The Benchwarmer Read online

  A benchwarmer?

  Nope, Teddy Hayes can really start her up…

  Second-string. That’s been Ellie Wilde’s position in life.

  The daughter of a superstar quarterback and his model wife, Ellie could have been beautiful, tough, desirable—a winner, just like her parents.

  It didn’t quite work out that way, but she’s satisfied with things as they are. She has a great job with a professional football team…which would be perfect, except that she’s a really just a gofer with her office in a janitor’s closet. She has a great boyfriend…or he would be, if he was aware of her existence, and wasn’t just the object of her 10-year, secret crush.

  Yeah. There are a few issues, but Ellie doesn’t dwell.

  Her life takes a definite turn when she meets Teddy Hayes, recently promoted to play on her team as the backup quarterback. He’s gorgeous, funny, and struggling. He has the opportunity of a lifetime to play in the pros, but he’s messing it up, and his personal life isn’t much better. Maybe Ellie can help him, both on and off the field, and maybe he can do the same for her…

  Maybe both these benchwarmers can step up to the big time and score—together.

  The Benchwarmer

  Jamie Bennett

  Copyright © 2020 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.

  Chapter 1

  I watched Davis Blake take the hit at the 30-yard line. He went down without ever seeing who got him, flying off the ground and sailing through the air as the defensive player slammed into his body. They both landed about five feet from where Davis had scrambled after handling the snap.

  Most of the other eyes in Woodsmen Stadium had been on the ball, which sailed with its usual speed and accuracy into the end zone to the new wide receiver, who then inexplicably dropped it. The crowd groaned as the first touchdown of the season slipped through his hands.

  But I was still watching the quarterback, as I always did. I had watched as the left tackle on the Jackson Juggernauts continued his rush several seconds after the ball left Davis Blake’s grip, and I had watched as he took out our QB from the blind side. I couldn’t stop the sound that emerged from my mouth: kind of a scream, kind of a groan. Everyone in our suite leaned forward, immediately tense, then momentarily frozen.

  It took just another few seconds before the crowd of 62,000 Woodsmen fans noticed what had happened to the franchise quarterback, and then they went almost totally silent, the cheers and clapping snuffed out. Now I looked over at my father, sure that he had also been watching Blake instead of the dropped touchdown pass.

  “Knee,” he diagnosed succinctly. “I saw it twist. Done for the season.” We watched the Woodsmen medical staff race out onto the field. Davis was already grabbing at his leg, so my dad was probably right. The three men in our box jumped up and left, and I stood, hesitating.

  “Sit down, Eleanor. What would you do?” my father asked.

  “Oh, I…” I also worked for the football team. “Maybe…” I looked in the direction that the Woodsmen General Manager, the Director of Player Personnel, and the CEO had gone. I sat back down. Nothing, there was nothing I could do.

  The trainers on the field had already called for the cart to come pick up Davis Blake and it drove out from the tunnel. They showed closeups on the big screens of him, of his other leg kicking, his body jerking around in pain. “Kayden Matthews is the backup QB,” my dad noted. He calmly sipped his scotch. “This game is going to be a bloodbath.”

  Yes, it was. After they took Davis Blake away on the cart, the touchdowns started to roll in, and not for the Woodsmen. It was like the defense had given up, and Kayden Matthews, the replacement quarterback, couldn’t find the end zone with GPS. His first throw—his first throw ever at the professional level in a game for the Woodsmen—went right to a defensive back for an interception. The first preseason game had turned into a nightmare.

  My father was on his phone for most of the first three quarters, texting with and taking calls from various coaches and team personnel. His title for the Woodsmen football team was officially “special advisor,” and they depended on his expertise in a lot of different ways—especially about the quarterbacks, of course. My dad, Warren Wilde, had played in that position in the United Football Confederation for 16 years, leading the Woodsmen to five League and eight Division Championships, and he hadn’t done it purely on brawn. Coming out of college, he hadn’t been the fastest, the biggest, or the strongest. He hadn’t even been in the first round of draft picks.

  No, he wasn’t any of those things, but (as he liked to say) he was the smartest player on the field, always, and the one who worked the hardest. That was why he had won the starting job in his first season with the Woodsmen, that was why he had been inducted into the hall of fame in a ceremony in San Francisco in the first year that he was eligible. That was why the current quarterbacks coach was calling and the offensive coordinator was texting him midgame, for help with this replacement QB who, frankly, sucked. I leaned over in my chair to try to see my dad’s phone, and since his sight had deteriorated but he wouldn’t wear readers, I got a little glimpse of his text conversation in the extra-large font. The team doctors confirmed my father’s earlier diagnosis: they weren’t sure exactly what the problem was without running tests, but clearly, Davis Blake’s knee was very messed up. He was definitely out for the game, and in their estimation, at least the season. If not longer.

  My heart sank and I wanted to cry as I thought of Davis. It was just so unfair! The play had been over, it was a late hit. And I knew that he’d already had an ACL repair in college. It was just wrong, but I did my best to mask my emotions from my stoic dad. He didn’t like what he termed “hysteria.”

