The Option Play, page 24
“Which, by the way, wasn’t that bad,” my friend broke in. “It only got to be a big deal because of the stupid Wonderwomen rules.”
“Which I knew about, and shouldn’t have broken,” I added. “I was acting like a little kid, like there weren’t consequences. I was thoughtless.” There was that word again. “But yeah, what happened with Brown was one of the reasons I went so crazy on my birthday. It was definitely one of the reasons that I signed the contract.”
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a contract,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
I told her everything else. Well, first I swore her to secrecy, not because I thought that Kellen would go after me legally anymore, but because it would hurt him so, so much if this story got out. Then I told her everything, starting with me going over to his house and meeting the image consultant, and ending with him donating a new parking lot to Helping Hands.
“He’s not a loser who can’t get women,” I said. “I’ve personally seen girls swoon when they see him. Actually get lightheaded and dizzy. And the comments under his social media posts are actually shocking sometimes,” I added. “But he didn’t want to deal with real emotion. He said that to me, said it straight out, he said that he didn’t want the hassle and complications of a real relationship. He only wants a fake girlfriend.” I sighed. “That’s all I was.”
“Oh.” Gaby blinked. “You—for so long—you’ve been saying—”
“I’m so sorry,” I told her miserably. “I’m sorry I lied and hid things from you, from everyone. I’ve been feeling awful about it, but then it became not really a lie. No, the part about us being a couple was still fake, but…”
“Wow.” She sat shaking her head. “Just, wow. This is hurtful, Caitlyn. I can’t believe you kept this from me, and you’ve been acting and pretending this whole time.”
“I’ve been very thoughtless in a lot of ways. I’m sorry.”
She sat for another moment. “I wish I could say that I don’t understand how you could have done that, but I do. I’ve been thoughtless, too. Before I met Ben, I lived a big lie, one way worse than this.” She sighed. “I get it. I wish you felt like you could have told me—”
“It wasn’t just my secret,” I said. “I couldn’t because of Kellen, too. I shouldn’t be telling you now, but I can’t keep it in.”
Gaby shook her head again. “How you were talking about him tonight? It sounds like a real relationship to me. You do things that couples do, like going out, getting groceries…”
“Working on his car,” I added. “I’ve made some great adjustments for him. But no, we’re not a real couple. We had a business relationship, but that ended.”
“It doesn’t sound that way,” she said stubbornly. “It doesn’t sound like it ever ended.”
It didn’t sound like it to other people, either. The Woodsmen gossip sites—yes, I was checking—were all talking about us and our couple activities as of late. “Well, that was the weird part. There was a whole plan for him to post things about our breakup. It was supposed to be over when we came back from the trip, absolutely done. But he never published anything.”
“Why?”
I shrugged a little. “He just says that it seemed like a better idea to keep it going. To keep the illusion going, and it has been working. Everyone still believes it!”
“You went along with that?”
I nodded. “I wanted to,” I said slowly.
“Because it’s not business,” Gaby filled in. “Not for you.”
“No, it’s not. I want hassle and complications. I want Kellen.”
She passed me another tissue. “I still don’t get why he didn’t break up with you. Fake break up, but whatever. He must have some attachment to you, too.”
“Mercy. ‘Some attachment?’” I rested my chin in my hands, thinking of Kellen’s dad who had been liked “well-enough” by his mother. “Great, just what I’ve been dreaming of.”
“More than just some attachment,” she revised. “I mean, it would have been easy enough to post a bunch of stuff that someone already wrote for him and tell the whole world that you two aren’t together anymore. He didn’t want to. For whatever reason, he wants to pretend to be your boyfriend. We just have to figure out why.”
“I think it did really help him,” I told her. “Maybe it still is, and that’s why he hasn’t made it officially over. All the stuff about us in Florida got a ton of attention. His original fake-girlfriend purpose was to fix his public image so he’d get more sponsorship deals. That was the main reason, but I know there was more. He said that he doesn’t care what people actually think of him, but I don’t believe that’s true. He does, he wants to connect but he doesn’t know how! Like, he didn’t have to come have dinner with my parents when we first starting faking everything. He didn’t have to be nice to me when we were alone together. He didn’t have to do a lot stuff, but he did, regardless if it was going to get him money or not.”
Gaby nodded. Then she shook her head. “I just said that we needed to figure out Kellen’s motivation, but that’s wrong. There’s a very easy way to solve all these mysteries. You just have to ask him.”
“No.”
“Why the heck not?” she demanded. “Caitlyn, I’ve made a lot of mistakes with my love life. A ton! But if I’d been honest with myself and forced my boyfriends to be honest, too? Things would have gone a lot smoother. You have to be your own advocate in life. It’s just part of growing up and being a woman.”
“I don’t like that,” I noted, and she laughed.
“Yeah, it’s one of the hard parts. But it leads to some of the great parts. Is it worth it to stay like this, wondering and confused? To waste a bunch of time playing games rather than being honest?”
I thought about Isaac, then. He said he’d liked me for three years and I’d been totally oblivious to it. To him. How long would it have gone on, how much more time would he have wasted on me, when there was a girl named Danni Lalka who already liked him back?
