The Option Play, page 11
“Exactly,” I said, and tucked the receipt back in my bag in case I might need it. If I remembered what it was for. “See how easy?”
“I know you. You’re under contract.”
I pointed at him. “Oh! Now who mentioned it?” Then I poked him with the pen again and signaled with my chin across the gate area. “See that kid? He wants to come over and meet you. Smile at him. No, not the rabid smile! Your normal one.”
As soon as he changed his face, the kid did trot over and asked Kellen to sign his t-shirt. They had a very normal interaction, except when my fake boyfriend told the kid that if he didn’t do well in school, he’d have a miserable life.
“Good,” I said. “Kind of. Next time, just finish with the ‘go Woodsmen’ thing.”
The flight to Detroit was short, and that airport was a lot bigger. Like, more than six gates and a whole lot of concourses and a whole lot of people staring. I watched Kellen as they watched us. He doesn’t like it, I thought. No matter what he’d said about not giving a fudge, he really didn’t like the attention. He did the same thing that I did, keeping his eyes on a point above all their heads so he didn’t really see anyone, and his face was set into a frown.
Until he pushed my fingers away from his neck and looked down at me, shocked. “Did you just try to tickle me?”
“I was trying to get you to relax,” I explained. “I feel like the ants again. I know you said they weren’t aware or whatever, but still.” I flicked my eyes over the sea of faces.
He nodded slightly.
“It’s not too far to the next gate,” I assured both of us. But there were a lot more crowds to face. A lot more stares, a lot of people who’d seen a lot of me. I shook my head to stop thinking about it.
“It’s not far,” he agreed. Then he reached and picked up my hand, which felt better. Maybe they were staring but they were staring at a couple, which they all believed to be a real couple. Anyway, there were two of us, together. We made it the rest of the way to the second plane and I was able to let my dad know we had time to spare, so he could stop worrying about having to take off work to drive us to Florida.
“You’re really eating those?” Kellen asked when we were on our way to Miami.
First class was something I’d only walked through on my way to the cheaper seats at the back and I had to say, I was enjoying this new experience. Especially the snacks. “They’re delicious,” I said, and had another cookie. “I never thought plane food would be this good.”
“If you’re actually hungry, I have more healthful options.” He reached into the leather and canvas backpack he’d been carrying and took out some metal containers.
I accepted one, interested. “What do you have?”
“That’s dried wakame. Seaweed,” he explained, just as I’d popped the top and taken a big sniff.
“Oh!” I gagged slightly. “You’re eating that plain?”
“It’s an excellent source of several vitamins and minerals,” he said, and then told me exactly which ones.
“What else do you have?” I took another container and was a lot more cautious when I opened it and looked inside. “Oh, this doesn’t smell much better…no, it’s worse. You should keep this closed or they’re going to boot us to coach.”
“It’s homemade salmon jerky,” he said briefly. “I also have baked chickpeas and azuki beans. And bananas.”
“I’ll take one of those, please,” I said, and was happy to get something that looked familiar. “You’re really into your diet. Did you have someone figure it out for you? I know a woman in town who lots of the Woodsmen players go to for nutrition advice.”
“I didn’t need anyone to tell me anything. I read, researched, and figured out my own plan,” Kellen told me.
“That’s what you said you did about the car battery, too,” I remembered. “Is that what you’re doing with your free time? Reading? Researching?”
“I read a lot.” He reached into his bag again and this time took out a book, a real one that had a hard cover and must have weighed fifty pounds. And he’d been worried about my luggage coming in over the limit?
I lifted it from his hands and read the title out loud. “Observational Data and the Development of Labor Market Theory. What is this about?”
“Exactly what it says.”
“I still have no idea,” I told him. “Imagine what you would say if I asked you to explain the Graham technique. Martha Graham,” I helpfully supplied. “Or if I wanted you to use Laban movement analysis to describe how you’d teach a beginning ballet class. How would you do that?”
