by Luis, Maria
A woman playing a man’s sport.
My gut twists unpleasantly and suddenly staying afloat feels that much more impossible. “Levi, I didn’t know.” How the hell didn’t I know? Watching her on the field with the Wildcats, it’s clear to anyone that she knows the sport well. Too well, some might say, for someone who only coaches the game. “I don’t—”
“You didn’t know for the same reason your show didn’t mention me, Dominic. It’s the same reason that Deegan Homer guy came and interviewed us and he spent forty minutes questioning you about your career. I was an accessory. On your show, I wasn’t even that. I’m not going to say you all passed me over because I’m a woman, but I won’t lie and say the thought didn’t enter my head a time or two while I counted down the top ten right along with you.”
Shame and fury squeeze my lungs. “No,” I growl, using my weight to dip the kayak and force her to look at me. Not out at the bay or down at her knees—at me. “Don’t ever use that word again.” When she only stares back at me, clearly confused, I spit, “Accessory. Toy.” She’d used the latter at the Golden Fleece when she warned me against messing with her emotions. “You’re not either of those things, Levi.” Squeezing my eyes shut, I loosen my tight grip on the kayak. “I feel like a self-absorbed prick for not realizing you played ball in college.”
“Dominic, you are somewhat of a—”
“An asshole,” I finish for her, recognizing the teasing lilt to her voice and taking no offense. I deserve that jab and any others she throws at me because I shouldn’t have assumed her knowledge of football was anything but personal experience showing itself on the field. Once again, she’s surprised me. That in and of itself shouldn’t be surprising. There hasn’t been a single day since I met Levi that she hasn’t proved me wrong in some way or another.
Call it my own intuition but I’m getting the feeling that the reason she was so upset about being left out of the top-ten countdown isn’t only a matter of being pushed out of the sport because of her gender. With rust coating my every word, I order, “Tell me what happened.”
She hangs her head, shame inscribed in her every feature. “I was stupid back then, Dominic. Naïve. Entranced by the idea that this mega-powerful general manager of a well-respected football team wanted me.”
I want her out of the kayak and in the water with me.
I want to be able to read the emotion in her gaze when she bares her soul.
I want her to know that even when you feel like you’re drowning, all it takes is one second of reminding yourself of mind over matter—that one’s head will always be smarter than the fickleness of one’s heart—to know that you won’t plummet to your death.
Aware that I sound way too gruff but unable to help it, I give it to her straight: “Levi—Aspen—he took advantage of you. That’s what guys like Clarke do. You weren’t naïve and you weren’t stupid.” Rick Clarke was a slick, older guy who’d preyed on Levi’s innocence. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. I bet he romanced her real nice with dinners and parties and gifts—nothing too extravagant because Levi isn’t the sort to be impressed with flashy things. He hooked her before she even knew she was being baited, and if I weren’t swimming right now I’d be up in that kayak pulling her into my arms. Wanting to make sure she heard me, I repeat, “You weren’t stupid, Levi.”
She shakes her head. “When our marriage went south, I used to wonder what it was about me that first attracted him. And it wasn’t for years that I realized that he liked only the idea of me. When I played for Boston College, I broke stats left and right. Local newspapers loved to talk about me—the first female kicker the NCAA had ever seen. They debated how the NFL would react to a player like me, someone who was just as good as any of my male counterparts.” She grips the oars, rowing them once like she’s so agitated that she can’t sit still. “I was an anomaly and Rick liked that. He liked to take what didn’t belong to him—whatever caught his fancy—and bend it to his will, offering promises he would never keep and the sort of support that would make any twenty-one-year-old girl’s head spin.”
As much as it pains me to admit it, I’m not surprised that I didn’t realize Levi played for BC.
She’s two years older than me, and at eighteen, I was solely focused on leaving my shitty reputation behind and focusing on the end goal: getting drafted by the NFL. If a school didn’t play mine on the regular, or at all, I paid it no attention. If you weren’t in my face day in and day out, living and breathing the same air as me, I didn’t pause to give a damn or learn anything more.
