by Eden Butler
“That man is sprung,” Layla says, returning to her spot on the blanket.
“And paranoid. You’d swear Cavanagh is about to go all ‘Red Dawn’ the way Declan carries on.”
“He’s just worried.” Layla sits up to watch the matches on the pitch. “I need another water. You want anything?” When she stands and stretches out her back, her spine popping, Layla’s eyes catch onto to something several hundred feet away. She reaches down, pulling Mollie up by her wrist.
“What, Jesus, Layla.”
Her best friend stands facing her, coming nearly nose to nose before she whispers in Mollie’s ear. “Okay. Be cool and don’t look out there yet, but past Declan and Donovan’s squad is your Marine.”
Mollie lifts her eyebrow, keeps her face trained toward Layla’s and moves her eyes to the right. Leaning against the bleachers several yards away from where Declan and his squad are stretching and preparing for their next match, she spots Vaughn talking to a group of guys all wearing matching red jerseys.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Mollie narrows her eyes at his back, at the way he picks his legs up by the ankle to stretch it. Tattoos cover one of his shoulders and Mollie can see a scaly, tattooed tail inching up toward the back of his neck.
“Obviously, he plays.” Layla turns around and joins Mollie in a small ogle of Vaughn and his friends. “And if he’s playing against Deco’s squad, he’s about to be highly embarrassed.” Layla’s head moves just a few inches and her eyes lock with Donovan. “Jackass.”
Mollie tries not to laugh as she notices the occasional sparkle of stray glitter on Donovan’s skin, the leftover remains of Layla’s attack. “At least try to be civil today, please. I don’t have the energy for the L and D Civil War.”
“He’s going to retaliate. I’m just waiting for his move,” Layla returns the glare that Donovan gives her. “Oh yeah, buddy,” she says to him, her voice low, “bring it on.”
Mollie ignores the small snarl her best friend and Donovan exchange, preferring instead to watch Vaughn as he walks toward the pitch. He moves like a tiger, cool, collected, his shoulders straight and wide. Mollie swallows thick when she takes in the corded muscles of his bare arms, the way the veins on his hands and forearms stick out against his tan skin. She feels her cheeks heat, remembering the way he brushed her off last week at the coffee shop and the awkwardness between them after her small grilling. She left that day feeling ridiculous for flirting with him, then angry that he didn’t respond. When he walks up to Declan, shakes his hand and both men turn toward her, the small blush on her face deepens and Mollie knows that the quick fever of her skin has nothing to do with the scorching temperatures.
“What the hell is he saying to Declan?” Layla grabs Mollie’s hand to walk toward the pitch.
“Stop. I don’t wanna go over there.” She pulls her hand away from Layla’s grip and tries not to focus too much on the way Declan crosses his arms, defensive, or how Vaughn glances in her direction and then continues on with whatever he’s telling the Irishman.
“Why? We were going down there anyway. You know that’s where Autumn will force us to sit once she gets here.”
But Mollie doesn’t answer Layla’s curiosity. She’s too concerned with how Declan and Vaughn are now laughing together, how they continue to make quick glances in her direction.
“I’d give my left tit to know what they’re talking about.”
Layla moves her head to the side, as though she’s trying to decipher Mollie’s meaning. “Why the left one?”
“Duh, it’s bigger than the right.”
When Mollie continues to stare at Declan and Vaughn, Layla grabs her arm, pulls her around to get her attention. “Since when do you get all nervous and shy around a guy?”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t wanna go over there and watch our friend play because Vaughn is talking to him? That’s bullshit, Mollie.” She rests her hands on her hips and narrows her eyes at Mollie. “You’re gonna let Vaughn screw with your baking day in the sun? Who the hell are you and what have you done to my best friend?”
“Shut up,” Mollie says, but she knows Layla is right. Vaughn is on her ground, in her territory, talking to her friend. She knows he’s likely fishing for information, trying to get Declan to disclose things she wouldn’t. And it pisses her off, his audacity, his continual butting into her life. “Screw this.” She pulls Layla toward the pitch. When they approach, Declan nods a greeting and Vaughn smiles, though it isn’t an overly friendly gesture.
