The Option Play, page 1
The Option Play
Jamie Bennett
Copyright © 2022 Jamie Bennett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at JamieBennettBooks@gmail.com.
This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Book cover by Angela Haddon Book Cover Designs.
Two strikes--and she's out!
Caitlyn Waite didn’t mean to get into trouble. Ok, maybe the first time she caused a stir, it was her own fault—but her run-in with Kellen Karma? No way. She didn’t plan to get tangled up with the big football player and go viral with what was actually was just a big mistake! And whatever people may be saying, thinking, and writing about her, none of it’s true.
But this isn’t baseball, it’s real life. It only takes two strikes before Caitlyn loses her job, her friends, and all her dreams for the future. She’s out.
Or maybe not. Because the next time Kellen Karma pops into her life, the Woodsmen wide receiver has a proposal that might help the both of them get onto the right track. They’re going to scam everyone into thinking that they’re in love, which is going to be harder than it sounds. Sure, Kellen’s gorgeous with a body that makes her get gooey. But in terms of personality?
He struck out there, himself. Everyone knows he’s a jerk.
Or maybe not. There seems to be more to Kellen Karma than Caitlyn had noticed. But that just makes their plot even harder! Yeah, it’s going to take some fudging, some outright lying, and a lot of nerve, but if she and Kellen can pull this off? They’ll both get what they want.
But what does she want, anyway? Is it a return to how things were? Or does Caitlyn’s future suddenly have a lot more to do with the guy in the football uniform?
Chapter 1
I swallowed as the screen turned and pointed in my direction. I didn’t want to look at what it showed, so I closed one eye, squinted the other, and took only a quick glance through my eyelashes to check.
Mercy. Yes, that was what I had expected, but it was still hard to believe that the person in that picture was really me, myself, Caitlyn Waite. I didn’t actually remember doing that, but all my memories of the night when it had been taken were a little cloudy and I couldn’t explain several things that had occurred. For example, the next morning I’d felt around my head and came upon a few pink hair extensions that definitely hadn’t been hanging there when I’d gotten ready to go out with my friends. Also, I’d woken up in bed, but I’d still been wearing shoes. They were someone else’s shoes.
I nodded slowly now at the image on the screen. “Um, yes, that does look like me.”
“Is it, in fact, you?”
“Um, yes,” I had to agree. I really, really wished it wasn’t me in that picture, that I wasn’t the upside-down girl with the red face, the girl drinking beer as fast as she could swallow it. The one with her hair in ropes and tangles and mascara dripping down her cheeks, the one whose top was fighting gravity and was just about to burst open and let her breasts fly free.
Rylah turned the phone and studied the screen herself. She used her finger and thumb to blow up the image, then showed it to the other coach.
Sam slid on reading glasses and squinted at it too. Then he looked up at me.
“Yes, I know,” I said. My mouth was dry and I scrabbled in my Woodsmen Wonderwomen logo bag for my Woodsmen Wonderwomen logo water bottle. “It’s bad.”
“No one’s supporting your legs,” he said, pointing to the picture. “You’re inverted on this keg all by yourself. How long can you hold a handstand?”
“Sam, her gymnastics skills are not the issue we’re meeting about today,” Rylah told him, and they glowered at each other for a little before she turned back to me. “Although this is impressive,” she acknowledged. “I know how much you’ve been working on your upper body and core.”
“Thank you, Coach Rylah,” I answered.
She went on. “The real issue is that this picture went moderately viral. Several hundred people commented on it.”
I nodded, because I already knew all the things that they’d written. A few had been compliments but not too many.
“The comments aren’t even the worst part of this, Caitlyn,” Rylah said. “Do you know who saw this post?” She pointed her finger towards the ceiling and nodded solemnly. “The Man Upstairs.”
“God?” I asked, and gulped again.
Sam snorted and Rylah briefly turned on her glare in his direction. “Well, probably,” she answered, “but I meant the other Man Upstairs. The Woodsmen CEO,” she explained when she saw that I still didn’t get it. “The head of the football team. The big yogurt around here.”
“Yogurt?” Sam laughed. “I think you’re mixing up your milk-based food items, Rylah—”
She kept talking over him. “I mean that the team’s CEO, the Certified Executive Official—”
“Chief Executive Officer,” Sam interrupted back, even louder.
“The guy in charge of the Woodsmen professional football organization called me personally to ask if this was the type of behavior that we allowed from our cheerleaders.” Rylah was practically shouting to drown out her partner. “And I said no, this is not allowed.” She shook her head at me, eyebrows raised. “This is definitely not allowed,” she said in a more normal tone of voice.
“I’m really sorry, Rylah. I am. It was my twenty-first birthday and things got…” How could I explain it? “We were all together, almost the whole Wonderwomen squad hanging out for the first time since the season had ended. We were having so much fun and there were so many things to celebrate. I just celebrated a little too much.” I believed that to be true, although my memories of the night had some holes. Like, several hours seemed to be missing from them.
“We’ve all been there,” Coach Sam said, nodding. “Once, I woke up in Winnetka and I had started the night a few miles away from where we are right now, up at Roy’s Tavern. Still don’t know how that happened.”
