by Mya Wood
Bianca’s head turned to the birdcage. She stared at it a long moment. Then she turned back to Landry.
“Who named the birds?” she asked.
“I did,” whispered Landry. “They didn’t have names. I didn’t think that was right.”
Bianca nodded. “And what’s the fourth one called…the one with the bright feathers?”
Landry lowered his head. “That would be Felix.”
“And you would be…?” asked Bianca, wanting to know his full name. She felt suddenly on edge, but she wasn’t sure why.
Landry wasn’t sure why either. “Landry…Landry Hampton.” He extended his hand in greeting, but Bianca did not accept it.
She knew who he was now. Boy, did she ever know…
Bianca stood up and threw her napkin down on the table.
“From the Gators, right?” she said with an edge to her voice.
Landry nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Bianca turned and walked away without another word. She stormed up the pathway and into her room, slamming the door behind her. She was livid. She paced up and down the room. How dare he?
How dare he what? asked another part of her brain. Does the guy have to wear a name tag or something?
The argument raged through her.
He should have said something.
Why? He’s not here because of that. And wouldn’t you have been impressed with, ‘Hi, I’m Landry. I’m rich and famous.”
But he was hiding it. He deliberately didn’t tell me.
Says you. How do you know what he was thinking? You’re just pissed because you misread him so completely. Because you thought he was a nobody – sweet but dim.
But…
You’re not mad at him. You’re mad at yourself. Because, congratulations Girl, you just made a fool of yourself again!
Bianca stopped pacing and sat down on the end of the bed. She hated being right about her faults. What would Landry think of her? She followed football enough for casual conversation, so why hadn't she recognized such a major player?
The Gators.
Oh Lord, Valerie would have a stroke when she found out. She loved the team, and more than that…she loved the players. Bianca liked them well enough, but she just wasn’t…
A knock on the door stopped her thoughts and her heart. Was it him? Bianca pulled open the door, prepared to apologize yet again. But it wasn’t Landry.
“Mornin’ ma’am. You got a problem with your shower.” It was the plumber.
“Yeah,” said Bianca. She showed the man the problem and left him to it, grabbing her car keys and her purse and heading out.
Meanwhile, Landry sat in a state of shock. He had had many reactions to his occupation before, but anger wasn’t usually one of them.
I told you she was a flake, said his brain. Stay away from her.
Shit, shit, shit, said his libido.
His heart didn’t say anything, but it was sad.
Landry got up and went into the kitchen to help tidy up the breakfast things. He missed seeing Bianca come up the path and jump into her car, but he certainly heard her wheels squeal as she backed out of the parking space and then turned out onto the road.
Bianca drove to a local strip mall. She wasn’t a shopper usually, but she needed to buy groceries, and she needed to pass some time away from the Inn. Plus, she couldn’t face running into Landry until she had some time to think.
Time to think? My God, Bianca, said her brain. That’s all you ever talk about, that you need time to think. Why don’t you actually take the time and do some thinking?
Shit, shit, shit, said her libido.
Sigh, said her heart.
Bianca went into the supermarket and bought fresh fruit and vegetables. She would eat salads and fruit for lunches, she decided. Then she wandered through Wal-Mart but didn’t see any good stuff. She had just decided to go back to the hotel when she spotted a library. She went in and looked around. Where would you find a book about the Gators, she wondered? She didn’t want to ask. She wasn’t twelve, after all.
Eventually, Bianca found one. In the soccer section, no less. And it wasn’t up-to-date. It only covered as far back as 2009, which she determined by looking at the publishing date.
Landry looked totally different in the book than he did today. Bianca liked today’s look much better, though. His hair softly curling around his face, that one little wispy bit that she wanted so badly to smooth back…
Bianca gave her head a shake and looked around. No one was looking at her, so she guessed she hadn’t moaned out loud.
She spent some time reading about the team and the guys on it. It was a commercial biography kind of thing, probably put out by the NFL or their management. It was all feel-good kind of stuff, but Bianca still read the parts on Landry carefully.
It was weird how much she actually knew about him. If you had asked her to tell you everything she knew about the Gators, she would have said, ‘they’re a football team’ and maybe named a couple of the players. But now, as she read the stuff, it sounded familiar.
Valerie, she thought. Valerie was always talking about them. Bianca guessed more of it had filtered through than she thought.
And just what would Valerie think if she knew that Bianca was looking for an opportunity to lay her hands on Landry Hampton himself?
Because that was exactly what Bianca was planning to do…if she could get through one conversation with the guy without making an idiot of herself, that is.
