The Comeback Route Page 9

  “A running board would be nice,” I agreed. “Maybe your next car will be smaller, to be easier for shorter passengers. When did you buy this one?”

  “It’s a rental. So is the apartment, month to month. I’m not planning on staying with the Cottonmouths. I have to start the season with them and then I’ll be looking for another trade to end this year somewhere else.”

  I turned to look at him. “What’s wrong with Miami? Have you noticed that it’s February and I’m wearing chancletas?” I held up my leg and wiggled my flip-flop at him.

  “Well, you know, I don’t actually pick where I play based around your footwear,” he confided.

  “Do you really get to pick? Because if so, I’d like you to think about Arizona, southern California, other warm places like that.”

  The car roared as he hit the gas hard. “Miss Smith, I thought I just said that I’m not basing my life around your flip-flops. And anyway, no, I don’t get to pick. I didn’t choose to leave the Woodsmen because I had hoped to stay there for a long time, maybe my whole career. And yet here I am, playing for a coach whose first words about me to the media were that the trade hadn’t been his idea, that they could have used the draft picks they gave up for me, but that he would have to make the best of it. Fuck him, and fuck the Cottonmouths.”

  “Is that why you’re acting like this?” I waved my middle finger in a circle to include all his bad behavior. “You’re flipping off Coach Cattaneo and the team?”

  We screeched to a stop at a red. “I’m not flipping off anyone. I’m young and I’m going to have some fun. I’m acting like every other twenty-some guy who doesn’t have a girlfriend or a wife or a family.”

  “Yeah, like how I act,” I agreed. “Like a twenty-some guy. Woman, I mean. I can do what I want, when I want to. Nobody cares except Daisy and she’s married now, so she can focus on that. I could do anything,” I mused. “I could move to the real Havana if I wanted to. Maybe I want to.” I considered life on a Communist island.

  “I wouldn’t suggest it. Let’s just go to the beach in Florida today.” Nico reached over and pulled my braid. “You’re not thinking about selling your organs for money, are you?”

  “No. Not today, anyway.”

  “Have you looked in your wallet?”

  First I had to find it, then I looked. “There’s money in here!” I exclaimed, staring. I turned to him. “How did you know it was in there? Did you do that?”

  “I checked on your cash supply while you were ranting about me last night as you got ready in the bathroom. ‘Stupid Nico, I hope he chokes on the cookies.’ That was what I could hear through the door.”

  “I don’t hope that you choke anymore, now that you’re acting like yourself again.”

  He glanced over and smiled a little at me. “Thanks, I guess. You know, you didn’t have any money at all in your purse. How would you have gotten home if things went sideways with Galen? You have to think of things like that. Think of your safety.”

  “Thank you, Nico. Thanks for doing that even after I called you names like ‘dickhead’ and ‘mierda for brains.’”

  “I didn’t hear that part.”

  “It may have been my internal dialogue,” I said. “I know that I yelled a lot about you slumming around with those plastic women in your bed. They were there to get famous, you know.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he told me.

  “I’m just trying—”

  “No, I mean it. Thanks for looking out for me.” Nico focused on the road. “I made them leave. All of them.” He cleared his throat. “I made them leave, but I don’t want you to. Ok?”

  “Good.” I settled back and opened the window to feel the warm winter breeze.

  “Did you have fun last night when you went out?” he asked after a while.

  “Hm.” I thought about that. “It’s a little hard to say,” I finally responded.

  “Why is that?”

  “A few reasons. I liked Galen mostly, and he’s handsome and big, which I tend to go for. I do have size standards.”

  “Despite your own lack of it,” Nico added. “So what went wrong?”

  “Nothing went exactly wrong, but I did fall asleep at the restaurant.”

  “While you were out with him, you fell asleep?” He started to laugh.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “Not on purpose. And I did enjoy that, but I could have done it anywhere. I didn’t need to be with him. Actually, it would have been more comfortable in my bed, even without the sheets on it.”

  Nico laughed harder. “How did Galen take it?”

  “Not very well. He seemed pretty miffed, but it didn’t have anything to do with him. I was tired after standing for so long at the bakery and I hadn’t slept much the night before because I was writing up ideas and plans. For you and for my life coaching business,” I clarified. “I just meant to close my eyes for a minute when he went to flirt with the hostess again and when I looked up, dinner was over and he was sitting at a different booth with some other women.”

  “He left you alone, sleeping?” The laugh turned into a frown. “And he left you at dinner to flirt with the hostess?”

  “She was very pretty. And tall,” I added wistfully. “And I remember you looking at that actress when we went out, so you should be careful about criticizing Galen for flirting.”

  “We weren’t on a real date,” Nico reminded me. “But sorry, anyway.”

  I accepted this with a gracious nod. “I was sorry last night also, and I told him so, but Galen was super angry about me conking out. He did drive me home, though. He could have just left me there and I might not have known it until a waiter poked me at closing time, so he did me a favor in the end.”

  “If you fall asleep on the beach today, I’ll grab you before I go. You don’t need to worry about that.” Nico pulled my braid again.

