by Layne Harper
“You have no idea how much. I need to be inside of you, baby.” I let out a moan as her hand grabs my balls through my shorts, and gives them a hard squeeze. “Hurry. I don’t want to blow my load in my pants.”
She lets out a precious little giggle. “It’d sure make an interesting addition to your former underwear endorsement campaign.”
Could I love her any more? I reach over and grab her breast, squeezing it through her silk blouse and bra. She lets me get away with it for a few seconds before she makes me stop. “If you want to get home safely, you better quit it.”
That reminds me of her poor driving skills, so I decide to keep my hands to myself and let her pleasure me.
As we turn into the neighborhood, Charlie gets a page on her phone. I let out a moan, and it’s not from the attention she’s showing my cock. I know that it’s from the hospital. She forgets massaging my dick and calls them back. I listen to her end of the conversation. I already know that she has to go in. Now, the best that I can hope for is a quickie.
When she hangs up, she says, “Baby, I’m just going to have to drop you off. There’s been a car accident, and I’m needed in surgery.”
“But what about my problem?” I ask, looking down at my dick. I know that it’s pathetic, but I need Charlie right now. I need reassurance that the news that we got today doesn’t change us. I need to know that we’re okay. She can tell me all she wants, but I read her best when we’re making love. That’s how I know where her head is at.
“Your problem,” she says, glancing at my cock, “will have to wait until I get home tonight.”
It’s pathetic. I know that I’m a pathetic, sorry, asshole, but I can’t wait until tonight. I fucking need her more than the patient needs her right now. “Just come in for a few minutes. I’ll make it worth your while.” I try to sound cocky, instead of like a whining pathetic asshole.
“Colin, you know that I can’t. Please don’t make this difficult on me,” she pleads.
Who’s the biggest jerk on the planet? Me, that’s who. Her words shut me up, but they don’t make me feel any better. She doesn’t even give me a goodbye kiss. As soon as the car stops, she’s on the phone with Brad, preparing him for the injuries they’re about to see. She peels out of the driveway without so much as a wave or look back.
I crutch my pathetic ass into my large, empty house. It’s devoid of soul when Charlie’s gone. I never realized it until she moved in. I thought that when Charlie left me, then I found out she was sick, it was the worst that I could feel. Then, when Jack kept me from her, I wanted to die. None of that compares to knowing that I can’t give Charlie the baby that we want so badly. I know the doctor said there’s hope for me regaining my count, but I’m already careful with wheat. How much difference can asking for a fresh frying pan make?
What if it doesn’t work and I can’t give us a child? I’m no good for her. In the nine months we’ve been back together, I’ve destroyed her life and her dreams. She deserves so much more than what I can give her, which, right now, is nothing. I’m using her, and giving her nothing in return. I fucking hate myself.
I sit on my couch, selfishly mad because she’s not sucking my dick right now. I want to care about the poor soul that needs her, but I need her more. I hate sharing her with anyone, even her patients and Brad. My heart rate is increasing and my breathing is speeding up until I’m taking sharp gasps to get air.
I drop my elbows to my knees and stare at the ground, trying to get my chest to relax. My stomach feels like I swallowed battery acid. I try taking deep breaths to calm my heart rate down, but it’s no use. I refuse to admit what I already know. This is a stress attack, and it’s going to kill me if I don’t find a way to relieve the pressure. I had them before my injury, but they’ve become worse since it happened.
My phone rings, and I hesitate to look at it. I do anyway after a few seconds, and see that it’s Aiden calling. I answer it, remembering that I was supposed to call him back.
“Hello.”
“What’s wrong, Colin?” Aiden asks. There’s no name calling when I actually answer with manners.
“More bad news. I don’t want to talk about it. What’s up?” I say, as evenly as possible.
“Well, I’ve got a couple of things for ya. Frankly, man, you sound so fucking bad that I’m not sure that I should tell you.”
“Go ahead. Let’s get all the shit on the table in one day.”
