"Oh, I think I can handle you," Jamie murmured, almost asleep. "I’ll apply for government cheese if things get too bad."
"We do need to work out some finances, Baby." Ryan was still wired from her evening, and she couldn’t let the issue go.
"We will," Jamie mumbled. "G’night, Sweetie."
Ryan placed a soft kiss right above her ear and pulled her limp body even tighter against herself. " ‘Night, Love," she whispered, hoping that they could come to an agreement over the financial issues that were beginning to cast a cloud over their lives.
"Jamie?" Receiving no answer, she raised her voice and tried again. "Jamie?" Ryan looked around on the first floor, trying to find her elusive lover. From the scent of espresso wafting through the house, it was obvious that she was up, but exactly where she was up, Ryan did not know.
A faint voice reached her ears. "I’m outside, Babe."
Ryan walked out onto the rear landing to see her partner sitting on the attractive wooden garden bench, The New York Times spread out over the small wrought iron table that was pulled up to her knees. She was wearing headphones, and her Walkman lay on the seat beside her. A cup of coffee, or more precisely latté, if Ryan’s guess was correct, shared space with the remaining sections of the newspaper.
"Now this is the picture of a woman starting her day out in the manner to which she has become accustomed." The truth of the matter was that Jamie did, in fact, look absolutely content. A short discussion had taken place when they woke, and she had admitted that, as much as she loved being with Ryan in the morning, she was beginning to miss her pre-Ryan routine. Seeing the contented look on her face, Ryan was very happy that her partner had decided to get back to it this morning. "Are you listening to music?" she asked, leaning over to kiss Jamie’s cheek.
The tousled blonde head shook briefly, and she removed the headphones to reply. "I listen to ‘Morning Edition’ on National Public Radio. The day doesn’t feel like it officially starts if I don’t hear Bob Edwards say good morning to me." Her sunny face was crinkled up in a playful grin, and Ryan got an even better indication of how important this routine was to her partner. Jamie started to get up, offering, "Let me make you some breakfast, Tiger. You look like you’ve burned off a couple of thousand calories already."
"No, please," Ryan insisted, lightly touching the tops of the terrycloth clad shoulders. "I want you to sit right here and enjoy your coffee. I still need to stretch, and then I prefer to take a shower before I eat." Jamie smiled up at her and sank back down onto the bench, tucking her mint green robe around her legs to ward off the morning chill. "Anyway, since breakfast is the meal I do best, why don’t I cook in the morning, and you can handle the evenings?"
A soft laugh and a teasing smirk were Jamie’s reply. "That would be fine, Buffy, but you’ve cooked every night so far. If that’s gonna be the plan, you’ve got to let me do my part, too."
Ryan lay down on the dew-soaked grass, a hiss of pleasure escaping as she let the cool moisture absorb some of her body heat. She started on her stretching routine, looking thoughtful as she did so. "On second thought, maybe you should be in charge of lunch," she suggested. "I get home before you do if you play a full round of golf in the afternoon, and I really do need to eat by six or so. Think you can stand my cooking?"
"I love your cooking," Jamie assured her, "but let’s see how it goes for a while. I don’t want you to wind up doing too much around here. You’re already in charge of laundry…If you add breakfast and dinner to your list of chores I won’t have a darned thing to do."
"Hey," Ryan grunted, nearly pulling her leg over her head in a painful-looking stretch, "being my sex slave takes a lot of time too, ya know. That’s your most important job around here."
Jamie grabbed the section of newspaper that she was working on and held it up close to her face. "If I don’t stop watching you stretch, we’re gonna miss another meal, Buffy. That routine of yours is definitely rated NC-17!"
Over breakfast Ryan commented, "Did this morning work better for you, Babe? You looked pretty darned content out there, reading your paper."
"Yeah…it did work better. I mean, I kinda feel bad to want that time to myself, but I’ve been doing that since I was six, and it just feels right."
Ryan cocked her head, her spoonful of cereal stuck halfway between the bowl and her mouth. "What part of your routine did you perform when you were six?"
