Swagger

by Liz Lincoln

  Tanni: urgent. i need one of you to call me right the fuck now. or call carrie. but for the love of god, someone call us. right. fucking. now.

  Heart pounding at the clear emergency Tanni was trying to contact them about, Marcus dialed her number. He was only vaguely aware of Jaron doing the same right next to him.

  She answered after one ring. “I need to talk to Matt right away.” Her voice was harsh and frantic. Which was not even close to normal for Tanni.

  Oh fuck. “Celia?” He crossed the room in three long strides, heading into the showers. His phone was water resistant. And if something was wrong with Celia and the babies, he didn’t really give a shit if his clothes got wet.

  “These babies tryin’ to come now,” Tanni said. There was downright panic in her voice.

  Matt was laughing at something one of his offensive lineman had said. Marcus ignored the murmurs questioning him coming into the shower fully clothed. He just shoved the phone at Matt. “Tanni. Cee’s in labor.”

  Matt took the phone and slammed it to his ear. “What the fuck is going on, Tanni? She can’t be having those babies. It’s too soon. And I’m not there. It’s too soon. They’re not…She’s not ready.” He stalked out of the showers, a streak of soapsuds still visible across his back. Marcus answered a few of the guys’ questions, telling them he didn’t know anything more than what they just heard. And then he followed his friend.

  Matt sat in front of his locker, naked and dripping, as he listened to Tanni. Jaron sat next to him, hand on Matt’s shoulder. Marcus grabbed a towel and sat down on Matt’s other side. He draped the towel over Matt’s leg, there if he wanted it. Then Marcus put his hand on Matt’s free shoulder.

  He could hear the murmur of Tanni’s voice, but not make out what she was saying. But the details weren’t important; his friend was in crisis, and he was there. He and Jaron would be there as long as Matt needed them, and he knew his teammates would be there too. The team was a brotherhood, an extended family. They would all help Matt through this.

  Figuring things out with Bree would just have to wait.

  *

  —

  Reina raised her beer bottle and looked around the table. “Before we get started on our last poker night, I want to—”

  “It’s not our last poker night,” Eric interrupted.

  “Asshole, it’s her last poker night.” Tomás glared at his friend. “Ergo, it is our last night as this group.”

  Eric managed to look sheepish. “Sorry, Reina. You were saying?”

  Reina cleared her throat and managed to make it sound sarcastic. “As we get started on the last poker night with any real meaning because I’m still here—”

  “I said I was sorry,” Eric mumbled, leaning into Bree. She patted him on the shoulder.

  “I just want to say how much I’m going to miss you guys. I mean, I’ll be back as much as I can, but don’t flatter yourselves, you two. It’s all for this guy.” Reina squeezed Tomás’ shoulder while looking at Eric and Kevin. “And I will be coming back for his poker chips.”

  Kevin groaned. “Please. No talking about your sex life.”

  “You’re just jealous because you can’t get it on the regular,” Tomás said.

  “Damn straight I am,” Kevin said. “Now are we done? Can we get to actually playing poker?”

  Reina waggled her beer bottle. “No. Trying to make a toast here. Jesus, you people have no social skills whatsoever.”

  “Of course we don’t.” Kevin shrugged. “We’re physicists.”

  Reina turned to Tomás. “Can you beat him up for me or something?”

  Tomás looked at her as if she were crazy. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m a physicist.” Tomás spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable.

  “Fine. I was going to say I would miss all you guys. But I don’t think I will. Except you, Bree.” Reina raised her beer bottle one more time. “Here’s to the end of our poker nights together, Bree. And I guess the rest of you assholes too.”

  On autopilot, Bree lifted her beer bottle and clinked it with the rest of her friends’. She should probably be feeling more sadness over the end of their two-year ritual. Or nostalgia. Or…something. Anything that wasn’t this emptiness that felt suspiciously like sadness and loneliness and had been there since the football game. For the past two weeks, since she saw Marcus at her dissertation defense, the feeling had nearly overwhelmed her.

