Breakout Play

by Rebel Hart

  Copyright © 2020 by Rebel Hart

  All rights reserved.

  www.RebelHart.net

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Kimberly

  2. William

  3. Kimberly

  4. William

  5. Kimberly

  6. William

  7. Kimberly

  8. William

  9. Kimberly

  10. William

  11. Kimberly

  12. William

  13. Kimberly

  14. William

  15. Kimberly

  16. William

  17. Kimberly

  18. William

  19. Kimberly

  20. William

  21. Kimberly

  22. William

  23. Kimberly

  24. William

  25. Kimberly

  26. William

  27. Kimberly

  28. William

  29. Kimberly

  30. William

  31. Kimberly

  32. William

  33. Kimberly

  34. William

  35. Kimberly

  36. William

  37. Kimberly

  38. William

  39. Kimberly

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Rebel Hart

  Breakout Play

  Rebel Hart

  1

  Kimberly

  The player’s box on the side of the rink was packed to maximum capacity with the eighteen children in my hockey team. Their parents had come down to greet them after practice and were now setting to work at the most tedious task of any hockey practice or game: removing the gear.

  I stayed on the ice. I moved from one end of the bench to the other to thank the parents for bringing their kids to practice. Most of the parents gave me warm smiles. Some thanked me for taking their children off their hands for an hour and a half two times a week.

  It was my pleasure.

  I appreciated the athleticism of the sport in the older girls, but my junior’s team always made me laugh. Having a bunch of eight-year-olds on the ice was sure to bring entertainment to every practice. There wasn’t much seriousness to it. Where I was focused on skill and precision and speed with my older team, I was more dedicated to the key things I believed young children needed to have in order to succeed in the sport later in life. Things like good sportsmanship, a love for the game, and a crystal clear understanding of what it meant to be a good teammate before being a good player.

  Little Drew Dunmoore finally managed to get her skates off with the help of her father, who was now sliding her sneakers on and lacing them up while she chowed down on an orange that was dripping down her wrists and forearms. I grinned and skated up to the bench to drape my arms over the edge.

  “You were really good out there tonight, Drew,” I said. “Did you notice a difference with the new skates?”

  Drew, all big eyes and helmet hair, nodded enthusiastically and smacked her citrus lips. “So much better, Coach K. My feet didn’t go numb!”

  I grinned and reached down to prod Drew’s father in the back of the shoulder. “The only sucky thing about hockey, huh? Expensive gear and kids who grow like beanstalks.”

  Mr. Dunmoore chuckled as he finished the bow on Drew’s sneaker. Then he straightened and pushed both hands into the small of his back. He was an accountant and spent a lot of time sitting and had chronic back problems from a car accident in his youth. Long Grove was a small town. Everyone knew a little something about everyone. “Tell me about it, Kim. How long did you have your old pair for, Drew Drop? Six months?”

  Drew shrugged and slid off the bench. “I dunno.”

  Mr. Dunmoore swept his fingers through his graying hair and shrugged as carelessly as his daughter had. The resemblance was uncanny. “She’s as good at keeping track of time as I am. Anyway, we’d better head out. Dinner is probably coming out of the oven and if we’re not home in time the Mrs. will have my head.”

  I nodded graciously and pushed away from the bench, skating backward and coming to an eventual slow stop. “Say hello to Sheila for me. Catch you guys next week. And again, Drew, great job out there tonight.”

  Drew beamed with pride as her father escorted her off the bench, down the hall to the lockers, and out into the lobby, where most of the other kids and their parents had already filed out. I began skating my laps of the ice and collecting the equipment from their practice: cones, pucks, sticks, sleds for pushing while the young girls learned proper footwork. I put it all away in the wheelie bin in the hall just off the locker rooms. Then my gaze was ceremoniously pulled back to the ice.

  It waited for me, calm and still and cold. It called me back like an old friend that wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye yet and was begging to share one more glass of wine. Like always, I listened to the call. It was too loud to ignore. Too desperate.

  I took to the ice for a few laps without the hindrance of children peppering my path. I started slow, feeling the tight muscles in the back of my thighs gently protesting. I knew I shouldn’t push. My doctor hadn’t even liked the idea of me returning to coaching after my surgery six months ago. Before going into the operating room and being sedated, I’d apparently asked the nurses how long it would be before I’d be able to skate again. The nurse had told me to close my eyes and dream I was skating right then and there.

  It wasn’t the answer I’d been looking for. It was the kind of answer someone gave out of sympathy. Someone who knew full well that my skating career was going to take yet another nosedive after this surgery, one in a history of many.

  I picked up my speed. I bent at the knees and tested my balance. God, it felt good. Right. My pushes became more purposeful. Soon I was going so fast the wind pulled my hair back and the cold bit pleasantly into my cheeks. I came out of the curve of the backboards and opened up, giving it all I had as I crossed the rink and listened to my blood rushing in my ears.

