In the ten years since his accident, he had become accustomed to many things. He didn’t wonder “what if,” because what-ifs had always driven him mad. Better to push forward than to look back. But he remembered the feeling of sharing a bed with someone and being aware of them along the whole length of your body. Sometimes it was a spark, sometimes it was a warmth and sometimes it was softness. He had liked it best when it was all three.
“You’re so quiet all of a sudden.” Ruby’s voice was soft next to him.
“I thought you wanted to sleep.”
“That’s not why you’re quiet.”
Was she going to ask the dreaded question?
“What are you thinking?”
Apparently she was and she did. He’d promised to be honest with her. “It has been a long time since I shared a night’s sleep with a girlfriend.”
She started moving her hand up and down the side of his body. Feeling. Silence. Feeling. Silence. Then she drew her hand across his nipples and they hardened. Strangely, he missed her hand across his stomach. He might not be able to feel her hand there, but that part of his body wasn’t dead. It deserved Ruby’s attention as much as the rest of him did.
“Really? How long has it been?” Her fingernails trailed patterns across his pectoral muscles, twirling around in his chest hair. All innocent and guileless. Like the old Ruby, only he knew them both better now.
“Are we really going to talk about this?”
“I’m sorry. I guess I feel like you’ve seen all my dirty laundry. Even helped me pack it up and move it to a new house.” He stopped her before she could pull her hand away. “I want to know about yours.”
“My last serious girlfriend was two years ago. We dated for six months and were talking about moving in together when it ended.”
“What happened?”
“Do you really want to know all this? Now?” He’d had many awkward conversations with women while lying in bed, but this beat them all. Most women seemed to know what was and what wasn’t appropriate pillow talk.
“I like to know my competition.”
Most women were not Ruby Heart.
“She says she left because I worked too much, but I don’t know if it would have lasted much longer, despite our attempts to salvage it. She never really stopped seeing me as her disabled boyfriend. She couldn’t see me as simply her boyfriend. It got old.”
“That’s funny. I’m always afraid most men will see me as Ruby Heart, some speedy, doped-up freak. And yet the first man I end up in bed with in five years—”
She hadn’t had sex in five years?
“—sees me only as Ruby Heart.”
“Ruby’s not so bad.” He pulled a hand out from between them, running it down the length of his own body until he could maneuver it to her leg. “She’s got a lot of fight left in her, and she’s got great legs—I’ve always been a leg man.” He squeezed her thigh. One bonus about being in bed with an athlete was that he never had to wonder if he was touching his leg or hers. His leg muscles hadn’t been that solid in a decade. Her quads twitched. Power pulsed under his hand.
“I wondered if I would ever be able to see you as anyone other than the man who defeated me. I hate to lose, you know.”
“I am aware.”
“Do you miss it?”
Micah bristled. He didn’t ask what it was. It was only ever one thing. This conversation was usually a prelude to some comment about how his body was less than, or wondering if he ever thought about suicide, or if he could have his legs back or a billion dollars which would he choose. No one who asked this conversation could stretch their imagination far enough to see that his life was pretty damn good, thank you very much. They never realized how their offensive and intrusive questions suggested they pitied him enough that they would rather be dead if in his situation.
He didn’t expect to be lying in bed next to Ruby when she disappointed him by falling into the question trap. He’d thought they’d made it past this. But he was tired, she was warm and her thigh muscle under his hand was an object of beauty, so he kept his calm when he said, “Why do you ask?”
“I’ve only ever been appreciated for my body and what it could do. When I was on the cover of Time, I mistakenly thought, ‘Oh, how nice. Someone is interested in me.’ But being America’s Darling was never about people being interested in me as a person. They weren’t even interested in the runner so much as the body. Like, no one ever asked me what my favorite book was.”
She said the last sentence with such sadness that Micah winced. He’d been as guilty as every other person. He assumed she could read, but he didn’t assume she did read. And he should know better than to stereotype an athlete, though it hadn’t been her athleticism that led him to underestimate her. She’d had, and still had, a lightness about her that he didn’t associate with someone who spent their free time reading.
And again, he was judging her.
“Yeah, what does the great Ruby Heart read anyway?”
“British Victorian literature.” His body must have given away his shock because she laughed. “No one ever remembers that I was an English major. I got C’s, but I was still an English major.”
The tips of her fingers tickled as she trailed them along the inside of his arm and to his armpit. His body was so heavy with relaxation he felt he could sink through his bed, through the floor and into the apartment below. Hypnotized by her touch.
“I used to wonder what it would be like to be introduced at a party as ‘Ruby Heart, the great chess player’ or ‘Ruby Heart, librarian.’ Or really anything that suggested I possessed a gift other than my two legs. I just wonder if you miss not being defined by your body.”