I nodded back, because it was just like me and the mysterious hair extensions. None of my friends, the other Woodsmen cheerleaders, had any idea of how they’d ended up on my head, or why someone had used gum and some kind of industrial glue to attach them. The next afternoon, my dad and I’d had to go to his auto body shop to apply a solvent to get them out. I felt carefully around the nape of my neck because even with a lot of conditioning treatments I’d used since, the hair still wasn’t great back there.
But as I did, I was also thinking hard, because something Sam had just said didn’t make sense. “How did you get from northern Michigan to another country so fast?” I asked my coach, and he looked at me and blinked, like he was surprised.
“Winnetka is near Chicago,” he explained, and Rylah coughed loudly and sharply.
“Even if that is true, we’re not talking about tourist crimes in large Midwestern cities,” she announced.
“I didn’t commit a crime, if that’s what—”
“We’re talking about Caitlyn embarrassing this organization with her drunken behavior,” she continued, and shook her head at me. “We’re talking about the comments under the picture.” She glanced down at her phone and chose a few to read aloud to us. “Why didn’t that shirt give up and let her tits fall out. I wanna a piece of that cake. I wish I had the confidence to post this! I dream of being that keg and she would suck on me all day long.”
I dropped my head and stared at my lap. I’d already practically memorized those words and all the others because I’d read them again and again. I remembered the first time I’d seen what people had written about me, right after my friend Shae had called early in the morning after my birthday. She woke me up with the news that a gossip account had somehow gotten a picture of me from the night before.
“Oh my God, Caitlyn, it’s so bad!” she’d said, and her voice had made my head pound with each word. “Have you been online? I can’t believe they used that ugly shot where your forehead looks so greasy! I’m so embarrassed for you! It’s so awful!” Groggy and confused, I’d reached for my phone and stared at the picture and read the comments beneath it until my pillow was all wet from my tears.
“It’s bad, Caitlyn,” Coach Sam agreed with my thoughts. He sounded very, very serious. “You signed a contract with conditions about your behavior. It’s called a morals clause.”
I bit my lip. I vaguely remembered something about that, but I hadn’t really read my contract with the team. I’d been so excited to sign it and be a real cheerleader, the words on the paper hadn’t mattered much and I’d flipped through fast and grabbed a pen. But what I did know, what we all knew, was that Wonderwomen were held to a high standard of behavior. Higher than me balanced on a keg, for sure.
Rylah picked up a piece of paper from her desk. “Woodsmen Wonderwomen cheerleaders will not commit any act which may invite public scandal or ridicule and/or tarnish the reputation of the Woodsmen Football Organization and/or the United Football Confederation,” she read, then looked up at me again. “A drunken keg stand where you’re just about to lose your shirt, surrounded by fifty cheering men who are praying that you’ll expose yourself? That invites ridicule. That’s tarnishing.”
“I see that now,” I said softly. “I’m sorry.” I hesitated, because I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know. “What are you going to do? What’s my punishment?”
Rylah swiped up and the terrible picture of me on my birthday disappeared from her screen. “Caitlyn, you may be a cheerleader for a professional football team, but this is going to be like baseball. You have one strike against you. If you get two strikes, you’re out.”
“No.”
She turned to stare at Sam. “What? We agreed that she’d get another chance.”
“Sam, please,” I begged. This couldn’t be over! I’d wanted to be a cheerleader for the Woodsmen ever since I was a little girl, when my dad had watched the games on TV and sometimes we’d even gone to the huge, noisy stadium to wear the orange and white and support our team. He’d watched the football, but I’d watched the women on the sidelines, dancing and smiling and perfect.
All I’d ever wanted was to be one of them. When I was nineteen, I’d tried out and I’d made it, and the past two Woodsmen seasons had been the most fun, most exciting years of my whole life. And now, because of one dumb night, I was going to lose it? “No, please?” I asked them, but they were busy fighting with each other.
“Rylah, in baseball it’s three strikes and you’re out. This isn’t like baseball at all! You really never watched the game before?” he asked her. “Where the hell are you from, Mars?”
“I’m a football fan, like you should be, Sam! That’s the sport where I put my attention.”
“There’s what’s called an off-season—”
“Excuse me?” I tried again. “Sam and Rylah? Are you saying that I’m not out? It’s like baseball, but not—I mean, do I get another chance?” I asked, hope rising up. I crossed all my fingers and my toes, which was hard in these shoes. I crossed my legs and then my arms. Briefly, I crossed my eyes.
“Yeah, you get one more chance. But only one more. Unlike baseball, where batters have three strikes, the Woodsmen cheerleaders get two,” Sam said. He held up that many fingers as he stared hard at Rylah. She looked at the ceiling again towards the Certified Executive Official and shook her head. “You’ve been a great dancer for us, Caitlyn,” he went on, “and we’d like to have you on our squad for a few more seasons. But we can’t, not if you’re acting like this.”
“You’re a returning cheerleader, a veteran now. You represent our organization and when people see you in pictures like that one, they think all the Wonderwomen are partying like they’re bacalao,” Rylah agreed.
