The Option Play, page 12
“Is that why you went to the lecture at my college about the language in those islands—the Div—Dah—”
“Dhivehi.”
“Dhivehi,” I repeated, and said it a few more times in my mind. “Are you interested in the Dhivehi language because you visited where it’s spoken?” I asked, but at that moment, we turned into a wide drive that led up to a giant, pink stadium. Much larger than Woodsmen Stadium and definitely more vibrant, which made sense for Florida. There were fountains with sprays of colored water and big, abstract murals covered the towering walls.
“It’s beautiful!” I breathed. “Isn’t it, Kellen?” He nodded back, looking grim. So when the driver opened the door of the car and we got out, I took his hand. “You look very nice tonight,” I told him, and he totally did. He’d put on a blazer, one that was fancier than his usual button-up shirts but also summery and cool, and also navy blue which made his eyes look beautiful. He looked so tall and strong and handsome. “Very nice,” I repeated.
“Thank you. As do you.”
I hoped so. I was wearing a dress that my friend Gaby loved, a lighter pink than this stadium and very Florida-looking. I was a little unhappy that I’d gotten no hint of tan at all on the beach today and my skin was still a close match to the paint color of our white limo. I could have gone for a spray tan back home, but the last time I’d done that, I’d ended up a little more orange than I’d been comfortable with. A hue closer to a carrot than I liked to be. So now, I needed some actual sun or someone was going to mistake me for cauliflower instead.
“We both look good,” I announced. “We’re both ready for tonight.” I looked up at him and he still seemed nervous, so I squeezed his hand, and when he looked down at me, I smiled. After a moment, he did back, his normal one and not the scary snarl-smile.
That came out when we were meeting the Cottonmouth people in a huge, fancy, chrome, pink, and yellow lobby that they said was part of the players’ area. Kellen’s agent was already there, and the head coach, a bunch of team officials, and most importantly, the Cottonmouth’s owner. The biggest of all the yogurts—no, the biggest cheese, I meant. Kellen definitely got the “I’m going to bite you” grin instead of his normal face and I let him know by pinching his hip. He jumped and frowned at me, but at least that made him stop scaring the people he might be working for.
And they were all very nice. We both got introduced around to everyone and their wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, and there was absolutely no way that I was going to remember them all. Kellen did, somehow, and I tried to pay attention when he called them each by name. We had cocktails (some of us) and talked about general, non-football stuff, until the GM said, “Let’s go on in,” and led us all through doors and down a tunnel.
“It’s like going to the field at Woodsmen Stadium,” I whispered to Kellen and he nodded to me. We walked out of the end of the tunnel, and it was amazing. They had set up a big table with a white cloth and gold chairs on the turf at the fifty-yard line, and there were waiters and champagne buckets and flowers and candles and it was beautiful!
“Woah,” I breathed, and Kellen took my hand again. “They did this for you,” I whispered to him. “This is how much they want you on their team.” I squeezed his fingers again to make my point.
“Your ring is digging into me,” was what he said back. And then, for no apparent reason, he added, “I lived part of my life in the Maldives. Twenty-three months when I was nine and ten.” Before I could answer, we were at the beautiful table and being shown to our seats.
We didn’t sit next to each other—they seated all the “couples” separately, and the table was big enough that I couldn’t tell what was happening at his end of the rectangle except that while he was sitting flagpole-straight, at least he wasn’t doing the weird smile anymore. He and the agent guy appeared to be listening a lot and at one point, Kellen started taking notes on his phone. I watched as he stared people down, but they were all pretty tough and didn’t start to sweat or anything.
The people I was seated with, the non-business side of the party, weren’t half as serious. They told me all about Florida and how much I’d like it, how much fun I’d have, what a great life it would be for me and Kellen.
Me and Kellen. I was a fraud, sitting here and listening to them, letting them think that I’d have some influence over his decision-making. I glanced down the white cloth and saw him watching me. He raised an eyebrow and I nodded back, but that made him frown. When dinner was over and the GM wanted us to go up to his skybox for coffee and dessert, Kellen came straight to my chair.
“Why did you look upset?” he asked. “Was the filet mignon bad?”
“No, I’m fine. What did you eat?”
“I’m fine.”
Good, we were fine. As we went up to the box, Maria Cattaneo, the head coach’s wife, started talking to both Kellen and me.
“You two should know, I’m a big busybody,” she said, smiling. “I keep track of everyone on the team and worry about them.”
“Like they need another mother,” the coach put in.
“Some of them do!” she told him. “I love watching the new couples. I’m guessing that you haven’t been together for very long.”
“Um, no,” I said, just as Kellen answered, “Eighty-three days.”
She was totally startled. “Eighty…”
“Not that he’s counting!” I said. I had to make him sound less like a robot. “It’s just easy for him to remember, because we met, um, it was on my birthday.” They might know when his was, but not mine. At first I congratulated myself for my quick thinking but then got the idea that it seemed like I was getting better at lying, and that was…
Maria Cattaneo still smiled. “How did you meet?”
