First Step Forward Read online

  Let’s not even touch the topic of her eyes, or her hair, or her lips. Definitely not that cute little nose ring. Or how good it felt when she rubbed my hand in hers. The hand thing is what did it. When she started, it just felt nice, but then it made my head stop hurting, which left space to consider how good her hands would feel rubbing and stroking other things.

  I went home with all of that swimming around in my brain. Frankly, I can be just as dumb of a jock as the next guy, and I’m not bright enough to make better decisions when my dick is involved in a fantasy about a girl who lives on the other side of the state and appears to have her own things going on. A ten-minute conversation was all it took to know Whitney is not the type who would aspire to be some football player’s girlfriend, sitting in the stands and cheering, or playing pretend besties with the other WAGs.

  Women fall into two distinct categories in my reality: jersey chasers and non–jersey chasers. Staying away from jersey chasers is best because they’re never worth the drama. Pick the wrong one, on the wrong night, and the next thing you know, a picture of you sprawled out naked and sleeping in bed goes viral. Likely captioned with something you definitely don’t want your mom to read.

  But I was tense. Fucking tense and horny and pissed that someone like Whitney lives in the middle of nowhere instead of here. I tried running a few miles to see if that might help. I tried playing video games that involved a lot of things getting blown up. Nothing worked, and I had only a few dwindling options left for distraction. Finally, I called up a few guys and we made our way to a bar crawling with an after-work crowd, hoping that even if I only nursed a club soda, I might still find a little relief.

  Callie, the blonde who talked nonstop for five straight hours, was sitting on a barstool surrounded by guys in cheap just-out-of-college suits, waving her hands around and laughing at her own story. She saw me no less than five minutes after we walked in and proceeded to begin the age-old routine of seducing a man from across the bar.

  Hair flipping. Minimal, possibly inadvertent, eye contact. Seductive drink sipping. Lingering, possibly intentional, eye contact. Precisely timed crossing and uncrossing of legs while wearing a short skirt. Followed by obviously intentional, come over here and talk to me eye contact.

  Once I played my part and wandered over there, I got the rest of the act.

  The laugh-and-touch-my-forearm thing. The whisperin-my-ear thing. Eventually, the rub-a-hand-up-and-down-my-thigh thing.

  I saw it, understood the game, and went with it. Have I mentioned that she talked a lot? About sports and work and clothes and her friends and her family and her new kitten and the car accident she was in and, for the love of Christ, she talked about nail polish for a good twenty minutes.

  Once we got going she talked dirty, but it was a poor showing. I’m all for a girl who lets me know, in explicit detail, exactly what she wants or how she likes it, but at a certain point, I just wanted her to be quiet for a while. So much that we went a second round because I thought I might lull her into a silent stupor if she came hard enough. It worked, but I still hated myself for trying to make a nice girl into the image of another woman. All I could do was pray that whoever is up there and calling the shots might overlook this night when it comes time to decide if I’m spending the afterlife behind the pearly gates or shoveling more coal into the fiery pits of hell.

  When my alarm clock goes off, I sneak out of the sheets to hit the shower and do my best to keep quiet, because Callie is still sleeping in said stupor and I’d love to keep it that way until I’ve at least had some coffee.

  As the hot water pours down over me, every limb starts to relax. This relaxed state leads to thinking about the woman I wish were tucked in my sheets right now. A sidestep from that leads to the obvious. Me, hard—and not in the best of situations to do anything worthwhile about it. I end up standing there almost helplessly and will myself to make it go away. Because if I wander out to Callie with this thing, she will think it’s about her, which it isn’t, and it would be rude to pretend otherwise.

  When I towel off and go into the bedroom, the sheets are rumpled but empty. My heart kicks up a notch at the possibility that she skedaddled and saved us both from a lame goodbye scene. I throw on a pair of warm-up pants and my hoodie, while giving myself a silent lecture for being a dick, deciding the punishment will be to juice up a green smoothie, which I despise, and glug it down on my way to practice.