  And the game went on, endless and depressing as the Woodsmen fumbled, fell, and practically ran into each other. Kayden Matthews, our new quarterback, seemed to get worse instead of better. Even the cheerleaders, the Woodsmen Dames, looked a little down, and they were professionally perky. In the fourth quarter, as the two Woodsmen mascots were dancing around and trying to rally the crowd, my father put down his scotch and stood up. “Let’s go.”

  “Oh, Daddy, we should stay. How would it look if the cameras cut to your box and you had left before the game was over?” I asked him.

  “It would look like I wasn’t going to waste my time watching a moron I told them not to draft. They should have listened.” He walked out of the suite, very slowly because he refused to use his canes at the stadium. I gathered up our stuff and hurried to follow him. He was my ride, after all.

  The other people streaming out of the luxury boxes on our level knew my dad, and although they all said hello and stared, they mostly left him alone. No one bothered him for an autograph, certainly not with the look he perpetually wore on his face (the look I fondly called the “Go and Suck It, World.”) We took the elevator down and then he walked toward the corridor with the executive offices. I noticed how hard he was trying not to limp.

  “Wait, Daddy?” I walked quickly after him. “Wait, are you going to be here for a while?”

  He stopped just as the security guard held the door for him, and I could see some people rushing around beyond the opening. This wasn’t normal for a game day—the Woodsmen operation had app
arently kicked into gear to deal with the injury to Davis Blake. “I’ll be here as long as it takes,” he answered me.

  “I guess, um, I’ll go to my office. Will you call me when you’re done?” Sometimes he forgot about me, and I didn’t want to get left at the stadium again.

  My father just turned and walked away, so I really hoped he would remember that I was there. “Hi, Lyle,” I told the security guard, and he nodded back glumly. Lyle usually knew everything about the Woodsmen, and I was betting he already had the inside scoop on Davis Blake. “Is it really bad?” I whispered.

  “I heard ACL. The knee he had operated on in college.” Lyle shook his head. “We lost Lynch when he retired, we traded away Williams for three draft-picks who were busts last season, Kayden Matthews is now our starting QB and there’s no backup for him unless your dad can suit up and play. If only,” he lamented. “The Woodsmen are screwed.”

  My heart sank further. Lyle knew his stuff, and I myself had been thinking along the same lines.

  “By the way, thanks for that pasta,” he told me. “I’ve been having it for dinner each night. I’ll bring you the pan next week.”

  “You’re welcome. You can keep the pan, I have a lot of those.” I tried to smile at Lyle as he closed the door behind me, but I didn’t feel it, not at all. Instead, I felt nearly sick about Davis Blake’s injury. It was so unfair! But lots of things were, and not just in the game of football. My dad liked to say that what happened on the field was a metaphor for life: you took hits, you depended on lesser people who then let you down, you struggled for a tiny gain. You fell and tried to get back up, until you couldn’t and it was all over. The end of your playing career/death, was what he meant by that last remark. He generally added that, just like life, football was usually an exercise in futility and the thrill of victory was fleeting and insignificant in the greater scheme of the march of the seasons.

  It wasn’t exactly inspiring, and thinking about it, I felt a whole lot worse. Davis Blake had tried to get back up today. He had rolled on the turf, grabbing his leg, and then he had tried to stand before the trainers got over to him. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t able to do it, and life was just so unfair.

  I walked down the hall past a few agitated Woodsmen staff members, but just a skeleton crew since usually this part of the stadium was almost empty on game days. I had told my dad that I was going to my own office, but that was a pretty grand term for where I worked. I was technically in the Department of Player Personnel, so the guy who had sat on my dad’s righthand side in our suite for the game today was my boss—that was what the email offering me the job with the team had said, that I would be in his department.

  But actually, I didn’t report to anyone in Player Personnel; I didn’t really seem to report to anyone at all. The first day I had arrived at Woodsmen Stadium for my new job at the beginning of the summer, Lyle the security guard had been the person to greet me and welcome me to the staff. He’d shown me to my desk, located in a very small room off a hallway well apart from the main group of offices. In fact, it was such a small room that I wasn’t sure how I’d get around the desk to sit in the chair on the other side. Lyle had looked at the setup and kind of shrugged. “Well, it’s something,” he’d said, but then he’d gotten a call on his walkie-talkie and had to go.

  I had tried to squeeze by on the side of the desk, then I had tried to move it, to angle it diagonally in the room, but it was fully wedged. In the end, I had climbed over as best I could in my pencil skirt and sat in the old, wood chair. The top of the desk had been empty, like no phone or computer, and there was nothing in the drawers. There was nothing at all to indicate what I was supposed to do there.

  I had waited for some time—like, an hour, maybe—before climbing back over the desk and wandering down the hall to the door which read “Director of Player Personnel.” I knew him as the guy who had sometimes sat with my dad in our box to watch the games, but now he was supposedly my boss. At least, he was my boss according to my emailed job offer, but Lyle the security guard hadn’t known anything about that.