“Your life can go in a bunch of different directions,” Gaby said. “But you’re in charge of it. You made the decisions, you make the choices.” Her voice got very brisk. “Let’s think of it in terms of offensive strategy.”
It made sense that she would want to, since her husband was the offensive coordinator for the Woodsmen and we both loved the game. “Ok. I’m in charge of my life,” I stated. I was. Right? “So I’m the quarterback.”
“Exactly! And the playbook’s huge, isn’t it? Huge and complicated.”
I nodded. The Woodsmen playbook had been really difficult for the new guy to pick up once Davis Blake, the former quarterback, had left the team.
“So you have a lot of stuff that you can choose from,” she went on. “But I think that life is most like an option play. You can pass to your receivers, you can hand off to a running back, you can take the ball downfield yourself. You have to make some quick decisions at the line of scrimmage and you have a lot of ways you can go, but you’re the one in charge. Not the coach on the sidelines, you.” She paused. “I freaking love football.”
“I’m the quarterback,” I echoed, and thought about that. “You’re right,” I told Gaby. “And I’m going to have to talk—oh, Kellen is texting me now. I wrote a bunch of stuff to him about the parking lot…” I trailed off as I stared at the picture he’d sent. “What is this?”
“Looks like a football cleat,” she pointed out helpfully.
“Yeah, but—Gaby! Those are two Ks embroidered on it! These are Kellen Karma cleats!” I stood up whooping, then remembered the kids sleeping upstairs and clapped a hand over my mouth. “He got a shoe contract!” I half-yelled.
“That’s wonderful, Caitlyn!” Gaby glanced upstairs as crying sounded through the baby monitor.
“Sorry about that,” I whispered. It was really too late for whispering.
“It’s ok. My friend Marley is with them,” she said. But she went upstairs to help, and while she did, I tried to call Kellen again. He was at a party, he wrote back, with the whole team. So I just said that I was so, so happy, and that I was definitely buying Kellen Karma cleats.
“You need them for football?” he asked me.
Well, I was the quarterback, wasn’t I?
Gaby came back down with a little spit-up in her hair but smiling. “Let’s do something fun together before I pass out from tiredness. You really should take on that project to help Help Hands. I mean, to helping Helping…you know what I mean. That’s where Ben’s brother volunteers,” she said. “Kayden has never mentioned to us that they need helping— I mean, that they need help there, but he probably wouldn’t have wanted to, because he’s trying to do stuff on his own a lot now and not get Ben to fix everything for him.” She grabbed her phone. “You and I can make a list of the people who were here at the party who said they’d like to volunteer or donate.”
“Let’s draft an email together to Miss Margulies to see what she needs for the programs and the building. You’re better at the fancy letter stuff than I am, although I think my vocabulary has improved a lot. I’ve been reading Dante. And Shakespeare,” I explained.
“I feel like that might be Kellen’s influence.”
“Just like how he’s driving faster is mine,” I said.
“See? You’re already a couple. At the least, you’re already friends. And that’s something, right?”
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed. It wasn’t enough, though. So I was going to have to step up and decide on my options.
Chapter 14
It was just that the timing wasn’t exactly right. There was a time and a place for everything, wasn’t there?
“Seriously, Caitlyn?”
“You know how busy the team has been,” I answered my friend. “You know that they hardly have time to eat! Does Kellen really need one more thing to worry about?”
Gaby stared at me and I patted her baby’s back. He was a little bundle of love on my shoulder but if I stopped swinging my hips, he got pretty mad, so I kept on rocking even as I made my excuses.
“I will talk to him. I really will. It’s just that there’s been a lot going on. Like, I’m starting back to school soon.” And it had turned out that Meredith Morin, Jory’s wife, worked in the college registrar’s office, and she’d helped me reorganize some of my classes. “And Kellen has the commercials to film now, so that even when he’s free from actual Woodsmen stuff, he’s still busy.” The team was back from Mackinac Island and regular practices had started, which meant twice a day they were together as a team, for hours. Plus workouts, plus meetings with the offense, meetings with the other receivers, meetings with the new quarterback and with different coaches—it was a ton.
And on top of that, he’d been flying to Chicago to film and once to Los Angeles, because besides the shoe contract, he’d also signed on with a car company and one for drinks, healthy ones that were mineral based and low-sugar. It tasted like drinking liquid rocks and stones, as far as I was concerned, but Kellen actually believed in the product. It was all very exciting and I’d really, really wanted to go with him when he flew off to the different cities.
But I hadn’t mentioned that, either. Dang it!
“You’re right. This has gone on long enough. I’m going to his house tonight and we’ll talk,” I told her. “I’ll make dinner and we’ll eat and—why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t think it’s the best idea,” she said, in the nice, Gaby way that she had of saying that I was totally wrong about something.
“You changed your mind about me being honest with Kellen about my feelings? You don’t think I’m the quarterback anymore?”
Her eyes got big. “No, I still really think all that! But I don’t think you should cook. Sorry, Caitlyn.”
