The Option Play, page 22
“I’m not feverish,” I announced. “I’m just tired. It must be almost morning and I’ve had such a long day already. The cleansers were at my house and I had to chant with them, and then I worked out at the gym, and then I met with Danni and we practiced together, and I went to the Helping Hands center and taught two dance classes. Then I got dressed and you picked me up.”
“I was there for the rest of it. The inedible fish, the board game that lasted four hours and thirty-eight minutes, and you curled in a little ball on the couch, piccola micetta mia. You know, your eyes are that color, too.”
I sighed and I got into the bed. Woah, this was much nicer than the one I had at the rental, a great mattress and super soft sheets. “You’re saying that my eyes match the couch? Yeah, makes sense. Mine are the same color as my dad’s and I remember you saying that to him, too. But I look more like my mom, don’t I?” He nodded. “Do you look like your parents?”
Kellen flicked off the lights and we lay in the darkness. “I have my mother’s eyes like you have your dad’s. Beyond that, no. I don’t look like either of them.”
I leaned on my elbow, angled off the comfy bed. “Do you have any pictures? There are none in the whole house. It doesn’t feel very personal here, you know?”
“This is leased. I chose it specifically for the gym space in the basement and I’ve never considered making it more personal. It’s only temporary and I’ll have to move on soon enough. I’ve chosen a career with little to no longevity and permanence. No roots, as you said before.” Light suddenly shone from his phone. “Here’s a picture my mother when she was in college.”
“Oh.” I took it from him. “Oh, she’s beautiful.” White-blonde hair and yeah, eyes just the same as her son’s, the light blue encircled by a navy-dark rim. “No, it’s not just your eyes,” I told him. “It’s your cheekbones. No, it’s the way your faces look so proud.”
“Proud?”
I nodded, but he couldn’t see me in the dark. “How you hold yourself, the tilt of your head. It’s kind of royal.” Their cheekbones and attitude were the same but he certainly didn’t have her turned-up nose or pursed-up mouth. She also looked tiny, like smaller than Mary Claire (who’d barely made the Wonderwomen because her lack of height made her stand out so much from the rest of us). Kellen’s dark hair, his severe jaw, his size—those traits must have come from the other side of his family tree.
“Royal?” I heard him laugh softly and he took back the phone. “This is my father,” he told me.
Woah. No, this guy was not where Kellen had gotten anything. He was small and husky, with a round face and bright red hair. He grinned at the camera like he didn’t have a care in the world. “He looks, uh, he seems like he was very happy.” And he didn’t seem like he could be Kellen’s dad.
“He was, at that point in his life. He and my mom were still together. They lasted through college, on and off, and then they decided to travel. They always did get along fairly well. My mother discovered that she was pregnant while they were in Spain and I was born there. She left and went to Slovenia and then Italy, and my dad followed her. With me, at that point.”
“Is that why you guys moved so much? He was following your mom?”
“Sometimes. Mostly, we didn’t know where she was so we were just wandering. My father really was as friendly as he looks in this picture. He’d started college a few years late after doing a lot of solo traveling first and he knew so many people, friends all over the world. If we weren’t trying to hunt her down, then we were staying with someone while we waited for her to resurface.” He paused. “Like a whale.”
I thought about that. “Did she know? She knew that you guys were wandering the world and she just let you follow her? She didn’t want to see you?”
“She wasn’t very interested in either of us.” It was totally quiet in the bedroom and I digested his statement. I knew that both of my parents loved me, loved me more than anything, and I felt the same way about them. I wondered how it would feel if it were any other way. What if we’d had to chase after my mom to try to make her care about us?
“My mother was the reason that we moved to the United States. She was ill and believed in the spiritual healing powers in New Mexico.” His voice brimmed with sarcasm, telling me that he didn’t really believe in those himself. “We followed her there so that my dad could take care of her and when she died shortly after, I refused to leave. I refused to move again, so we stayed.”
“Oh.” I reached out my hand to him but drew it back and we lay quietly in the darkness.
“You shouldn’t get the wrong idea about my father,” Kellen broke the silence. “Yes, he made unwise, emotional decisions, and yes, he suffered from an utter lack of judgment about my mother, but he did the best he could for me. He didn’t have to.”
“Huh? What does that mean? Why wouldn’t he have to? Aren’t parents always supposed to do the best they can for their kids?”
“They should, of course, but he’s not my biological parent. It became obvious as I grew, as I grew exactly one foot taller than he is. Was,” Kellen corrected himself.
I was speechless for a moment. This was a lot of information coming from a guy who didn’t often volunteer it, and the information he was volunteering was a shock. “You didn’t know—he didn’t know that he and you weren’t—no one knew that?” I finally stuttered out.
“My mother had led him to believe that she was in one of her periods of fidelity to him when I was conceived and until I was slightly older, I’m sure he didn’t doubt that I was his child. He had an unfortunate tendency to trust her.” Kellen sighed. “We never looked at all alike, of course, but even when I questioned it, he was consistent in his denials. He never once brought up why we looked so entirely dissimilar or made any reference to a possible lack of genetic ties between us. I assume that my actual father, the sperm donor, was someone my mom met in Spain while they traveled there.”