Micah had no idea what to make of this. “When I played quarterback, I was also defined by my body. I’m no longer revered for my body, but my other talents are still ignored by those too ignorant to see past the functionality of my legs. So how I’m judged has changed, but I don’t miss it. I worked hard for my life and I wouldn’t trade it.” Other possibilities to her question suggested themselves. “Are you saying you’re jealous of people less talented than you? Because that’s nuts.”
Her wandering fingers stopped at the crook of his elbow and she seemed to think for a minute. “No. Jealousy implies some desire to trade places. And I don’t want to do that.”
“I can tell you for certain that a spinal cord injury only increases people’s interest in your body.”
This time her fingers skipped a beat before starting their route around his arm again. “Like I’m doing to you. Although,” she said, and giggled, “I am interested in your body for other reasons, too.”
“Quite.” The last lingering bit of tension in his shoulders drained away. “And, for your information, I like to read true stories of the feats of man. Shackelton’s adventures in Antarctica. The climbing of Mount Everest. Stuff like that.”
“Man versus nature.” Again he must have twitched with surprise because she said, “Hey, I said I was an English major. I was a C student because I had more important things on my mind than studying, not because I didn’t like the subject.”
Again he was confusing naive with simple and stereotyping where he shouldn’t. He knew as well as anyone that no one expected the pretty-boy quarterback to study either, but he’d gotten his master’s degree, and everyone, including himself, had forgotten that he was supposed to be stupid. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I did make judgments when I shouldn’t. I think of the books as man versus nature, man versus self and man versus man all rolled into one. That’s part of their appeal.”
She kissed his shoulder. “I forgive you for making judgments. You have had so little good of me to go on.”
“Is that what you think of yourself?”
“I was only ever valued for my running. When I threw that away, I didn�
��t have anything left. Even now I’m only able to make a new life for myself by running.” Despite the snuggles and the warmth of the bed, he heard bitterness in her voice. “Any personal training job I ever get is going to be about me the runner and not me the person.”
“Why don’t you own it?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s stopping you from winning one of those ultramarathons?”
She pulled back from him and cooler air rushed in to fill the void. “Can you imagine what would happen if I won?”
“You would be the comeback story of the year.”
“Women don’t get comeback stories. Once they fall, they fall. So long as I was America’s Darling, being competitive was acceptable. Being America’s Doping Case, anything I do for the rest of my life is suspect.” She sighed. “I’m not blaming anyone but myself for that. Many roads and many people led me to doping, but I’m ultimately responsible for saying yes.”
“How do you handle it?”
“Handle what?”
“I’ve not only seen you run, but I’ve lost to you at board games. You’re a competitive person, and yet when you step up to that start line at the races, you do so planning to lose.”
“I finish the race and my times keep improving. That’s not losing.”
“Do you try to win?”
“I’m not a masochist.”
Knowing what ultramarathons did to the mind and body of the runner, Micah doubted this statement. But she was referring to her fear of being in the public spotlight again, not the physical toll of the sport on her body. Ruby was an athlete and would think nothing of pushing her body to its limit. “You should go for it. We both know you would have a chance.”
“I can’t do what you do. I can’t look at the world and see anything other than walls.”
Now it was his turn to be offended. “You think it’s easy for me to scale walls? That I just use my massive wheelchair arm strength to pull myself over heights on a rope?”
“That’s not what I...”
“Lying in a hospital bed ten years ago, I had to make a decision.” His jaw tensed with disappointment and it was hard for him to get out the rest of the words. “I could either look back on what had happened or I could go forward with what had changed. I decided to go forward. You’re still looking back.”
“But when you do look back, what do you see?”
He wanted to get in his chair and roll away from her question, but he didn’t run from challenges—either figuratively or literally.
“That was another life, in another body. I got a spinal cord injury that left me paralyzed from the nipples down. Everyone sees that injury as a tragedy, but my former teammates have had their heads bashed in week in and week out. When I’m fifty, I won’t be able to walk, but I’ll be independent—they might be in a nursing home.” He took a deep breath. “So when I look back and then look forward to that other life—which is what you’re really asking about—I don’t necessarily see glory and the good life. Changing one small decision, taking one different step that day, doesn’t mean my life would have been better in that other future. It is what it is and you go on with it.”
“I can’t help but think I would have that gold medal.”
“Does it ever occur to you that without the blood doping, you might not have won?”
“No.”
Her unencumbered honesty and self-confidence surprised a snort out of him. “No?”
“I was the best middle-distance runner in the world. Bar none.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal. I had hair out of a bottle. I either wore sports bras or push-up bras—no one ever saw my real tits. Fake eyelashes and fake lips. What was someone else’s blood?”
“And the real you?”
“The real me is here in bed with you right now.”
“Does the real you think of winning?”
“All the time. But I’m not sure the real me deserves it. When will I have repented enough?”
