Winning Ruby Heart

by Jennifer Lohmann

  CHAPTER THREE

  MICAH HAD ARRIVED back in Chicago late Tuesday night and wasn’t expected in the studio until after lunch on Wednesday, so he stopped at his favorite restaurant for a bite to eat before work. The lunch hour meant Micah had to force his way through the other regulars, all of whom greeted him, to get his wheelchair to a table. But Sheila, the hostess, always took special care of him and got him a table for four, which was great until King showed up. “Is this seat taken?” the other reporter asked while pulling out a chair and sitting down. Micah didn’t bother to say no; King would only pretend that the restaurant was too noisy to hear.

  After asking the waitress, Patty, for a beer, King turned to Micah with the manly joie de vivre that could lure inexperienced athletes into ignoring the cameras and pretending they were in a high school locker room. Savvy athletes, however, treated the wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the same distant professionalism they offered reporters in the locker room after a game, making the majority of King’s interviews some of the most boring two minutes of sports reporting on television. The man kept his job only because the few times he got an athlete to confide, internet GIF memes were sparked and YouTube hits records set. Often, those athletes didn’t have long careers. Micah tapped his fingers against his chair and waited for the inevitable intrusion that would come after the small talk.

  King took a long pull on his beer and set the bottle down with a thunk. “Amir says you spent the entire race in your room and then the night in a runner’s room.” Micah didn’t believe Amir would sell him out, especially after King turned his head to one side, as if offering up his left ear for girlish intimacies, and nodded knowingly.

  “I think,” King said, tapping his index finger against his lips, “that you knew this runner before you met her at the race.”

  Micah threw the man a bone, since King didn’t have the investigative skills to do anything with this conversation. “I did know her before.”

  “From college?”

  “No.”

  King lifted his brow for an elaboration, but Micah didn’t offer one. The other reporter shrugged off the small insult, took another long pull of his beer and then signaled for another. “A friend, then. Your connection to the elusive Currito?”

  Micah had long since stopped being amazed that King couldn’t conceive of a nonplatonic reason for Micah to interact with a woman. In an industry dominated by men who didn’t even bother looking to see whose dick hung the lowest—because, of course, they would win—Micah knew his supposed celibacy was a curiosity. He had heard all the rumored reasons for why he never had a date at office parties, ranging from some sort of self-imposed sexual exile out of a dislike of women with strange kinks to the ongoing question of how well his plumbing worked. The folks in the first camp would probably be disappointed to learn that there weren’t hundreds of women lined up outside hotel rooms across America with fetishes for men who couldn’t wiggle their toes. The one woman with such a kink who’d found Micah had been strange in bed. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat.

  Lack of imagination generally meant his coworkers credited Micah’s physical body for his sparse sex life instead of recognizing that Micah worked too damn much. At least, that was the reason most of his girlfriends never made it far enough past “short-term” for his coworkers to meet them.

  King, Micah knew, fell firmly into the camp that believed Micah couldn’t get it up anymore. Much to Micah’s amusement—and many women’s disappointment, he was sure—King didn’t seem to understand how a woman could find sexual pleasure unless a man stuck an erect penis into her vagina and then bounced his ass up and down in the air. Once, after ten hours of drinking on a flight to Sydney, King had told Micah that lesbians had to use “accessories.” Micah had yet to decide if King’s indirect approach was better or worse than the strangers who flat out asked intrusive questions.

  The memory of the conversation reminded Micah that he didn’t want to be sitting in public with King and alcohol. Unfortunately, Micah had talked himself into a King-created corner. Denying now that he hadn’t spent the night in Ruby’s bedroom would only push King and his beers into asking what Micah hadn’t been doing when he hadn’t been in the room—wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Saying that Ruby hadn’t been his connection to Currito would also stretch King’s imagination to the breaking point.

  “A friend,” Micah said simply, before pulling his cell phone out of his pocket and checking the time.

  “You are a mysterious man, Micah Blackwell.”

  Micah nodded, the statement overwhelmingly true from King’s point of view. “And, given that I overestimated how much time I have for lunch, I’m likely to stay that way.” When the waitress arrived at his signal, he asked for his lunch to go.

  King peered across the small table at Micah and harrumphed. “You think you can keep this a secret.” The ensuing silence would almost have been suspenseful if King hadn’t been flicking his index finger from his lips to point at Micah and back again, over and over and over in some falsity of a knowing gesture. “Now I am interested and on your trail.”

  “Okay.” Micah backed his chair away from the table and swore under his breath when he hit the chair behind him. The benefit of King moving the chairs out of his way as he navigated through the restaurant was overshadowed by the exaggerated way in which the man drew attention to what a stand-up guy he was by “helping.”

  “Micah, man, stay longer next time,” said one of the cooks from the kitchen, who met him at the front door to drop a sack of food in his lap. “None of this eatin’ and rollin’ when I’ve got a fantasy baseball team to manage.”

  Micah handed Patty a wad of bills before turning to the cook. “Frank, you know I’ll be back for lunch tomorrow and you can pick my brain then.” They exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then Micah was out the door with a wave.

