Red Card

by Liz Crowe

  “What did I do wrong?” Mel asked as Zach climbed into his grandfather’s sedan and stared straight ahead. “I mean… I was just a kid myself.”

  Alicia wiped her face and gripped her shoulders. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Go on home, get some sleep, let him get some, then talk to Daddy’s lawyer about next steps. Then ground him for a year. And triple his chores.”

  Mel nodded, sniffling, and got into the passenger seat. Metin stayed quiet, although Alicia knew it cost him. He probably had strong opinions about how Zach had been coddled into this very situation. A surge of defensive anger lit her brain. He had no right to judge her family.

  They watched in silence as the car eased into the light traffic, headed toward Grosse Pointe. “Don’t say anything,” she ground out as they waited for their taxi.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He stiffened when a car squealed into the lot, stopped, and a guy with a camera jumped out. “Shit, pull your hat down and follow me.” He dragged her inside, but not before the bright flash seared her retinas.

  Chapter Nine

  Metin groaned and rolled over, hoping to hold Alicia’s warm body close and grab another hour of sleep. But her side of the bed remained cold and empty. And had been for weeks. Sighing, he lay still, contemplating the ceiling of his ridiculously expensive condo in Madrid, replaying their last argument for the millionth time. Trying to figure out how he could have handled it better, or at least avoided the nuclear bomb that seemed to have detonated all over his dream of being with the woman forever.

  Because he still wanted it despite her stubborn insistence that his attempts to help her had backfired, put her in a position to refuse a great offer with her dream team in L.A. and taking the crappy option in Portland. He would never understand women. And this one in particular.

  But he missed her so keenly he walked around every day feeling as if he had amputated a limb. Even after she’d gifted him a black eye with an impressive left hook. He touched the still aching socket. He’d taken no end of ribbing from his teammates about the sexy American girlfriend who’d punched him on his way out of her life. But something about that connection, though violent, had not surprised him or really upset him that much. He’d never met a woman more evenly matched to him in temperament. When she’d done it, the urge to do nothing more than grab her and hold her close had come over him, but he’d walked away knowing she’d regret it enough on her own.

  He sat up, put his head in his hands and ignored the morning hard-on, unwilling to even masturbate his way into a better mood. No, he would let that pressure recede, build up yet more stress in his gut. He could translate it out onto the practice pitch.

  What a fucking mess.

  The coffee was already on, thanks to the timer. He poured a cup, sat, and stared out over the skyline of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, utterly miserable. Flipping open his laptop, knowing it for a bad idea but unable to stop, he opened up a few American news sites. Sure enough, his name and face, once only known to a handful of soccer fans in the States was a near-household word now, thanks to the antics of Alicia’s errant nephew and Metin’s ill-conceived plan to go with her to the inner-city police station.

  Their larger than life photos had been plastered all over the place. The ones from dinner where Alicia looked stunning and happy with him as he fed her a bite of dessert. Then later, trying to be incognito with their sloppy clothes and hats.

  He should have known better. After the first photogs emerged from their rat holes, he should have kept his sorry ass in the hotel while she went to the station. But he hadn’t even considered not going, not for a second. His woman’s family needed her. Ergo, he had to go along. It was a simple as that. And as a result, he no longer had said woman.

  The day after the story broke, his last day in the States at the tail end of the soccer expo junket across America, Alicia received a call from the L.A. women’s team—the team that had almost every name player on the previous year’s gold-medal winning squad. Her reaction had floored him. She’d clutched the phone in one hand, dragging her fingers through her hair with the other.

  She’d turned them down flat, unwilling to even consider going out for another combine, which would let her show off her skills to the coaching staff as she played with the existing team. Putting the phone down, she’d stared at it a full minute while he tried like hell to understand what she’d done.

  “This is your fault,” she’d said quietly before looking at him with tear-filled eyes.

  “My… what?”

  “The only reason they want me is because of this shit.” She pointed to the photo that had hit the wires about an hour after they got back to his suite.

  “I hardly think….” Unable to articulate it in English, he trailed off. Slumping in his chair, he’d watched her pace, her face getting redder by the minute as she named off all the reasons he was a shithead, selfish, overpaid, oversexed playboy douchebag. When he had to stop and ask her what that word meant, he’d earned the black eye.

  Then she’d left, in an angry huff, leaving him flabbergasted, furious, and already missing her. He played his final match, half-assing it like he’d promised his agent so as not to risk injury, playing her argument over and over in his head for the first of many times. Jesus, it had hardly even been an “argument” really. He’d listened to her rant, so shocked at her vehement reaction to getting that call, he’d been unable to form a coherent defense.

  Mel kept him abreast of Alicia’s next move, to Portland, a few days after he left for Spain. “I don’t know what you did, soccer boy. But I have never seen my sister so livid. Well done, really.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what I did either, to be honest. So, thanks. I think. How’s your son?” He had been fiddling with his boarding pass, sitting in the terminal; so desperate to make contact with Alicia he’d decided to brave a call to her sister.

  “On lockdown, thanks.”

  “Okay… well….”