They were back to that question of forgiveness. The one that had haunted their first dinner together and never left Ruby’s shoulder. If forgiveness danced on her right shoulder, what devil danced on her left? Responsibility? Regret? Shame?
He reached an arm around to pull her so that she snuggled against him, then kissed the top of her head and her real, mousy-brown hair that was luscious in the morning, stringy by the evening and always smelled a little salty from sweat. He supposed perfect, wavy locks of hair were important to some men, but he’d always been a leg man. And the strength in her thighs was all her own.
“Do you have to know the answer to that question now, Ruby?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Good, because I’m tired now and would like to fall asleep. You’d probably think it rude if I fell asleep while you were still talking. Besides, I thought you were too tired for anything more active.”
In the dim light through the window, he could see her head tilt up. He angled his face down to meet her lips and indulged in the kind of luxurious, long, good-night kiss one only gets when you know the person will also be there when you wake up.
She shifted against him, his pillow collapsing and rising as she moved. When her breathing became slow and steady, Micah sighed and stared at the ceiling. By encouraging Ruby to fall asleep so he could think, he’d told his first lie.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MICAH LAY IN his bed, wide-awake and haunted by the idea of repentance and forgiveness. He had no answers. The questions Ruby asked were not the same questions he asked of himself, but they had been asked of him. For the month he had been in the hospital, Dominick Carter’s name had been conspicuously absent from conversation when other players visited him. In the rehabilitation hospital that followed, only the shrink had been willing to mention Nick’s name. No one thought Micah should see the footage of the tackle that forever split his life into pre and post. The shrink had wanted to talk about his feelings without ever giving him a context for those feelings.
His father had finally snuck the footage in. Every night for a week Micah waited until the last check, opened up his laptop and watched the tackle until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He measured the distance between steps, the number of steps, the dart to the right, Nick’s arm position, his arm position. Micah memorized each movement in such detail and with such precision that he could have drawn a cartoon. Right leg, there. Left knee bent at a twenty-degree angle. Right hip forward. Back arched.
Boom! Nick was a solid defensive tackle who, for the first and only time in his career, had made a late and high hit. Micah was lucky, they said, that his back had broken and not his neck. It could have so easily been his neck. And if it had been his neck, Micah might not be lying here in bed with Ruby. He definitely wouldn’t be able to put his arm around her without help. Able to feel her hair tickle his chest and the soft puffs of her breath across his shoulders.
One inch. Millimeter even, together with the pads, made the difference between minor injury, paraplegia and quadriplegia. And Micah could have placed his body an inch differently. The late hit was all Nick, but that inch... They shared that inch.
Once Micah had realized that, forgiveness was easy.
The concepts of restitution and redemption had been harder on both of them. When Nick had finally worked up the courage to see Micah, once Micah had moved out of the rehabilitation hospital and into his father’s apartment, Nick had prostrated himself at Micah’s feet for forgiveness. Easy. But Nick couldn’t accept a handshake and a “don’t worry about it, man,” and then move on to talking about the next game. He circled around and around his own guilt until he was a large black vulture riding the air currents. And Micah wasn’t carrion.
Eventually Micah had been “busy” whenever Nick wanted to
come over and flagellate himself on Micah’s behalf. Then Micah had gone to graduate school, gotten his job at NSN and moved on with his life. Nick still played, but the aggressiveness that had made his career was gone.
Forgiveness had come so naturally to Micah that Nick’s restitution or repentance had never been an issue for him. And so it was the only issue for Nick.
Was Ruby Nick, or was she Micah? Probably both and neither at the same time.
The sporting world had been out for her blood. The networks, the magazines, the gear companies—none of them stopped to consider that she’d made them millions and all it had cost her was a life. Maybe it took a person examining their own culpability before offering forgiveness. Maybe forgiveness meant only that a person turned their head to face them back. The former was something Ruby was never going to get from the American public; the latter was still possible.
The ends of Micah’s fingers began to tingle, so he shifted Ruby’s head on his arms a little. She gave a soft, warm sigh and snuggled closer to him, using his chest as a pillow. With the extra freedom in his arm, he traced the angle of her spine as far down her back as he could, not quite able to reach the curve of her butt. Her knees were probably butted up against his thighs down in the silence. He liked to think his legs enjoyed the sensation.
She stirred more in her sleep, let out a couple hard snorts and then settled down again. The embargo of information between his brain and his legs meant that if she were a kicker, he’d never know. Though, because it was Ruby, she would probably leave bruises. He wrapped his arm more tightly around her, enjoying her warmth. Any more thoughts he had on Ruby could wait until morning. It had been over a year since he’d shared a bed with a woman, and he was going to eke every last bit of enjoyable sleep out of it.
Winning Ruby Heart Page 21