  Rounding the corner into the kitchen, the sight I find squashes my hope for a smooth getaway. Because there’s Callie, still here and wearing my T-shirt.

  First off, I think we should reserve the whole wearing-a-guy’s-T-shirt-in-the-morning move for two people who are starting something. You know, the girl you took to dinner, the girl you texted flirting, funny things to, the girl you don’t want to leave right away because you really want to strip that shirt off her and screw her in the kitchen until you’re both late for work.

  There’s a second problem, though. Which is that Callie found Whitney’s apple butter and now she’s standing in my kitchen slurping up a spoonful of it. I watch her devour a heaping mouthful and lick the spoon clean. Then, please no, she does it again.

  So. Much. Worse.

  The woman is double-dipping into my apple butter.

  I understand exactly how irrational this sounds, given that my mouth and her mouth did far more intimate things than double-dipping last night. But this is different. I had plans for that apple butter.

  As lame as it sounds, I was saving it. Yesterday, when I set the jar on the counter, I was picturing it on some thick multigrain bread from the bakery down the street, toasted up with a bunch of butter. Swirled on top of the plain Greek yogurt the team nutritionists want me to eat even though it tastes like feet. Spread on a toasted waffle when I’m too beat to do anything else before dropping into bed.

  “This stuff is soooo good.” Callie licks the spoon in what seems to be an attempt to look seductive. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was a gift. Kind of,” I answer flatly.

  Her spoon clatters into the sink and she sets the lid back on, tightening the band over the top of it. Then she shoves it absentmindedly across the counter, where it bumps into the backsplash. I try not to growl or curse or drag her gently by the arm and show her the door. Taking a deep breath helps. Barely.

  “I’ve got to get to practice. I need you to get dressed and head out.”

  Her face falls, and then I really feel like shit. This is why I don’t do this. This is why I’ve kept it in my pants for the most part these last few years. I’m short-tempered, I say a shit ton of things I shouldn’t, and I don’t do disappointment well, especially with women. When Callie smooths down my shirt, then tugs on the hem like she’s awkwardly trying to cover herself, I take a step forward and run my hand across her hip.

  “Hey.” She takes a cautious peek up at me. “Thank you for last night, Callie. But I’m not good for anything more here. I’ve got a long few months coming and I’m not exactly good at dividing my focus during season. OK?”

  Everything I just said is true, which means I can give Callie a conciliatory grin and hope she doesn’t want or need more than that, because I’m practically worthless for anything off the field. It works, because she smiles and goes to get dressed. All that matters is that she didn’t cry. No tears means a win given the context, and I’ll always take a win no matter how it comes.

  October in Colorado is a crapshoot when it comes to weather. From bitter-cold mornings to afternoons full of balmy sunshine, you never know what’s to come. Today happens to be so cold that the disgusting green smoothie I concocted starts turning slushy by the time I gag down the last swallow and hit the front doors of our team headquarters. Once inside, I take a swig of water from the cooler in the hallway, just to clear out the last of the awful taste in my mouth.

  “Uh-oh. Somebody’s drinking a green juice. She wear you out that bad?”

  I turn and give a glare to the smart-ass t
eammate of mine who enjoys my misery, in any form, far too much. Aaron Bolden is two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and technical brilliance, but most days I think he’s also a good hundred pounds of mouth.

  Aaron is an outside linebacker who knows exactly how to x-ray an offense to find the inevitable hole that exposes their weakness, even when they didn’t know it existed. Despite occasionally wishing we weren’t teammates and then he wouldn’t know me as well as he does, I can’t tell you how thankful I am for never having to line up across from him, even with all the bullshit he throws my way.

  He’s also the only guy who’s been here in Denver as long as I have. Other than Aaron, it’s been a carousel of new faces and egos to fill the rest of the line, so over time, he became my other half on the team—a work wife, if there is such a thing in football.

  Still, he has a certifiable motor mouth and, unlike so many others, he isn’t the least bit hesitant to point it in my direction. Especially since he was witness to my performance at the bar last night, right up until Callie started rubbing my thigh, at which point Aaron claimed an emergency text from his wife and bailed with a smirk on his face.