“Okay,” he says, hesitant. “There’s pictures of you on one of the tabloid websites sitting in a female doctor’s office, with rabid speculation that you and Caroline are having a baby.”
“We could only be so lucky.” It’s the best reply that I have.
“I assume you want Jenny to reply with ‘No comment?’”
“Sounds like as good of a response as any.”
“Secondly…” he pauses. I know that he’s gauging whether or not to tell me what’s next. “…I know who told Kenzie about the prescription pills.”
I sit up straighter on the couch. We’ve been working to get this answer for some time. A part of me desperately hopes that it wasn’t Mark. “Who?”
The phone goes quiet for a second. I know that I’m not going to be happy with the answer.
“Jenna. It appears that you had pills called in, using her name. Maybe more than one time. Anyway, she put two and two together, and figured it out. She’s the one who tipped Kenzie off. Now, why Kenzie hates you so much is something that only you can answer.”
“I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.” I hit end on my phone before he can try to stop me.
I send all of his subsequent calls to voice mail. Fuck Aiden. I know what I have to do.
Me: Send me Jenna’s phone number.
Jenny: Why?
Me: Do you have to have a reason for everything? Just send me her fucking number.
Jenny: What crawled up your ass?
Me: Not today. NUMBER!
Jenny: Fine, here.
I open the contact information and hit “send.”
Jenna answers on the second ring. “I knew you’d get tired of the good doctor before too long. Where shall I meet you?” she drawls.
“What does your schedule look like for the rest of the week?”
“I’m off until after the new year.”
“Good. Come to Dallas. I’ll book you our room at The Magnolia, downtown. Text me when you arrive.”
I end the call and send a text to Aiden.
Me: Send me whatever proof you have.
Aiden: I will, but don’t be stupid.
I call the Magnolia Hotel and book Jenna in our old room. I put the reservation in the name that I travel under, and on my credit card. I text Jenna to tell her that everything is arranged.
It’s days like this when I miss not being able to drink. It’s what I did after I broke up with Charlie when I felt like this. Nothing can numb me like sitting down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a shot glass. Now, I can’t, and I have no way to take the edge off of life.
Fuck me. I can’t run these demons out. I need a release. I’ve gotten used to fucking the stress away, and Charlie’s taking care of someone who’s more important than me.
I get anxious. I need to pace, to move around. I need to do something to relieve the pressure that’s boiling inside of me. I feel like a raging inferno, trapped inside my body. I’m surrounded by the joy of the season. Yet, there’s not a drop of joy in my heart. There’s only misery. I never knew that disappointment could hurt this fucking much. I want to numb the ache in my chest, to alleviate the pressure that’s making it hard to breathe. I want to transfer this pain into something else.
Why can’t something in my life go right? Is it really fair that God’s dropped a season-ending injury and some crazy disease that affects my balls on me at the same time? I mean, shit, couldn’t we have spread this out just a little?
Then there’s Jenna. I thought, above all else, that we were friends. I’ve never loved her, but damn, we’ve had a
relationship for over half of our lives. Fuck! Doesn’t that buy at least a degree of loyalty? I can’t fucking believe that she did that to me. I hate her. With a fucking passion, I hate her. Why has she been my fuck friend for so many years? I don’t like her. She’s a miserable excuse for a person. I should’ve never spoken to her again after she confronted me at Jennifer and Quinn’s house. She’s a crazy bitch.
I get some satisfaction in thinking that she’s driving from San Antonio to Dallas, thinking she’s getting my married dick. Ha! Joke’s on her. I’m going to confront her, and then take away everything I’ve given.
The more I think about it, the angrier I get at her, and at life, for dealing me such a shitty hand. Why don’t Charlie and I get our happy ending? Why can’t something be easy for us? Why is she stuck with me, a low sperm count motherfucker with a broken leg, who can’t even properly fuck her in the bedroom because of it? It’s another fucking disappointment, on top of the most disappointing couple of months of my entire career. We were fucking undefeated. Undefeated. This is the best team that we’ve ever had, and I break my leg. Another year of not bringing home the title. Another year that I’ve pissed away.
