Delay of Game

by Catherine Gayle

  And I couldn’t deny that I liked the feeling of having Sara in my arms. Not that I ever would have wanted it to be for a reason like this.

  It didn’t matter that she’d made a water-drenched, snotty mess of my suit; I was crazy attracted to her. She was always walking around in her skinny jeans and flirty skirts and designer tops and fuck-me shoes, and I couldn’t stop myself from looking. And wanting.

  But what I wanted didn’t matter. She was the coach’s daughter, which made her as off-limits as they come.

  That was why I’d never done anything stupid like ask her out. Besides, I wasn’t anything close to the right guy for her. She liked to party, to go out dancing and clubbing and all sorts of other things that were much more Burnzie’s scene than mine. Burnzie was a guy who was the absolute life of the party anywhere he went. But me? I was more often the designated driver, the guy who made sure everyone got home alive, if I went along for something like that in the first place. I didn’t mind having a beer every now and then, and a night with a few of the guys sometimes was fine, but partying held no interest for me.

  Probably because of my father, come to think of it, not that it mattered right now.

  Nothing mattered except for the fact that Sara was in my arms, crying so hard she was practically hyperventilating from the force of it. Not only that, but every fucking eye in this waiting room was focused squarely on her. I knew they didn’t mean any harm, that they were just worried about both Scotty and Sara and couldn’t help staring because she was so upset. But I also knew that she would be embarrassed once she stopped crying if she turned around and found them all staring like that. We were in the corner of the room, but that wasn’t really giving us any privacy.

  I didn’t stand there thinking about it any longer than I had to. I put one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, picked her up, and carried her out of the waiting room.

  She lifted her head, her eyes bloodshot and puffy, her nose red. “What…?”

  There were chairs scattered throughout the emergency room lobby, and only a couple of people waiting to be taken back. Better yet, none of them were people who knew Sara, at least as far as I knew. I found a quiet corner and sat down with her on my lap.

  “I thought you could use some privacy,” I explained. The table next to me had a box of tissues on it. I picked up the whole thing and handed it to her.

  She sniffled and tugged two tissues from the box. “Why are you being nice to me? I was just awful to you.”

  “I deserved a lot worse than that.”

  Shaking her head, she blew her nose. “No, you didn’t. No one deserves to have water thrown on him like that. I just flipped out for a minute. God, I was going to hit you. It’s all these stupid h— Never mind. Nothing excuses my behavior.”

  There was nothing that could absolve me from what I’d done. I didn’t want to argue with her about it right now, though. I just wanted to comfort her in whatever way I could.

  Her tears had slowed, and her sobs had dropped off until she was hiccupping from the crying jag, so I knew the worst was over. At least for now.

  Sara made no move to get off my lap, and I was definitely not in a hurry for her to leave it. I had one hand on her thigh, just above her knee, and the other was sliding up and down her spine in slow, steady movements. She rested her head on my shoulder.

  After a minute, she grabbed another tissue and blew her nose again. “You’re still all wet. God, Jonny, I’m sorry. I’m not normally such a bitch.”

  “Don’t call yourself that.”

  “If the shoe fits…”

  “That shoe doesn’t fit you.” And all that talk about shoes just made me think more about hers. I’d never paid so much attention to anyone’s shoes as I did to hers. I didn’t even normally pay much attention to my own. But with Sara? I always looked to see what shoes she was wearing. I’d even taken a sneak shot of a pair of them with the camera on my phone a while ago because they were hot as sin.

  She sat up a bit and moved her head back so she could look at me. The puffiness around her eyes was starting to go down a little, but her mascara was smeared all over. Her lips were turned down in a frown. “You think a lot better of me than you should, you know that?”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort.”

  “Hmph.”

  I’d rarely seen anything as adorable as the pout she was giving me. I had to look away because my thoughts turned to kissing it right off her face. That would be just about the worst thing I could possibly do. Because whether she was on my lap or not, she was still my coach’s daughter, and he was in the ER right now thanks to a heart attack I’d caused.

  We fell into silence then, which was a hell of a lot more comfortable for me than having to figure out what to say to her. I far preferred having my actions speak for me.

  “Jonny?” she said after a minute. The hand she had wrapped behind my neck was massaging me lightly, similar to how I was stroking her back. Slow. Soothing. Addicting.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Please don’t apologi—”

  “No, I need to. No matter how scared I am, I shouldn’t have thrown my water on you, and there is never any call for me to hit you. You didn’t have anything to do with whatever’s going on with Daddy. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry.”

  “It is my fault,” I said.

  “No, it’s his fault. Or mine. Or God’s fault or nature’s fault, or I don’t even know. But you didn’t do anything to make this happen. He’s known he needed to make changes for a while now. You didn’t do this.”

  She could tell me that until she was blue in the face, but I doubted I’d ever be able to believe it. I’d been there. I’d seen it go down.

  But Sara had stopped crying, and her hiccups had gone away, and she was still here in my arms. Not trying to leave. It was starting to feel cozy and comfortable, and that was a dangerous thought.