Classes. Practice. Games.
There was no room in my life for anything else to exist, even on the periphery.
“I dropped out of college when he knocked me up.” At her confession, my heart sinks even as I train my gaze on her face. “All those years of putting in the work—gone. All those practices where I had to deal with the guys on the team giving me the cold shoulder, and making me feel like I was an outsider, and telling me that I didn’t belong—none of it ended up mattering at all.”
“Jesus.” Gripping the oar, I tug it out of her grasp so she can’t try to outswim me. “How the hell did your parents allow you to marry a prick like Clarke?”
“They didn’t.” Another loose-limbed shrug, but the casualness of it is belied by the bone-weary fatigue in her voice. “I eloped with Rick like a total fool. Dropped out of BC during my senior year because Rick lived in Pittsburgh. He’d only been visiting London when we met, and I was so gung-ho about raising our baby together as a family. My mom begged me to reconsider, but I thought I was in love. People do all sorts of reckless things for the ones they love, right?”
I hear her utter self-loathing, and for the first time in my life, I hate that it’s in this moment that my soul recognizes it’s not so alone. Me and Levi, we aren’t so very different.
Sure, she grew up here in beautiful little London surrounded by her family and I grew up in shithole neighborhood after shithole neighborhood in and around San Francisco, but at the bottom of it all . . . we’ve both survived insurmountable obstacles and come out on the other side to tell the tale.
We’re one and the same—and I hate that.
I fucking hate to think of Levi hurting, especially at the hands of a scumbag like Clarke.
“My earliest memory of football is watching the kids in my neighborhood play on the street,” I say, a notch above a husky murmur, to make sure she hears every word. “I’d just ended up in juvie for the first time. I robbed”—fuck, this is hard. I close my eyes against any possible disgust that I’ll see in her face, even as I keep the biggest secret to myself—“a corner store, but that was the first tick on a whole lot of boxes that had me on the wrong side of the law.”
She breathes out my name.
I do my best to pretend there’s no pity in those three syllables.
“I was bad,” I go on, kicking my feet a little faster, relishing the burn in my thighs and my calves. “Kicked out of school. Wearing an ankle monitor like I was some sort of prepubescent savage. I was already big for my age—looked closer to thirteen or fourteen. But I was in bad shape, heading straight for a career in misdemeanor crimes at best, federal charges at worst, and then I looked out the kitchen window and saw them all throwing the ball.”
Hope burns in her voice when she asks, “Did you go out there and play?”
I laugh, the sound harsh and angry. “With that ankle monitor beeping every time I got close to the front door? Not a chance in hell. But I dreamed about it later that night. Every night after that, too. Football was my gateway out of the shithole that was my life.”
I stole money for pads and gear.
I rode a shitty-ass bike that I found in a junkyard to and from practice, its janky wheels bumping along like I was riding a roller coaster and not the black mountain bike that had seen better days.
When I hit middle school and found that the gym was open until six at night, I toiled away every ex
tra hour that I could, lifting weights and building up my core strength.
But a kid is only as successful as his environment allows him to be, and I spent more time in juvie than I spent out of it by the time I turned sixteen. When Louisiana State actually looked at me as a potential recruit during my senior year and took a chance on a poor, troubled kid from Cali, I cried.
Big fat tears that my ratted blanket soaked up while I slept on the couch of my last and final foster home.
I look up at the sky. The stars are duller now, the encroaching sun already starting to peek out over the horizon. We’ve stayed out here long past our allotted twenty minutes, and I . . . I—
“I’m grateful for you.”
My head whips toward Levi. “What?”
She runs her tongue along her bottom lip, sending heat straight down to my groin. “It’s something I started doing when I first married Rick—finding little things to be grateful for when everything else felt like it was crumbling down.”
I swallow, hard.
