“I know you didn’t. I always knew you had to do the right thing. It was one of the things I loved about you, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less.” She looked into his brown eyes, and said, “Or that I’ll ever let you hurt me like that again.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.” He reached for her hand and pulled her against his chest. “I like you, and I think you like me. We’re adults. Let’s just have fun together while you’re here.”
His fingers brushed her back and sent hot tingles up her spine. Through his clothes and hers, his chest warmed her breasts, and she didn’t want to give up the tingles. Not yet. She wouldn’t be here long enough to develop deep feelings for him. Not this time.
“Okay, but just don’t ask me out on a date,” she said, fearing that if they ever actually dated, the curse would make sure things went straight to hell.
“What? Of course I’ll ask you out.”
She shook her head. “No, don’t. It will ruin everything.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and raised her mouth for his kiss. She liked him. After a three-year dry spell, he made her feel wanted. Like a desired woman, but that wasn’t love. It wasn’t the heart-pinching, stomach-aching love she’d had for him so many years ago. It wasn’t even the easy kind of love she’d felt as an adult for some of the other men in her life.
This time it was simply heart-pounding, stomach-tightening lust. She was old enough not to mistake the two. To know the difference and not confuse it with deeper emotions. Not even when he made love to her on the floor and gave her an orgasm that left her weak and gasping. Not even when he came over the next two days for repeat performances.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, he and Tiffany left town to visit his family in Austin, but he turned up on Adele’s porch bright and early the following Monday morning. They ran five miles together, and he told her about his mother’s cornbread stuffing and ambrosia.
“You like ambrosia?” Adele managed to ask as they ran. Usually Adele didn’t like to talk while she huffed and puffed along, but Zach didn’t seem to have the same problem. In fact, a few times he turned and jogged backward.
Show-off.
“You don’t?”
Adele shook her head. “Too much going on all in the same bowl.”
“Are you sure you’re from Texas?”
Sometimes she wondered that herself.
Over the next two weeks, they jogged together most weekday mornings. When they returned, they soaped each other up in the shower or in Sherilyn’s spa tub and worked out in a whole different way. Zach always made sure he brought his own condom, and she always made sure she had granola bars or croissants for afterward. Together, they even managed to put up the baby’s crib and swing.
He always parked his Escalade by the curb and didn’t seem concerned that anyone would see them together out on their run, but she knew Tiffany wasn’t aware that her father was spending a lot of time with Adele. Adele did not kid herself into thinking Tiffany would be okay with it.
“Daddy wants to take down the portrait of my momma,” Tiffany mentioned as Adele took her home one day after school. “He says it’s time, but that makes me mad. When your momma died, did your daddy make you take all the pictures out of the house?”
Somehow, Adele figured “all the pictures” was an exaggeration. “Not all of them. Just the ones that made him sad.” She looked into the rearview mirror into Tiffany’s green eyes. “Maybe you could find something to hang up there that would make you both happy.”
A frown appeared between Tiffany’s brows, and Adele returned her gaze to the road. “Do you think the picture of Momma makes my daddy sad?”
No. “Talk to him about it.”
“Right,” Tiffany scoffed. “All he wants to talk about is the game Friday night.”
That particular game was the state championship, and it was being played across town at the Warren P. Bradshaw Stadium. The whole town had been celebrating for a week. The local newspaper had written about the impending game and about Zach, and the story had been picked up in papers across the state. The Dallas Morning News and Austin American Statesman had interviewed him. A former NFL star turned high-school football coach in a small Texas town made great ink.
She asked him if all the pressure got to him and made him nervous. He’d shrugged. “Everyone gets nervous right before a game. L. C. Johnson used to puke before every game. A lot of guys do.”
“Did you?”
“Nah.”
“Who’s L. C. Johnson?”
He’d chuckled and kissed the curve of her neck. “Only the biggest dual threat in the NFL. The last year I played for Denver, he put up some crazy stats. He rushed for over sixteen hundred yards and caught damn near everything I threw to him.”