“Ok. So you don’t spend all day long at that college running around in a tutu.”
I turned angrily, but saw that he was smirking. “Ha ha. When you were in college, you probably spent all your time making out with your calculator.”
“Making out with my calculator.” He pursed his lips. “I do really love it.”
I studied his mouth and thought about him kissing. His lips were full but not feminine. I bet he’d kiss hard with them, hard but also soft. Powerful but sweet. I bet it would be good.
“What?”
I moved my gaze up to his eyes. “Nothing. Can I have another banana? I was too upset to eat this morning before we left,” I explained. “I’m very independent but I can be upset sometimes!” I added when I saw he was about to speak, because I knew what was going to come out of his mouth.
He shrugged but gave me the fruit. “We should discuss our cover story,” he remarked.
I tried one of his dried chickpeas, too. Not bad. “I know. What if we say that we met when your car broke down last winter and you couldn’t get cell service to call for help, and luckily I came across you out on the road alone or you would have frozen to death?”
“I wouldn’t have frozen to death,” he informed me, and then explained five strategies that he would have used to prevent that. “Besides, it makes me sound weak, like I can’t fix my own car.”
I shrugged slightly and didn’t point out the obvious, which was that he couldn’t. “What’s your idea?”
“Mutual friends. It’s how sixty-four percent of American couples meet.” Kellen took out a super-skinny laptop from his bag. “Here. I worked on it,” he said, and opened a spreadsheet. It was all spelled out: how we met (mutual friends), how long we’d been together (eighty-three days), what our first date was (sushi then a lecture on “Diglossia and Dhivehi” at the college).
I pointed to that section. “No, I wouldn’t go to this lecture, because I never go to lectures. I don’t even know what this means. Either of these words.”
“I went,” he said. “It was fascinating and if anyone checks out our story, then we’re covered.”
“No one’s going to go back and check if there was actually a lecture on dervishes. And you didn’t get to why we were in the Silver Dollar the night of the unfortunate incident and how my dress ended up ripped. If we had really been dating then, I bet you would have reacted differently. Like, if some girl pulled down my boyfriend’s pants and exposed his penis to a crowd, then that video would have ended with me screaming my head off and escorting her out of the bar myself. ‘Scene’ wouldn’t have described it. It would have been…”
“A fracas. Melee.” Kellen frowned. “I didn’t really know you then,” he said.
“It’s ok, I’m not blaming you. I just mean that it might seem weird to people that you didn’t react more. Maybe we could say we started dating after the unfortunate incident—although that would mean that we haven’t been together for very long, and it might also seem weird that you’d already want me to come look at teams with you. How did you settle on us lasting eighty-three days so far?”
“I’m twenty-six and you’re twenty-one. The average length of a relationship between people in our age bracket is ninety-eight days.”
“Right,” I said, understanding. “You mean because we’ll ‘break up’ after this fifteen-day trip. I can add, too,” I told him, and poked him like I had with the pen. He shook his head but stopped with the frown. “We should also know about each other’s lives. Like our families.”
“Your parents are Jenny and Bill. They met in high school. You’re an only child and you’ve told me all about your cousins. You’ve told me a lot.” He rolled his eyes a little.
He got another poke for that. “What about you? Just about all I know is that your parents made up your last name,” I said.
Kellen pointed at his laptop screen. “‘Diglossia’ means two forms of the same language used in different situations. Classical Arabic, used for writing, is very different from the spoken Arabic in many countries. Another example is Tamil.”
“Huh.” I’d never heard of this. Any of it.
“And Dhivehi is the language spoken in the Maldives.” Then he cracked open his huge book and read it steadily, only responding with a word or two when I tried to ask him more questions, and those words weren’t good answers. He read very fast, turning the leaves with sharp little flicks and running his finger down the middle of each page, then flicking again. I watched him for a while before I fell asleep, because I’d been up the night before, too, thinking about this very trip.