There was a terrible silence. “At a lecture,” I said, at the same exact moment that Kellen announced, “We were introduced by mutual friends.”
Shoot! The lecture was supposed to be our first date. Kellen shot poison darts at me with his eyes.
“We were introduced by mutual friends at a lecture on ‘Diglossia and Dhivehi’ at the college I go to,” I said, slightly louder. “It was about different ways to speak the language in these islands where Kellen used to live. They’re called the Maldives and they’re closest to India and Sri Lanka. In a different ocean from the Florida one.”
“How interesting!” she said, and it turned out she was really into travel and learning languages, so the two of them lit into that topic. I focused on trying to stop the cold sweat that had started when her questions had begun.
She kept asking us more during dessert, which Kellen wasn’t having. I wasn’t either, even though it wasn’t like me to avoid a sweet. My stomach was already in a knot and I hadn’t enjoyed the filet, even though it had smelled great.
“Caitlyn mentioned that she used to be a Woodsmen cheerleader,” she said to him, and then turned to me. “Why did you leave the team? Was it too much with your schoolwork? I’ve heard from the cheerleaders here that it’s quite a load!”
“Oh,” I muttered, not sure of how to respond. She hadn’t seen the video. There was someone left who hadn’t seen it? “Um,” I went on, but then stopped again.
Kellen put his hand on my back. He had before, earlier that night, but this felt different. First, it was on my bare skin due to the low cut of my dress, and second, he wasn’t trying to remove me from the bathroom so that he could get ready, so this felt comforting instead of pushy. “Caitlyn was an excellent cheerleader,” he said, in that way he had of answering without really answering. “I think that she was the best dancer on the squad. Definitely the most charismatic.” He looked down at me and explained, “I watched all the available game tape and you drew the eye more than any other woman.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “I appreciate that.” And I did. I got a warm feeling all over, not just where his palm rested.
“Maybe you could try out for the Cottonmouth Chorus,” Maria Cattaneo suggested, and I just shrugged. “There’s no pressure!” she told me with a smile, and then went to find where the coffee was being served.
I relaxed, sagging slightly against Kellen’s palm. He’d left it against my back. “This is harder than I thought,” I whispered. “We should have practiced our story more.”
“We didn’t practice at all.”
“Well, we’re going to start tonight when we get out of here. But did you really mean that?” I asked him. “What you said about me and my dancing?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t lying. Not about that part.” He took his hand away to rub his own forehead. “This is harder than I anticipated, too.”
But the night wasn’t over. We took a short tour of the complex and I had to admit that the locker rooms and lounges were a lot nicer than what we had at Woodsmen Stadium. I saw Kellen notice them, too. As we walked, I chatted more with the offensive coordinator’s boyfriend while Kellen talked with the head coach. Their conversation seemed to get pretty serious and his agent joined them, and I lost track of what I was supposed to be saying while I watched. Finally, we returned to the lobby where we’d started out and it was time to go. I was exhausted like I’d just finished cheering on a game day.
“I thought it went well,” I announced when we got back into the white limo, and then yawned so big that my jaw cracked. “I liked all the people and I liked the stadium, too. What did you think? What were you and Coach Cattaneo talking about before we left?”
“He suggested that I meet more of the team tomorrow. My agent’s setting it up and I’ll go work out with them and then, somehow, we’ll magically bond. The center’s girlfriend is going to text you so you can meet her and some of her friends. Would you want to do that? You don’t know them.”
“This would be my chance to,” I said. “Over dinner, everyone was talking about all the stuff to do here and it would be fun to see the sights. And I should start to meet people if we...” I stopped. “Oh. I won’t really need to meet people, of course! I wouldn’t really be coming to Florida.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” We rode in silence for a while before he spoke again. “Did you research the lecture on diglossia at the college?”
“Yeah, because I didn’t know what you were talking about, even after you explained it to me. I’m pretty bad with geography, too, I guess. I’d never heard of the place where you grew up so I wanted to know about it.”
“I lived in a lot of places,” he volunteered. Like, he just gave up some information, all on his own! “Italy. France, Mexico. Costa Rica, Panama, New Zealand, Senegal, Morocco, Italy again, Slovenia, Croatia. I’m forgetting one. Latvia,” he said after a moment. “We were in Latvia one summer but we left before it got cold.”
“Woah! That’s amazing. Did you move all around because of a job or something?”
“No.” He blew out a puff of air, like he was rejecting that idea. “We certainly weren’t moving due to a job. My dad wrote some, translated some, played his guitar some. Enough to get by, but he wasn’t regularly employed.”
“It was just you and your dad?” I asked.
“The two of us traveled together but he has friends everywhere. He seems to know people across the entire globe. We’d stay with someone for a while and then move on.” He blew another breath, this one a long sigh. “We did that until I was in tenth grade and then we settled down for the next few years in New Mexico.”
“Wait, how did you go to school before then?”
“I didn’t. Not really,” Kellen answered. “He organized things for me to study—no, ‘organized’ isn’t the right word. He let me study what I was interested in and found resources for me to do it. I was working my way through calculus when I was twelve and I spoke four languages. I like to read, so we were always buying and selling books. That was how I spent almost all my time.”