  As he made his way to his car, he wondered if he should track down Ruby and warn her of King’s interest. Not that King was likely to remember the rise and fall of Chicago’s native gazelle. He’d been busy working his way up the sporting news food chain covering high school football in Texas during that time. However, it was a convenient excuse to ask her for that interview again. No way was he letting her play the part of reformed recluse.

  * * *

  MICAH ENTERED HIS office on the sprawling suburban Chicago campus of the National Sports Network to find the message light on his phone blinking and no fewer than five sticky notes on his monitor. Since all the notes were from his boss, Micah listened to the phone messages first. There were the usual calls from publicists and agents looking for spotlight stories, two from viewers who had managed to bluff or gruff their way past the operator and one call from King, assuring Micah that he was onto him and would solve the mystery of the female racer.

  Micah wouldn’t give King the chance. King wouldn’t even think to ask the interesting questions, like how she’d managed to negotiate her lifetime ban down to five years. The details of her settlement with the governing body were locked up in a nondisclosure agreement, but whatever she’d done for the reduced sentence, her coach had been arrested and the once-great sports agency run by her agent had been dismantled in disgrace. Suggestions that the governing body had gone easy on her because she was white, young, cute and rich had been the dominant theme in any conversation about her punishment.

  Micah logged on to his computer and hunted around the old news stories about Ruby, an itch at the back of his brain. The Ruby he remembered had been completely focused on running, but selling out an entire system of cheaters implied that she’d been listening when the people around her talked about the supply chain. She’d claimed not to have been included in the decision making and had simply followed the recommendations of her coach. If Micah was willing to grant her the benefit of the doubt in order to follow his train of thought, then everyone around Ruby had assumed she was
too dumb to be a liability and she’d proved, to herself if to no one else, that they’d all underestimated her.

  Micah’s realization only made him more determined to prevent King from getting that interview.

  He didn’t have time to return the calls, and there was no need to go see what his boss wanted, because Dexter, one of NSN’s executive producers, sauntered up to Micah’s door and leaned against the metal jamb, his arms crossed and curiosity etched across his dark skin. “King Ripley came back from lunch telling everyone you got lucky while in Iowa.”

  “As usual, he had access to all the facts and came to the wrong conclusion.”

  “But you did have Amir take video of Ruby Heart running.”

  That explained why there had been five stickies on his monitor instead of one. When Micah had first started at NSN, he’d been surprised at Dexter’s clairvoyance. Now it was both a blessing and a curse. “I did.”

  Dexter’s dreadlocks swayed as he nodded. “And you’re sure it’s her?”

  “She didn’t deny it, though she said she’d never do another interview.” The anger he’d seen in her face when she talked about press intrusion into her life had to be a part of whatever new role she was playing.

  “And you want her to be in the ultra series.”

  “The feature,” Micah said. Ruby may not wish for the spotlight, but the spotlight wished for her.

  “Get the interview first. We’ll run that and see how interested people are.”

  As soon as Dexter left the office, Micah searched through his contacts until he found Mike Danforth’s number. Five years ago, Mike Danforth had worked in the same office as Ruby’s agent. Mike also owed him a favor and would probably see nothing wrong with Ruby sweating under the hot lights of another interview.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  RUBY WALKED INTO her parents’ large Lake Forest home and put her running bag on top of the washing machine. Neither the clunk of the bag on the appliance nor the buzz of the overhead lights were enough to distract from the usual deathly silence of the house. Not that the house was emotionless, because cold was an emotion, at least as Ruby had experienced it for the past five years.

  She grabbed a towel from her bag, wiping the sweat from the back of her neck. Running had been her passion, her chore and her job. Now it was a gift she both gave and received, and she didn’t ever take it for granted. She’d been itching to get out and run again after a few days’ rest, and today’s volunteer shift at the animal shelter had been especially lovely with the warmer weather and partially cloudy skies. By the third dog she took out for a run, Ruby had settled into a routine and had been able to banish the constant specter of Micah Blackwell.

  Her daydreams were nightmares where an interview reinvigorated press attention. At night, though, Micah’s chocolaty voice invited her into his world and she dreamed about what his deltoids and trapezius must look like to support his pecs. She explored the rest of his body in her dreams, too, only to wake up hot and excited.

  She walked to the kitchen and got herself a banana and a glass of chocolate milk. When she turned to head down to the weight room for some stretching, she found her mother floating in the doorway, the light linens she wore given a weightless quality with the slight breeze of the fan. Her mom looked thin, which wasn’t unusual, but the black circles were back under her eyes and her cheeks had a sunken quality Ruby didn’t remember having been there this morning.

  “You promised.” Her mom’s fingers fluttered together with the same airy quality of her clothes, giving the impression that her mom had so little substance the air from a fan could blow her away.

  Her mom’s voice was also several octaves above normal, a sign her mother was more wounded than hurt, so Ruby only asked, “What did I promise?” before taking a gulp of her milk. In another lifetime, she would have rushed to her mother to apologize and beg forgiveness, even before knowing her crime. Also in another lifetime, she would fear finishing a race without knowing her mother would be at the finish line.