Miami was hot and humid and I loved it the moment we stepped out of the airport. A driver met us with a long, white limo this time. “It’s like prom,” I whispered, and Kellen frowned.
“The team sent this car. I don’t need this.”
I checked the minibar as soon as we got in. “It’s totally stocked. Woah! Did you know that champagne came in such tiny bottles? They’re so cute!” I took a picture.
“Isn’t it a little early?”
“I’m not drinking it,” I said, and put it back. “I don’t really drink.”
His eyebrows went up. He must have been remembering the keg stand.
“Except two times,” I said, and frowned right back at him. “Two times, and they both ended up terrible, and that was enough for me.” I settled my butt back angrily into the seat.
“I know what happened the second time,” he said. Yeah, everyone knew about my keg stand. The views on that had gone way, way up since my second strike. “What happened the first time?”
“I was nineteen and I puked all over my friend Gaby’s car.” I winced. “It was awful. She brought it into the shop afterwards and my dad was so mad at me, he made me clean every inch of the interior myself. And we did all kinds of body work on it for free. But she deserved it, because she was so nice about everything. She’s still one of my best friends, like a big sister. She’s married to the offensive coordinator and I was in the wedding,” I mentioned.
“Matthews? Ben Matthews?” His frown came back, majorly. “Your friend is married to the Woodsmen offensive coordinator? Have you been talking to her about me?”
“Some,” I answered. “Nothing about the thing-which-may-not-be-named. The contract,” I explained, and he shook his head. “Sorry, but you obviously didn’t get what I wasn’t naming. You said that the Woodsmen team already knows that you’re looking at other places to play and I never told Gaby the truth about us.” Which still felt terrible. “Am I not supposed to say anything, to talk to her about you at all? That would be weird. Don’t you tell your friends stuff?”
He shrugged.
“Well, she definitely knows I’m going to Florida with you, but the whole world knows. Somebody posted it on all your accounts for you.” I showed him my screen. “It’s a good picture.”
Kellen took my phone and looked at it closely. “I suppose so.” He didn’t seem overly pleased.
“So, what are we doing now that we’re here? Oh, there’s the ocean! There’s the ocean!”
“That’s Biscayne Bay. The ocean is on the other side.”
“How do you know? Wait—you read about it,” I filled in.
“I’ve been here before,” he told me, but didn’t say any more about when or why. “Tonight, we have a dinner with my agent and some of the officials from the Cottonmouths at the stadium south of the city.”
“At the stadium?” I imagined hot dogs were in our future, if their food was anything like what Woodsmen Stadium served. “Well, that sounds cool. And I’m supposed to go?”
“You’re my girlfriend,” he reminded me, and I started to smile, because it sounded nice—until he added, “as far as they know.”
“You’re getting worse about it than I am. If you keep saying things like that, eventually you’re going to spill the beans about how we’re fake.”
“No, I won’t. Until then, we could go to the beach. I wouldn’t mind taking a swim.”
I thought about him in a bathing suit. “I wouldn’t mind that at all,” I agreed. This trip was starting out great. I smiled at Kellen’s profile. Really great.
Chapter 7
No, it was weird. Really weird. I was getting ready in the bathroom—the one bathroom that we were sharing—and Kellen was sitting just outside the door, waiting for me. Well, not directly outside, because this was a big, beautiful suite and he was in the living area, but it felt close. I guessed that it bothered me because I was only wearing one of the nice hotel robes, which wasn’t actually a lot of protection between my body and the rest of the world. A lot more fabric than my Wonderwomen cheer outfit, that was for sure, and a whole lot more than I’d worn today at the beach, but still. This felt different. Weird!
As for the beach, things there had not gone exactly how I’d imagined. Yes, Kellen had been in a bathing suit, but when he’d said that he wanted to swim, he meant that he was going to wear goggles and do laps. As soon as a nice attendant got us set up on some comfy chairs on the sand under a big umbrella, my fake boyfriend took off for the water. Like, before I’d even removed the cute sarong that I’d gotten all those years before in Hawaii, he was gone.
