The Checkdown Read online

  IT’S 4TH AND GOAL FOR LOVE…SHOULD KATIE GO FOR IT?

  Katie Bell is Nutty.

  You know, Nutty the Chipmunk? Katie is the woman inside the costume, one of the mascots for her town’s football team, and Davis Blake—handsome, forbidding, tough Davis Blake—is the starting quarterback.

  Until he gets injured and his season, and possibly his career, are over.

  Davis needs her help, and Katie sees a temp job working for him as an opportunity to secure her future with the football team. But is there more possible for both of them? Maybe friendship? Maybe...love?

  When it’s fourth down, can both Katie and Davis put their hearts on the line and take a risk?

  Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Bennett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  The Checkdown

  Jamie Bennett

  Chapter 1

  “That had to hurt!”

  The other commentator winced. “Looks like a bad one, Randy.” They cut to another slow motion shot of Davis Blake falling, grabbing his knee. He had tried to get up, and fell again. “You can see by how he’s holding it. ACL? PCL? To me, looks like a ligament issue, but I’m no expert. We’re all waiting for word from the doctors and coaches of the Woodsmen and as of yet, the team has kept silent on the fate of the MVP quarterback. Is his season over? His career? Randy, an injury like this—”

  I reached up and turned off the ancient TV by smacking the knob.

  “Hey!” A chorus of voices sounded in the warehouse.

  “I’m not watching that again!” I called. “I’ll turn it back on when they start talking about something else.”

  Karl dropped a box in front of my desk. “You think they’re going to talk about something else? That’s not going to happen, not around here. People are going nuts about Blake getting hurt. My daughter asked if they were going to cancel school.”

  Our hometown team, the Woodsmen, was not like other teams in the United Football Confederation. They were in cities with millions of potential fans, but when I said “hometown,” I meant it. We were a town: nothing more, nothing less. No other professional sports, no big nightlife scene, no major concert venues, etc., etc.

  What that meant was that almost everything in a 100-mile radius revolved around our football team, our Woodsmen. I actually wouldn’t have been surprised if they closed the schools for a day of mourning if our quarterback really was out for the season. Or longer. This was supposed to be our year: we had gotten our highest draft pick in almost a decade in the off-season, a receiver from a big-name school who was finally going to be able to catch the rockets that Davis Blake threw. Plus, we had made three or four good trades that could have made a difference. And now, in first quarter of the first pre-season game…

  “What was it like in the stadium when it happened?” Karl asked me.

  “Everyone got quiet.” It was one of the eeriest things I had ever experienced. The stadium, filled to capacity with 61,777 fans on our opening day, had gone completely silent. Almost 62,000 people were holding their breaths. From where I had been standing on the sidelines, I could hear Davis Blake swearing and saw his hands yanking at the artificial turf as he writhed in pain. Yeah, it had been a bad one. Terrible to watch.

  “You really don’t know anything else, Katie?” Alfonso prompted me. “You were right there when it happened.”

  I shook the picture of our injured quarterback out of my mind. “Nope.”

  “What good is it, you working there, if we can’t get the inside shit?” He grinned at me as he said it. “You already denied me on hook-ups with the cheerleaders.”

  “It will probably surprise you to hear that the Woodsmen cheerleaders are not be interested in a guy who’s already married. Also, the team mascot isn’t in on sensitive personnel matters, so no, I don’t have any inside information for you. Shocker, right?” I grinned back at him, then checked the clock. “You guys are late!” They didn’t move from around my desk. “Look, I’m heading over to the stadium to rehearse after work. I hear anything new, I swear, you guys will be the first to know.” As highly unlikely as it was that I’d hear anything, I felt safe making that promise.

  The warehouse emptied of the drivers and I checked my phone. There wasn’t anything new online either about Davis Blake. Just more speculation, endless speculation. I thought of him swearing again, and of the confusion and dejection on the sidelines as they put him on the cart, then the cautious and hesitating applause from the stands as the untried, fourth-round pick came in to play for him. The replacement had immediately thrown an interception and the atmosphere in building felt like a popped balloon. The crowd had filed out at the end of the game with tears running down their faces. I wondered what was going on behind the scenes today. If the early reports on the sports websites were correct, Davis Blake was having his knee evaluated and the coaches were deciding what they were going to do without their star quarterback.

  I left the warehouse in the late afternoon. Despite the three fans I had going around my desk, I had cooked in there all day long, and the blacktop of the parking lot didn’t offer any reprieve from the August heat. I made the sign of a cross on the top of my little car before I got in. Keeping it going was really a matter of prayer, now. When it started, I breathed a sigh of relief, but every time it happened I knew I was just holding off the inevitable. I needed a new car. The kitschy hula girl on my dashboard rocked and rolled as the tiny tires navigated the potholes of the parking lot.

  When I got to the stadium, it was still strangely subdued. All the people I passed in the hallways kept their heads down, eyes averted. There was clanking and crashing from the weights in the player gym, but I didn’t hear any of the laughing and yelling between the guys that normally went on.