  I crumple the tiny paper cup from the water cooler and shake my head in his direction.

  “I’m fine. The juice was punishment, not replenishment. The only thing she wore out was my hearing.”

  Aaron lets out a huge laugh. “What? Chatty Cathy didn’t have an off switch?”

  “Not that I could find. And I looked. Trust me.”

  A hard slap lands on my shoulder.

  “Had to see that coming, dude. I told Kendra the whole story when I got home and she bitched at me that I should have run interference. Like your dubious taste in bedmates is my fault somehow. Also, she claims to have found the ‘perfect’ woman for you.”

  “Fuck. Again?”

  Aaron’s wife has few enduring passions in her life. Her twin boys, Aaron, her sisters, Justin Timberlake, White Castle burgers, and finding me a wife. Unfortunately, her instincts when it comes to sourcing my true love are usually way off base.

  “Some charity maven she met planning an early education fund-raiser. Which means the woman is probably alimony rich, but has a decent rack thanks to a set of expensive implants, and spends most of her time complaining about being bored because she’s essentially unemployed. So unless you’ve decided that’s your type, beware of all invitations to our home in the near future. Any supposed barbeque get-togethers are merely love traps—remember that.”

  I groan. Aaron shrugs but grins. Because underneath any bro-code alliance we have, he’s married to the woman who set a love trap that he happily fell into and he has no interest in untangling himself from it.

  “Too bad. I do like her potato salad.”

  Aaron saunters off toward our team conference room, where we’ll spend the next three hours watching game film.

  “Horseradish mayo and those fancy little gherkins. That’s her secret.”

  Everything is just fine until we hit the field in the afternoon. Sauntering out to the green turf, my head feels clearer than it has in days. There is less pain, less haze threatening to dim my vision or knock my legs out from underneath me.

  When the drills start, though, all the pain comes rushing back in dense, relentless waves. The aches, the nausea, the sensation of clammy sweat on my face, the feeling that my limbs don’t belong to me anymore. Hunt has been watching me all day with an unnerving constancy. If I stumble or hesitate, he makes a note on his clipboard. A few times, he huddled up with offensive coaching staff and they stood there watching me, focusing on my every move. Under their scrutiny and the way my body won’t get on board, I feel a little like an uncoordinated chubby dog in a tutu out here, putting on a pitiful show for the judges.

  In this world, a flash of hesitance on a practice drill lands a question mark next to your name on the performance notes. A tick of inaccuracy in your hands can lead to a conversation with Coach about whether you make the field on Sunday. When these things happen, it means you have to buck up ten times harder than yesterday to keep your job. This game, the reality of being a pro, is a ceaseless merry-go-round of fiascos and victories. In between each one, you have to hold your breath and dig deep, calling on each scrap of bootstrapping tenacity you possess.

  Pressure is a given, but every day and every practice is like a job interview; most people don’t understand that. It isn’t only about game day or even a season; it’s a relentless audition for your dream. The only damn one I’ve ever known.

  Two hours in, I drop three passes in succession. Wide-open, here-it-comes, land-in-your-lap passes. We’re running the pro football equivalent of tossing the ball around in a city park with your friends, one-on-one, to build timing and drive consistency between passers and receivers. All you have to do is focus on reading the pass before you reach for it.

  In the air, every ball has its own unique qualities, defined by the quarterback and his style combined with the conditions. Dry air turns the ball slicker, a quarterback with a longer extension means a higher arc that slows the ball, and it’s my job to figure it all out in the span of seconds. But when my mind won’t pitch in and my body won’t stay on task, I can’t complete the simplest of tasks. After those three passes land on the field and bounce away from my hands, I hear the whistle, and Hunt shouting my name.

  Back in the training room, Hunt runs through the same tests we did Sunday on the sidelines. The use of a foam board intensifies the tests, designed specifically to throw me off balance if possible, and it works. I’m a spectacular mess of clumsy and weak appendages. By the time we stop and Hunt runs through the questionnaire about dizziness, sleep patterns, and foggy memory problems, I think I might pass out for real. I’ve never been so grateful for a folding chair in my life.