  Sometimes it resembled her anxiety, always lurking in the back of her head, reminding her of all the things that would never be. Just like with poker, she could bluff her way through social situations. Through her dissertation party, through her parents’ overnight visit, even somewhat through helping Reina pack up all her stuff to move to Madison. And when her best friend asked about Bree’s sadness, she could bluff through that too, saying it was because after so many years of living in the same apartment, they would no longer live even in the same city. And Reina seemed to almost believe her.

  Toasting done, the group settled into their first few hands of poker. Bree seemed to be having shit luck, folding every hand. The best she could pull off was a pair of fours. And when she was bluffing in so many other areas of her life, she just didn’t have the energy to bluff her way through the poker game. It seemed to be Tomás’ night.

  Bree missed Marcus.

  The thought liked to randomly pop into her head. And it got worse around Reina and Tomás.

  When Tomás finally lost a hand, it was Reina who won instead. “Maybe we should use this to start our honeymoon fund,” she said as she scooped the chips toward herself.

  Their what? Honey-what fund?

  “That’s a great idea.” Tomás leaned toward Reina to kiss her cheek, oblivious to the three people staring at them.

  “I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “But for a second there, it sounded like you said honeymoon. Like something you do after a wedding.”

  Reina and Tomás looked around at their friends. Reina got a sheepish look on her face. “Did we forget to mention that?”

  Bree gave her a sarcastic look. “Little bit, yeah.”

  Tomás put his arm around Reina and leaned his head against hers. “With her leaving, I realized I don’t ever want to be apart from this woman. Seemed like the best way to keep that from happening was to be her husband.”

  “And why would I say no to someone this sexy?” Reina grinned. “Think about how adorable our children will be.”

  Ignoring the ache in her chest, instead focusing on the excitement also bubbling inside her, Bree got up to hug her best friend, squeezing tightly the woman she couldn’t love more if they were sisters. “I’m so happy for you guys. Congratulations.”

  Reina hugged her back, squeezing tight. “Thank you. You are, of course, going to be my maid of honor.”

  Straightening, Bree grinned. “Duh.” She turned to hug Tomás. “You know the drill,” she told him. “You hurt her, I kill you, yada yada yada.”

  Tomás shot Reina a tender smile. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Once everyone was done with hugs and congratulations and manly punches to the shoulder, their game resumed. Bree excused herself to go to the kitchen.

  To give herself something to do, she opened the refrigerator to get another beer. Setting it unopened on the counter, she stared out the window at the snowy driveway. Christmas was in three days, but instead of holiday cheer, she felt more alone than she ever had in her life. She was thrilled for her best friend to have found her happily ever after. But it hurt to know she too loved a man but wouldn’t get that same happy ending.

  Maybe she’d been wrong to get so mad at him and send him away. But she couldn’t let men keep trying to run her life. She was capable of standing on her own, capable of doing incredible things. She didn’t need men stepping in to fix things for her.

  Something bumped against her leg, accompanied by an annoyed meow. She checked the clock and Diablo was right. It was ten
o’clock, an hour past his dinnertime. She scratched his head before heading for the refrigerator. At least he didn’t try to redirect her career.

  “After tomorrow, bud, it’s just you and me. I’ll be the world’s youngest cat lady.”

  Diablo blinked expectantly, staring at the can of cat food in her hand.

  “Yeah, I get it. Food.”

  Diablo meowed his agreement.

  Watching her cat chow down reminded Bree of the text Marcus had sent on Tuesday. It had been of him holding a ridiculously adorable orange tabby kitten. The little furball had fit in the palm of his large hand. The accompanying text had read: My new roommate, Dorito.

  The thought of Marcus adopting a kitten had made her entirely too gooey inside. Like someone had replaced her internal organs with cinnamon rolls. So she hadn’t responded. She hadn’t been able to think of anything to say aside from begging him to come see her. And that was a bad idea.

  Except maybe it wasn’t. She was in love with the fool, and maybe what he’d done should’ve been just a fight, not an end.