  It was always a little odd, and awe-inspiring, to go out onto the field with no one in the stands. It was the biggest empty room on the planet. I worked through the new routine that Trish, the head choreographer, had texted to me, just marking it. It was pretty simple and I had it down after the second run-through. But all the routines got more difficult after I suited up for the games—I meant, Chipmunk-suited up for the games.

  And Sam wasn’t there. I checked my watch and saw he was now 40 minutes late. This wasn’t the first time he had pulled this, and every time he did it I got madder. There was only so much that I could practice alone! Without him as Hank the Hunter, my Chipmunk part in the performances didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Really, neither of us made a lot of sense on the sidelines of a football field. Way back in the 1920s, when we entered the United Football Confederation, the owners of the new Woodsmen football team thought it would be funny to have an outdoorsman as their mascot and an animal character for him to go after on the sidelines, to provide additional entertainment during halftime and time-outs. The first animal had been a porcupine, then a skunk, but they had settled on the Nutty the Chipmunk by the third season. And now, that was me! Back in the early years, the Hank the Hunter character and the animal just ran around the stadium willy-nilly and the Hunter would “shoot” at it with an oversized fake riffle. The animal died at least once a game. Fake blood was involved. Hilarious, right?

  Tastes had changed, and no one was interested in seeing the demise of an animal at football
games anymore. Sam and I were more of a comedy and dance duo now. We had at least five choreographed dance routines during each game to the different songs played for the cheerleaders, and we also played pranks on each other. I would steal a big bag of nuts from his back pocket and run away and do cartwheels; he would pretend to set traps or step on my tail to catch me. It was all super corny, but our fans loved it. Our social media pages (in character) had more followers than a lot of the actual football players on the team

  Besides dancing next to the cheerleaders, Sam and I also had to interact with them a lot. Sam would act all bashful, and they kissed the plush cheeks of his giant fake head. I rolled around so they would pet me, or I would fall over with happiness when they scratched behind my furry ears. Again, corny, but people absolutely loved it, and it was so fun to see the kids clap and jump around. They lined up to give Nutty hugs when I went up in the stands. Some of them thought I was real, or asked if I could come live with them. They cracked me up.

  I did another run-through of the new steps, then did a few of our old routines too. Without Sam, there was only so far I could go with everything. The Hunter and the Chipmunk were really not solo artists. While I waited for the cheerleaders to show up for their on-field rehearsal, I practiced some easy tumbling and did some running. About a minute before the cheerleaders arrived, Sam raced onto the field, looking like a mess.

  “Where have you been?” I grumbled, trying to fix his hair. “What’s all over your t-shirt? Please, please don’t tell me it’s puke.”

  He took off his shirt and turned it inside out. “Better? God damn it, I’m too old for this shit.” While I was fairly new to the role of Chipmunk, Sam had been the Hank the Hunter for almost 30 years.

  We heard the laughter and chatter in the tunnel that presaged the arrival of the cheerleaders. I leaned forward and sniffed Sam. “Sweet Lord! Have you been rolling around in a dumpster? Stay away from Trish at all costs.”

  Trish, the choreographer, was talking into her phone when she came out of the tunnel but waved me and Sam over. He stood at a discrete distance. Both of us waited for her to finish her call. “I expect your homework to be done by the time I walk through that door, the dishwasher empty, the dog walked. Do you have it down?” She stared at me. “Well, do you?”

  “Me?” I asked, pointing at my chest. “The new routine? Yes.”

  “The graphing calculator is not my responsibility, so if you really lost it, you will be paying for a new one yourself,” Trish told me. “Music, now. From the top.”

  I realized she also had a walkie-talkie in her other hand, connecting her to the people in the booth. The woman was a master of multitasking. The first notes came through the giant sound system and Sam and I ran to get into position.

  It took about a second before Trish called a halt to our disgrace of a performance.

  “That was a disgrace of a performance,” she yelled. “I thought you said you had it down. One thing I don’t like is lying.”

  The cheerleaders tittered from the ground where they had been stretching. “I did have it down,” I mumbled. It was really hard to do my part while trying to lead Sam through his. He obviously had no idea what the hell was going on.

  Trish turned in fury on the cheerleaders. “If you’re laughing, you must know your own dances perfectly. Let’s see it, then. Line up!”

  She started to put them through a serious workout and I glared at Sam as we walked together over to the endzone. “Thanks!”

  “Trish don’t matter. Screw her.” He glowered meanly.

  “She doesn’t matter to you, because you’re a permanent fixture here. Chipmunks come and go!” My job was in no way as secure as his was, a fact Sam never seemed to comprehend. But by the end of the rehearsal, we were both laughing, back on good terms. It wasn’t a good idea to be a quarrelling comedy duo. We usually worked well together, when he wasn’t late and smelling like the bottom of my shoe. What I assumed bottom of my shoe smelled like. I didn’t really test it.