"All of it," Jamie blithely replied.
Ryan laughed, thinking of her partner sitting at the kitchen table, tiny little feet dangling high off the floor, reading The New York Times. "What…you read one of your little story books while you ate breakfast?"
"Noooo…I read The New York Times."
"When you were six?" The disbelief was evident in Ryan’s tone, if not the question.
"Yeaaaaah…is there an age limit that I’m not familiar with?" Jamie’s green eyes were dancing, obviously enjoying the teasing.
"So you’d sit at the table and read the paper while you had your juice and your cereal?"
"Noooo…I’d read the paper while I had my latté and my jam and bread. While listening to ‘Morning Edition,’ that is." Now she was unable to hide her grin, finally breaking into a laugh at the astounded look on Ryan’s face.
"That’s…that’s…Are you serious??"
"Yes, Babe. I didn’t understand ten percent of what I read, but my father read the Times while he ate, so I read the Times while I ate. It was a nice time for us," she said softly, looking rather wistful. "I’d ask him questions about words I didn’t understand, and he’d quiz me on different things that he thought I should know about. I was probably the only six-year-old who could have competently cast a vote in the 1984 presidential elections." Ryan was staring at her with a rather stunned expression still gracing her face. "I just find that unbelievable," she muttered, thinking of the thick-paged, small-word picture books she'd read at age six. "That doesn’t explain why you were eating bread and drinking latté though. That sounds like some strange form of yuppie child abuse!"
Jamie laughed at her partner’s hyperbole. "That was one of mother’s eccentricities. She thought breakfast cereal was a horrible thing to put into a child, so we ate more like the French. Marta would go to the bakery in the morning and buy brioche or a baguette, and we’d just have some fresh bread and a little jam. I guess I started drinking latté to imitate mother. I couldn’t drink espresso, because it was way too strong, so Marta added steamed milk until it suited me. I probably had a half-ounce of espresso to twelve ounces of milk, but it made me feel very sophisticated." Her smile faded as she admitted, "Both of my parents paid more attention to me when I acted like an adult."
Ryan grasped her hand and chafed it a bit between her own hands, "How do you want to handle breakfast with our kids?" She knew that talking about their future family always lightened Jamie’s mood, and today was no exception.
"I’m not sure," she admitted, her smile returning. "I kinda liked being treated like I had a brain. They never treated me like a dumb kid, and that really helped my self-confidence and independence. But I think I like breakfast at your house a lot better."
"Let’s compromise," Ryan suggested. "We can have porridge and back bacon with latté and the sports section of the Times."
"Best idea I’ve heard all day," Jamie agreed happily, picturing their future family sitting around a breakfast table that looked amazingly like the one in the O’Flaherty manse.
"I will never understand how taking a shower together takes three times longer than showering separately." Ryan was grumbling, mostly under her breath, as they jogged through the corridors of the brand-new, partially finished Haas Pavilion. Jamie didn’t take her grousing very seriously, knowing that her partner loved their communal cleanup. Ryan just hated to be late, no matter how pleasurable the reason for the delay.
They arrived at the office they were looking for less than five minutes after their scheduled time, but Ryan was apologizing to every person she
made eye contact with. "Hi, I’m Ryan O’Flaherty," she said to the receptionist, speaking her name with just the barest hint of an Irish accent. "I’ve an appointment with Coach Placer, but I’m late. Is he still available?"
The woman looked at the large clock on the wall, then glanced at her appointment book. "It’s 9:03, Honey. Take a chill pill."
Ryan shoved her hands into the pockets of her chinos, and started to rock back and forth. She looked about ready to jump out of her skin, and Jamie placed a calming hand on the small of her back, giving her a light scratch. Ryan took in a breath and held it for a moment, feeling some of the tension leave her body. "I…um…I just hate to be late," she admitted.