Shit! What about Tucker Wilson my backup quarterback. What if this is it? What if Coach sees that he’s better than me? Fuck! What if I’ve played my last down of football? It’s never occurred to me that I wouldn’t one day be a Super Bowl champion.
The thought punches me in the gut, taking the remaining air out of my lungs. I sit up straight, begging my lungs to expand. I finally take a needed breath, but it doesn’t make my chest feel any less tight.
I almost pick up the phone and call Charlie to ask her to come home. Instead, I toss my phone across the room watching as it hits the mantle that holds our Christmas stockings. Her decorations are not cheering me up, like Charlie had planned. They’re tormenting me. There will never be our child’s stocking hanging up on that mantle, waiting for Santa Claus. I’ll never get to take our child to sit on Santa’s lap. I’ll never get to read The Night Before Christmas to a little boy with Charlie’s lavender eyes.
I turn on the television to distract myself, but there’s nothing worth watching. I consider going into the office, but I’m in such a bad mood that I’ll just end up fighting with Jenny. Then she’ll have to drive me back home, pissed at me. What I should do is go to my gym and lift weights until I tire myself out.
However, what I do instead is stand up, and hop to the Christmas tree. I grab the Christmas countdown chain that Charlie made for me and rip it off the tree. I can’t stand to hear another reason why she loves me. She shouldn’t love me. Charlie might be blind, but I’m not. I see me for what I am. I’m a selfish prick, who’s done nothing but burden her life.
It dulls the pain for a few seconds when I shred the construction paper with my hands. I watch the red and green confetti fall to the ground and decorate the floor around me, like the confetti that will be falling in New Orleans when another team wins the Super Bowl.
I sit down and scoot on my ass into the kitchen, and grab black garbage bags from under the sink. Next, I crawl to the fireplace, and I pull down the stockings that are mocking me. Charlie had a Dallas Cowboy’s stocking, monogrammed with the number eight turned on its side, for me. Her stocking is a ballerina from The Nutcracker. Brad’s is a gingerbread house, and Jenny’s is a kaleidoscope of colors. I shove them all in the garbage bag.
Next, I scoot to the Christmas tree, and remove as many ornaments as I can reach, and throw them in the bag, too. Why do we need a Christmas tree? There’s no child to enjoy it. I pull down the popcorn chain that we made, and popcorn goes everywhere. I gather tinsel and garland and shove it in the bags.
I survey what’s left in the house. We have wreaths on the windows, and the nativity scene on some side table. I leave the nativity scene, because I can’t bear to break up the happy family. At least someone deserves happiness this time of the year, even if they wind up losing their only son when he’s about my age.
I crawl to each window, and pull the wreaths down shoving them in more black bags.
The last thing I do is crawl through the house, and stick as many of the framed pictures of Charlie and I that I can reach in the bag.
I can only scoot and drag one bag at a time, but I manage to get all five of them by the back door. Alice will have to load them in the garbage can for me when she comes tomorrow.
My last step is to call Jack Collins. I think, if I beg for his help, he’ll do it. He’ll ask her to join his practice again. I won’t be in the picture anymore, so it shouldn’t affect their patients. She can have her old life back, like it was before I destroyed it. She was happy.
She can have a baby with someone who can give it to her. After a while, the press will leave her alone, and she’ll go back to a quiet life without security. She can run the streets in her beloved neighborhood, instead of running the lab rat maze, as she calls it, inside of my gilded cage.
She’ll be able to eat out without interruptions, and go to the park on a sunny day. She’ll be able to play at the beach, and not have to see a picture of herself on a website while people critique her body.
What will become of me? Who fucking cares? As Charlie would say, “Brad and I’ll add it to your I Don’t Give A Fuck list.”