“Woah.” I tried to absorb all that. “Well, maybe you don’t look very much alike—”
“At all alike.”
“But how do you know for sure?” I persisted.
“We had to have blood typing tests when my mother was ill so we could donate to her. My blood group is O. Both my purported parents are AB and it would have been extremely rare, almost impossible, for them to have produced me. I pursued genetic testing.”
“What did your mom say?” I asked. “Before she died, did she admit that she…that you…”
“No. And my father also denied it. He told me that I was his son, period.”
I pushed down my shock to answer him. He needed support at this moment, not more questions from me, even though I had about a million. “Well, you were his son,” I said. “Because you don’t have to have the same blood type, of course. Isn’t it love that makes the bond between a father and a child?”
Silence.
“Kellen?” I scooted over to him and reached up for his hand. This time I took it and held it tightly. “I’m sorry you lost him. He was definitely your dad. Your real dad.”
“It’s harder than I expected,” his deep voice sighed out. “I didn’t understand it before, I didn’t understand loss. It was different when my mother died because I was so angry with her. And I didn’t really know her, not as a person. She was always just my father’s dream, a chimera. But he…he was real. He was always present somehow, even when he lived in his hut in New Mexico, refusing to leave because that was where she’d died. It’s difficult for me to process that he isn’t there anymore. That he’s actually gone.”
I thought more about the lack of pictures. How the only thing personal in this house was the urn. And Kellen himself, alone here with it. He didn’t have anyone anymore.
“A few seasons ago, the father of one of the offensive linemen was ill and I couldn’t believe how he let it distract him. Now I see.” His hand squeezed. “You were right. I should tell the coaches.”
“Yeah, you should.” I squeezed back. I thought for a long time, long after I heard his breathing get deep and even. But eventually, I fell asleep too, still holding his hand.
∞
I’d done it again.
Oh mercy, this was even worse. This time, I was curled around his back—more like riding on his back like a dang baby monkey! I had my leg hitched over his waist and my arm locked around his chest, and our fingers were still twined together. I’d pressed my face into his neck, into his thick hair and against that skin which smelled so, sooo good. I inhaled deeply. What gave him this delicious aroma? It made my heart absolutely pound with…want. I tried not to press even more against him to relieve the sudden ache that bloomed right in my—
“Good morning.”
My heart stopped, like I was literally dead for a moment at the sound of Kellen’s voice. At the same time, I tried to throw myself backwards and off him. But he didn’t let go of my hand, so the most I did was choke on what I thought was my final breath and practically pull my own shoulder out of its socket.
“You slept well,” Kellen went on, totally calmly. He even yawned a little, his chest expanding under my arm.
Did he not notice my position? Like, that I was positioned on top of him?
“Oh, did I?” I asked. “How do you know if you were asleep too?” Was I making chitchat while he wore me like a coat?
“Because I wasn’t,” he answered. “I never sleep very well. I was up several times and I checked on you, but you were practically unconscious. Once you’re out, it’s exactly like what I witnessed in the plane when we encountered the downdraft. You never even twitched, not even when the priest in the row behind us started a prayer of commendation for the dying.”
“Wait, who said what? There was a priest where?”
“Sometimes you make little noises in your sleep,” he continued. “Like purring. Has anyone ever told you that?”
No, not my parents or my cousins, the only people I’d spent the night with before. “Those noises are probably snoring,” I said, still holding myself rigidly. As rigidly as I could, but my lips were tiny parts of an inch away from his neck. Less than a meter, for sure. “Um, I should get up. I have a lot to do today.”
He didn’t move, except to settle our hands better under his chin, which tugged my body even a little closer. “Like what? What do you have to do?”
“Oh, you know…all the stuff. The general stuff. My stuff.” I racked my brain for Sunday activities. “I should definitely make sure that my house didn’t blow up. Ours is probably the most vulnerable with all of Courtney’s cooking gases hanging around.” I twisted my fingers a little.
Kellen didn’t let go. “I thought the vent hood was fixed,” he commented.
“Oh, sure. No, it totally is. It works great since you sent that repair guy over. My dad had tried but he really didn’t know what he was doing, but your guy, uh, yeah. Yeah, the vent hood.” What was I talking about? And my voice was very high, much higher than normal. “Um, Kellen? Can you let go of my hand so I can get up?”
Slowly, he released my fingers and I shot away from him, rolled off the bed, and ran into the bathroom where I’d left the toothbrush with the pink head that worked so well. Then I leaned against the door and slid down to sit on the floor. What in the heck was going on here? I wasn’t running away from Kellen, I realized, not at all. I was trying to get away from my feverish reaction to him! What was wrong with me?
“Caitlyn?” Kellen asked through the door. “I assembled Bircher muesli last night while you were asleep. I think you’ll like it.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t know what he’d put together—maybe it was a puzzle or a foreign Lego set or something else that he wanted me to see. “I’ll be down in a minute.” I pulled myself up and turned on the electric toothbrush so it sounded like I had a purpose to be in here, besides losing my marbles. I also turned on the cold water in the sink and put my face under it.