  “Thanks. And if you try to take up with any women today, I’ll put hermit crabs down your bathing suit. The front part,” I specified. He seemed to take that seriously, not as a joke, which was exactly how I meant it.

  The beach was gorgeous, wide with white sand dipping down into turquoise water. “This is why people come to Florida,” I told Nico as we walked out of the parking lot and the view spread out before us. “This, and El Asturiano bakery.”

  We walked closer to the waves until Nico stopped and dropped my bag with a huff onto the sand. “I swear, you’re carrying rocks.”

  “No, you were carrying the rocks,” I answered, smiling sweetly. I moved around and set up our campsite, all the stuff I had found in our hall closet for the beach. “Here, let me put sunscreen on you,” I said, and he immediately pulled off his shirt. Oh, yes. Perfect. He sat down so I could reach, and I rubbed lotion all over his back, up and down and over again, massaging with my fingers. I loved touching him, feeling his warm, smooth skin and all the hard muscles underneath it. I focused especially the back of his neck, which I could hardly stop myself from kissing because it was just so attractive. “I should do your front,” I said, scooting around him and appraising his chest and abs. And lower, where he might have also appreciated a bit of a rub.

  “I’ve got it,” he told me, and took the bottle from my hand. I shrugged and lay down on one of the mats we had carried. He had carried.

  “Here.” He moved to sit next to me in the sand. “Despite what you said about your good skin, I’ll grease you up, too.” I reached behind and untied my bikini top with one hand.

  “Galen wrote to me while you were out with him last night,” Nico mentioned.

  “That’s weird. He did?”

  “Yeah. He was wondering about some of the things you were telling him.” His fingers massaged too, rubbing my shoulders and tracing down my spine.

  “Mmmm,” I said, reveling in his touch. I thought that we should stay on the beach forever, and he should always keep rubbing my back.

  “Apparently, something you said sounded very familiar to him,” Nico continued. “You told him that you were ori
ginally from Georgia, and that you have six brothers and sisters. That sounded familiar to me, also. It sounds a lot like what I had told Galen about my life while he and I were at the gym with the other Cottonmouths. In fact, that is my life story and not yours, Miss Smith.”

  “Maybe Galen got confused,” I muttered. All this lovely massaging was putting me back to sleep. “He got a bit upset about that.”

  “About you lying about being from Georgia?”

  “About you,” I corrected, and sighed in happiness when his palms made circles on my lower back. “That’s where it hurts after the bakery, I think from standing. Or can eating too many cookies cause back pain?”

  “No, your shoes suck. Why did Galen get upset about me?”

  “He didn’t like hearing so much about you. I guess I talked about you a lot or something and even after I told myself to stop, I couldn’t until I conked out.”

  Nico’s hands paused, then moved off my skin. “You’re all set. No sunburn for you today.”

  “You’re done?” I rolled over. “You can do my front.”

  “The nude part of the beach is down the way, so you’ll need to put that top back on,” he said, looking out at the ocean. Huffily, I pulled nylon over the illicit bits. “What were you plotting out for me the other night that made you so tired that you fell asleep on a date?”

  “I was planning your approach to social media, mostly. And what we’re going to do about your family.”

  “What about them?” he asked, irritated. “You’re going to try to manage their lives, too?”

  “They keep making comments to the press about you. Have you talked to your parents lately?” I asked, making a loose knot of my bikini strings.

  “Nope. And I’m not going to, so leave that alone. Hear me?”

  I nodded. “Ok. I’ll find a work-around.”

  “What about you? Have you talked to your parents?”

  “Nope. Not to my father, and my mom is already dead and I don’t really go in for all that séance stuff, so not to her either.”

  “I didn’t know that your mom had died. When did that happen?” He looked over at me and put his hand on my braid, but not to pull it.

  “When I was a kid. I don’t remember her that well, not anymore.”

  “Your dad never remarried?”

  “No.” I thought for a moment. “Before, when people asked me that, I laughed, because he always talked so much about how he didn’t like being married the first time around to my mom. If she hadn’t died, they were heading for divorce. He used to like being single and screwing every woman who walked by. He always had a lot of ‘special friends’ when I was younger, special women friends, but I just thought he was a really likeable person. I didn’t get that it was all about fucking. He did everyone, everywhere.”

  Nico winced. “You’re talking about your father. I couldn’t stand to know that about my parents.”

  I shrugged. “He never tried to hide anything from me. He used to use me to meet women, when I was a cute little kid.”

  “That’s nasty.”

  I shrugged again. “I guess all that will be over now, because he is getting married again. I should have seen it coming. He never redecorated in all the years after my mom died, so our house was stuck in a kind of time warp of shabby chic, but then he hired an interior designer, Chelsea. She was over constantly, taking measurements or whatever, and I thought it was just him getting laid, but then they redid the whole house. It was an obvious sign. She ended up with the diamond from my mom’s old ring, but I’ll bet Chelsea doesn’t know that it was pre-owned.”

  “Did he kick you out because he’s getting remarried?”