As hard as it was for her to admit, Bianca knew she was sometimes considered a flake by her friends because she was so unpredictable. Thus, she didn’t necessarily follow the prescribed path.
“You go your own way…” floated through her consciousness. It was something her father would often say, but Bianca knew she was carrying her flakiness a bit far now.
She left the library and drove back to the hotel. She looked around carefully as she got out of the car. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to run into Landry or if she dreaded seeing him. She still didn’t know after she realized he wasn’t around because her sense of relief was balanced by an equal feeling of disappointment.
Bianca carried the groceries to her room and put them away. She looked at her watch. 12:30. Time for lunch – a homemade, nutritious one, full of vitamins and minerals – made by an obviously sane person – yes, if she could make a healthy lunch, that would make her less of a flake.
Unless, of course, she said to herself, the first words out of her mouth when she next saw Landry were, “Hi. I’m sane. I can make salad.”
Bianca laughed out loud at the thought and then wondered if laughing out loud when you’re alone was a sign of craziness.
“Well, lock me up now,” she said to the lettuce, “’cause I refuse to give up laughing.”
Laughing out loud probably wasn’t a sign you were losing your mind, but discussing it out loud with your vegetables definitely was, so Bianca clamped her lips together and continued making her lunch.
This is going to be one damn fine salad, she thought, surveying the array of fruits and vegetables before her. It was a damn good thing, too, because she was going to be eating the same lunch for the next two days.
No wonder single people ate so much processed crap. It came in single servings. It was hard to work your way through a whole head of lettuce before it either went bad or put you right off lettuce for six months.
Bianca had opened the bottle of wine and poured herself a glass almost before she realized it. She stared at it and felt guilty. Starting a little early, aren’t we?
Bianca picked up her plate and cutlery and carried them to the table by the window. She looked back at the counter, and then, with a sigh, she went over and picked up the glass.
One glass with lunch, she told herself. And that’s it.
She ate her salad and looked out the window. The pool was deserted in the hottest part of the day. Bianca thought she
might take a book out and lie under the awning. Or maybe, she reconsidered, lie on the bed here in air-conditioned splendor and read until she fell asleep. She didn’t usually take naps, but she hadn’t slept well last night.
She picked up the wine bottle and refilled her glass.
This will help me fall asleep, she rationalized, and then I’ll really get a good, deep sleep.
Which I need.
Because I didn’t sleep well last night.
Because of the water dripping.
Having convinced some small part of her mind that it was indeed a righteous move, Bianca propped up the pillows and settled on the bed with her book. She pulled the edge of the bedspread over her legs and flipped the book open to the marked page. Then she read the story and sipped the wine until she realized that the glass was empty and that she had read the same paragraph six times without really seeing it.
Because what she was really ‘seeing’ was Landry.
Am I destined to spend the next few days saying constantly, “I’m sorry. I know I must seem like a loon, but I’m really not?” she asked herself.
And I’m not one, she thought, so why is it that every time I’m around him, I do or say something foolish?
Because he’s so hot, replied a small sex-starved part of her brain, and you want him bad, Girl.
I barely know him, she answered back.
Yeah, well point out any other guy on the premises under the age of ninety.
Was that it? Bianca wondered. It had been a long, hot summer with no sexual ‘relief’. Am I just horny? Jeez, what great choices, she thought, rearranging the pillows and pulling the bedspread over her. Either I’m crazy or I’m horny to the point of craziness.
Or maybe it’s just because it’s August.
God, I hate August!
Chapter 6
Bianca slept for nearly three hours, and when she woke up, she didn’t feel refreshed…only sluggish.
Boy, naps aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, she thought.
Her eyes found the bottle of wine on the counter. She jumped off the bed and grabbed it. Then she turned on the tap and poured the remaining wine straight down the drain.
That game is over! she told herself. Over!
Bianca dropped the empty wine bottle into the trash and then immediately retrieved it. What if someone saw it there? They would think she’d drunk the whole thing in the afternoon!
She rinsed out the wine bottle and dried it off. She wrapped it in yesterday’s dirty t-shirt and placed it deep at the bottom of her suitcase, trying to rid her mind of the scene in ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ where Meg Ryan gets up in the middle of the night to sneak her empty liquor bottles out to the garbage at the curb.
Bianca put on her bathing suit and grabbed a towel. The ocean was calling her name again, and it had waited long enough. She slipped on a pair of beach sandals and headed out. She didn’t even bother with a t-shirt or a wrap. She wanted to get wet.
Bianca was disappointed when she got to the beach to find it totally deserted. Damn! Not one other person in sight. She knew it was a really bad idea to go in the ocean on your own. She looked up and down the beach again. Still no one.