  There is a final question, the one I always answer yes to. There is no other answer. Ever. When the day comes that I consider answering no, I will gladly walk away, because the fire and love for this game will have gone dark.

  “Do you consider yourself fit to play football?”

  I stare Hunt down and nod my head. “Yes.”

  Hunt’s eyes darken a bit, and then he shoves the medical clearance questionnaire across the table to me with a pen. I already know where to sign. Scrawling my name where it belongs, on the line that states I don’t want to be anywhere else but on the field Sunday, I shove it back to him.

  “You have a concussion, Lowry. Mild enough, but mark my words, kid, if you lie to me again on the sidelines, I will have you on IR so fast your stupid head will spin. I can’t do my job if you lie to me.”

  “I took a hit. That’s part of my job, Hunt. We don’t need to make it a big deal. I’ll be fine by Friday afternoon and I intend to be on the team plane to Phoenix.”

  Hunt sighs and starts to shove his papers into a black binder, then slaps it shut so his hand lands on the front with a thud.

  “Go home. You’re out until Friday. Come by that morning and we’ll decide then. Take the next two days and do nothing. I mean nothing. No girls, no booze, no clubs, no lifting, no running. I don’t even want you watching TV or playing those idiotic video games. Sleep as much as you can, take up bird-watching, but that’s it.”

  “Sounds like a slow form of torture. I’m not good with being lazy; you know that. If I end up taking a sledgehammer to the walls in my loft, that shit will be on you, Hunt.”

  Standing up to leave, Hunt looks old all of a sudden, weary of telling a bunch of overgrown boys to behave and take care of themselves. Slipping the binder and his clipboard into a messenger bag, he pulls it over his shoulder.

  “Someday, years from now, Lowry, I want you standing on a porch with a pretty girl at your side and a bunch of towheaded kids running around making you nuts. If you don’t take this shit seriously, if you keep lying to save your season instead of your goddam body, that won’t happen. You’ll be raging at things no one else can see or drinking yourself into an early grave because you can’t thin
k straight. Alone. Don’t choose the game over everything else. There has to be more than this game, kid.”

  I want to take off on a tear out of the room, but he starts for the door before I can. Leaving me sitting there like a fool, hating the unforgiving mirror he just held up to my life, confronted with the reality that there isn’t anything more than the game for me. Since I was eight years old, this has been everything.

  Hunt slows his gait and then stops in the doorway without turning to face me.

  “Get out of town, Lowry. Find a change of scenery and enjoy it for the next forty-eight hours. Go somewhere football is the last thing on your mind. Shit, we live in Colorado. People come here to get lost all the damn time.”

  At home, I toss my bag in the hallway and slump into the couch cushions. I want to erupt with anxious energy and restless anger at something, anything. A bag, a blocking dummy, at nothing but the silence in my living room. I can’t even watch TV. Can’t do anything but stare at the walls until they close in on me.

  Before it takes me down, I jump off the couch and head into the kitchen. Maybe if I eat something it will take the edge off the hunger to drive my fist through the wall, effectively smothering one hunger by feeding another. Leaning against the counter with a bowl of quinoa and grilled chicken in my hands, I catch a glimpse of Whitney’s apple butter jar, sitting right where Callie left it after she tossed it aside. That sight rouses an idea.

  Maybe I will get out of town. You know where I’ve heard is nice? The Western Slope. I can take I-70 straight out of downtown, and before you know it, I’ll be in Glenwood Springs.

  Then Carbondale.

  Then Paonia.

  Then maybe a little town called Hotchkiss.

  I hear they’ve got fruit orchards full of apples and peaches and pears down there. The Gunnison River runs through every mile, with rainbow trout and browns aplenty in the cold, clear water. A tranquil, relaxing lifestyle where a guy might get lost for a couple of days.

  I bet some people don’t even own TVs.