“Mollie.” Vaughn’s acknowledgment is quiet and he barely meets her eyes before he walks back toward his squad mates.
When he’s out of earshot, she turns on Declan. “What the hell was that?”
“He’s not the enemy, love.” Declan catches the ball that Donovan throws to him, as though Mollie’s presence is barely worth noticing.
“Declan…”
He returns the ball to Donovan and waits for another toss. “He’s a good lad. Just trying to find out what I knew about the fire.” Mollie steps in front of the ball and catches it, bringing an end to Declan’s dismissal. He sighs, resigned, but finally focuses on her. “I don’t know why me talking to him hacks you off.”
“He’s sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Declan pauses for a moment, his gaze moving over her head to where she knows Vaughn is standing with his friends. “I thought the pair of you…”
“No. He thinks I’m a kid.” Over her shoulder, Mollie glances at Vaughn, but his attention is diverted, in a quiet discussion with one of his squadmates. “He blew me off last week, made me feel like an idiot for flirting with him so no, there is no ‘pair of us.’ I’d appreciate it if you kept my business out of his ear.”
Declan’s forehead is dipped, and a small line works under his eyes as though he’s debating something over in his head. “Fair enough,” he says, giving Mollie’s shoulder a soft punch before he heads to the pitch for the beginning of the match.
Mollie pulls Layla toward the shaded base of an oak tree just off of the pitch, yanking her best friend away from whatever nasty thing she mutters as Donovan passes them. She ignores Layla’s grumbles, thinks she hears something about “dog snatcher” and “glittering, rugby-playing Edward Cullen clone” before the blonde finally joins her. The squads enter the pitch, immediately form into the scrum when the referee calls them, but Mollie isn’t interested in watching the match. Instead she digs her phone out of her pocket and sends Autumn a text. She’s the reason they came, after all, and her ginger friend wasn’t doing either of them any favors by being late.
Where the hell are you? she texts Autumn before she leans against the oak tree.
The match moves forward, and is particularly violent as one of Vaughn’s squadmates tackles Donovan to the ground. Mollie sighs at Layla cheering on the guy with COLLINS draped across the back of his jersey and a penalty is called. She looks down at her cell a few minutes later when Autumn replies.
Autumn: About to be there. We have to drop something off. Sorry!
Mollie: Your man is doing that worried, Declan thing. Hurry up.
Autumn: Be there in ten.
Mollie isn’t really interested in the match, that’s what she tells herself anyway. She doesn’t care that Vaughn seems to be a fairly decent player, especially for someone so new to the sport. She doesn’t care that he’s playing a bit more aggressive than she thinks he should, especially when Declan and Donovan barrel down the pitch and waylay several of Vaughn’s squadmates like they’re high schoolers playing with National League vets. She really doesn’t care that if Vaughn isn’t careful—garnering penalty after penalty as he tussles against players that are lither and younger than him—that he’ll do some real damage to himself.
“Hasn’t played much, has he?” Layla’s head moves up and down the pitch as the match powers on.
“No idea, but I don’t think so.” She frowns when Vaughn and the Collins guy run into each o
ther as they both make a play for the ball. “This is actually kind of pathetic.”
Then, she echoes Layla’s quick hiss of disapproval as Vaughn and Collins collide on the field yet again. When Vaughn continues to lay on the ground, the girls stand, both moving their head to see if he manages to get up.
The thing about league tournaments, especially in Cavanagh, is that there isn’t an overabundance of caution taken in the organization of the matches. Most residents are happy to watch the matches simply because they miss the university’s season. But these tournaments don’t have the funding that the Cavanagh squad does. They are essentially just pick-up matches to fill the time between seasons. The refs tend to be coaches from the high school leagues. The pitch is rarely maintained in the off season and there are never any EMTs or even trainers there to treat any injuries a player may sustain during a match.
