The Option Play, page 5
“My what? Who?”
Now I stared at him. “The Woodsmen announcers?” I prompted. “They’ve been the faces and voices of the team since…forever! They call every game and do the pre- and post- shows. They have the Woodsmen radio hour every week, every day during the season. You can watch their vlog or read their blog. They live-stream. Really?” Because he looked blank. “I’ve seen them interview you!”
“The old guys?”
“Yeah, the old guys!” I agreed and then paused. “I can’t remember why I started talking about them.”
“I didn’t come here about the announcers,” Karma said.
“Then—”
“Are you done for the day? Everyone else is leaving.”
I turned and saw the guys, my dad’s employees, walking by the window. They were all staring in through the glass at Kellen Karma, who didn’t even bother to blink back at them. “I have to stay and wait for a delivery,” I explained. “Why do you ask?”
“Landon had an idea. Landon Zalamero.”
“The image guy,” I filled in.
“Yes, my image guy. He’s still trying to correct that problem.”
“The problem of your image?” I asked, and Kellen Karma nodded. “Is it working?”
“Not really, no. You stated before that I’m a jerk and you still think it, don’t you?”
I remembered how he’d just treated Isaac and shrugged, not wanting to answer.
“I don’t care,” Karma said, shaking his head. “The opinions of the masses mean little to nothing to me personally.”
“Then why do you need that Zalamero guy?” I asked curiously.
“The sponsorships,” he stated. “The teams don’t care about my lack of personality, as long as I’m not poison in the locker room, but corporations do. All I currently have for sponsorships is the seaweed soap.”
“Soap made of…”
“Seaweed,” he repeated. “Sargassum. It’s shampoo and conditioner, actually.” He ran a hand through his hair, which was thick and glossy with a little wave to it. It brushed the tops of his broad shoulders and looked really nice. I tilted my head, thinking I would look up that shampoo later.
“But I need more.”
“You need more sponsorships,” I clarified, and he nodded. “Why?”
“For the money,” he said slowly and carefully, as if I might not understand. “I need a shoe contract, workout gear. I could sell cars, trucks, mouthwash, painkillers, pizza, deodorant, all the things that players at my level shill so happily. If I sign with a bigger-market team, I can have local sponsorships in that city, which wouldn’t be as lucrative but would be better than nothing. But they don’t want a total asshole. At a minimum, they want me to hide it better.” He looked toward the window. “I’m not going to last forever playing football. I could drop a can of black beans on my foot tomorrow and be finished.”
A bean can? That was specific. But I’d seen weird, bad stuff happen to Woodsmen players. One guy had a hidden heart problem and collapsed the night before he played in his first game, another had gotten hit in the head with a boom while sailing on Lake Michigan and had never put on a uniform again.
I opened my mouth to ask why he’d come by here today to tell me this, but a truck screeched to a stop in front of my dad’s business. “That’s my delivery,” I said instead, and walked outside. The driver raced around and pulled open the back door, then tugged on a huge box until it tumbled to the ground. He was running to return to the cab and didn’t even slow when I called after him.
“Hey, you can’t just drop that! It’s chemicals, it’s dangerous! And it’s too heavy, I can’t carry it inside.” He didn’t seem to hear me, but he did come to a complete halt when another voice joined mine.
“Stop. Come back.”
The driver turned and his eyes widened. He obviously hadn’t expected to see a Woodsmen player here, and in my mind, I agreed with him. It was weird. “Kellen Karma?” he asked, like he wasn’t sure.
“If you’re delivering that, then do it right.” Karma pointed to the box. “Do the job you were hired for.”
“Sure,” the guy said, his eyes as big as Isaac’s had been. He glanced at me and got a funny expression, and then smiled as he placed who I was. “You’re the Woodsmen cheerleader, the one in the dress—”
“Please just pick that up!” I broke in. And he smirked again but got out a hand truck, put the delivery on it, and asked me where I wanted it to go. I showed him and then checked inside the box, but everything seemed fine despite how he’d tossed it.
“Thank you,” I told him, and then said it again to Kellen Karma. I would never have gotten the delivery into the shop without him stepping in.
The driver paused before he left. “Mr. Karma, can I get your—”
“No,” Karma shot out, and the guy jumped then left fast. “Are you finished now?” he asked me.
“Um, yeah. I guess, but why? And why don’t you give autographs?”
“I don’t like going out, not to restaurants, bars, or coffee shops, but you shouldn’t come back to my house,” he responded, which didn’t answer either of my questions. “It’s not a good look for you.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. It was too late to worry about that, since I was already only a former Wonderwoman, not a cheerleader anymore.
“I was surprised that you came over when you did,” he commented.
“Why? You didn’t think I’d give your wallet back?”
Karma shrugged slightly. “I didn’t think I’d see it again and I’d already cancelled all of my cards. I meant that I was surprised that you’d walk into a stranger’s house, alone with two men. Do you know what could have happened to you?”
I gulped. Was he threatening me? Because we were alone again right now in my father’s shop. “No, I didn’t think about that,” I said carefully.
“You should. So you’ll come to my house now?”
“No.” The word burst from my mouth.