I had no what I was doing, but more than that, I had no idea what Kellen was up to, either. Did he sleep like that with all of his female friends? Was I his friend? Were we more than friends?
I picked up my head and looked at my red, dripping face. I needed to figure out the answers to my questions. I needed to find out what that muesli thing was, too. Mostly, I felt a need to be near Kellen again, because I’d been wrong that he didn’t have anyone. He definitely had me, so I reached for the nice pink toothbrush and with it thoroughly cleansing my teeth, I ran downstairs.
Chapter 13
I realized that I was tapping my phone on my lip, just like my mom did when she was thinking about something hard. When she was worrying about it, more like. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel up to a party.”
“Why?” Gaby asked me, confused. “You’ve always been so social and…” Her voice was drowned out by a wail. “Hold on,” she told me loudly. The baby kept crying and I kept tapping my lip, kind of along to the beat of his howls. Gaby had only called me because I’d stopped answering her texts about coming to her house for the party she was throwing, and she never did that well with talking on the phone. Someone, kid or husband, was often interrupting.
“It’s not a party, it’s just a little get-together,” she said when the crying stopped and the sounds of suckling started. “Ouch! No, it’s ok,” she told someone else. “It’s a little sore. Sorry, Caitlyn, I’m talking about my nipples. I have a lot to share with you about breastfeeding when you start!”
That wouldn’t be happening for centuries, not at the rate I was going. Not that I wanted it to. Or maybe I did, maybe someday—but who knew? Who knew anything? I was no closer to figuring out a dang thing, certainly not Kellen’s feelings and not really my own, either. No, I knew how I felt, I thought, but I also thought that I shouldn’t. Feel that way, I meant, and actually? I wasn’t very sure that I knew that I felt it. Or even felt that I knew it. I’d never been quite so confused! Well, maybe I had been, like a few times in school when I hadn’t been paying attention for a while and then had tried to jump back in. That had been my fault, not the teachers who were mostly giving it their all.
And I figured that the current situation with Kellen was completely my fault, too, because I was probably just reading a lot into nothing. Progressing, that was what I was doing…no, I was processing. No, broadcasting. Forecasting. Foreshadowing. Shadowboxing. What was the word?
“G, what’s that thing where you throw your feelings onto someone else? Like showing a movie on a screen?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“Projecting? That’s it,” I said triumphantly.
“Do you mean that you’re sharing your feelings like they’re on a big screen? What are you projecting?”
Well, I hoped I wasn’t showing off my emotions like that. In the time since I’d cuddled (again!) with Kellen in his bed, we’d both gone on as if nothing had gone on. In other words, we were shopping at the grocery store together, going to the beach, on runs, to the gym—my gym. Which was weird, actually, because he had a gym of his own in his house, and he could have also used the really nice one for players in Woodsmen Stadium, and also a pretty nice one in the Woodsmen practice facility.
But he’d come to mine a few times and then stood next to me while I was on the elliptical, and when I was doing inclined sit-ups, and while I tried to tone my arms as much as his were with the free weights. Yeah, Kellen had stood directly next to me and actually asked one guy who walked up what in the hell he wanted, which had been very awkward when all he’d wanted was to pick up the dirty towel hamper in the corner.
“Caitlyn?” Gaby demanded through my speaker. “What are you talking about? What in the heck is going on with you? Ow! Ok, I’m switching sides.” There was another wail and then both she and the baby sighed. “Much better. Now I’m really listening, and I want you to explain to me exactly what you’re projecting. I also want to know why you’re not coming over to my house when every single other Woodsmen wife, husband, girlfriend, and boyfriend will be here except for Camdyn Riordan because she and César are just about to have another baby, and he freaks out if she leaves the house alone. He has his whole family staying with her and he even rented a plane to be on standby so he can fly back from Mackinac if she goes into labor.”
César Hidalgo, the Woodsmen tight end, was on Mackinac with the rest of the team for the annual meetings that they always held on the island, every summer before the football season started. Gaby’s husband was there too, and also the new quarterback who sucked. Kellen Karma was there as well. And Gaby was having everyone over, all the significant others who’d been left behind here.
Of course, she considered me to be part of that group and I was trying to weasel my way out of coming to her house tonight. But just like my parents, she was getting mighty suspicious that something was up with me, that something was wrong. The relationship/Kellen lie that I’d thought I could maintain for my trip to Florida was wearing a little thin and so was I. Not thin, like, I wasn’t losing weight. Thin, like, I felt as if my nerves were stretched across the county and I was so, so tired of not telling everyone the truth.
“But what is the truth?” I asked.
“Um, is that just an open-ended, philosophical question or do you really want me to try to answer?” Gaby responded.
“No, you don’t have to answer. I think that I already know the answer, at least, on my end. Or do I?”
“What? Caitlyn, have you been drinking or something?”
“No! And yeah, I will come to your party,” I told her, just to get her to stop probing about why I wouldn’t. “See you there.”
“Come early so Tessa and I can do your hair,” she ordered. Both Gaby and her daughter were fiends for updos.
I hung up and rubbed my temples. Then I picked up the phone again and sent a message to Kellen. He was pretty busy with football team stuff on the island but he always got back to me as quick as he could.
