Winning Ruby Heart

by Jennifer Lohmann

  She shifted her weight from side to side, partially to keep muscles pliable and partially to move the uncomfortable knowledge of how naive and self-centered she’d been far enough into the back of her head that she didn’t have to stare at it throughout the race. When she’d been training she’d been so focused on herself. Her entire family had been focused on her. All the spare resources went to Team Ruby. She hadn’t even noticed how unhappy her family was until she didn’t have anything else to occupy her mind and they no longer had her to rally around any. Her career hadn’t been the glue that held them together; it had been the butterfly bandage barely keeping them from falling apart when really they’d needed stiches. Now they were left with a scar that would never go away.

  This time around she was racing on her own, with her own meager resources. Even though she wasn’t doing it to win, her entire family—maybe not Josh—would say she was being selfish. And they’d be right. She was here to find the good parts of Ruby Heart again. She hadn’t realized that for her first race, but she knew that now. Ruby Heart had been a scandal and she’d done something horrible, but she couldn’t be all bad.

  She shivered as it felt as if a mouse ran down her spine. The crowds were sparse enough that she could glance around and see each and every person waiting for the gun to go off. Including the man she wanted to see least, the man who could wreck her whole plan to rediscover Ruby Heart. Micah Blackwell was watching her from the sidelines with his head cocked, a vague smile on his face and his hands on the wheels of his chair as if he were going to dart away from the sidelines to race after her at any moment. Right behind him stood his cameraman and the giant camera stared at her with its black, unblinking eye.

  The starting gun boomed and Ruby burst forward. Try to catch me, she wanted to yell. She wanted to laugh. Micah could chase her all he wanted, but she was Ruby Heart, and he would never catch her.

  * * *

  MICAH SAT ON the sidelines, tapping his fingers against the wheel of his chair and watching Ruby work to keep her muscles warm for the race. The neon green hat Ruby had been wearing at the first race must have been completely abandoned in Iowa, because she wore a different hat today. The mud-brown canvas wasn’t nearly as eye-catching as the neon had been, but it didn’t need to be. The set of Ruby’s shoulders would attract as much attention as any ugly hat. Her hot pants were a velvety gray, and she wore a tight yellow running shirt. When she moved, he thought he saw a gray parrot silhouetted in the fabric of the back of her shirt. Not quite trying to hide in the crowds today. People would remember the parrot. He was going to remember the way her muscles shifted and moved, like watching a panther stretch.

  Her body stilled. She had seen him watching her. Then she straightened and her shoulders rolled back. As the countdown got closer to one, Ruby tilted herself forward. When the gun went off, her muscles contracted for a blink of an eye before she burst forward. Ruby Heart was back. And different.

  * * *

  SHE FINISHED IN just under four hours, fifteen minutes, smashing her past race time and on a harder course, and all that was left to do was to enjoy the euphoria of finishing a race and eat her banana before she fell over. Instead, she took a sip of her beer and looked around. The congratulations friends and family offered other runners boomed over the clamor of the band onstage. The spectators also offered assistance. “How do you feel? Have a seat, I’ll get you some chips. The guac is real good.”

  The top finishers in the race hung around, chatting with one another like old friends and cheering for the runners crossing the finish line. Step over that line from pain into party, their cheers promised. Supportive. Encouraging. A reminder of what it had been like to be a member of a team, even though these were all individual racers.

  Her runner’s high put a goofy smile on her face and she stood there, not certain where to put her hands, where to look, wishing she had someone to hold a plate of chips and guacamole for her. Finishing one small plate of food was enough to make her feel ready to take the shuttle back to her hotel, so Ruby left the postrace celebration.

  She, Ruby Heart, used to being surrounded by coaches and her mother at the end of a race, accustomed to the cheers of an Olympic stadium, had been the only racer on the bus ride back. Of course, old Ruby Heart had been accustomed to winning, not achieving personal bests.

  The last of her race euphoria abandoned her when she crossed the threshold into her hotel room. As the sweat crystalized on her body in the dry hotel room air-conditioning, she wondered, who is Ruby Heart? Whoever she was, she needed to find dinner and rest, or else it wouldn’t matter who Ruby Heart was, because she’d be as stiff as a stadium seat in the morning and would have to drive like a zombie with her joints all locked up.

  The phone next to the bed rang and Ruby had the relief of having something to do. “Hello?”

  “Ruby?”

  The velvet voice said her name, like it did in her dreams before turning on her. You had someone shove your failure into your arm and then you pissed your dreams away. When she hadn’t seen Micah at the finish line, she’d convinced herself that his presence at the starting line had been a figment of her imagination. And been disappointed that he’d given up so easily.

  A part of her—one larger than she cared to admit—wished Micah were at her door. Company, any company, would be nice, but especially company that understood what it meant to create and then smash a personal goal.

  But those desires were overshadowed by terror that the press wolves were only waiting for the call of their leader to descend upon her. With no talking, not even the television, to drown out the beats, the drum of her pen tapping the hotel pad filled the room.