“And you’re grateful for me?” My voice is thick, guttural. I don’t bother to clear it when I try to add a little levity to the conversation with a teasing, “Because you like how I kiss?”
“Because you remind me that life’s not worth living if we aren’t willing to take a risk.”
Before I can even predict what she’ll do next, she surprises me—yet again—by tossing her glasses into the kayak and jumping into the bay beside me. The pressure of her fall sends water splashing into my face, and I quickly re-grasp the side of the kayak before it floats away.
Levi bobs up next to me, slicking her hands back over her drenched blond hair.
A nervous smile pulls at her lips as she reaches out a hand and pats the air between us. “I’m blind as a bat without my glasses,” is all she says, missing my face by about ten inches.
I hook an arm around her waist, keeping her afloat. The feel of her almost naked body slipping against mine? Jesus fuck. It’s all I can do to keep hold of my restraint when I growl, “Get back in the kayak before you drown.”
“You asked me to trust you.”
My heart speeds up at a fast clip. “Aspen . . .” Her name is a warning and a request all at once. What the fuck is she thinking, launching herself into the water like that? “You’re scared of sharks.”
“You told me being scared is half the fun.”
I don’t know whether to wring her neck for throwing my words back in my face or drop my lips to hers for a hot kiss. Screw my vow to keep tonight platonic. In the end, I only manage a strangled laugh that catches in my throat. “You said it was pitch-black out.”
Still caged to my side by my one arm, she points at my face. “I can’t see a thing. Could be bright as day and I’d still be lost. Now, are you going to see me safely home like a gentleman or what?”
I’m pretty sure no one has ever labeled me a gentleman before.
A criminal? In my early days, yeah.
A smooth-talking playboy? Often enough.
A real good football player? Every day for the last decade and counting.
Never a gentleman, though. Not until now.
Not until Levi.
“You want to ride on my back?” I ask, because I’ll be damned if I let a single thing happen to her.
“And take a free pass to the beach?” She sprays water at me with a flick of her fingers in the rippling tide. “I’m not afraid of a little hard work, Coach. I’ll race you.”
I’m never one to turn down a challenge.
Or, it seems, a friendly race through the dark waters of Frenchman Bay, with me pushing the kayak and Levi having no qualms about pretending she can’t see me when she kicks me in the side or tries to shove me out of the way.
She’s as devious as her son.
And I like it. More than I should.
We make it back to shore in one piece.
Except that I can’t help but fear that a sliver of my useless heart has been stolen by the woman who flops onto her back as soon as we make it to the beach. Forgetting all about the sand that’s now coating her skin, she asks me, “Can we come back out tomorrow night?”
I throw my head back and laugh freely. “You’re a piece of work, Coach.”
Her fingers brush my ankle as I tower over her. “Correction—as a wise man once told me, I’m something of a work in progress.”
22
Aspen
“Oh, my God, look at that guy.”
When Willow’s finger darts in front of my face, I bat her arm away and discreetly lean back on my bar stool to scope out whoever that guy is. My sister’s not one for subtlety, that’s for sure, which I guess isn’t a bad thing since we’ve skipped the Golden Fleece and opted for a night out in Bar Harbor, which is only a twenty-minute drive up the road from London.
The good thing about Bar Harbor?
Everyone’s a stranger.
Since walking into The Red Ruby thirty minutes ago, I haven’t recognized a single face. There’s certainly something to be said for not having to play the Coach card tonight or the Levi card or any card, really, besides tossing back a drink or two and enjoying the evening for what it is. Freedom.
I’m grateful for having a night out with my sister where I can just relax.
Willow smacks my arm, hissing, “He’s leaving!”
I sip my vodka and cranberry. No Guinness for me tonight. I learned that mistake very well the last time. “That’s what patrons do, Wills. They grab a cocktail, stay awhile, then leave when they’re ready to go home.”
“I’m going to get his number.”
I choke back a laugh. “You’re obsessive.”