“You kept saying that about me and how I used to act before I got married, so I looked it up and figured out what you meant,” Sam said. “Bacchus. You mean Bacchus, not that other thing. He’s the Roman god of parties and bars, I think.”
She ignored him. “You should be setting the example for the other cheerleaders and for our fans,” Rylah reminded me, and I hung my head again.
“I know. I’m going to set a good example from here on out. I swear I won’t get another strike.”
“One more chance,” Sam repeated. “Come back for auditions next week and remember, we’re watching.”
I stood to leave Rylah’s office and felt a wash of relief through my body that almost made me dizzy. With a small part of my mind, I noticed that my coaches were still arguing about sports rules and ancient religions but all I really heard was the sweet phrase that had come from Sam’s mouth: “One more chance.”
I’d been sure that they were going to march me over to my locker to clean it out, and then order me not to come back and audition again next week. Everyone had to try out, new girls and veterans, for every football season. Wonderwomen cheerleaders returning from the previous year were pretty much shoo-ins and the coaches mostly used the auditions to compare the new candidates to us. But every season was a new contract—the one with the morals clause, apparently. Nothing was guaranteed.
The minute I got outside the stadium and into the big, empty parking lots, I grabbed my Woodsmen Wonderwomen water bottle and took a long, long chug. And water is all you’re going to be drinking for the rest of your life, Caitlyn Waite, I told myself sternly. My mom had warned me to be careful on my twenty-first, but I’d thought it was just more weird, old-fashioned advice that I didn’t really have to listen to.
I’d filed away the “don’t drink too much on your birthday” tip in my mind with her opinion about my former boyfriend, Brown, and how she’d said that he really wasn’t a good guy. I’d told my mom that she was wrong about him. It didn’t mean anything that he still talked to other women, because they were his friends. We hadn’t said that we were exclusive (even if I was to him). Also, I’d continued, it wasn’t a big deal how he honked from the driveway instead of coming to the door to meet her and my dad when he picked me up.
“This isn’t the nineties anymore,” I‘d announced. “Times have changed and so have guys.” And she’d answered something about men being just the same as when she was young, back when everyone got around by riding dinosaurs. Which I’d checked on—no, I knew that she wasn’t around when there were dinosaurs! But no one else had ridden on them, either. It had to do with a meteor and a type of soup. Soup made of primordials, which were like olden-time ingredients.
Just like she’d been right about me drinking too much, it had turned out that my mom also been exactly on point about Brown and his relationship goals. In fact, his goals didn’t actually have anything to do with forming a relationship and were all about removing my bra and underwear. But she hadn’t even whispered an I-told-you-so when he’d dumped me. Instead, she’d hugged me and gone to the store to buy more boxes of tissues.
Now I saw that actually, it was lucky how Brown and I had broken up, because I had all my time free to focus on my career as a Woodsmen cheerleader and on setting a good example by never even tasting alcohol again. The next thing I did after guzzling the water to restore my parched throat was to get on our group chat and tell the girls, my besties from the Wonderwomen, that I was in the clear. Kind of.
Me: I have one strike and I only get one more before I’m out!! But I can come back for tryouts next week and I hope I’ll make it!!!
Bexley: of course you’ll be on the team again with us. So relieved!
Macy left a string of emojis. That was mostly all she ever wrote on her phone.
Shae: Super happy for you girl! What are we doing tonite?
She added a list of suggestions of locations but I shook my head as I read them. Oh, no. I wasn’t going out with them, for sure. I typed my response firmly with my thumbs, full of resolution not to party, not ever again.
Me: I’m not going out. I can’t mess up anymore because Rylah says it’s like baseball. Two strikes and you’re out!!
Bexley: ???
But I couldn’t explain because Shae had already written back that we were only going to dinner and grabbing a drink or two, that we had to because Macy had gotten a promotion at work and weren’t we going to celebrate with her? And then Macy sent a lot more emojis, all sad, crying faces, and I felt terrible. It was really mean of me to ignore her achievement like that.
Shae: What are you going to do, live like a hermit and ignore your squad? And don’t you want to meet a guy?
Then our other friend, Mary Claire, chimed in. She taught exercise classes for older ladies and when she texted during their workouts it was always a little hard to figure out what she was trying to say. This was because she wasn’t actually allowed to write while she was teaching. She had to pretend that she was only messing with her phone to change the music or something so she had to be quick when she typed.
Mary Claire: Carton y es cone f?
I looked at her message, thinking how nice it was that she’d jumped out of Gentle Yoga or Dance Fitness for Seniors to try to be supportive, and I bit my lip. It was hard when all my friends were so persuasive and besides, we were only going to dinner! Shae had also mentioned a few drinks, but I would head right home after the meal part of the night was over.
“Ok,” I wrote back, because of course I wasn’t going to be a hermit. Shae knew me really well, too, because she’d been right in what she’d written: I wanted to meet a new guy for sure. It had been a long, long time since Brown had broken up with me, even a month maybe, which was definitely enough space to have healed from the emotional wounds and move on.