That’s probably not something Vaughn realized when he agreed to this tournament and Mollie is sure that’s something he probably wouldn’t want to hear right now as he is still on the ground.
“Shit,” she says when Declan looks her way and shakes his head. Mollie has zero formal training in medicine, but she has had to learn a thing or two over the years at the Compound. You can’t be a kid living the life she did without some “on the job” training.
When she and Layla jog out to the pitch, Vaughn isn’t moving. He’s awake, staring out above the other players surrounding him, begging off their calls of concern.
“I’m fine.” He waves off Collins and Declan as he slowly moves to his feet.
“You sure, mate?” Declan asks only to have Vaughn frown at him.
“Happens a lot, actually.”
Vaughn moves his completely motionless shoulder in an odd wiggle and at the gesture, Mollie hears Layla next to her, covering her mouth as though she may vomit. The joint of his shoulder is lowered and protrudes against the skin. Dislocated. Mollie would know what that looked like anywhere. How many times had a fight or drunken horseplay at the Compound resulted in this exact injury?
Despite her awkwardness with Vaughn the last time she saw him, Mollie knows how painful this injury is. She also knows that if it isn’t taken care of immediately, the treatment will be worse than the injury itself.
“You’ve done this before?” she asks Vaughn.
Despite his coolness to her earlier, Vaughn manages to look her in the eyes. “Yeah. I probably need surgery, but haven’t gotten around to it. I can pop it back.” But Mollie notices how hard Vaughn winces, how his bottom lip is trembling from sheer pain.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
“It’s fine.” He takes a step back as she walks in front of him. “Besides, there isn’t any medical personnel here to take care of it.”
“Let me take you to the ER.” Collins nods toward the parking lot.
“Hell, no. It’s fine. I don’t need a doctor.”
“You can’t stay like that,” Collins tells him, but Vaughn isn’t watching him. Instead, Mollie notices that his eyes are focused on the large oak tree she and Layla had used for shade.
Mollie follows his gaze and then quickly looks back at him, understanding that he thinks slamming his body against the old tree would be an easy way to get his shoulder back into socket. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Nobody here can treat it,” he says, looking down at her. She walks up to him and tries to disregard how his eyes have lowered, how despite the pain, he’s looking at her like he’d very much like to devour her. Though, she thinks, that could just be the mind numbing pain.
“I can.” She doesn’t return his smile when he laughs. “Something funny?”
“What do you weigh, one-ten? No thanks, little one, I can do it myself.”
Mollie doesn’t think it would be wise to punch an already injured man, but it’s difficult to remember that when he’s looking at her like she’s an eight year old asking a classmate if he wants to play doctor.
“Right. Enough of the G.I. Joe bullshit.” She looks at Declan, then to Donovan. “Take him down, boys.” And in an instant, both men have wrestled Vaughn to the ground flat on his back. He begins to fight them, to get their hands and arms away from him, but the pain must strike him fast; his winces and low curses tell Mollie that the pain is cresting.
When she straddles his waist, Vaughn’s protests slow to mild complaints. Around them, the players back off, giving Mollie room to work.
“Fine.” His voice is nothing more than a growl, “but if you’re going to do this be sure you get your knee in…”
“Hey, Semper Fi, shut it.” Mollie’s bare legs move along his ribs, dragging his shirt with them so that her smooth skin slides against his body. She rests her hands on the ground around his head, hovering just above him. There’s a small blink of time where she catches Vaughn’s eyes and they stare at each other, their breaths heating between their open mouths. “I know what I’m doing so can the instructions.” Vaughn wets his lips, eyes drifting down to her chest which is only millimeters from his mouth before he focuses back at her face. “This isn’t my first time.”
Despite the pain and the awkward tension building in front of their small audience, Vaughn manages a smile. “Well, will you be gentle?”
“No.” Mollie climbs onto Vaughn’s chest, lifting her knee just below the dislocated shoulder. Before she pushes her leg up, she leans down, catching a whiff of his sweat-slick skin to whisper just above his mouth. “Baby, I’m always good, but I ain’t never gentle.”