  The idea of sending him a text or calling him made the panic rise up. So powerful, she couldn’t breathe. Her thoughts and emotions were so jumbled up she didn’t know how to sort out if that was because it was a terrible idea, or because she was just too chickenshit about the possibility of rejection.

  “I just don’t know.”

  Diablo glanced up, clearly annoyed with the interruption in his scarfing of food.

  “Don’t know what?” Kevin wandered in and put his empty bottle into the recycling can.

  “Whether I should take the start-up job here or the one at Carnegie Mellon.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She didn’t know that either. Celia had gone into labor, and though her doctors had been able to stop it, she was in the hospital for the rest of her pregnancy. So she’d given Bree more time to make a decision, which was both a blessing and a curse.

  Bree wasn’t about to discuss her love life with Kevin. She was still a little mad at him for talking to Bryant without her permission, even though she knew it was irrational and probably as much about Bryant and Marcus as it was about Kevin.

  At least she never had to see Bryant again. A Christmas miracle.

  Kevin twisted off the top on his new beer bottle and leaned back against the counter. After taking a slow pull, he said, “Not taking the job at Duke?”

  To keep her hands busy, Bree picked up her bottle and twisted off the top. “No, turns out the guy I would have been working for there couldn’t say enough good things about Bryant. That’s not someone I can work for.”

  Kevin’s laugh sounded a little bit nervous. “No, I suppose not.”

  Awkward silence passed between them. Finally, he cleared his throat. “I know I already said I was sorry, for talking to Bryant. But I just feel like I should say it one more time. I was a jerk.”

  She wasn’t going to argue with him about that. Though he’d been a good friend, and she could understand the difference between making a dick move and actually being a dick.

  “Anyway, next time I decide it’s my job to rescue the damsels, I’ll make sure to consult one of them first. I just thought you should know your point wasn’t lost on me.” He took a gulp of his beer, as if saying those few sentences had parched him.

  The last of Bree’s annoyance faded. “I appreciate that. And I do get that your intention was to help. But it’s up to me to decide if I need help.”

  “I know. If it makes a difference, I’ve felt like shit since you came into my office and yelled at me. And you have no idea how fucking relieved I was when you passed your dissertation.”

  She smiled. “Not nearly as relieved as I was.”

  “There’s that.” With a nod, Kevin headed back to the dining room. Leaving Bree once again alone with her thoughts.

  Was she now the one being a dick, giving Marcus the continued silent treatment? She hadn’t let him explain his actions when he drove her home from the football game. She’d been too angry. But when it came down to it, what he’d done hadn’t been anywhere near as potentially awful as what Kevin did.

  Kevin could have prevented her from getting her PhD. Because of Marcus, the worst she had to endure was deciding between two job offers she wanted. Nice problem to have. Had she overreacted because she was still so raw from her meeting with Bryant and anger at Kevin?

  Fuck.

  “Hey, you ever coming back in?” Reina rolled into the kitchen. “And more importantly, are we out of Doritos?”

  Bree stood on tiptoe to reach that extra bag she’d stashed on top of the kitchen cabinets. Accessible cupboard space was at a premium, so Bree was in charge of all the overstock. “Like I would ever let us be out of Doritos.” She tossed the bag to her friend. Huh, Marcus had named his cat Dorito, same as her favorite junk food. How funny.

  Reina settled the bag on her lap. “You okay in here?”

  There was no way she was getting into her complicated feelings about Marcus and how they were jumbled up with Reina and Tomás’ engagement announcement. Maybe later, when they didn’t have company.

  “Diablo wanted his dinner. Then I got stuck trying to figure out the whole Carnegie Mellon versus start-up issue.”

  “If I take two minutes to walk you through this, promise to come back in there?”

  She had spent the better part of a week agonizing over this decision. But sure, Reina could solve it in two minutes. “Go for it.” Then again, her friend did have a knack for this sort of thing.

  “Tell me the biggest pro and the biggest con for each job.” Reina looked up at her expectantly.