“Then we can talk here.” He glanced at the metal stools behind the front counter.
“No,” I answered again. The room seemed small and way too quiet. “No, why don’t you come to my house instead?” That would be safer. Actually, I could have just told him to leave and that I didn’t want to talk to him at all, but by this point I was pretty curious. Why in the heck had Kellen Karma shown up today? Why had he helped me with that delivery, and what could he possibly want with me?
“I’ll follow directly behind your car. Do you usually invite men you’ve only seen twice in your life home with you?” He was gone before I had the chance to answer him.
Well, that was very insulting, and I would have told him so except he got away too fast! I’d seen him plenty because he was on a giant field every week in the fall, in case he’d forgotten. I huffed angrily as I finished up at the shop and then he did follow behind me—directly behind. He was directly on my bumper all the way back to my house, in a black Bronco this time instead of the Ferrari.
I kept staring at his truck in my mirrors and a few times, I turned around to check to make sure, but Kellen Karma was still there even as I turned onto my street. There were a bunch of cars in the driveway, so we both parked at the curb and then he followed directly behind me again as I walked in through the garage.
“Caitlyn? Is that you?”
“Hi, Mom,” I answered. “Dad, the shipment came and I locked up the shop.” I had, while pretending not to watch Karma sitting in his car. He’d been doing something on his phone again and not watching me back.
“There’s a bunch of food if you...” My mom walked into the kitchen but stopped on a dime when she saw that I wasn’t alone. She looked at me and then pointed to him.
“Mom, this is Kellen Karma. Kellen Karma, this is my mom, Jenny Waite.”
He immediately put out his hand. “Ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Uh…yes.” She slowly extended hers and then let him pump it up and down, two times exactly before he let go. “You’re…you’re the Woodsmen wide receiver. That Kellen Karma.” She blinked. “I would guess there aren’t that many. I mean, it’s an unusual name. And you’re an unusual size. And very handsome. Mercy, you are.”
“Mom!”
“What?” She clapped her hand over her mouth and her cheeks pinked up. “Oh, excuse me, I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m very startled that a Woodsmen player has appeared in my kitchen.”
Karma didn’t even crack a smile. He only nodded briefly,
“Caitlyn, I didn’t know that you knew…him,” she said to me, then she seemed to remember. “The pictures. The video.”
“Mom, we’re going upstairs,” I said, and grabbed his arm. “Come on.”
“To your room?” she asked me, but I had already pulled us away, zipping around the corner so that the book club members wouldn’t also get a glimpse of my guest.
When we got to my bedroom, I let go of his arm and looked at it appreciatively. His level of triceps development was something I could only dream of. I rubbed it briefly again, admiring the outlines of the muscle. I’d never been able to get that, no matter how many reps I did. “What’s your arm routine?” I asked him.
He pulled away and rubbed his arm himself. “I had no idea that you lived with your parents. How old are you?”
That had been a little point of, well, interest among the other Wonderwomen. No, not exactly interest. More like a point that people made fun of sometimes, saying it just like he did, like they had a hard time believing that I was still at home with my mom and dad. “I’m twenty-one,” I said coldly. “That’s not very old. A lot of people stay with their parents for a long time.”
“Some cultures encourage it. In some countries, it’s the norm.” He picked up one of my American Girl dolls. “Not here, though.”
“I have a job and I’m in college!” I defended myself. “Why would I live in a gross dorm or waste money on an apartment when I could be in my own house?”
“So you could be an independent adult,” Kellen Karma stated.
Yeah, I guessed there was that. I studied my nails. “I like living here and my parents like to have me,” I told him. “I am an independent adult.” I totally was.
“Who does your laundry?” Now he picked up a bubble blowing machine.
“I don’t ever use that thing,” I told him. “It was just a souvenir.” And I wasn’t going to answer his question about my dirty clothes.
Karma pushed a button and released a stream of bubbles into the room, then he looked at me out of those light blue eyes. They had a darker rim around the blue, I saw, which seemed to make his stare even harder.
I yanked up the covers on my bed and sat on it. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”
He looked around again and I noticed that there was no other place to sit besides next to me on the twin mattress, since my desk chair was occupied by a lot of clothes and the armchair held a big, stuffed gorilla and several of his friends. Karma put himself down carefully but the bed creaked anyway. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you.”
“About your image?” I prompted.
He put the bubble blower on my nightstand and reached past me to pick up a dance award from the shelf above the bed. That swayed a little, because my dad had hung it there, and he was amazing with cars but home repairs were better left to my mom.
Karma studied the engraving on the trophy. “First place, junior division, lyrical solo,” he read out loud, and I remembered that routine. He put it back and the shelf wobbled again. “I hired the consultant, but it was your image that suffered after what happened at the Silver Dollar,” he mentioned. “I read everything that people wrote about you.”
Now I couldn’t look at him and I felt hot embarrassment, shame, flood my face. Did he mean the comments about my body and the fun that people wanted to have with it, or did he mean the comments about how I was too fat/too thin/too curvy/too flat? Maybe the fake/real breasts discussion, or the “is she a natural blonde” debate that was based on what they thought they could see beneath my underwear? Or possibly he’d read the gossip about the two of us, what they imagined I’d been doing to him in that bar. Really, really nasty stuff.