  Ruby put the pen down. Pretending to be someone she wasn’t, lying to herself and everyone around her about her true nature, isolated her. Cabin fever, only without the fresh pine scent of the woods.

  Lying created multilevel problems, like the fear deep in her breast that her falsehood would be found out. Because she knew what happened when the world discovered you’d been lying to them. Only this would be worse, because their anger would be unleashed at Ruby’s true self, rather than a publicity designed cover girl.

  These ultra runs were about conquering your mind as much as your body, so she drew on the reserves of mental energy that kept her putting one foot in front of another and responded without a hint of fear in her voice. “Hello, Micah. Couldn’t get the hotel staff to give you my room number this time?”

  “Didn’t have Amir follow you to your floor.” His tone was gentle and correcting, but also offered something. He was playing nice today.

  She wondered what else he would offer in exchange for her story and how hard she could push him away before he snapped. “That you did that is incredibly creepy.”

  He chuckled. “You’re right. In this case, the bald truth serves me better than a well-crafted story. In Iowa, Amir was on the same floor and discovered your room number by sheer luck. Luck failed me this time. But that’s okay, because I’m not calling for business.”

  She picked up the pen. Put it down. Stood to walk around the room, only to be stopped by the cord. The last phone in the world to have a cord was in her hotel room. The bed squeaked when she sat back down on the brown-and-orange-striped comforter. “And I’m not the same naive fool I was five years ago, so tell me a story I might believe.”

  There was silence on the line for a while before Micah said, “Okay. I’m here on business, but I know I’m not going to get an interview today. Amir is still partying with the racers, so a camera isn’t even available. But I’d like the chance to convince you to sit for an interview. And not just an interview—an entire feature series where you can tell your story.”

  “Over the phone?” She could leave the receiver sitting on the bed, take a shower and he could try to persuade her all he wanted. If she turned the volume on the phone all the way up, maybe she could
listen to his voice stroke her skin while the water rushed over her.

  “Over dinner.”

  Ruby was so shocked she couldn’t say anything for several seconds. He really thinks I’ll say yes to dinner? Then she opened her mouth to say no, and the intake of her breath was the loudest sound in the room. The joyous group in the hall, probably a runner and her family celebrating the finish, had passed out of her hearing. If she said yes, she would be eating dinner with Micah Blackwell, who probably still hated her. If she said no, she would be eating dinner alone.

  “Okay.” Regret and her teeth chewed at her bottom lip, but she didn’t take back her answer. She was intimate with the sound of her own chewing. Even when sitting around the table with her parents, there was rarely any talking. Just forks scraping across plates and the booming way you disappointed us echoed through a room, even when no one said a word. Dinner with Micah would at least be different. “Where should I meet you?”

  “Tell me your room number and I’ll bring dinner to you.”

  “I’d rather go out.”

  “We can do that, but I get recognized, especially at sporting events. Do you really want to sit at a table with me and have someone ask who you are?”

  No. But neither did she want the memory of him lingering in this room, even if only for one night. “I just have one chair.”

  “Lucky for both of us that I bring my own.”

  Right. “I’m in room 415.”

  “There’s a Mexican restaurant that is supposed to do good takeout. Give me some idea of what you like and I’ll be at your room in about an hour.”

  Ruby gave him a couple generic Mexican-food suggestions, said what she didn’t like, and he hung up, leaving her to be grateful she only had one change of clothes and couldn’t fret about what to wear. The warmth in his eyes would relax her shoulders. His smile would invite her to share intimacies. And all of those were professional tricks designed to lure unsuspecting athletes into his trap. She wouldn’t fall for them.

  Which meant she had to push her curiosity and interest in the power of Micah’s shoulders out of her head. She was never going to see him shirtless. And I don’t want to! she told herself, though not strongly enough to believe it. It was just a professional interest in his physique, was all. One athlete to another. She’d ask him about his weight-lifting regime. They could compare notes.

  Despite her promises to herself, she took the time to blow-dry her hair after her shower.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RUBY WAS MOVING the small hotel table and chair around to accommodate dinner and a wheelchair when she heard a knock at the door. She looked through the peephole, saw a hand and opened the door. On Micah’s lap was a bag of takeout, and balanced on top of that was a tray holding two plastic cups with what looked like slushies inside.

  “Margaritas.” He lifted one of the cups up to her with a smile after she had turned back from closing the door. “To loosen you up.”

  “This is not an interview,” she insisted, not even questioning how he managed to get to-go margaritas. She had been right not to want him in this room. He took up too much space. He smelled too good. “And how do you know I drink? Maybe I don’t.”

  “Another’s blood was fine, but alcohol is forbidden?” The tone sounded innocent enough, but the words stung. At least he didn’t dance around her crime with euphemisms. The incident, her mom called it, which blanketed the severity of her crime with blandness and implied that if they never called it what it was, it hadn’t happened.