She’d moved her hair to give him better access. “Do you miss it?”
“Playing ball?” He’d run his finger across her bare shoulder and pushed her bra strap down her arm. “Sometimes, but not as much as I used to. I miss throwing the perfect pass. I miss winning the battle, but I don’t miss trying to get out of bed the morning after a game. Or playing through the pain and nausea right after getting hit by a guy determined to kill me.”
She’d pulled back and looked into his face. “That’s horrible.”
“It’s part of the game. Besides, I had a live-in masseuse.”
She laughed. “I can’t see Devon playing masseuse.”
“Honey, Devon didn’t live in Denver with me.”
“Ever?”
He shook his head. “For most of our marriage she lived here. Across town in the big house she built. I’d come and see her and Tiffany as much as I could.”
Adele couldn’t imagine being married to Zach and living so far away from him. “That doesn’t sound like much of a marriage.”
“It wasn’t.”
She stared into his brown eyes and asked a question that was none of her business, “How could you be faithful to each other if you lived in different states?”
“I wasn’t.”
Adele had guessed that he’d been a typical jock, and it disturbed her more than it should. Bothered her more than she had a right to be bothered, and she looked away. “Oh.”
Zach’s hand at the side of her face brought her gaze back to his. “Devon didn’t give a shit who I slept with. I can tell by the look in your eyes that you don’t understand that.”
He was right. She didn’t.
“You’re a woman who’d want her man’s body and soul. Devon didn’t want me body and soul.”
“What did she want?”
“Money and status. As long as Devon got what she wanted, she didn’t care what I did.”
“What did you get?”
He looked at her as if he’d never thought to ask himself that question. He shook his head slowly. “How did we get on this topic?”
“Football.”
“Ahh.” He put his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. “Are you coming to the game?”
She looked up into his beautiful face and almost said yes, but something held her back. Something deep inside that kept her heart safe. Something that kept her from falling completely in love with him again. “I need to spend time with Sherilyn,” she said, and looked away from the disappointment in his eyes.
Chapter 14
The second Saturday in December, the Cedar Creek Cougars squared off against Odessa for the state championship at Warren P. Bradshaw Stadium. Twenty-five thousand fans from around the state packed the seats, chanting and cheering and stomping their feet.
At the half, the score was tied at fourteen all, and Zach stood in the home team’s locker room with his arms crossed over his chest. His boys had played near-perfect ball. They’d played in sync, hitting and sticking and moving the ball down the field. They were doing everything he asked of them, and he feared it might not be enough. Odessa had come to play, and they were bigger and faster than the Cougars.
Joe stood in front of the boys going over defensive plays,
and for once, he wasn’t ballistic. He went over the strategies and what the boys should do depending on how Odessa lined up on the offense.
Zach knew the pressures of the game, had lived it most of his life. The last time he’d felt pressure like this was when he’d played in the Super Bowl. When Joe finished, Zach stepped to the front of the team. He looked at them all sitting there, beat-up, bloodied, and grass-stained. He’d never been prouder.
“You boys have given me everything you have to give. You’ve left your blood and sweat out on that field. You haven’t held anything back, and the other coaches and I thank you.
“I’m not going to lie to you guys, you’re too smart and deserve the truth. Those Odessa boys are bigger and faster than we are. We knew that going in, but we’re hanging in there. Going toe-to-toe. Hit for hit, just like we talked about. Y’all should be proud of what you’ve accomplished so far today.
“But now every one of you is going to have to pull something extra from somewhere. Something that’s gonna make you play better than you have your whole lives. You’re going to have to seize every opportunity. Take every advantage. When you step onto the field, you go balls out. You stick every play and don’t give them anything. I know you can win this thing. They might be bigger and faster, but you’re smarter. It’s going to come down to who wants it more.”