“That’s over,” I said resolutely. “There are already a lot of other things to make fun of and what happened isn’t getting as much attention anymore. It was like a car crash. Everyone stares when they see one but after a minute, they drive past. It’s—what’s the word when something doesn’t last very long?”
“Ephemeral. Was this, though? It doesn’t seem to have died down, based on the number of views that the video gets on an hourly basis. It doesn’t seem that anyone has forgotten yet.”
“Did you want to talk to me today to make me feel worse?” I asked angrily. “Of course, everyone remembers! The delivery guy today, he definitely remembered. All the people downstairs in the book club, all the guys I work with at the body shop, all the other customers at the grocery store, all my friends and relatives—that’s what they remember when they see me. A dumb, drunk, naked girl rubbing on a Woodmen football player in a bar. A lot of them don’t even question if the rumors are true, that’s just who they think I am.” I took a tissue from the extra-large box next to the bubble machine on my nightstand. “Thanks for coming over here to remind me again.”
“Perhaps you should go away for a while. Out of this small media market,” he suggested. “That was my consultant’s idea.”
“That I go away? Landon Zalamero thinks I should take a vacation?” I asked, so confused. “Why would he care about me?”
“No, he doesn’t bother to care about you. He cares about me, because I’m paying him,” Karma told me. “He believes I can turn around this situation and use it to my advantage. He encouraged me to hire you.”
“Me?” I pointed at my chest and repeated the question. “Me?”
“You,” he agreed. “I’m going to be visiting a few teams to discuss signing with them. The Dukes in New Mexico, the Cottonmouths, and the Cougars. He thinks you should accompany me.”
“Me?” I said for the third time, but managed to add to that. “Why? Why would I come?”
“Image,” he said. “In Zalamero’s words, it would make me look good to have a girlfriend along, and it makes sense that you would be that woman. It would help to explain why I got a hand job from you in a bar.”
“That wasn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter what actually occurred,” he broke in. “It’s all image. Landon Zalamero believes that you could improve mine, soften it up. You’re pretty enough.”
“Um, thanks?”
“And you must have some personality or you wouldn’t have been a Woodsmen cheerleader,” he went on. “Don’t they check for that?”
“Are you asking if they do personality tests for the Wonderwomen? They won’t hire a jerk, if that’s what you mean. They want women of good character.” I shook my head. That was why I wasn’t dancing with them right at this moment. “Are you seriously trying to hire me to be your girlfriend?”
“I’m not asking you to be a prostitute,” he said, and I grimaced.
“Good, because I’m not!”
“I would hire you to pretend, that’s all. It would only be a job.”
I thought. “Almost like a babysitter.”
“A babysitter? No, not like that.”
“You couldn’t just get a girl on your own?” I asked him, but I already knew the answer. “You could have anyone in the whole town! Probably even married women would go for you.”
They would, I was sure. Besides the fact that he was a rich and famous football player, I was realizing more and more that he was utterly handsome—almost perfect in his features, like a painting or a statue of a Greek guy from olden times. Like something in a museum that you might stare at, in other words, with your parents telling you to appreciate it because the tickets had been expensive, you wouldn’t be coming back here again, and this was Art.
He had dark eyebrows that slashed in his high forehead over his blue eyes, and a straight nose that might have been too big on another face, except it was just right between his sharp cheekbones and over his full lips. His skin was nice, too, a beautiful olive so that even now, when the weather was just starting to warm up after the long, dark Michigan winter, he already looked like he’d been outside enjoying the sunshine. We hadn’t had much of that yet.
Kellen Karma shook his head at me. “I don’t want a woman. I mean that I don’t want a girlfriend, not a real one. I don’t want the hassle and complications of that. You would come with me as I talk to these teams, then we’d be done. Zalamero already has someone working on my social media and after we returned, they’d post something sad about our breakup, how wonderful you are, and how I’d always care about you or some such bullshit about my heart and my wounded soul.” He looked like he felt sick to his stomach. “How I’d never be the same again, et cetera. All the usual platitudes about breakups that people regurgitate before they have a drink and move on entirely.”
I blinked. “Yeah, never mind what I said about finding someone. You actually don’t really seem relationship-ready.”
“I have to move on from this team and this town. You could help me and I’d pay you.” And he told me how much he was going to shell out for my pretend-girlfriend services.
My jaw dropped and I didn’t speak for a moment.
“You’d sign a confidentiality agreement and I would come after you if you reneged on it,” Karma informed me.
“A confidentiality agreement? You mean that I couldn’t tell anyone,” I said, and he nodded. That made me think. “It would be hard,” I went on. “I’d have to lie to my family and friends and pretend that we were a couple. And then I’d also have to pretend that I was sad when we broke up, I guess.”
He stood and the bed creaked again. “I’ll see myself out.”
“No, wait!” I stood too and put my hand back on his arm. His biceps were really impressive, just like his triceps. And probably his delts…I slid my hand up towards his shoulder, and yeah. Woah.