  Faster.

  Unable to stop the grin stretching my cheeks, I hunched down and took off as I came in around the net. I came in hard and fast but controlled. Ice sprayed up the boards and the glass and then I was hop stepping on the ice, one foot over the other, until I had open ice in front of me again. I dropped low. Pushed hard with my right foot.

  And then the pain brought me down.

  I let out a startled yelp and gripped my left knee as I went down. The ice bit into my exposed forearms and I slid a good seven or eight feet until coming to a stop with my left leg stretched out in front of me.

  “Damn it!”

  I slammed my palms into the ice. It hurt. I did it again anyway.

  Then I sat there, much like some of my eight-year-old girls did after a bad fall, and leaned forward to brace my forearms on the ice and stretch out my hamstrings. My knee continued to sing with sharp pain. Pushing up after the stretch, I dug my fingers in around my kneecap and began to gently massage the same way my physiotherapist did. The pain abated but only a little, and I was sure walking on it was going to be a bitch.

  Slowly, so as not to aggravate the injury, I began unlacing my skates. I pulled them off and struggled more than a little with the left one. My knee felt like it was swelling already. I had to get off the ice and shower and then get home and slap some ice on it. My parents were going to give me an earful about being reckless. Dad especially. He hated when I was in pain and he hated even more that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  I don’t know which one of us had cried harder when I
’d first injured myself back in high school. Me or him. Maybe him. He’d had a better grasp of what it was going to cost me at the time. I’d still been idealistic and assumed it was just an injury, and injuries healed. This one did not. Not properly, anyway.

  The body I’d taken such good care of had betrayed me and continued to do so even now, some eight years later.

  I walked across the ice in my socks with my skates in one hand. I put them up in my locker along with my gear, and then I stood under a hot shower, favoring my left leg and trying not to put too much weight on it. After my shower, I threw on my leggings and oversized forest green sweater (which actually belonged to my older brother Keith, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him), and left the locker room with my back hair still wet. I headed for the lobby, where my coworker, Doyle Digby, was finishing mopping the floors.

  He had one headphone in. I could hear the screamo music blaring through the speakers as I crossed the cement floor. I had almost reached the door when he straightened and turned to me, his shaggy hair hanging in front of his eyes.

  “Yo, Kimmy,” he called.

  I stopped five feet from the door and adjusted the strap of my bag on my shoulder before turning and mustering up a smile. “Doyle. Need any help closing up?”

  He shook his head. His hair clung to his eyelashes and he gave his head a shake to get it out of the way. Then he placed both hands on the end of his mop and rested his chin on his knuckles. “Nah. I got it. You limping again?”

  I wished my cheeks weren’t burning. “Yeah. Pushed it a little too hard tonight. But it will pass. It always does.”

  Doyle rested his broom up against the wall underneath the sign that read ‘No Unaccompanied Minors.’ Then he wiped his hands on his jeans. “Let me walk you to your car.”

  “It’s all right. I can handle it.”

  “I insist.”

  I licked my lips. Then, knowing there was no sense in arguing with a guy like Doyle, I moved to the doors and gave them a push. He’d already locked them so I had to wait for him to fish the keys out of his pocket and let me out. He held the door open with a sheepish smile and I had to slip between him and the door.

  The heels of his sneakers, which were well worn and a bit too big for him, slapped and dragged across the cement platform outside the front doors. He followed me down the steps to the parking lot.

  “Nice night, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I glanced over my shoulder and then looked up at the sky. Long Grove was a small community about thirty-five miles from Chicago. From certain points you could see the city’s lights, but out here in the more rural areas there wasn’t much light, so the stars were brighter. “It is.”

  “Can’t believe fall is here already. Summer just flew by, you know?”

  “It does every year,” I said. He was fishing. I knew he was. He and I had this same routine on a near weekly basis, and every week he failed to get the hint that I was not, and never would be interested in him. I’d seen him with his ex when she used to come around the rink. They broke up about a month ago. Maybe a little longer. When I heard the news I wanted to celebrate for her. From what I’d seen, Doyle could be a controlling ass with exceptionally high expectations of ‘his girl,’ as he liked to call her. They’d been together for about eight months and I never learned her name.

  We reached my car. Well, my mom’s car. It was a little blue Honda hatchback with a hockey stick sticker on the rear window. Doyle managed to put himself right in front of the driver’s side door as I fished my keys out of my bag.

  He took a deep breath and crossed his arms over his chest. “Got any plans tonight?”

  “Family dinner.”

  “Nice.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “You’re lucky you know.” Doyle rested his hip against the car door. I eyed the gold button on the side of his pocket and willed him not to scratch the paint.

  “Why is that?”