FIVE
Vaughn hates hospitals. They always remind him of the desert, of the men and women in his unit that went in with missing limbs or gaping wounds and never came out. Hospitals in the States are nothing like hospitals in the desert. Logically, he knows that. But they all smell the same. There is always that sterile, putrid scent that burns the nostrils.
This ER waiting room smells like shitty diapers and stale Fritos. There are two families waiting their turn as he sits next to Mollie. His arm in a sling, Mollie had insisted on the ER visit, wanting to score Vaughn some anti-inflammatories, maybe some pain meds. He just didn’t have it in him to argue. It seems when Mollie makes up her mind about something, there is no changing it and so he answered the young doctor’s questions, listened as the man berated him about a possible rotator cuff surgery and then he sent Vaughn and Mollie out into the lobby to wait on the prescriptions.
The orange, plastic chairs squeak every time Vaughn moves. He watches Mollie’s foot shake, her spine straight as she avoids him, as a little kid sitting across the lobby from him smears chocolate across his dirty face. At least, Vaughn hopes it’s chocolate.
The woman calling back to the kid, voice droning, whiny, holds an infant; the baby is swaddled in a thin, pink blanket and the woman pats its bottom, cooing to it in between fusses at the chocolate-faced boy. When the blanket falls from the infant’s head and Vaughn spots the billowing tufts of white blonde hair, he closes his eyes, heart clenched, air constricting him at a flash of memory, of potential, that left him a year before. His past, his wife, what she did, what was lost, all coalesces in that moment and it’s only when Vaughn shuts his eyes and focuses on the movement of Mollie’s jiggling foot and the smell of her skin—intoxicating vanilla—that the quick flash of pain eases from his heart.
Mollie’s foot moves faster, shakes the ends of her sandals against her heel and Vaughn rests his hand on her knee to stop the movement. Her skin is soft, smooth but when she freezes, eyes downcast at his fingers covering her knee, he jerks his hand back.
“You don’t have to wait with me.” He wonders why she won’t meet his eyes. “I can catch a cab after they bring me my prescriptions.”
“It’s fine.” She exhales, rubs the back of her neck before she looks at him. “I don’t mind.”
He should thank her. He knows that, but something stops him, clots the words in the back of his throat. She’d been so raw, so demanding out on that pitch, her body deceptive. She should not have been abl
e to exert that much force. She is thin, muscular, true, but slender and her over him, breasts just inches from his mouth, words whipping out like a promise, like a threat, had Vaughn’s head spinning so much that the pain of his misplaced joint was momentarily forgotten.
“How did you do it?” He stares at her profile and the delicate features of her nose, her cheekbones silhouetted against the fluorescent light.
“What?” She finally looks at him, her left cheek up, giving her eyes a confused, curious expression.
“My shoulder. How did you do it? You said you’d done it before, but you made it look like nothing.” Vaughn absently touches the tender joint. “I barely felt anything.”
Mollie shrugs, passes off his compliments by looping the ends of her hair around her pinky. “I had to learn.” No further explanation; just like always, she is vague.
Vaughn knows the cryptic nature comes from the secrets she likely had to keep for her father. He knows that the non-answers and tight-lipped way in which she generally speaks is all conditioned. He appreciates that, sees much of the same in himself. He wants to know. Part of him feels, he has to know.
“How many times have you done it?”
When her shoulders lower and her breath releases quick like she’s finally decided to exorcise some of the past, Vaughn leans back, stretches his good arm behind her on the plastic chair.
“I couldn’t say.” Mollie chews her lip, squints her eyes as though trying to tick off a number in her head. “At least ten times?”
This revelation has Vaughn’s eyes rounding. “At least ten times?” She nods. “Jesus.” Viv told him about the MC. She told him that Mollie had been taken from her father after his arrest. He couldn’t imagine what she’d seen in those short thirteen years, but if, during that time, she’d popped in dislocated shoulders at least ten times, then he wondered what else she had to learn. “Is that the only thing you learned how to treat?”