"Three minutes is not late, Honey," the woman laughed. "Three hours…three days…three weeks…now that’s late." Her laugh floated behind her as she walked down a short corridor and poked her head into an office. Stepping back towards the reception desk she motioned Ryan and Jamie forward. "Come on, Honey, he’s on the phone, but you can come in."
Ryan gave her a grateful nod, and strode into the office, Jamie right at her side. She smiled at the man sitting behind the desk, and they both sat when he motioned them to. Rich Placer was a good looking, dark-haired young man, about 28 years old. He had been hired the year before to take over from the coach who had wooed Ryan when she was in high school. He finished his call and stood, extending his hand. "Ryan?" he asked.
"Good to meet you, Coach. I've brought someone with me. Is that okay?"
"Sure," he said easily, offering his hand to Jamie. "Rich Placer."
"This is Jamie Evans, Coach. She’s my life-mate."
"Life-mate, huh?" His eyes were twinkling as he sat down and regarded the pair. "I like that term, Ryan. Life is a lot more pleasant with a mate to help you through it, isn’t it?"
Ryan grinned at him, his stock rising dramatically in her book with just those few words. "Life is wonderful with the right mate," she said, sparing a meaningful glance at her partner.
The coach pulled a legal-sized manila folder into the center of his desk and tossed it open. He started thumbing through the two-inch-thick pile, smiling to himself as he scanned the notes. "So, I read the file that Coach Nichols made about your high school career. He was obviously very impressed with your game to recruit you when you only played his sport for one year."
Ryan nodded, thinking about her reply to that comment for a moment. "It always bothered me that I had to choose between sports, but when two of them are at the same time, you have to pick. During my freshman year, I got a slight head injury playing soccer. They wouldn’t let me play the rest of the season, so I finagled my way into an open spot as an outside hitter. I really only played six games, so I was surprised to learn that Coach Nichols was interested in me."
Rich Placer smiled at the self-effacing, confident young woman who smiled back at him. "Well, I remember you from U.S.F, even though you only played one year there too. You tend to make a rather lasting impression on a coach, Ryan." He smiled at the slight blush that traveled slowly up her cheeks, charmed to be able to speak to an athlete who did not think they invented their sport. "I don't think there's any question that you can play. Check that. There IS no question that you can play. Obviously your grades have been superb since you've been in college, but I'm really puzzled by the path you've taken. Tell me what happened in high school."
Ryan took a deep breath and decided to tell it all. It wasn't really much of a risk at this point in her life, but she still felt a little nervous about talking about her personal life with a stranger. "As you can probably tell, I had three great years at Sacred Heart. But during the summer after my junior year, I fell in love. With another woman." She waited for a beat, then continued, "Things didn’t work out quite like I had hoped, and she …freaked out," Ryan said, minimizing the incident as much as she could. "She stopped speaking to me and that was really hard, but I could have lived with it. However, I guess she told someone at school that we had sex, and within a week the entire school knew."
Coach Placer looked puzzled by this part of the story, and he asked for clarification. "Why would she do that, Ryan? If she was freaked out, why tell everyone?"
"To this day I have no idea, Coach. All I know is that everyone knew, and she and I were the only people involved. I know I didn’t tell…" She shook her head sadly, still unable to understand the betrayal. "It’s actually worse than it sounds, to be honest," she said softly. "I don’t know what she said, but the other girls definitely had the impression that our time together was not entirely consensual."
Ryan looked like she was about to cry, and her voice had grown so quiet that Jamie had to lean towards her to hear the last of her sentence. She reached out and grasped Ryan’s hand firmly, shocked at this stunning revelation. Ryan’s face was set in a grim mask of pain, and most of the color had drained from her skin.
"That’s not uncommon, Ryan," the coach said softly. "Sometimes kids deal with their own guilt about something like this by trying to blame the other person. I’m sure that the people who knew you didn’t believe it."
