparently I sucked at it.

  My sister and her husband, Axl, joined me.

  “What’s your excuse this time?” Annika asked.

  “Work.”

  “Work?”

  “My job as a football player, remember? I got cornered to run the forty-yard dash. Nothing I could do but do it.”

  “And?” Axl said.

  “Three runs averaged four point seven seven, so not bad.”

  “Jens, that’s great and you know it,” Annika said.

  I gave her a fist bump. “Training has paid off. So what’d I miss here?”

  Annika started listing family members. “Let’s see . . . Lucy dropped Mimi off and things were tense between her and Jax. Nolan showed up with flavor of the week and I swear she’s barely legal.”

  I glanced over at the pink-haired chick wearing a leopard print bodysuit, clinging to Nolan like he was catnip.

  “Ash,” Annika continued, “I don’t know why he’s not here. Walker and Trinity left right after we ate because Walker is psycho about Trinity getting enough rest. Brady and Lennox are playing lord and lady of the manor up at the cabin. And Dallas . . .” Annika exchanged a look with Axl. “She was here briefly but she bailed because she’s having a rough go of it.”

  “Why? I saw her Friday and she seemed fine.”

  “She is fine when no one brings up Iron Man.” Annika’s gaze narrowed. “Which I assume you didn’t do since you were too busy ogling cheerleader boobs and butts during team tryouts at the U of M.”

  Naturally Dallas had blabbed about that to my sister. “Did she tell you I was there strictly in an educational capacity?”

  “She mentioned it—not that I believed her. Anyway, today as soon as she saw Axl, she started grilling him on whether he’d heard anything from Igor.”

  “How long has it been since anyone has mentioned him by name?” Iron Man was our lame code for Igor, the Russian hockey player.

  “Months. So I want to know . . .”

  My mind drifted as Annika kept chattering. Igor had been a teammate of Axl’s with the Minnesota Wild. Right after the start of last year’s season, a death in Igor’s family sent him back to Russia for the funeral. But while he was there, an issue arose with his work visa. No one in the government could explain why his visa had been revoked. No one in the United States had heard from him, and no one could get in touch with his family; it was as if he’d disappeared. Not even the NHL legal department had the power to cut through the bureaucracy. The government agencies they’d reached out to didn’t have answers or plain hadn’t answered.

  In the third month with no word about his whereabouts, our normally upbeat cousin had become inconsolable because she could no longer “feel” Igor’s presence on this earthly realm. My aunt and uncle freaked out when Dallas went off the rails, ranting about gypsy curses, conspiracy theories and the power of the Russian mob. Then she crawled into bed and refused to eat, refused to shower, refused to leave her room. After two weeks of feeling helpless, her older brother Ash had run interference, tasking Annika to track down a specialized spiritual spa. Then she, Axl and Ash had convinced Dallas to check in to realign her chakras, reset her aura, or immerse herself in whatever woo-woo type of healing she needed to return to being our sweet, kooky, loving cousin.

  It’d worked. It’d taken two months, but she’d returned to the Lund Collective back to normal—well, normal for Dallas. Although she’d graduated from college almost a year ago, she’d yet to choose a career path—even when a job waited for her at Lund Industries. But given the big mess with Igor’s disappearance, no one had pushed her to make any decisions about her future.

  “Jens,” Annika said sharply.

  My gaze snapped to hers. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  “I asked why you’re so interested in Rowan Michaels.”

  I looked over my shoulder. “Keep it down. You want Mom hauling ass over here?”

  “Why? Do you have something to hide?” she shot back.

  “No, but apparently Martin did. I had no idea that he even had a sister.” My focus moved to Axl. “Did you?”

  “Yah. But I didn’t know she cheered for the Vikings.”

  “She’s the hot redhead with the killer body and the huge”—Annika grinned—“smile.”

  I met her gaze. “Even you know who she is?”

  “Only because you had zero playing time last year. Watching the cheerleaders was more entertaining than watching the game.” She swigged her beer. “Is she giving you a hard time?”

  “For not remembering that we’d met before under other circumstances? Yeah, you could say that.”

  Axl laughed. “Poor footballer. Pretty woman moves in right across from you and you cannot do anything but . . . drool all over that rule book you’re so proud of.”

  “Piss off, puck-tard.”

  “Rowan is totally hot in that ‘I’m super limber and can crack your head like a walnut between my muscular thighs’ kind of way that all dudes totally dig.”

  I leaned in closer to my sister. “Are you drunk?”

  “Don’t tell me you weren’t secretly watching her perform the Rockette kick line at the home games last season and fantasizing about having her ankle by your head as you—”

  Axl put his mouth on her ear, cutting off her stream-of-consciousness rambling.

  I didn’t even want to know what he’d whispered that’d made her blush that hard. I left the table but I doubted they noticed.

  • • •

  The afternoon had been low-key for a Lund gathering.

  I spent time talking cars with my dad and we made plans to meet at our usual private racetrack. His vintage 1967 Corvette was no match for my ZR1, but that didn’t keep him from trying to whip my ass several times over the summer.

  By the time I returned to my apartment complex it was almost dinnertime.

  Exhausted, I took the elevator to the second floor, rather than the stairs.

  In the hallway, Calder’s voice gave him away before he turned the corner. Out of instinct I twisted my pelvis to protect my balls.

  Calder wasn’t alone. He held the hand of a man with long silver hair pulled into a ponytail. The dark red flannel worn over a pair of overalls provided a better hint of his identity.

  Just then Calder noticed me. “Hey!”

  “Hey yourself. Whatcha been up to?”

  “I was at Grammy and Pop-pop’s farm.”

  I walked toward them. “I figured you were gone, it was far too quiet around here. No one running in the hallway playing ninja-samurai.”

  “Know what? I met some kids in the other building.”

  “Yeah? That’s cool you’ll have kids to play with this summer.”

  “If Mommy lets me.”

  Calder leaned his head against the man’s side, as if he had a sudden bout of shyness.

  The man stared at me hard and kept a protective hand on Calder’s shoulder.

  I offered my hand. “Jensen Lund. I’m betting you’re Rowan’s father.”

  He harrumphed but he shook my hand—more like he crushed it. “Michael Michaels.”

  “It’s good to meet you, sir. I’ve lived here for over a year so I’m friends with Martin too.”

  He continued to size me up. “I know who you are, son. I’ve been a Vikings fan since I was Calder’s age.”