  It had taken me a while to work up the courage to knock on the door, and before I had, it had flung open. I recognized the woman who came out as another person I had met through my dad, but I wasn’t sure of her name or exactly where she worked—I thought maybe college scouting.

  “Hi, Ellie,” she had greeted me. “Is your father here? Are you looking for him?

  “I work for the Woodsmen now, starting today,” I’d explained. “I’m supposed to be in Player Personnel, but…” She looked friendly, so I had persevered. “I don’t know what I should do.”

  She had looked behind herself into the office. “Mitch? Do you know anything about Warren Wilde’s daughter working here with you?”

  No. The assistant at the desk inside had checked his computer, frowning. Then he called someone, still frowning, and said “ok” a few times into the phone. “I guess she does work here now,” he had finally and reluctantly answered. “I don’t know…” He looked pointedly at the woman from scouting

  “Uh, ok, I have some things you can do,” she had told me. “Come on.”

  In the two months since that first weird morning, my job had consisted of whatever happened to be needed that day, across all different divisions of the Woodsmen front office. And I had realized that my own “office” was probably a former janitor’s closet. I had finally identified the pungent smell in there as the same as the floor cleaner I knew they used in the wet areas of the locker and training rooms. I had played in the tiled areas a lot when I was a kid and I’d come to the stadium with my dad.

  Last Friday, I had been tasked with bringing doughnuts around to the assistants in the various divisions as a special treat to thank them for working so hard to get ready for the preseason games. I had carried them into my closet/office to organize prior to distribution, and my battered desk was still covered in rainbow and chocolate sprinkles, bits of glaze, and sugar. I carefully swept the debris into my palm before I climbed over the top and seated myself in the creaking chair. I had no idea how long my father was going to be at the stadium, but there wasn’t one thing to do in my “office” after I had cleaned up from the doughnuts.

  I sat for a moment, thinking, then got up and climbed back out of the closet. I wanted to check around with the other employees to see if I could help with this awful Davis Blake situation. Also, I wanted to be busy and occupied (or at least appear that way) just in case my father did venture over to see me. He hadn’t visited yet since I had started working for the Woodsmen, but you never knew with my dad. One of his greatest skills as a quarterback had been keeping the offense unpredictable, and he still acted the same way in other areas of his life.

  I also didn’t want to sit in the light of the one bare bulb and brood over what had happened to our team’s quarterback. I was still in a state of shock, and pretty close to crying when I thought about it. I felt just like the fans that they had shown on the big screens above the field as Davis was taken off on the injury cart: they had been either stunned or bawling their eyes out.

  “Hello…excuse me, I can’t remember your name.”

  I stopped and half-turned in the hallway, unsure if the voice was directed at me, and not wanting to seem like I was presuming too much. Usually, people around here weren’t talking to me, unless it was to give me their lunch orders.

  “Is it…Emily? Emily Wilde?” This was a woman I recognized from my trips around the stadium looking for things to do, the assistant to the CEO. She smiled a little.

  “Oh! No, it’s Ellie.” I thought she did mean me, unless there was an Emily Wilde nearby.

  “Wonderful. You’re just the person I was looking for.”

  “I was? Me?” No, that was wrong, because I wasn’t anybody around here. I wasn’t anyone who someone looked for, anyway. “I’m Ellie Wilde,” I said, just in case she really was needing another woman named Emily.

  The woman gave me an odd look. “Yes, pard
on me for mistaking your name,” she said, a little frosty now.

  “Oh! No, that’s not—” I tried to explain.

  “You’re in Player Personnel, right? Great.” She walked off down the carpeted hallway, and reluctantly, I followed her to an office. She stuck her head through the open door to talk to whoever was inside. “Frank? What about Warren Wilde’s daughter?” She gestured to me. “Emily, come here. She’s not doing anything,” she told the person in the office.

  “Ellie,” I whispered. I couldn’t hear a response from beyond the door.

  The woman stepped aside. “Have you met Frank? Frank, this is Warren Wilde’s daughter.”

  “Of course, Emily,” the man in the office said. “Come in. I’m Frank Pauley.”

  “Oh, it’s Ellie…”

  Frank Pauley stepped from around the desk. We were about the same height, but to me, he looked so tiny. My dad was my yardstick for every other man, and he was tall and broad. Even now, kind of hunched with his bad back and with his knees making him sink down more, he was still bigger than most guys standing on their tiptoes with their chests puffed out like mating birds. Kind of like Frank Pauley seemed to be doing now. “I’m not sure if you remember me, but we have met before,” Frank said. “When we retired your father’s number, at the party afterwards.” His eyes swept over me and I unconsciously crossed my arms over my body, covering my breasts.

  “Yes, of course, I remember you.” I recognized him for sure, but I knew a lot of people around here one way or another. I’d been coming to the stadium since I was born. “Did you really need me, or were you looking for my dad?”

  “You’re available to work today?” When I nodded eagerly, he told me, “We have a special project for you, regarding Davis Blake.”

  My heart started to pound. “You want me to help Davis? Yes! Of course! What can I do?”