  The cheerleaders were all bent over, leaning on their knees when I walked out. Trish was a serious coach and these ladies were serious athletes and dancers. They still had another hour of practice to go before they were finished for the evening. I said goodnight to Sam and walked out to the parking lot. I had gotten a great spot, right in fr—

  I stopped dead. A humongous monster truck was parked on top of my car. Not next to, not near, not bumper to bumper with. It was on top of my car. My car was now the cracker underneath a giant wedge of cheese, if I wanted to use a snack food metaphor.

  I blinked my eyes rapidly as if that would make the horrific image go away. No, my car was still there. The back end was under the oversized tires of the shiny black truck. Flattened. The front end was tilted up from the weight in the back. It was like something out of a horror movie where cars attacked other cars. Other smaller, defenseless cars. What had my grandpa’s tiny hatchback ever done to deserve this?

  While I stood there with my mouth gaping, the door to the stadium opened and closed behind me. A huge man on crutches, mirrored aviator sunglasses over his eyes in the waning August sunlight, slowly limped up to me.

  “Is that yours?” He pointed at the car pile with one of his crutches.

  “Yes! Someone killed my car!”

  “That’s my truck. I tapped yours when I came in,” he mentioned.

  “You tapped it?” I turned to stare at him, and suddenly it dawned on me that this was Davis Blake. The one, the only Davis Blake. The winningest quarterback in the history of our team, who broke the United Football Conference passing yards record the year before. Davis Blake. Sweet Jesus.

  Davis Blake had murdered my car.

  “You tapped it?” I repeated.

  He was already slowly moving over towards his truck and beeping it to unlock the door. I immediately saw the issue.

  “Hang on,” I called, jogging up to him. “How are you driving with your right leg injured?”

  He turned to stare at me. At least, I thought he was staring at me. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the glasses.

  “I’m using my left leg,” he said finally.

  “I don’t think that’s working for you,” I said helplessly. Closer up, I could see the extent of the damage. No way was my car drivable. I didn’t know if it was even fixable. “Did you hit the gas instead of the brake?”

  He just looked at me. Or maybe he had fallen asleep behind the sunglasses, I couldn’t tell.

  “How am I supposed to get home?” He didn’t answer. “My car is like a fly that got swatted! Like an old tube of toothpaste! I have the panini of hatchbacks!” I realized that I was waving my arms around over my head and my voice had increased dramatically in volume.

  “You shouldn’t have parked in this lot, anyway. It’s only for players.”

  “And for on-field employees on rehearsal days, like today,” I defended myself. “It’s in the Woodsmen Family Handbook.”

  “You read all that? Huh.” That seemed to be my dismissal, because he turned and limped the few steps to his truck.

  “Hang on. Hang on! You can’t drive, you’re going to make this worse.” I hopped ahead of him, putting myself between him and the vehicles. “Let me back the truck off. Down.” I winced.

  Davis Blake just stared at me. Maybe he was staring at me. His face was pointed toward me.

  “Fine.” He held out the keys and I put out my hand as he dropped them. “Be careful with it.”

  “You have a well-developed sense of irony,” I muttered. I could barely reach the door handle. There was a bar you could step on to get in, but it was a lucky thing I was so limber, or I wouldn’t have gotten my butt up in the truck.

  I started the engine and it roared and rumbled like a herd of elephants ran past. Music blasted out of the oversized speakers on the doors and base boomed up from the back. I covered one ear and flailed with my other hand at the buttons on the dashboard until it stopped. Then I carefully moved the seat forward so that I could d
rive this behemoth.

  The view was actually nice from so high. It would be easy to get through traffic. And if someone was in your way, you could just drive right over their car! Sweet Jesus. I put the truck into reverse and carefully eased back it off mine, flinching at the creaking and breaking noises I could hear over the deafening thunder of the engine. I threw it in park, turned it off, and leaped down to assess the damage.

  “Oh. My. Lord.”

  Davis Blake pursed his lips. “Let me know how much it costs to get it touched up, and I’ll pay you.”

  “Touched up? Touched up?” I was close to yelling again. “Touched up. My car is…” There were no words. “I can’t drive this, and I obviously can’t let you drive yours.”

  His mouth tightened. “I told you that I will pay for your repairs. What do you suggest we do now?”

  There were two of us, one car between us, and only one of us was fit to drive it. The answer seemed clear to me.

  Really, I didn’t know how he’d managed to get into the truck to drive himself over to the stadium. Even as big and strong as he was, he was barely able to get up into the passenger side with his hurt leg, and I found myself pushing on his butt to help him. I was pushing Davis Blake’s…no one would ever believe me. It felt like two very unripe, hard melons. Not that I was squeezing, I was only doing it to help him. Totally not perverted, at all.

  When I had hauled myself back into the driver’s seat, he was already on his phone. “I’m getting your car towed. They’ll meet you at my house with a loaner,” he said when he hung up, his words flat and expressionless. The last time I’d heard his voice was when he had been hurt on the field, but I’d listened to his interviews plenty of times. He didn’t usually sound so…empty.

  I took a breath, feeling better. Davis Blake would get my car fixed, and Lord knew it needed it even before it was pancaked. “Thank you,” I said. “Well? Are you going to say it?”