“And you’re sexually frustrated,” Willow counters with full-on sass. Momentarily forgetting about her target, she sips her cocktail and stares at me unerringly. “I still can’t believe you went swimming with Dominic and didn’t even get the D. I’m telling you, it’s a travesty. Even I feel disappointed—I can only imagine how neglected your vagina must feel.”
“Keep your voice down,” I frantically whisper, shooting a glance to my left. A relieved sigh works its way up and out of my system when it’s clear that no one has taken a seat beside me. All the points go to Bar Harbor, of which I know zero people. “I regret telling you anything.”
“Liar. You so don’t.”
“I really, really do. Also, who uses the phrase get the D in their thirties?”
Willow tosses her hair over one shoulder, her lips pursed smugly. “Those of us who know what it feels like to get some dirty sex, dear sister. If you just”—here she makes an obscene hand gesture that honestly terrifies me—“let your reservations go, you’d probably have a good time together.”
Since that single kiss at London High a few days ago, Dominic has kept our physicality on lockdown.
And I get it—I really, really do.
We work together. Technically, I’m his boss. It’s unlikely that he’s here in town for the long haul, and there’s also the matter of Topher . . .
I’ll never do to my son what his father has accomplished in the year that we’ve been divorced. Rick totes around new women like they’re fashion accessories. He calls Topher while he’s on his way home from a date—in other words, when he’s with his date. He only wants to video chat when he has “company” over because, as he puts it, “Don’t you want to meet my new girlfriend, bud? Don’t tell Mom about this, yeah?” It’s manipulative and it’s disgusting, and while I know Rick doesn’t want me, I think he’s pissed that Topher chose to move to Maine with me instead of staying in Pittsburgh.
Punishing us both is the name of the game for my ex-husband, but what he doesn’t seem to realize is the lasting damage he’s doing to his son. Instead of thinking his dad is so “cool” to be hanging out with women who are just this side of legal, Topher asks if Rick is depressed or sad that we left. It doesn’t help when Rick regularly forgets to check in, leaving Topher to sit by the phone for hours and wait for his call. All attempts
on my end to whip my ex-husband into shape have gone unanswered.
Rick does what he wants to do and nothing else, literally and figuratively.
So while my ex-husband flaunts his menagerie of women around, including in front of his son, I haven’t slept with a single soul.
Not one.
And yet . . .
“Is it wrong that I can’t imagine myself having a fling?” I utter the damning words slowly, softly, so there’s no chance Willow will ask me to repeat them. “I’ve never . . .” I shove my hands through my straight hair, dropping my chin to stare into my pink cocktail like it holds all the answers to the dating universe. If only. “Rick was my first, Wills. The guy before him was . . . well, unmemorable. You know that. I know that.”
Surprisingly, Willow doesn’t launch into a dramatic rant fit for an off-Broadway show. Hell, she doesn’t even smile when she settles a hand over my forearm, her hot-pink nails a direct contrast to my pale skin.
“You’re scared of commitment,” she assesses succinctly.
I bark out a startled laugh. “I was married to Rick for fourteen years, Willow. I don’t think commitment is my problem.”
She arches her brow, taunting me. “Then let’s call it like it is: you’re scared of sex.”
My eyes go wide as I jerk a glance over my shoulder. “Keep your voice down! You can’t just . . . you can’t just—”
“You have sexphobia.”
Seeking alcoholic guidance, I drain the rest of my cocktail. The ice cubes rattle in the glass when I plunk it down on the bar top. Feeling heat dust my shoulders and warm my cheeks, I finally mutter, “That’s not a real psychological term.”
It’s a pathetic retort and we both know it.
Willow lifts a finger to call for another round of drinks. Then she turns back to me, her blue eyes—so much like mine—curious and zeroed in on my face. “Don’t forget that you spilled your guts out to me after you left Rick.”
“Another reason to avoid Guinness for the rest of my life. It never, ever does me any favors.”