  “For Carnegie Mellon, the biggest pro is it’s an established program with a great reputation. The biggest con is…The research is, well, typical for an academic postdoc. It would be a long time before I got to do really cutting-edge stuff. The project is interesting but not that exciting.”

  “And that research group here?”

  “The con is easy. Start-ups are really risky, and if I go that route and it fails, it would be harder to go back to academia. But I’d be doing amazing stuff right away. There’d be the potential to have a real impact.” She ignored the voice in her head reminding her that Pittsburgh was a plane ride away from Marcus and Milwaukee was not.

  Moving quickly, Reina pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of Bree.

  “What was that for?” She frowned at her friend.

  Reina rolled closer, tapped through a few screens, then turned the phone so Bree could see. “Look at your face.”

  Bending down to get a better look at the picture, Bree studied her expression. Her mouth turned up in a dreamy sort of smile and her eyes held a faraway glow. Her cheeks even looked a little flushed, but that could just be the kitchen lighting.

  “For the record, you don’t look like that when you talk about Carnegie Mellon. You look resigned.” Reina tucked her phone back under her thigh, where she usually kept it. “I know the risk is scary, but between grad school, undergrad, and all the people those guys know, we collectively know a shit ton of people. We’ll all call in favors and make sure you land on your feet if this company goes belly up. But hell, you got an NFL star backing you. Sadly, that means more than having scientists back you.”

  Bree swallowed hard, because suddenly there was a lump in her throat. No, dammit, she was not going to cry. But she did wrap her arms around Reina. “Thank you. I’m gonna miss the hell out of you.”

  Reina patted her arm. “I know you will. Now get off me or I’m gonna get choked up too. And I promised myself I wouldn’t cry until the end of poker night.”

  Sniffing, Bree straightened. She gestured toward the dining room. “After you.”

  Now that she’d figured out which job to take—she’d send emails in the morning, even though they wouldn’t be read until after the long holiday weekend—maybe she’d have a chance at figuring out what the hell to do about Marcus.

  Chapter 20

  Bree yanked back the showe
r curtain and grabbed her towel. After quickly drying off, she got out and snatched her phone from the vanity. She’d gotten at least five text messages while in the shower, which had her anxious imagination convinced Reina and Tomás were dead on the side of the highway because the moving truck had hit ice and flipped over the guardrail. Or maybe her dad had a heart attack and she’d be spending Christmas in the hospital at his bedside.

  She knew it probably wasn’t something that bad, but for fuck’s sake, people should know better than to text her that much in such a short time. Anyone who had that much to say to her knew she had anxiety.

  She woke up the screen to see a series of messages from Marcus.

  Celia? Did something happen with the babies? That was the only possible reason he could have for sending so many messages.

  Marcus: Can we get together? Just to talk?

  Seriously? That’s what he sent her imagination into worst-case-scenario overdrive about?

  Marcus: I promise I won’t take much of your time. I just have a few things I’d like to say.

  Marcus: Maybe a quick lunch or something.

  Marcus: Are you leaving town for the holidays? I’m sticking around. It would be great if we could do it before Christmas.

  Marcus: I got a little something for you, and I’d like to give it to you.

  He got her a Christmas present? It was silly, but the idea made everything inside her feel warm and gooey, the way she felt eating her mom’s homemade Christmas morning frosted apple turnovers. Her stomach did a little flip-flop.

  Dammit, now she had to think of something to get for him. What could she give a millionaire that he didn’t already have? Maybe something for Dorito.

  Marcus: Let me know when you’re free. We’re home this weekend, the Monday night game, so I’m not traveling with the team. But you probably know that.

  She flopped back onto her bed, staring at the wood beams in her ceiling. Now that Reina had moved out, she’d lowered the temperature in the house—Reina liked to keep it ridiculously warm—so the air chilled her still-damp skin. But she ignored it, trying to process all of Marcus’ messages while simultaneously trying to ease the lingering panic in her mind. Just because the imagined threat was over didn’t mean her anxiety disappeared in a poof. That would make life far too easy.