He looked into the faces of his young warriors, their hair sticking up at odd angles or plastered to their heads.
“This is it, gentlemen. This is what we’ve been playin’ for all season. Some of you are going to go on to play college ball. Some will go on to different lives, but I guaran-goddamn-tee every last one of you will remember this night. You will either look back on it with glory or regret. The choice is yours. You play with your hearts and guts, and you’ll get the glory.”
He gathered the team around him. “So let’s hear it together: hearts, guts, glory.”
“Hearts, guts, glory!” they yelled, butting chests and helmets. Then they raised a battle cry and ran toward the field and the destiny that waited for them.
Zach lined up with the other coaches, and they followed the players out of the tunnel to the blare of horns and boom of drums as the Cedar Creek band played the school fight song.
During the third quarter, both teams played textbook ball, but in the last five minutes, Odessa’s size and speed finally gained them an advantage, and they scored on a thirty-eight-yard drive.
Zach stood on the sidelines, his heart in his stomach, and studied both teams’ offensive and defensive formations. He looked at how they lined up, and five minutes into the fourth quarter, he finally saw what he’d been looking for: a crack in the Odessa defense. Something he hadn’t seen in the hours of game tapes he’d watched. If the Cougars could take advantage of it, exploit it, they just might turn the game around. He called a time-out and walked out to meet his quarterback. He told him to start playing the left side. Then he turned toward the sidelines and something made him look up. Maybe it was the blast from an air horn or someone waving silver pompoms, but he looked up and saw her. She sat on the second deck, a few rows over from the fifty. Perhaps it was her wild blond hair that drew his gaze, or maybe it was her smile. Whatever it was, it had always been that way. Wherever she was in a crowd, his attention had always been drawn to Adele.
He turned back toward the game, pulled the brim of his hat lower, and smiled. She’d come. He guessed he’d better win this thing.
Growing up in Texas, Adele knew the basics of football. There are four quarters and each team tries to score a touchdown when it got the ball. Watching Zach, she had a feeling that the game was a lot more complicated than that. At first glance, he appeared just to be standing there, but the more she watched him, the more she noticed his hands move. He’d point to the left or the right, make some sort of signal with his fingers, or send one of the players out to the huddle. He talked into his headset and raised a clenched fist into the air when the Cougars made a good play. He was like a general directing his troops, and her heart warmed a little as she watched him. He turned and glanced up at her, and her stomach got light and fuzzy and took a tumble.
She pulled the collar of her wool peacoat up around her cheeks and looked over at Kendra, sitting two rows down with Tiffany and some other girls. Adele was really glad Kendra had made good friends since she’d moved to Cedar Creek. Otherwise, the upheaval in her life would have been so much harder on the thirteen-year-old.
The crowd around Adele cheered, and she looked toward the field. One of the Cougar players intercepted the ball on the Odessa fifteen. With four minutes left on the clock, the Cougars got the ball and steadily moved it down the field. If Adele had been a nail biter, she would have chewed off her fingers as they moved it yard by painstaking yard. With less than thirty seconds to go, tension buzzed the air and grabbed the back of her neck as the Cougars’ quarterback dropped back, looked to his right, then threw the ball to the left. The ball sailed through the air into the hands of a receiver, who ran the ball into the end zone from the ten-yard line. The crowd went wild, jumping to their feet and screaming as six points were put up on the scoreboard. Odessa still led by a point with five seconds left in the game.
“It’s goin’ into overtime,” said the man next to her. He’d painted his face green and black and wore a Cougars jersey.
Overtime? Adele didn’t think she could take the excitement of overtime. She wondered how Zach could handle it. He called a time-out, and she looked down at him in his dark green Cougars jacket, surrounded by his players, pointing as they nodded their helmets. Then he moved back to the sidelines and put his hands on his hips. As he watched his team line up, he pulled at the brim of his hat as if he couldn’t find the right spot on his head.