I got what I wanted most in the world, and I’ve destroyed it. I’ve destroyed her. She went from her own beautiful practice, with the best of everything, to working in a charity hospital, for God’s sake. That’s what I’ve done to her.
This is my last year of football. I’ll quietly retire at the end of the season. My leg is a perfect excuse. It’ll be the injury that I couldn’t recover from. That way, I won’t have the humiliation of losing my starting job to my back up. People will feel sorry for me, instead of watching the mighty Colin McKinney fall. Where will I go? Who the fuck knows? I’m not staying here, that’s for damn sure. There’s got to be somewhere on this planet I can go where no one knows my name.
I have a plan, but for some reason, it doesn’t lessen the weight on my chest one little bit. Can I live without Charlie? I know that I can’t. I decide not to make the phone call to Jack, just in case my girl decides that she still wants the broken parts of the man that she married.
My phone keeps vibrating across the room, but I don’t move to answer it. The world can go fuck itself. Colin McKinney is closed for business.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie
Has Colin McKinney used his downtime from his leg injury to become a dad? Sources are reporting that McKinney was spotted at a gynecologist’s office with Doctor Caroline Collins. A little CharCol in the oven? We’ll see in about nine months. Congratulations!
A car accident anytime is awful, but this close to Christmas is tragic. Brad and I finish filling out the last of the paperwork and stop by the patient’s room for one more check. She has a broken left arm and leg, and injured ribs, but she’s going to live. She’s very lucky.
I give Brad a hug, and tell him I’ll call him tomorrow. We’re both so exhausted from the surgery that he doesn’t even have a snarky comment for me.
My security detail follows me to my car and waits for me to climb in, start it, and drive off before they leave, as per Colin’s instructions.
I try calling Colin a couple of times on my way home, but he’s not answering. He frequently puts his phone on vibrate and leaves it sitting somewhere when he crutches to the next spot. No big deal.
We have leftover pork chops in the refrigerator that I can heat up for supper, and I think we have everything for a nice salad.
I start mentally making a checklist of what we’re going to have to do to make sure that Colin is completely gluten-free. I talked to the nutritionist at the hospital. She informed me on the cross contamination issues, but also warned me that my shampoo, soaps, lipstick and other toiletries might contain traces of gluten. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we can do it. A quote that I printed out and framed above my desk in medi
cal school read, “A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.” Colin Powell said it, and I love it.
Having a baby has become our dream; not just Colin’s, but mine also. I’ve thought about it today, and we’ll give the natural method a go until our one-year anniversary. If we’re not pregnant by then, we’ll do IVF. I hope that Colin’s onboard, and doesn’t give me too much grief. I can see him wanting to do IVF now, just because he’s lacking in patience. Instantaneous gratification is what he wants.
I wave at both of our security guards as I drive into the gilded cage – the one that the neighborhood pays for and the one that’s on Colin’s payroll. They both wave back at me. I pull into the driveway and check the time. It’s after nine o’clock, and I hate getting home this late, but it just can’t be helped.
I try to open the back door, but something is blocking it. I push again a little harder, and get the door to open enough so I can squeeze by. There are black garbage bags piled up. That’s odd. I wonder why Alice didn’t take them out.
I walk into the kitchen and call Colin’s name as I look through our mail. It’s typical junk. Most of it is tossed into the recycling bin. Next, I turn on the oven to three fifty and pull out the pork chops from the refrigerator. I’d really like for them to get to room temperature before I heat them, but that means we wouldn’t be eating dinner until midnight. Instead, I pour a little milk on them so they don’t get too dry in the oven.
Crap! I’m supposed to shower as soon as I get home. Even though I shower at the hospital, I still have to walk through the place to leave. I don’t want Colin to get sick again. That was a miserable twelve hours, because, dear God, he’s an awful patient.
When I walk into the living room, I stop dead in my tracks. My breath catches in my throat. We look like we’ve been robbed. From about five feet down, everything has been removed from our Christmas tree. Our stockings are gone. Our Christmas decorations are gone. Our pictures are gone.