“Woah,” I said again. “You studied all the time? No summer vacations? Maybe since you were in those nice places, you already felt like you were on vacation.”
“I suppose,” he said briefly.
“And your dad was your teacher.” I thought about that. “My dad would have let me get away with murder, so it was lucky I had real teachers. I don’t mean that your dad wasn’t a real teacher for you,” I added quickly.
“He wasn’t. He must have helped me when I was young, but I only remember teaching myself.”
If my schooling had been left up to me, I would have only learned how to use my phone better. “That’s…cool?”
“I suppose,” he said again. “It made my education overly narrow. I’d never studied any chemistry or American history, for example, but I’d read Dante and the Shakespeare canon by the time I was ten.”
I myself had only done Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade. “I knew a guy named Dante,” I mentioned, and Kellen explained that he meant a different Dante, an old, Italian one who wrote a funny book. “You went to high school already knowing all that?” I asked him doubtfully.
“The first year, I took the majority of my classes at the local community college,” he said. “Then, when I was supposed to be a senior, I went to the University of New Mexico. I could have finished my degree there but I wanted to go away and I got an academic scholarship.”
“Not for football?” I asked.
“They don’t give money for athletics at my college. Anyway, I was a walk-on for the team.”
“Really? You didn’t get recruited out of high school?”
“No.” He shook his head and looked toward the tinted window.
“Why did you stop traveling with your dad? Why did you stay in New Mexico? Does he still live there? Where’s your mom?” The questions shot out of me and I heard echoes of my own mother. This was how she’d tried to pump him for information when he’d come for dinner at my house and it hadn’t worked—it didn’t now, either.
“The coach said that the Cottonmouth offense is happy that I’m here looking at the team,” Kellen mentioned. “He said they were thrilled. That’s probably a stretch.”
No, not an answer to any of my questions. “I bet they are! I mean, I would say you’re the top receiver in the league. Anyway, you will be again once you play with a decent quarterback.”
“Thank you.” He looked away from the window and back at me. “You really do follow football.”
“Yeah, I really do. I like it, and it was my job before to keep up. It is now too, isn’t it? Once I signed the con—”
“Don’t say it.”
I stuck out my tongue. “Tell me what else the coach and the GM said to you.”
He did and it was relaxing to hear him speak. I listened carefully, both to what he was saying and how he said it, and I picked up on something that I’d heard before. It was the rhythm of his words, that was what was different. The more we were together, the more I heard it. He didn’t talk like someone from Michigan, or my cousins in Minnesota, or the people here in Florida.
I listened now and I added my opinions or comments sometimes, up until we got back to the hotel. It was only then that I realized that if the shower/bathroom situation had bothered me, I was really going to have a problem now:
There was only one bed.
Kellen disappeared into the bathroom of our suite and came out brushing his teeth. Shirtless. In only his underwear. Naked from the waist up and the mid-thigh down.
“Ohhhh,” I said, and stared first at his beautiful body, at his muscles and the miles of his skin. Then I stared again at where we were going to sleep. Ok, this would be tricky, but we had our contract to fall back on. Hand-holding was a yes, but sexual intercourse was a no in our relationship. We didn’t even have a relationship—or we did, yeah, but we had a business relationship.
A business relationship that involved only one bed.
But this didn’t have to be weird, I told myself as I brushed my teeth, too. I did that job better than I ever had before because I had never slept in the same bed with someone else, besides my cousins or besties or parents. I thought Kellen might appreciate the mint and it also gave me more time to calm myself down.
Because I could act normal and casual. Calm and relaxed, I repeated in my mind as I washed my face. Of course I could do this! I pulled on the pajamas my mom had suggested were ready for a sorority pillow fight because of the pink bows and shorty little shorts, a comment I hadn’t appreciated when I’d packed them. I could totally do this!
I opened the bathroom door and saw that Kellen was already in the bed, lying against the fluffy pillows. The sheet draped down over his hip bones, down at where those cool lines of muscle cut across his pelvis, below all those other muscles and their lines. All of them. I swallowed. He rested there with his arms behind his head, a serious expression on his face as he looked at the ceiling. His chest was just wide open for viewing. He wasn’t an overly hairy guy, which I appreciated, but he did have just a smattering of dark, silky…
Ok, no. This was not something I could do, because it was the same thing that men did to me. What was the word Kellen had given me before? Ogling! I was ogling him and now I was going to get in bed with him? Was he nervous? Was he looking so serious because he was considering what it would be like to have me there next to him?
“Our first night,” I mentioned. “But it doesn’t have to be weird. It’s just business. Right?”
“What?” His eyes moved to me. “Did you say something?”
“I was just…no, nothing. What are you thinking about so hard?”
“I was calculating the load on the roof of this hotel, based on the capacity of the bar and the size of the pool up there,” he commented. “How many gallons of water would you estimate that it holds? Do you know what material was used on the decks?”
Our minds were not going in the same direction, then. “I have no idea,” I said. My words sounded tight and strained as I got beneath the crisp sheets.
