The Option Play, page 10
At least, I thought that was what she’d wanted to ask me, but she’d been at work and writing while she was teaching her exercise classes, so it had been hard to interpret. There was definitely something about killer, which I’d thought meant Kellen, and rubber at the Sliver Door and a starving stride. I’d just answered her that things were great.
Besides MC, Bexley had been writing, too. She and I had never been super close but it was good to hear from her again, and she’d even wanted to make plans. Maybe my Woodsmen Wonderwomen friends were coming back? I hoped so.
I’d told Bex that sorry, I couldn’t go out, because I was going away. Which I was, tomorrow. Kellen was picking me up to drive to the airport and we were stopping in Detroit on the way to Miami, where we’d stay in a hotel near the ocean. I was excited, very, but also very nervous. More than I’d expected to be, so having Gaby here was nice. It made this seem normal, like it should be fun.
She checked her phone and then hugged me. “Let me know how you’re doing while you’re gone, ok?” she said. “I want to hear what’s happening.” She tilted her head like she was considering. “Do you really want to do this? You don’t seem very into this trip.”
I opened my mouth and the words almost started coming out—like, I almost started to tell her the truth about why I was going, the truth about me and Kellen. It had been hard over the last week or so to keep this secret, so, so much more difficult than I’d ever imagined. Every time I turned around, I was lying to someone about me, about him, about our relationship. At first, I’d been happy about the new, positive publicity, but that had turned into pressure, too. It felt like the whole world was a witness to my dishonesty. I wanted to confess, to tell my friend what was actually happening between me and my “boyfriend.”
“No, I really want to go,” I said instead, and hugged her again. I’d signed an official, legal document, and after my experience with the morals clause in my contract with the Wonderwomen, I knew those weren’t to be messed with.
“Are you nervous about sex? About sleeping with him?”
“No,” I answered immediately and very strongly, because there wasn’t going to be any of that. No matter how many brochures about prophylactics and pills that I had hidden under my bed, sex wouldn’t be happening. “No, I’m not worried about sex.”
“Good,” Gaby said. “I’m glad you’re not. After what went on with Brown—”
“Nope,” I said, cutting her off. “Not worried at all.”
When she left, I took off the bikini and put on flannel PJs, then slowly kept packing. I had to admit that it had occurred to me, the whole “sex with Kellen” idea. We had a contract that very clearly stated that it wasn’t going to happen, but I also knew that crazy things went on during vacations to sunny places. When a bunch of girls from my high school went to Antigua for spring break, for example, one of them had come back with a husband. And also, she’d tried to hide a lizard in her luggage to keep for a pet. A lizard! True story.
I stood with a pile of bras in my hand. Sex with Kellen. If he was like a lot of the other single guys on the football team, then his schedule was already full-up with that activity. Women were practically crawling on the Woodsmen, and not only here, but also in the cities where they had their away games. They had their pick, practically, and I’d seen it with my own two eyes. The Wonderwomen didn’t usually travel with the team unless it was for something special, like when Davis Blake had still been the quarterback and they’d won the championship. We’d seen how much attention the players had gotten on the trip, but I didn’t actually remember Kellen going off with anyone.
I thought hard, but I’d never seen him with anyone at all, except that one time when he’d been out with his image consultant on the night of the unfortunate incident. What did he do with his time? I picked up my phone and looked at some of the Woodsmen fan sites, and they did have stories about him.
Like, “I saw Kellen Karma buying organic produce at Green Goddess Grocery. I asked him for his autograph and he acted like he didn’t even hear me, the dick!” There were more than a few examples of bad behavior at the Green Goddess Grocery. But also, “We contacted Kellen Karma to see if he would be one of our celebrity MCs for our big adoption night. He (or one of his people) wrote back ‘no’ and that was it. Who doesn’t want to help homeless dogs and cats?” And there was a picture of the cutest puppy ever accompanying that complaint, and really, how could he have said no to that face?
But there wasn’t anything about him going out, about him and a woman, about him and anything else other than descriptions of brief encounters where he’d been rude. I knew, very personally, how people online could interpret you wrong, but I knew Kellen a little, too. He did come off as rude sometimes—first I’d heard about it from Bexley, and I’d also seen it myself. And this many people writing with so many different examples made it obvious that there was a real pattern.
From what I’d scrolled through, all I knew was that he got groceries a lot, went to the car wash sometimes, and made people mad at him in all cases. There had to be more. “What do you do in your free time?” I typed on my phone, sent it, and waited for a minute. Kellen was usually pretty quick to write back to me. I’d been pestering him with questions about the flights and about Miami and he’d always responded fast.
He did again.
Kellen: I spend most of my life answering you.
I smiled at the screen.
Me: No, seriously! You don’t like bars, restaurants, so…what? Where do you go?
Kellen: I usually stay here.
Me: Do your friends come over?
Kellen: Sure. Are you packed? One bag only.
That had been something we’d argued a little over. Maybe we’d argued a lot.
Me: Yeah, just the one!!! Mercy.
Luckily, he hadn’t thought about size restrictions.
Kellen: No larger than 62 total linear inches and 70 lbs.