  Still, she didn’t need to have her face rubbed in it. Again. She was moving to reopen the door and push him out of her room when he opened his mouth again and said, “That crack was uncalled-for.”

  “Especially if you want my participation in any kind of story.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

  “I apologize.”

  Her hand stopped on the door handle, the metal warming under her palm. She’d expected something less than an apology out of the great Micah Blackwell, especially for a crack about her blood doping. Silly Micah—she’d have accepted less. Her hand lifted off the handle and rested at her side.

  “May I pull up a seat to dinner?” He waved to the table with one hand, the other on the wheel of his chair.

  He was here now, and if he left, she’d know he’d been here by the smell of his cologne, the Mexican food on the table and the browsing history on her phone where she’d looked up the mechanics of sex with a paraplegic. God, she couldn’t even blame that thought on an athlete’s curiosity about the body. She pasted a bland smile on her face. That last thought was just her contrary, competitive nature talking anyway. He didn’t like her, and that made him a challenge. Contemplating the feel of his skin against hers was proof that approaching life as one contest after another was stupid. A middle ground existed somewhere between competition and the hollow life she was living now and it didn’t involve seeking out the one man who hated her above all else. That was perversity, pure and simple.

  He smiled at her silence, completely unconcerned with the mental acrobatics she had to go through to take a step forward. And not to rush at him.

  “You may pull up a seat,” she said, her haughtiness no compensation for her nerves. Then she slipped into the chair and let him pass out their supper. She choreographed the movements of her hands above the table so that hers never brushed his. The awareness she felt and her body’s intense curiosity each time their hands came within a hairbreadth was because she’d been living the life of a nun for five years. It was absolutely not because of Micah.

  You tell yourself another tall one.

  It couldn’t be Micah. She’d never survive.

  The aroma of spice and beans wafting from the food overpowered the generic hotel room smell. While he opened the bag of tortilla chips and cup of salsa, she shoved a fork and napkin under his makeshift plate. Swallowing a sigh, she prepared herself to pretend that interrogation and attempted coercion was the same thing as conversation. Second to running, weathering a cross-examination might be her greatest skill.

  When he smiled and asked about her drive down here, she realized she’d underestimated Micah. He was practiced at making people feel comfortable. As they made small talk about the changes to Chicago’s lakefront, the weather and the possibility of either baseball team making the playoffs, Ruby wondered if Micah’s skill at easing people’s anxiety had come after his disability, was part of his training to be a sportscaster, a natural trait that had helped make him a star football player or all of the above. Being a sportscaster had a least helped with the magic spell he was trying to weave and she was trying to resist. As far as she remembered, he hadn’t been nearly so charming five years ago.

  He also hadn’t been trying, because who would waste the effort charming the sporting princess who’d had it all and been stupid enough to throw it all away? He hadn’t needed to try. She’d fallen prey to his face with probably little effort on his part. A walking, talking, running doll, with little else to recommend her.

  “Do you hate me?” she asked, interrupting his story about meeting his childhood hero, Joe Montana.

  She saw by his face that he was considering answering her question with a meaningless of course not, when he set his fork down, folded his arms on the table and looked at her. His eyes darkened as he regarded her and thought about her question. She would not squirm. She was not afraid of him any longer. Wary—but caution came from experience and was not the same as fear.

  Finally, he said, “Why are you asking that question? Do you mean, do I hate that you can walk and I can’t? Do I hate that you are trying to return to your sport, even if only as an amateur, when I must report from the sidelines? Instead of hating, I could resent—”

  She held up a hand to stop him. He might come up with reasons she hadn’t thought of yet and she wasn’t sure her tender decision not to be
caged could withstand rough treatment. “Do you hate me for cheating? For throwing away a career and a life and a dream? For disgracing my sport? Can I be forgiven for that?”

  The combination of exhaustion, tequila and heavy hotel drapes protecting her from the outside world must have made her willing to ask such a question. If she had let the world into this room by opening her blinds or turning on the television, she’d realize she was opening her heart to this man—again—and inviting him to stick a stake in it. But Micah had made her feel safe, so she’d stuck her neck out and was now waiting for him to drop the guillotine.

  Instead, he was silent for several seconds. Ruby was about to tell him to forget she asked when he said, “Why are you asking me this question and not someone else?”

  “Because when everyone close to me was telling me that blood doping was no big deal, you came right out and told me that I was the emperor wearing no clothes.” After that interview, faced with his scorn, she’d been naked, shivering with exposure. “If I specifically ask you for the truth, you won’t lie to me.”

  Micah drummed his fingers on the table as he regarded her, again stripping away the protective layers she’d so carefully constructed over the past several years until her raw nakedness was exposed. She shivered.

  “Do people lie to you regularly?” he asked.

  “Forget it.” She shoved a heaping pile of refried beans onto her fork. It was more than she could fit in her mouth, but the protein in the beans would help her build back the layers she needed to protect herself. “Despite you pretending earlier, this isn’t a conversation. Hell, it’s not even an interview. This is turning into some weird therapy session.”