Bloody low-season.
Bloody August.
Not far away, Landry watched Bianca from his room. Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to go into the ocean on her own. She didn’t strike him as a stupid person, quite the contrary actually, but man, she did some pretty nutty things. Like stomping away from the breakfast table when she found out who he was, for instance.
Landry had spent most of the day walking on the beach and working out with the light weights that he had brought with him. It was like he was trying to sweat Bianca out of his system, and he laughed at the irony that being a Gator had been the ticket to getting him laid many times in the past when this time it looked like it might actually prevent it.
Landry’s brain told him to stay away from her. Sure, you’re here in the back of beyond, in a perfect little bubble of paradise, but she knows who you are now, and who knows what she might do.
Landry was pretty sure she wasn’t a end zone bunny – aka girls who sought out athletes just to have sex with them – her surprise at learning his identity had been too real. But there was something about her, something a little off-center…and he didn’t want this coming back to bite him in the ass.
That had happened to all of them, he mused. Even Sean. He knew the fans thought that Sean was innocent and pure for a man in his profession, but he’d had his moments before he married Patricia.
And then there was Mason, the teams start running back. When Mason admitted to “sowing some wild oats” before he got married, he wasn’t kidding. Mason had seen some pretty wild times. They all had when they were first drafted.
But they were older now, and wiser.
Their handlers had managed to keep their reputations fairly clean, but there had been some tense moments for all of them, some near misses, and some serious lectures about STDs and the importance of birth control. Thus, they all figured that there were no tabloid stories entitled, “I Had Sex with a Florida Gator” because it was just too common an occurrence to be considered newsworthy.
Landry could see that Bianca was now in the ocean up to her ankles. Should he call to her? he wondered. Should he go down?
Meanwhile, Bianca felt the sand shift under her feet with each wave. She looked around again. Still no one. She walked in up to her knees. This gave her a more stable footing, as the sand shifted less. Still, every fourth or fifth wave was a little stronger and splashed water up to her waist. It felt so good. She closed her eyes and listened to the waves. It was like music.
Bianca sighed as she thought about her father, who had loved the ocean more than anyone. If she was being truthful with herself, she had never really recovered from losing him. Sure, she had regained her equilibrium enough where after a couple of years the outside world couldn't tell what a mess she was inside, but that was about the extent of it.
When Bianca told her teachers that she was ‘here for a good time, not a long time’, she had meant it, and though she had tempered that philosophy somewhat with respect to the earthier parts of life, she still lived for the present.
Making a decision to choose a definite fork in the road was not easy for Bianca, and Valerie was right. She had had to get the hell out of town to do it.
If you asked Bianca’s friends to describe her, they would say nice things about how smart she was, what a great sense of humor she had, and how she was generous to a fault. But further on in the conversation, you would hear about her outspokenness.
‘Good ol’ Bianca. Boy, you sure know what’s she’s thinking’, how there was an edge to her, ‘Yeah, you never know what Bianca is going to say or do next’ and her sexual…well, promiscuity was a strong word, maybe ‘liberated attitude’ was better.
It wasn’t that Bianca would sleep with anyone and everyone. She believed in serial monogamy…having sex with guys, one relationship at a time.
During the traumatic days of her father’s death and funeral, the only time she ever heard her mother laugh was when her oldest friend, Diana Cunningham, didn’t realize that Bianca could hear and commented about the change to her friend’s sex life.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll start getting some,” her mother replied.
Diana suggested that it wasn’t as bad as all that.
“Well,” Bianca’s mother answered, “you know that old saying that you put a mark on the wall by the bed for every time that you have sex during the first year of marriage…”
Diana nodded. “Yeah, and then you erase a mark for every time you have sex after that, and you see how many years it takes you to erase them all.”
“Right!” said Gladys. She leaned in close to her friend. “Let’s just say I have some wall washing to do.”
The two women had laughed heartily and thrown their arms around each other, but the laughte
r soon turned to choking sobs as the grief bubbled up and out.
Bianca had never forgotten that moment, and when she discovered in college that she liked sex – real sex, grown up sex, not the teenage fumbling and groping she had done in high school – she decided that if she wasn’t going to get much after she was married, she sure as hell was going to get it before.
And who was to say she would even get married? She was already twenty-nine. Save it for marriage? No ma’am. Not Bianca Watson!
A larger-than-usual wave rocked Bianca’s body and made her open her eyes. The tide was coming in, and she was now up to her waist. God, she just wanted to swim out so badly. She looked up and down the beach again. Still no one. Dammit!