I’d lain back in the chair and imagined how I’d spend a day on the beach with a real boyfriend instead of this pretend one. I pictured the blonde guy again, giving him light blue eyes this time with dark rims around the irises, a look I found very attractive. He would bring me drinks and put sunscreen on my shoulders. “Oh, that’s great,” I told him as he also massaged my back. Yeah, it would have been.
Kellen, the fake boyfriend, kept swimming until I had to leave the beach to come up to our room to get ready in this gorgeous bathroom. The one that was just a few inches of hollow wood away from him. And honestly? I’d never been this close to nude in front of a man. Unless you counted my Wonderwomen uniform, my bikinis, and when I’d gone as a mermaid for Halloween and worn a shell bra. My dad had not been happy about that costume.
Actually, I had been more naked than this, and in front of a lot more men. In front of thousands of them, because they’d all seen me in the pictures and the video after Brown had ripped my dress. But in a way, that didn’t feel real—or at least, it felt like there was a space between me and them. This was very, very close. Kellen’s chair creaked and I could hear it because the room was totally silent as he read in his chair. I could almost hear the pages as he flicked them.
“Caitlyn, are you ready?”
“Almost,” I called back to him. That wasn’t true, but I was hurrying. “Coming!” I turned on the hairdryer and worked on styling as fast as I could, but by the time I was doing my eyes, Kellen was pounding on the other side of the door.
I yanked it open. “I said that I was coming!”
“I need to get in there, too,” he said, and walked right past me and turned on the shower. Then he started to pull off his shirt.
Well.
“Are you going to stand there as I strip?”
Well…
But I did grab my makeup bags and got myself out, helped along by his hand on my back guiding me through the door. In the five seconds it took him to shower, shave, and dress, I was almost there. It was only fifteen more minutes after that, or maybe twenty.
“Finally,” he commented as we waited in the freezing cold air conditioning of the lobby for the car that the Cottonmouths had sent.
“We beat our ride!” I told him, then looked at him closely. “Are you nervous about tonight?”
“We’ll be eating with the head coach, Chris Cattaneo, and his wife. There will also be other Cottonmouth front office personnel.” He named them, and they included the general manager, the team president, and the owner.
“The owner of the team is coming to have dinner with you?” I asked, impressed. “They must really want you to play for them.”
Kellen shrugged. “They’re very, very thin at wide receiver since Nico Williams retired. He’s in the broadcast booth now.”
I knew all about Williams, because he’d played for the Woodsmen, too. “His wife has a bakery back home and it’s delicious,” I added, but Kellen wouldn’t have known. All the items there had sugar and none were made of fish. “Hey.”
He turned to look at me.
“You don’t need to be nervous,” I told him. “They want you, not the other way around.”
“I wouldn’t mind playing for the Florida Cottonmouths,” he said, and his kissable mouth got kind of tight. Yeah, I thought, he’s nervous. “Bigger media market. Better weather. Better quarterback, that’s for sure.”
“Ok, you want it too, but they’re desperate. Harbison isn’t going to do it for them at receiver. He was ok as Williams’ backup, but he’s not a big-game guy. And he dropped more than he caught.”
Kellen stared at me. “How do you know that?”
“Mercy! How would anyone know anything? Reading, of course. Research.”
He laughed, which was what I’d been hoping he’d do. In the car on the way to the stadium, which was a long drive south of the city, we talked about dumb stuff as a distraction. I told him stories about weird things I’d done as a kid, like how my favorite snack was toast with honey and one time I’d dropped it onto an ant hill and then kept eating it before my mom saw.
He looked disgusted. I had to admit, it was bad. According to her, I’d digested more than a few. “I’ve noticed that you don’t have very discerning taste,” Kellen commented. But then he told me about when he was a kid and threw up after eating a whole pile of octopus in the Maldives, and they mostly came back up whole. More interesting to me than the part where he vomited was the part about him being in that far-off place.