  Mel stayed silent long enough to make him squirm, which pissed him off. “Take care, Metin. Have a nice life.” She had hung up then, leaving him with his face flaming in fury. Fuck the Matthews women. He did not need their shit.

  He’d come to their country two weeks earlier, content with his decision to marry Graciella the flighty, grasping model. He wanted a family. She’d appeared amenable enough to that concept. After games in New York, Boston, Dallas, and St. Louis, he hit Detroit with a burning urge to get home and away from the intensity of America. The rush-around, hurry-up, loud… American-ness wore him down.

  Then he’d made a snap decision to attend the party being thrown by the car company funding their game in Detroit. And he had laid eyes on her, on Alicia. The girl he’d done a bit of cursory research about, once he figured out Trevor Matthews had funded the Midwest leg of their tour. Who had tuned into the blonde goddess of his dreams.

  He was such a total sap. He should get laid. Graciella wasn’t due home for another week, and he’d been bouncing around from practice to condo like some kind of loser. Yeah, getting laid. That would purge her for good. He glared in the bathroom mirror.

  It’s been nearly five weeks. You have got to shake this off. For god’s sake, you only knew the woman, what? The equivalent of a week? Fucked her three times, big deal. You’d do that on a slow weekend in Barcelona. She was no different than any other convenient pussy. Get over it.

  Grabbing his phone, he thumbed through a few viable options toward that goal as he headed for the shower. He only had an afternoon practice today since they’d had two grueling sessions yesterday. His muscles ached. But not as much as his chest, which burned with the not-having, the absence of the one he knew he loved. He hit one of the numbers, smiling when the woman answered.

  “Hola,” he said, pulling out all the stops and speaking her language.

  “Metin, my darling,” she cooed. “Long time no… see.”

  “Indeed. How do you feel about correcting that error? I could use some company.�
��

  The woman showed up right on schedule as he emerged from his shower. She smiled, dropped her stuff, and obliged him for an hour or so.

  “Darling,” she gasped when he finished and dropped onto his back, no better off for the activity. “Who is this Ali-shee-ah? If I thought we had anything like a normal relationship, I’d be very jealous.” She lit a cigarette and smiled at him through the smoke.

  He groaned and sat up, cursing himself, Alicia, her sister, Graciella, his parents for insisting he skip university for the shot at soccer stardom. It had worked, but at nearly twenty-six, he had maybe another year before the next crop of youngsters took his spot with their fresh legs and smart mouths.

  “I have a practice,” he mumbled, heading to the bathroom. He couldn’t even look at her after treating her like some kind of whore. And she wasn’t. She was a nice girl, one of the usual hangers-on around the team, willing to fuck any one of them for a chance to be close to a star.

  When he emerged, she’d gone, getting his “thanks, now get the hell out” message loud and clear. He dropped into his leather chair, despising himself, hating what he had become, thanks to the easy-access nature of his life as soccer stud. His phone buzzed. One of his brothers calling from France, where he had settled with a lovely wife, two beautiful daughters, and a great life as… something boring… an accountant, yes, that was it.

  Not in the mood for fraternal ribbing, he turned the device all the way off. His family knew how to get him through his agent in case of emergency. He needed some quiet, some space. Deciding a walk through the teeming streets of his adopted town might help, he tugged on jeans and a cotton shirt, jammed a cap on his head, and put on sunglasses.

  Two hours later he climbed into the elevator, heart racing. Panic roiled in his gut. His temples pounded. The longer he’d walked, head down, going either unrecognized or left alone for a change, the worse it had gotten. He had such a gut-deep urge to talk to Alicia, to make sure she was all right. He didn’t care if he came off as all sorts of lame for tracking her down. He had to do it.

  Chapter Ten

  Alicia stared at the turf, gasping for breath. Her first three weeks with the expansion team in Portland had been beyond brutal. The workouts were one thing, but the publicity from the photos with Metin had been a hundred times worse.

  Well, you let him fuck you no less than three times, once in the goddamned tunnel at Ford Field, you slut. You went out to dinner, let him charm you, disarm you, then when the call came from the team you and every other female player wanted, offering you one more chance, you snapped. You… punched the guy right in the face, for Christ’s sake.

  She groaned, willing her heart to stop pounding after the suicide drills they’d endured. The other girls on the team barely talked to her other than to ask her how it felt to screw her way onto a team. She didn’t even have the energy to respond, to point out the basic flaw in their constant low-level muttering. If she’d screwed her way onto a team, she sure as hell would not be in this godforsaken city, on an old football field, with a bunch of third and fourth-tier players.

  Sure, she would be the star, bound and determined to prove she would carry the lame-ass team on her shoulders. But… she could use a friend amongst all their bitching. She missed her father, Melanie, and the boys. And every time she allowed herself to think about Metin, she wanted to burst into stupid, girlie tears.

  Their first game had been a blowout, not in their favor. She had done her bit, used the hip fakery tricks Metin taught her, and scored three times. But their porous back line and awful goalkeeper allowed ten balls to get by them. A mess, but telling, and to his credit, the coach addressed it by making them all play defense for a week’s worth of practices. Threatening to rotate every goddamned player he had through the defensive line to find one who knew how to play the position.