Well, darn. I stared in dismay at the bag I was currently packing, because it was large enough that I could have fit Kellen himself in there. “Mom?” I called out of my door. “I’m going to have to borrow some of your suitcases.”
The next morning, waiting for him to come, I was a giant ball of nerves. “Sit down and eat something, Bit!” my dad urged me, but there was just no way I could swallow any food. I picked up my coffee cup to refill it but my mom shook her head.
“I think that’s making you jittery. The last time I saw you so anxious was when you tried out—” She stopped, but I knew what she meant. The last time I’d been this anxious was when I’d tried out for the Wonderwomen for the first time. Both my parents had dropped me off at the stadium that day and I remembered very well when I’d come out after the preliminary audition and announced that I’d made it through. They’d been so proud of me, and I’d been so proud of myself.
“I’m just concerned that we won’t make the connecting flight. We don’t have that much time in Detroit,” I said, which really had been on my mind, because my dad had always obsessed over connections when we flew and apparently, that had rubbed off on me. “We could easily miss it,” I added. That made him sit down at the kitchen table to start checking on things, telling me what other routes we could use to get to Florida if we arrived late at Detroit Metro. His ideas included connecting through Reno and Dallas, or him driving the two of us south himself, which he said wouldn’t be a problem.
“It’s ok, Dad. I’m sure it will work…” I stopped as I glanced into the driveway. “That must be Kellen now.” This was really happening.
A black car with tinted windows had pulled up at our house and Kellen did emerge from the back seat. He walked to the door and I let him in, just as my dad was calling from the kitchen, offering another alternate route but we’d have to go through Toronto for that one.
“Hi,” I greeted my fake boyfriend. “I stayed totally regulation for my luggage.”
“Good,” he answered, but frowned when he saw what I was pointing at. “Two bags. Two? And you consider that to be regulation?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I do. They’re both exactly the right size, under sixty-two linear inches and seventy pounds. And I think you made up the rule that they only allow a single suitcase.”
He shrugged. Caught!
“So we’re good,” I said. “If you grab one, I’ll get the other.”
Kellen didn’t move. “If those weigh seventy pounds, then so do I.”
“Don’t be silly. I stood on the bathroom scale and held them and then subtracted my weight.” And if that scale was wrong and I weighed more than it had said, I was going to be really mad. Or would I weigh less in that scenario?
“You’re certain that you need all this?”
“We’re going for two weeks,” I told him. “I definitely need all this. I can’t walk around naked in New Mexico and California.”
“They don’t appreciate that in most parts of Florida, either. Only in designated areas.”
“Is that another joke?”
He stopped frowning at the suitcases and smiled at me. I had thought, a vision, of Kellen standing in the sun, smiling at me on a beach. A nude beach. So in my mind, he was naked and mercy, that—
My mom walked in from the kitchen and the vision exploded. “Naked? Who’s naked?” she asked. “Caitlyn, you left your curling iron plugged in again upstairs.” She tapped her lip with a luggage tag. “Do you have—”
And I knew that she was going to ask me if I had the gallon-sized baggie of condoms that she’d strategically left on my pillow the night before. “Mom! I have everything under control. We don’t need anything. Please, let’s not discuss it.” Not in front of Kellen.
His eyebrows went up. “The weather is lovely today,” he told her very formally and she nodded, smiling. “Not much chance that we’ll have a wind-, rain-, or fog-related crash on our way to Detroit. The biggest issues of concern will be mechanical failure or pilot error for that leg. I’ve been tracking a storm system across the Southeast and have some concerns about microbursts. One of those could take down our plane quite easily, particularly on our approach into the airport in Florida.”
“What?”
“Kellen!” I said, but he was already repeating that remark word for word to my dad when he came to say good morning. “Time to go,” I announced to my parents’ stunned faces. We left in a flurry of hugs and kisses from me and instructions from her about sunscreen and from him about airport parking and leaving things out on the seats—like finding an open spot in the lot was ever hard or like break-ins were a problem at our small airport. Also, we had a driver, who said hello as I got into the black Lincoln. He closed the car door behind me and that was it. We were going.
I watched my parents standing in the driveway, waving as we backed up. They were still there when we turned off my street.
“We don’t need to worry about parking,” Kellen noted. “We have a driver.”
I nodded.
“Caitlyn?” When I didn’t answer, he said my name again, and then also tapped me on the shoulder. “Why are you crying?” he asked when I eventually turned his way.
“I’m going to miss them.”
He crinkled his nice eyebrows. “You’ll only be gone for fifteen days.”
“Still,” I said, and that made him nod…knowingly? “What are you thinking?” I demanded.
“This is probably the first time you’ve exercised any independence,” he said. “It must be hard. You delayed it for much too long.”
“I exercise plenty!” No, I didn’t. I should have gotten in a lot more workouts before this trip, but I did the independence thing, too. “Just because I live with my parents doesn’t mean that I’m not independent.”
“That’s exactly what it means. You eat the food they cook, let them do your laundry.”
How had he figured that out?
“You work for your father, you vacation together. I would call you dependent.”