  Doc came around the corner from the waiting room area and cleared his throat, announcing his presence.

  Sara nearly leaped up to her feet. “Can I see him?”

  “He did have a heart attack, Sara.”

  Doc sat in the chair across from me, and she rushed over to sit next to him. I felt hollow without her in my arms. Her eyes filled with fresh tears, and I wanted to be holding her, stroking her back, trying to console her. But she wasn’t my girlfriend, so I had no business wanting anything like that.

  “They’re keeping him in the ICU tonight, and he’ll undergo bypass surgery tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh God. Single bypass?”

  “At least double. Maybe more. They won’t know for sure until they finish running all the tests tomorrow and see what they’re working with.”

  She sucked in a breath. I could see the struggle in her, the way she was fighting to hold herself together. Trying to be strong for her father. I recognized it in her because I’d spent so many years doing the same for my mom and my sisters.

  But then she took a deep breath and she nodded, and I knew I’d just witnessed Sara steeling herself against whatever was to come. She believed I thought too highly of her, but she was wrong. She didn’t give herself anywhere near enough credit.

  “Can I see him? I need to see him, Doc.”

  He nodded. “They’ll let you go in for just a bit. Not too long, though. He needs his rest.” He stood, and Sara was instantly on her feet. They headed off down a long hallway and through a set of double doors, and I was left alone and wondering how I could ever make this right.

  After a few minutes, I got up and went back to the waiting room. Doc had already returned from leaving Sara with her father, and he’d delivered the news to the others. Several of them were gathering their things to go home, as there was nothing any of us could do but wait and hope for good news tomorrow.

  Jim met me by the entry. “I know now’s not the time you want to think about this, but the League has requested a telephone hearing with you at one o’c
lock tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you take the morning off from practice to prepare yourself? You can come in before the conference call.”

  What was the point of even holding this hearing? There wasn’t anything I could do to change what I’d done, and the rules were fairly cut and dry. “Not sure anything I say will change things. The suspension is automatic.”

  “It is. But it’s procedure. They can’t give you a suspension without a hearing of some sort, even in cases like this where it is automatic. They have to give it due process.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I just got off the phone with your agent, too. He’ll be part of the conference call, and so will I. Bergy and Hammer are planning to sit in for Scotty, since…”

  There was no need to finish that statement.

  “Yeah, all right,” I finally said. “I’ll be there before one.”

  “Just head up to my office. I’ll have Rachel get us set up somewhere. She can fill you in once you get there.”

  I nodded and said good night, and he made his way out along with a number of the others who’d been waiting.

  They didn’t all leave, though. Zee inclined his head toward me, in an apparent invitation to join him and Dana. I headed in their direction.

  “How will Sara get home tonight?” he asked. “We can wait and—”

  “I’ll take her home.” I’d been the one to bring her here, leaving her car behind. Besides, I didn’t have to be at practice in the morning. It wouldn’t matter how late I was here with her. I needed to be sure she got home all right.

  I DIDN’T TELL Daddy what I’d done to Jonny. The last thing he needed right now was to know that I was behaving like a lunatic. Instead, I told him how pretty much the entire Portland Storm organization had come to see about him. I told him that I loved him. I told him all the good things and none of the bad—nothing that would upset him.

  I’d done my best to dry my eyes, sort out my makeup, and hide the puffiness, but I hadn’t been able to really mask the fact that I had been crying. That, of course, was the first thing he saw when I got to the ICU.

  “Don’t worry about me, baby girl.” He looked tired, the lines on his face much more pronounced than usual, and his eyes kind of sunken in because of the grayish pallor his skin had taken on. He patted a spot on the bed beside him.

  I didn’t need any more invitation than that. I rushed across the room and sat where he’d indicated, being careful not to dislodge any of the tubes and wires connected to him. That might have been the scariest part for me—seeing him attached to all of those machines while they beeped and whirred and made other creepy hospital sounds.

  This was all still new for me—the thought that his health wasn’t where it should be and that I needed to worry about him. He’d always been so big and strong, like an ox. I’d never really thought about the fact that he wouldn’t always be around. He’d always been able to do anything, to be everything I needed. It seemed like a thing most little girls did, thinking their dads could hang the moon. I supposed most little girls realized their fathers were just men a little sooner than I had, like when they were still little girls. I was only now coming to terms with the fact that Daddy was a mere mortal like the rest of us.

  It had been much easier for me to think of him as superhuman, somehow.

  “I always worry about you,” I said. At least these days I did. He was the only person I had to worry about other than myself, and I would much prefer to avoid thinking about my issues at the moment.

  “Doc said Jonny took care of you. That he brought you here and looked after you.”

  I nodded, feeling even worse about the fact that I’d just assaulted him in the waiting room. He had taken care of me at a time when I hadn’t been able to take care of myself. What a way to repay him for his thoughtfulness.

  “Make sure he knows this wasn’t his fault, Sara.” Daddy sat up a little straighter in his bed, putting his arm around my back.