“They’re going for the two points,” the guy beside her said, his voice serious as a heart attack. “I hope like hell they don’t screw the pooch on this one.”
Adele’s attention returned to the line of scrimmage as the ball was snapped. The quarterback took the snap, fell back and brought the ball behind his head for a pass to the left. The defense anticipated the pass and crowded the end zone, leaving a gaping hole on the right for the Cedar Creek running back to sprint through. By the time Odessa saw the ball hadn’t been thrown but handed off, it was carried into the end zone.
“They ran the Statue of Liberty,” the guy beside her yelled, as half the crowd screamed, and the other half groaned. Two more points flashed up on the Cougars side as the time clock read double zero. Game over.
“We won?”
The guy nodded and wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
“H–h-how?” she managed, as he jumped up and down while she was trying to avoid all that paint on his face. How had the quarterback handed the ball off when everyone thought he’d passed it? Was that legal?
“That was goddamn brilliant.” Then he let out a holler that made Adele’s ears ring. He sat her back down on her heels, then leapt over a few rows and moved toward the field. Adele couldn’t see Zach at first, but then she spotted him out on the field, in the center of his team. The boys were all jumping on top of each other and flashing the hook ’em horns sign. Two of the players ran onto the field with a big ice chest and dumped its contents on top of Zach’s head. He turned as ice cubes bounced off his shoulders and the top of his hat. He laughed and shook his head.
Kendra made her way to Adele and together they sat for the award ceremony. Adele watched the Cougars hoist their big gold trophy and pass it around. They named the most valuable players, and Zach gave a little speech about the team. He was interviewed by news organizations from as far away as Austin and Dallas, and as the crowd moved from the stands, Zach and the players headed into the tunnel.
“You ready?” she asked Kendra as she pulled out one of Sherilyn’s lists from her coat pocket. She had to get two Christmas trees. One for the hospital and one for the condo, as well as ornaments and gifts. “We’ve got a lot to do before Christmas. We have to decorate the
condo and your mom’s room,” she said, and looked up, catching one last glimpse of Zach and the lucky hat she’d rescued from a couple of cheerleaders that day last month inside the girls’ bathroom.
Tiffany stood at the back of the crowd and waited for her daddy to make his way toward her. She could see his head above everyone around him as he shook hands with the people who waited for the coaches and players at the gates to the stadium. She could see his ball cap and his great big smile. Her heart got big as a balloon when she saw him. She loved him and was so proud that she was his daughter. Sometimes she got scared when she thought about something happening to him like it had Momma. When she thought about losing her daddy, her stomach hurt, and her chest got tight.
A man in a big cowboy hat shook her daddy’s hand, then wrapped his arms around him in a big hug. The man looked like he was crying.
Tiffany liked football, but gee, it wasn’t like dance-team competition. Dance team was tough.
She continued to wait for him as the crowd filed past, shaking his hand and patting him on the back. She looked at her pink wristwatch. It had been about forty minutes. Sheesh, that was a really long time to wait, and the crowd didn’t seem to be thinning. Tiffany didn’t mind sharing her daddy sometimes, but this was getting ridiculous. She was supposed to have gotten a ride from Becky Lee and her mom, Cindy Ann, but she’d rather wait and ride home with her dad.
Finally, after a few more minutes he looked over in her direction. He smiled and lifted a hand to wave. She waved back, and his smile got bigger. Something in his eyes made her slowly lower her hand and turn at the waist to look behind her. Her gaze landed on Adele and Kendra standing a few feet away. She turned back, and her dad motioned for her to join him. She picked up the green-and-black stadium chair by her left foot and weaved her way through the crowd. Just before she got to him, he reached out his hand, but he didn’t reach for her. A few feet from Tiffany’s face, her daddy grasped Adele’s hand and he pulled her toward him.
“Excuse me,” he said to someone who was chatting at him. He put one hand on Adele’s waist and one on the side of her face, and right there in front of the whole town, he kissed her.
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