  As a result, Alicia had way more bruises and scars than usual because he kept putting her on center defense during their brutal fifty-fifty sessions. Making her match up to every single player on the team, over and over again.

  It didn’t help that her energy level had diminished, drastically. She’d been playing the game, training or working out to get better at it since the age of nine. She knew her body so well, she could anticipate exactly where she would hurt, how she could address it, and how much rest she required for recovery after every practice session.

  But the stress and emotional energy it took to shove Metin’s dark eyes, deep laugh, lips, hands… all of it out of her head twenty-four seven, drained her. Mel said she should go to the team doctor and tell him. Maybe she needed vitamin B shots.

  The team filed past her, no one acknowledging her presence as she stayed gassed for way longer than she should have. She stood up, and the field faded. Her vision wavered, got dim from the inside out. Dropping to her hands and knees, she believed passing out at that moment might be the only real way to cope. Perhaps she’d wake up and be transported to the split second in that hotel casino bathroom when she’d let him kiss her the first time, and could choose differently. That way, she would not be lying there on the turf, surrounded by fluttering trainers, and pregnant.

  “Can you come home?” Mel’s first question irritated her.

  “Why would I do that?” She fiddled with her keyboard, fingers hovering over the send button on the email she’d composed to Metin, telling him what had happened and what she’d done about it.

  It was such a perverse thing, she knew. Despite his surface modern attitude, Metin was very hidebound traditional. If he knew about her pregnancy, he’d do everything he could to stop her from aborting which was why she had to set the appointment, now that she’d taken twenty home pregnancy tests. She’d located the clinic across town on her own and concocted excuses in advance, knowing no team doctor would make her “prove” her period was so heavy and painful she couldn’t play for three days.

  And she composed the simple email message, planning to hit send after she walked back in the door from the procedure.

  Of course, all she’d done for a week was dream about Metin. She could hear him, smell, and taste him, and woke in tears every time. She would put a hand on her flat stomach then launch out of bed and into running clothes, to avoid even the slightest thought that she wanted this because she did not want his or any other man’s child. She had something to prove still and intended to do so, by gutting out this lousy assignment then trying out and making the national team next year.

  But as she ran, visions of him, and of another, a small version of him, holding his hand, his dark hair thick, his eyes a compelling dark blue, made her stop and double over. Not even realizing her breakdown until some kind, nosy Portlander put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right.

  She’d finally bitten the bullet and told Mel, needing to unburden, turning to the one person on the planet she trusted. Her sister had been supportive and thankfully non-judgmental, if a little bossy about having the abortion as quickly as possible, before she could change her mind.

  “Yeah, right, like I’d do that,” she huffed and puffed on the phone even as she turned to the side, observing her silhouette in the mirror and wondering what she would look like in eight months.

  “I just mean,” Mel said, snapping her back to the present, “that if you came here for a week, I’d take care of you. You know… after.”

  “I can’t, Mel,” although that option sounded better and better. The furor over her hookup with soccer’s hottest swinging dick still hovered like a thin fog. And the thought of getting caught out somehow, in this immature “you let him knock you up too?” moment made her grind her teeth.

  “You should. I think. Even though Portland is a shithole for women’s soccer, you can’t risk it. What if someone follows you there?”

  “Well….” She paced, kicking at the soccer balls scattered in the floor of her tiny condo.

  “Do it. Tell your coach I’m sick or something and you need a week to come home. You have a bye week coming up and�
�� well, you guys suck anyway, so who cares. Sorry.” Her sister’s no-nonsense manner soothed her.

  “Yeah.” Alicia dropped into a chair, relieved she was taking over. Putting a hand over her eternally leaking eyes, she whispered, “I miss him so much.”

  “No. You don’t. I took your advice this spring and didn’t let Scott back into my life, into my sons’ lives. Now you are gonna take mine. Leave him behind, Alicia. He is not for you.”

  Scott Miller had ruined her sister. That much was certain. Already wealthy in his late twenties, the handsome, charming man had taken one look at her, working as a teller in one of the branches of the bank where he moved money around in some mysterious fashion, and pounced like the predator he was. She’d taken the job for the summer after her senior year of college, hoping to parlay it into a career. Mel had been a natural for that sort of people work. Perky, pretty, personable, and fresh prey.

  Alicia had been too busy trying to make the varsity starting lineup as a freshman in high school to concern herself much with her sister’s being swept off her feet by a much older man.

  But he was a liar, a cheater, a thief of the highest order, having stolen Melanie’s ability to trust, or love anyone but her sons and her father and sister.

  The closeness the sisters shared had once been born of necessity. When their mother died, Mel had been handed responsibility for Alicia while their father continued in workaholic mode as high level auto executive. The nine years between the girls remained a gaping hole of experiences neither were willing to bridge.

  She’d been uneasy about Mel never quite sure if her sister loved her or resented her presence with her perpetual need to be driven to soccer practices and games. When her sister’s life had transformed from slightly sullen student and bank teller into a whirlwind of over-the-top wedding, Italian honeymoon, giant housewarming party, baby showers, and the birth of her son, exactly seven months after the wedding, Alicia had been shocked.