  “Family dinners. Not all of us have people who want to cook for us. You should be grateful.”

  “I am.”

  Where does he get off telling me how I should feel?

  Doyle grinned. It was a charming, sloppy sort of smile. But I saw right through it. Then he reached out and tugged at the strap of the bag over my shoulder. “Sorry, Kimmy. I should’ve offered to carry this for you. With your bum knee and all.”

  “Thanks. But no thanks. Now, sorry Doyle, but could you get out of my way? I have to get home, otherwise I’ll be late for dinner. Can’t let Mom go to all that work and show up late. Gratitude. Right?”

  Doyle held up his hands and backed off. “Oh yes, of course. Go ahead.”

  I opened the door and threw my bag over the console into the passenger seat. Then I slid in, mindful of my knee, and started the engine. I closed the door and Doyle rapped his knuckles on the window. It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to roll my eyes as I opened the window three inches.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Drive safe.”

  I put the car in reverse. “Watch your feet.”

  I reversed out of my spot before Doyle finished backing up. I knew I wasn’t going to run over his foot, but boy, if I had, it would have been priceless. I watched him turn into a smaller and smaller dark splotch in my rear view mirror as I peeled out of the parking lot and shifted from first to second, and then third. My knee ached something terrible every time I pushed down on the clutch.

  2

  William

  Nothing had changed.

  The Renwick house still smelled like it had when I lived here for my senior year of high school; like vanilla candles and a hint of clove. Mrs. Renwick had an obsession with scents and a cupboard full of candles above the stove. She’d pull out different ones for different seasons, and seeing as how fall was around the corner, she’d already opted for sweet, cozy scents in place of what she likely had been burning in the summer months. I assumed the house had smelled like citrus just weeks ago.

  Not only did it smell the same, but it looked the same too. For the most part. The dining room table where I currently sat with Keith, my best friend, and his parents, Liz and Roger, was the same vintage piece Mrs. Renwick had picked up at a local thrift store when Keith and I were only twelve. It was set with a lace runner that had been used on the head table at Liz and Roger’s wedding. It had yellowed somewhat, but that didn’t stop them from using it year round.

  The plates, which had been heavy with servings of spaghetti moments earlier, were the same powder blue ceramic pieces with hand-painted bushels of lavender in their centers.

  Roger Renwick leaned back in his usual seat at the head of the table. His chair creaked gently and he patted his belly, which was a little rounder than it had been when I left seven years ago after I was drafted. “Liz, sweetheart, that might have been your best pot of spaghetti yet,” he sighed.

  Liz smiled at her husband as she lifted her glass of wine to her lips. She’d stopped dyeing her hair in the years since I’d been gone. What had once been a shiny head of black hair was now a shiny head of silvery hair. It suited her. She’d always had a bit of a fashionable edge to her and it seemed to show even more now. Perhaps it was the sharp-angled glasses that were perched on her nose. “You say that every time, dear.”

  “And I mean it every time,” Roger said.

  Keith, who sat across from me, added his two cents. “I agree. Delicious, Mom. Thank you.”

  “Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Renwick,” I said. I should’ve been the first to thank her.

  Liz turned her green eyes to me. They narrowed. “Mrs. Renwick? Good grief, Will. You may have been gone awhile but please, call me Liz.”

  I chuckled and rubbed the back of my neck. “Sorry.”

  Roger tipped sideways in his chair to mutter under his breath to me, “She thinks Mrs. Renwick makes her sound old.”

  Liz arched an eyebrow. “I can hear you, Roger. I may be blind as a bat, but I’m not deaf.”

  “Unfortunately,” Roger w
hispered.

  Liz plucked a piece of sliced baguette from her plate and threw it across the table at her husband. It hit him square in the chest and bounced into his lap. He caught it before it rolled to the floor and brushed crumbs from his shirt before picking up his knife and buttering his newfound piece of bread. “Thank you, dear.”

  I laughed.

  “Don’t encourage him.” Liz scowled, but her hard expression broke and she too began to giggle.

  Another thing that hadn’t changed.

  Roger got to his feet and made a lap of the table to refill everyone’s wine glass. He started with his wife, as always, and then walked around. I was drinking water and refused the offer of wine for what felt like the tenth time that evening.

  “Sorry, Will,” Roger said, pausing with a hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t be.” Alcohol had never appealed to me. It brought up too many bad memories; it had tainted too many hearts. Mine would not be one of them. I had other things I preferred to indulge in. “Mind if I help myself to a refill?” I lifted my nearly empty glass of water.

  Roger nodded for me to go ahead, so I pushed my chair back and scooted out between the table and the hutch at my back, which was filled with all of Liz’s mother’s old china that she grew up eating off of on special occasions. If things were still the same, which I was sure they were, the china only came out for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. Sometimes Easter. But that wasn’t a guarantee.