Her dark head lifted slowly and Jamie could see every bit of pain and dismay from those days settle onto her face. "That’s what nearly destroyed me," she whispered. "Everybody did believe it. Within days there wasn’t one girl who would take the risk of talking to me in public. This happened at the end of junior year. I got through the end of the term, and spent the summer in Ireland with my family. I honestly thought things would blow over after the summer. But after the second game of the soccer season, some of the most talented players accosted me in the locker room and told me that they wanted me to quit. They said that they didn't want to have a predator watching them get dressed and taking showers."
The color was back in her cheeks now, but it was the deep flush of shame that showed on her face. "I relied on these women. We were teammates," she said simply, still unable to process the hurt. "We had won the state championship the year before, and we still had an excellent team. But they were so afraid of being associated with me that they demanded I quit."
Both Jamie and Coach Placer were taken aback by this revelation. They both stared at Ryan for a long time, until Jamie silently reached for her partner’s hand again and grasped it tightly. Ignoring the coach, she lifted the hand and brought it to her lips, placing a gentle kiss on the soft skin and whispering, "I’m so sorry, Sweetheart. I’m so very sorry that happened to you."
Ryan just nodded her head briefly, her lower lip caught between her teeth in her characteristic effort to stave off tears. "It was horrible," she agreed, her voice no more than a whisper. "In one of the most gay-friendly cities in America, in 1993…It still boggles my mind."
"It makes perfect sense that you quit," Jamie murmured, still holding Ryan’s hand close to her face. "Nobody should have to put up with that kind of treatment from their teammates."
"I didn’t quit immediately," Ryan amended softly. "I guess I was still naïve about the ways of the world. I went to the coach of my soccer team. We had always been close, and she had made me the team captain at the end of the previous year. I told her that the other girls wanted me to quit, and I asked her what she thought I should do. She said that she couldn't 'take the risk' of standing up for me. She said that it would probably hurt the team if I stayed on, so I finally realized that I couldn’t stand up to the whole school by myself, and I quit."
"Did it eventually get better?" Coach Placer asked, causing Jamie to gasp as she remembered where they were.
Ryan shook her head again, defeat clouding her features. "Once I gave in, it actually got worse and worse. I had disgusting notes taped to my locker and my bike was vandalized more than once. I couldn't concentrate in school and my grades just plummeted. I was considering dropping out and just getting a G.E.D., but my family finally got me to tell them what was happening, and they were a tremendous help in getting me back on track. By second semester my grades were back to normal, but I was never treated any better by the student
s. Only two or three girls were openly hostile to me, but nobody else had the guts to talk to me in public. I spent the entire second semester without a single word being said to me socially."
Coach Placer asked, "The file I have here says that you decided not to pursue playing for Cal. Why was that?"
Ryan barked out a bitter laugh. "That’s a lie, Coach. I desperately wanted to come to Cal, but every one of the coaches here dumped me. I hadn’t signed my letter of intent yet, and my soccer scholarship, which I thought was a lock, disappeared. I was pretty bitter about it for a long time, but I think I'm over it now. I decided to not let my animosity rob me of my goal of graduating from here. I’m happy that I transferred, and now I want to play a varsity sport. Mostly I want to do it for myself, but partly, I want to show those coaches that they should have taken a chance on me."
Coach Placer silently stared at the ceiling for a long minute. Finally, he gave Ryan a big smile and said, "You do know that my predecessor is now at U.C.L.A."
She found this an odd path for the conversation to take, but she acknowledged his statement. "Yeah, I do."
"There's no team I'd be happier to beat," he said with another grin.
Ryan understood his point immediately, and answered him with a beaming smile. "Death to the Bruins!"
As they left the office, Ryan reached over and took Jamie's hand. They walked together down the long corridors until they found their way back to their car. "He certainly seemed excited about having you play...whatever sport it is that we're talking about," she said as she pinched Ryan in the ribs.
"I thought you were a detective," she teased. "Use your deductive reasoning."
"I could, but I might as well wait until you go back to work out for the whole coaching staff. I guess we'd better get to bed early tonight, huh, Tiger."
"I wonder what poor souls he's going to make show up to play against me at seven in the morning?"
Disclosures - SF4 Page 18