Well, she was probably correct. “The real reason I haven’t brought anything up is that we’ve been having a lot of fun together,” I sighed. “Even with him so busy with the season and me doing all my stuff, we’ve been spending time together. He’s very, very good at scheduling himself so that we can see each other. Like, he’s coming to my ballet class this afternoon before he has to go lift at the stadium.”
Her eyebrows went up. “To your ballet class? I thought—isn’t it beginning ballet?”
I nodded. “They’re three and four. They’re so cute in their leotards and buns, I can’t stop smiling for the whole time.” I looked at my phone. “I have to leave for that right now, actually. And afterwards when I go to his house, I’ll say my speech.” I’d been working on it quite a bit and it wasn’t too dang bad, if I did say so myself. Short, to the point, and there was no way he was going to get around answering me directly.
“Good luck!” she said. “I’m sure that this is going to turn out for the best.”
I nodded as I left and then thought that those words actually weren’t the most positive. Things turning out for “the best” didn’t mean that she thought that Kellen and I would end up together. But that was the best for me, I thought, and I thought it more when I saw him waiting next to his black car in the perfect new parking lot outside of the Helping Hands building. I got out fast and ran over to him, and then I just jumped and hugged him.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” I said, and nuzzled under his chin.
“Twenty-two hours,” he answered. But he put his arms under me to hold me up, and he laughed.
I looked at him, smiling right back. “Are you ready to dance?”
He had to put me down to walk inside and once we were there, he got mobbed. First, the director of Helping Hands came out to thank him in person for his donations and hugged him. Then Jessie hugged him too, probably less to thank him and more just because she wanted to, but I couldn’t really blame her for that. I ended up hugging him again, myself.
Kellen looked overwhelmed, especially when all the parents of the little dancers in my class also approached to say hello and to shake his hand and talk about the Woodsmen, and then the little girls swarmed as well. It was time for the class to start, so I herded everyone into the studio—Kellen included.
“You need better lighting here also,” he said, looking up at the bulbs.
“We do, and I’ve been talking to Amaya Reiser, Darius’s wife. She’s a contractor—oh, no, we need to leave our buns where they are,” I told one of my students. I meant her updo, not her actual buns, because she was trying to tug the hair-pinned pile off her head. The discussion of what Amaya Reiser had planned for the Helping Hands building was going to have to wait until ballet was over.
I clapped my hands in the pattern that signaled the start of our class and the little girls lined up. Kellen took a spot at the back of the room.
“You don’t have to do this,” I mouthed, but he did look so cute in his shorts, it would have been a shame to stop.
“I’ve been studying dance since we met,” he answered. “But it’s much better to learn it from someone. I believe that you’ll be a great teacher.”
“She’s my teacher,” one of the little girls told him, and he nodded at her seriously.
“She teaches me things, too,” he answered.
“Ok.” I was smiling so largely, it was a little hard to talk. “Let’s start, ladies! And gentleman.”
He obviously had been studying. Due to that, and to all the strength and flexibility training in his past, and to a ton of inborn grace, he was a natural ballet dancer. He took it so seriously that the little girls stopped staring at him and took it seriously too. I just smiled the whole time, watching Kellen in first position and then second, then doing a demi-plié. We also did a lot of leaping in our class because of the fun-ness of it, and he got so high he almost took out some of the dangling bulbs. His twirls were awesome, as well.
“I think you picked the wrong career,” I said in the parking lot. Class was over and he’d hugged every one of the other students then run the gauntlet of their parents, Jessie, Miss Margulies, and various other people from the neighborhood who’d heard that he was here.
“Should I give up on football and focus on dance?” Kellen asked me. He opened his arms slightly and looked at me so I obviously had to hug him again.
“I mean, you’re doing ok with football,” I answered. “And now that you’re pretty much the king of endorsements, it seems like a shame to give it all up. But if you want to fall back on something, yeah, I would suggest ballet. What other kinds of dance have you been studying?”
“I can show you later,” he said. “I’ll be done at the stadium at about six…”
“Go ahead,” I told him. “You should say it.”
“Six thirty-three,” he finished. “I planned to make dinner for us.”
“I also planned that,” I said proudly, and his eyebrows went up. Mercy, he had nice eyebrows. “I have a good plan. I’ll let myself in, ok?” Because now I knew the code for the front door, too.
“I’ll see you again soon.” But then he hesitated, like there was more to say.
“What?”
“I’ll see you again soon,” he repeated, and kissed my cheek very softly. I hugged him tight enough that he pretended to cough and said that he appreciated the increased definition in my arms. He’d finally given me his upper body routine and I did think it was working.
I went home to get dressed, shaving another two minutes off my time by using a combination moisturizer and foundation, and then started prepping for my dinner. Courtney was very helpful, actually, because Kellen liked the stinky veggies just as much as she did. But during our meal prep, my phone started sounding off with texts from Mary Claire, and then it rang.
“Caitlyn!” MC squealed when I answered. “I didn’t know who else to talk to.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Didn’t you get my texts?” She didn’t bother to wait for my answer, which was that even with my experience in interpreting her messages, these latest ones were still beyond me. “Ray and I broke up. He broke up with me! Because…” She started sobbing and then I suddenly understood what the one message had meant when she’d written, “Ray g admitted golf pensive!”