“I would call you a know-it-all,” I muttered.
“What?”
“I said that this will be a great time to show you how self-sufficient I am,” I said, and he shook his head.
“That wasn’t what you—”
“If you’re thinking that I’m going to be a little girl that you need to take care of on this trip, you’re entirely mistaken,” I informed him, and then looked out the window again so he couldn’t see that I was still pretty sad. Yes, I was a totally independent, self-sufficient woman. And yes, I was going to miss my parents a lot.
I was also worried about how this trip was going to go, with just me and Kellen. How well did we even know each other? Not well at all, I answered my own question. How was it going to be to share a hotel room with him? Would I really be able to pretend to be crazy in love with him for fifteen days? We’d gotten into an argument within the first five minutes of being in this car!
My nerves got worse the moment we got out of it. It was a small airport, but there it was again: the concentrated attention. People stared and gaped and it made my stomach churn as I imagined what they were thinking about. I tried to ignore them and nudged my “boyfriend” and he jumped slightly.
“We should take a picture,” I said. “Put your arm around me and get closer. I initialed that clause about photo ops.”
“You’re not supposed to reference that.”
“Oh, yeah. Last time, I swear.” We stood together and he almost had to squat with how I held the phone. “No, you take it instead,” I said, shaking my head. “Your arms are longer and you won’t have to lean so far over that you look like you’re bowing.” So he adjusted me closer to his side and we smiled up at the phone. I stepped a bit nearer and he held me even tighter.
He took several before I was satisfied with the results. “Give them to Landon what’s-his-name so he can get them posted, too,” I ordered. “Or do you want to keep this quiet, so that the Woodsmen people don’t know that you’re talking to other teams?”
“They know. It’s not a secret.”
“So the Man Upstairs isn’t going to be mad?” I asked, remembering what my former coach Rylah had called the head of the team.
“God?” Kellen asked.
“No, the Woodsmen CEO. The, um, certified…no, the chief executive officer. The big yogurt.” That was another thing she’d said. “Cheese, I mean.”
“Why are you talking about dairy products? The Woodsmen want me to stay with them, yes. They’re presenting an offer to my agent, but I’m free to talk to other teams, too. They know it’s happening and because they didn’t lock me up last season with a better contract, it’s their own damn fault.”
We were moving through security as we talked. It was a very short line but we did get slowed up because more than a few people wanted to stare or get close to Kellen, and the bravest went ahead and asked him to sign something. He immediately said no, as I’d known that he would.
“Why won’t you do autographs? It’s mean,” I informed him as we walked to the gate. There were only six at this airport, so it was a short walk.
“It’s asinine. Why would someone want something that I sign?”
“Because they do!” I said. “Why does it matter what the reason is? Step one of not being a jerk is to start giving autographs and taking selfies with your fans. If you want them to be your fans, that is. You’re not going to sell a lot of shoes if no one likes you.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. Then he muttered something, much quieter than he usually spoke.
“What?” I cupped my hand to my ear. “Say that again, please.”
“I don’t like things like that,” he repeated, slightly louder. “When they come up for autographs, I have to talk to them.”
“You mean that you don’t like to talk to strangers?” That was what my mom used to tell me not to do when I was a kid, but those days were long gone for a big guy like Kellen Karma.
“I’m not good with it. I get, uh, uncomfortable.” He scowled. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”
“Are you saying that you’re shy? Really? You’re on everyone’s TV and playing on a field in front of, like, a hundred thousand people in the stadium on game days!”
“Actually, the capacity of Woodsmen Stadium is…” He stopped. “That’s different,” he said, and sighed. “I know what I’m doing on the field. Always. I don’t leave anything to chance. I have statistics on every defender I’m going to face and on his back-up, and on that guy’s back-up. When I have to face strangers, I don’t know anything.”
“I’d be more scared of the big cornerback on the Granite,” I mentioned. “I get it, though. I got really nervous during the interview part of the Wonderwomen tryout. They asked us questions like reporters and we had to be normal. Make sense and not start giggling or crying or puking,” I explained. “It was scary not to know what was going to come at me, how they were going to try to trip me up.” I’d barely squeaked through the interviews both seasons that I’d made the squad. “But the people who want your autograph aren’t going to grill you. They’re going to say, ‘Great game, Mr. Karma! Can you sign my hat?’ And you’ll say, ‘Thanks, bud. Sure, I’ll sign. Stay in school!’”
“Stay in school,” he repeated.
“Or not that, but something nice. You could just tell them, ‘Go Woodsmen!’ Everybody says that. Here, let’s practice.” I reached in my bag and found a pen. “Um, Mr. Karma? Kellen Karma?” I asked.
“I’m not doing this.”
I poked him with the pen. “Excuse me? Hello?”
He sighed again. “Yes, stranger?”
“Will you sign my, uh…will you sign this old paper receipt that I was keeping in case I needed to return something on it, but now I can’t remember what it was that I might want to return, and the words have rubbed off anyway?”
He took the crumpled paper. “Sure, I’ll sign. Go Woodsmen.” He scrawled his name with a big flourish.