  In this lifetime, her mom didn’t even know there was a finish line.

  “Running.” Her mother’s voice cracked between the two n’s. “You’ve been running.”

  “Mom, I’ve been volunteering at the shelter for three years. Why are you complaining about it now?” Ruby’s running used to be a source of pride for her mother. At track meets, in church, and at the grocery store, her mother had always been the first person to exclaim over her daughter’s athleticism and how her daughter was going to be an Olympic champion. Ruby had won her first big race by running right into her mother’s open arms.

  Now every time Ruby returned from her shift at the shelter, her mother eyed the running shoes left by the door with the same disgust she gave an errant cuticle. One of the many hard things Ruby had learned five years ago was that her mother’s love was conditional on Ruby’s success.

  Ruby didn’t even know what success looked like anymore. Three measly minutes. If she’d run each kilometer only four seconds faster she’d have been looking at her goal from over her shoulder rather than staring at its butt.

  “Where were you last weekend?”

  “I was visiting Haley.” Her cousin had been pushing Ruby to move on with her life for years and had been more than willing to provide an alibi.

  “Shopping for wedding dresses, you said.” Her mother’s voice lost its tremble, becoming sharp and pointed. “I called Marguerite and she didn’t see either of you.”

  Ruby nearly choked on her banana. Both Haley and Ruby had been certain her mother wouldn’t do more than call Haley to confirm. Since Ruby had started to express interest in a life outside of this house, her mother had become more concerned with her whereabouts, but she’d never gone this far. Chewing and swallowing her food gave Ruby time to come up with an answer. “We weren’t looking for her real wedding dress. We went to the big bridal outlet to get a sense for what Haley might like.”

  “I don’t see how that took all weekend.” The quiver was back.

  Something specific had sparked her mother’s paranoia, but Ruby would play along with this game as far as she could. She took another bite of her banana and waited.

  “Mike Danforth called.” Ah. Well, if anyone was going to call from the agency she’d destroyed, Mike was the best option. “Micah Blackwell—” the name hissed out of her mother’s mouth as if it were a name that should never be spoken “—wants an interview with you. Why?” The fear on her mother’s face didn’t surprise Ruby—the year after the scandal had been scary for everyone—but the concern did.

  “Who can say?” She shrugged. “March Madness is over. Maybe NSN needs to fill airtime.”

  “You know what your, your...”

  Mistake? Scandal? Embarrassment? Failure? Sin? Crime?

  “...incident cost the family. You wouldn’t want to put us through that again.”

  “I remember. And I don’t.” Her father knew—to the penny—how much the legal bills would have been, if my firm hadn’t taken care of it for you. The pill bottles left scattered around the house were a reminder of the emotional cost to her mother. Ruby’s sister, Roxanne, was still miffed that her research had been overshadowed by questions from even the crustiest academic about her infamous sister. And Josh was kind enough to regularly mention how much experience his sister’s problems had given him as a young associate. Josh also said those words while giving Ruby a hug, so she knew her brother’s sarcasm wasn’t mean-spirited.

  Ruby rinsed out her glass and put it in the dishwasher, then threw out her banana peel. “Mom, I really need to stretch. Did you want anything else?”

  “Don’t forget how important it is to all of us that you stay out of the spotlight.”

  What about me and my life? Ruby knew saying those words would prompt her mother to talk about the sacrifices the family had made for Ruby’s spo
rt, the energy and money they’d thrown away and how her brother and sister had had to fend for themselves. Ruby knew the resources her family had put into her running, but in hindsight she wondered if it had all been for her.

  Down in the weight room, Ruby laid out her mat and began her regular series of stretches. The room had been built for her when she was in high school and college coaches had started showing up at her meets. And after college she’d gotten new weight benches and a private coach. The room was the temple to her success and the dumbbell racks her altar.

  She’d stayed away from her weight room for an entire year after the Olympics. It had taken another year after that for her to feel comfortable being surrounded by herself in all the mirrors. Now, checking the alignment of her spine as she reached forward and grabbed her toes, Ruby wondered if the room was more a cloister than a temple, designed to keep her in and obedient. She’d only started coming into this room regularly when her father had reminded her how much it had cost the family. “Your brother always wanted a game room,” her dad had said, as if her brother hadn’t already been off at college and done living at home when the weight room had been put in.

  Regardless of everything, she loved this room. She loved the smooth wood under her feet and the way the light bounced off the mirrors. She loved how the mats gave gently under the pressure of her feet when she pushed a loaded bar over her head, and the sharp smell of iron against iron when she pushed another weight plate onto the metal bars. She loved how the speakers drowned out her anxieties when she plugged in her iPod. The room was a sanctuary and also one of the reasons she hadn’t moved out of her parents’ house yet.

  But why should she feel trapped here? She wasn’t just a runner, she was the runner. The runner who’d made Americans care about middle-distance running again. The runner who’d graced the covers of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and People.