  My mind instantly brought back the sensation of Jonny’s hand touching me there, soothing me and helping to calm me down. I had to shake that thought from my mind. Ideas like that didn’t belong in my head.

  “He knows it wasn’t his fault,” I said. Didn’t he? He had to, even though he had apologized for it and said he’d caused it. That was just because I’d blamed him at first, but I hadn’t been serious about it. That was just my hormones talking. But maybe I should try harder to be certain he knew he wasn’t to blame. I supposed he deserved that much.

  No, I knew he deserved that much.

  “Even so, I need you to talk to him.” He sighed, and it sounded as beleaguered as I’d ever heard from him. “And I need you to have Jim come talk to me in the morning before my surgery. And Hammer and Bergy, too.”

  I shook my head. “Not gonna happen. The last thing you need to think about is work.”

  “I’ll just call Jim myself—”

  “Not if I take away your phone.” I did just that, taking it off the rolling table in front of him and stuffing it in my purse. I ignored the way he was scowling at me. “You need to rest. You need to recover. That’s going to be my one goal: to make sure you actually do that this time, Daddy.”

  “I have a job to do.”

  “Your job is to get better so that you can do your job later. That’s it. Someone else is going to be coaching the team for a while because you can’t do it right now.”

  He didn’t look like he had any intention of giving up on the thought that he still had work to do. I didn’t know how long it would take for him to recover, but there was no chance he would be getting back on the job until this year’s playoffs were a thing of the past.

  At least he didn’t try to argue with me about it anymore, though. No, now he went a completely different direction—starting in with something else to upset me.

  “Why don’t you have someone take you ho—”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He might as well get that thought out of his head right this instant.

  “Go home. Get some rest. You can come back tomorrow.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m leaving your side until you get to come home, too.”

  “Sara…” The way he said it just crushed me, like a ten-ton slab of concrete crashing down on top of me.

  But I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I went home, anyway, so what was the point? I’d just be panicking about him non-stop, wondering if anything else had gone wrong and if the doctors would be able to get to him in time.

  “Don’t ask me to leave you at a time like this,” I said.

  “If you don’t leave—”

  “They can bring a cot in for me.”

  “And you wouldn’t use it because you’d be hovering over me,” Daddy countered. “Baby girl, I need you to go home and sleep in your own bed so I won’t worry about you. And we both know that won’t do me any good.”

  That was probably the only argument he could have come up with to convince me to leave. I could worry about him whether I was here or at home. Leaving wouldn’t change that. But I didn’t want him to think about anything but getting better. Definitely not me.

  I still didn’t like the idea, though.

  I frowned at him. “All right. I’ll go. But I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

  “Not before lunch. They won’t finish until well after then anyway.”

  “But I need to see you before you go in. Not negotiable.”

  One good thing about our relationship was that we were pretty good at coming to compromises most of the time.

  He scowled, but he nodded. “Fine. But go home now.”

  I kissed him on the cheek and told him I loved him, and then I made my way back out to the waiting room. I was half expecting to find the whole lot of them still there. Jonny was the only person I recognized, though.

  A couple of strangers, an older man and woman, were huddled together next to the window. They looked up fretfully when I came through the door and quickly deflated upon seeing
me. They had probably been hoping I had been a doctor coming to explain what was going on with their loved one.

  Jonny was seated near the coffee pot, his arms resting on his knees, and an anxious expression knitting his brows together.

  He stood up and crossed over to me, tucking his hands in his pockets. “You all right?”

  No. Not even close. “Yeah.” I crossed my arms, suddenly self-conscious since he was the only person still here. “Did Dana and Laura— Did they all go home finally?”

  “I sent them home. Told them I’d wait for you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Should I— Are you ready to go home?”

  I nodded, even though it wouldn’t feel like I was going home. How could it be home if Daddy wasn’t there? Not that staying here would feel like home, either. Nothing sounded appealing.

  Jonny put an arm around my back, resting his hand on my waist as he’d done earlier. Some crazy part of me—probably due to the pregnancy hormones—wanted to curl into him and grab on.

  Instead, I let him lead me out of the hospital. He helped me climb up into his truck and shut the door.

  I didn’t even have the energy left in me to cry after all of that.

  WE’D BEEN SITTING in the driveway in front of the house for at least five minutes with neither of us saying a word. It might have been even longer than that. It was hard to tell with the way my thoughts were running through my mind at a million miles a minute. Jonny still had the engine of his truck running. He’d put it in park once we got there, and then neither of us had moved a muscle.

  If we were just going to sit there, he should probably shut the ignition off. He had to be wasting a shit-ton of gas by idling it like that, and I didn’t want to go inside. Not yet. Not alone, at least.

  That house felt too big and open and empty even from the driveway for me to be there by myself tonight. It was weird—when the team was gone on a road trip, I never had any problem being in Daddy’s house without him. But everything felt different now. Probably because my father was supposed to be here tonight, but he wasn’t. He was spending the night in the ICU with IVs poking into him and machines attached to him and everything beeping.