  “No, and I didn’t want to stay anyway,” I assured Nico. “It was time to spread my wings and hit the pavement.”

  “That didn’t sound right, did it? Don’t end up on your ass.”

  I laughed. “I don’t plan to. Not in the high heels you hate, anyway. I have to admit that you were right about those and I’m going to give them up so that I can walk a little faster and without fear.”

  “So I was right about one thing,” Nico mused. He let some sand run through his fingers. “Tatum, what are your long-term plans?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “You’re staying with me for a while, then you said you were going to do a Mary Poppins and take off when I’m cured of my evil ways.”

  “Oh, right.” I had told him something like that. “Sure, maybe that’s what I’ll do. When you’re all fixed up, maybe I’ll go.” No, no way would that happen. “What about you? You want to get traded, and that’s it?”

  “That’s about it.” He lay back on his own mat, basking in the sun. “I’ll get traded and play my ass off and both the Woodsmen and the Cottonmouths will be sorry.” He looked at me and laughed. “How old did I just sound?”

  “Maybe ten, eleven tops.” I rolled and leaned on my elbow to look down at his face. “It wasn’t personal, was it? The Woodsmen seemed very sorry when they talked about trading you. They were sorry for you to go but they were making a business decision.”

  “Sure felt personal when I had to pack up my life and move away from Michigan. Ah, screw ‘em.”

  “If you want to get traded again, you have to play even better than before. If I were you, I’d be getting my ass into gear to get ready for the season. You have to work at it.”

  “Says the girl who just got her first job at age twenty-four.” Nico laughed. “I usually go to Las Vegas in the off-season to train but I just didn’t want to.”

  “You wanted to come down here and get into trouble instead. To show them that they were wrong to trade for you.” I nodded. “I get it.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said, irritated again. “Can we talk about something else? Anything else?”

  “Ok. Were you really shy in college? That was what Faris the linebacker said.”

  He shook his head, crinkling the mat. “I wasn’t shy. But when I went off to college, I was a small-town hick who really didn’t know jack shit about football. I kept my mouth shut and learned, and maybe I did come off that way. What were you like way back when?”

  “In high school?” I thought. “I guess I was pretty popular. I always had friends. Well, I always knew a lot of people from all different places. I went to boarding school in California and it was very diverse.”

  “That’s a long way from home.”

  “I was away from home a lot before that,” I said. “I used to go to camp in Maine for seven weeks each summer, every summer until I was fourteen.”

  “Did you ever even see your father?”

  “Sure! We always took one long vacation together, every year. Last summer, we went all over Europe. My dad and I get along pretty well together, except…” It was hard to explain. “Remember Daisy?”

  “Your friend? Knox Lynch’s wife?”

  I nodded. “We haven’t known each other for that long, but she’s my absolute best friend. She cares about me and worries about me, and I’m the same way about her. I would do anything for Daisy,” I said with assurance. “But my dad…no. I know he doesn’t feel like that. He loves me, in a way, but not like Daisy does. And we get along fine, but he doesn’t actually know me very well. Like, the real me.”

  “The woman from Georgia who has six brothers and sisters?” Nico asked.

  “The woman who’s his daughter.” I stood up, not wanting to think about my father anymore. “I’m getting hot. Let’s go swim.”

  “Give me a minute to grab my rope to tie us together.” But when he stood up, he held out his hand instead. “You keep right with me, hear that, Tatum Smith? And all parts of your bathing suit stay on.”

  “It was your fault that my top fell off in the pool. And I got the feeling that you didn’t mind the view,” I told him.

  He didn’t answer, but he was grinning as we walked to the water. And he held my hand or my ankle the whole time, and I didn’t get swept away by waves as I u
sually did.

  ∞

  “Jesus, Tatum,” he said a few hours later. “Jesus Christ almighty. If I had known that was why you brought the chisel, I would have left it in the garage. Does it really hurt?”

  “Well, I’ve felt better,” I said. “Could you please stand a little closer?” Nico stepped to my side and I held on to him with my good hand and put my face into his shirt, peeking at the doctor with one eye.

  “This is just the numbing,” the doctor said. “You’re lucky, Hortense. Hand injuries can be very serious.”

  “Tatum. Her name is Tatum,” Nico said, and the doctor glanced at my chart.

  “Right, Tatum. I don’t know where I got Hortense from, sorry.”

  I looked up at Nico and he was glaring at me, but his face went back to sympathetic when I felt the needle and jumped. He sat down and I leaned into him and closed my eyes. He hummed a little and patted my shoulder.

  “We see a lot of coconut injuries,” the doctor commented. “Irrigating now.” I felt him tugging at the skin where the chisel had sliced it as he discussed tendons and ligaments and how much damage you could do to your hand with a sharp tool. He finished with, “It’s almost always the tourists who do this. The sight of a coconut seems to make them crazy.”

  “I’m not a tourist,” I informed him, but my voice was muffled by Nico’s shoulder. “I live here.”

  “We’re Miami residents,” Nico agreed. “Residents who will no longer be using chisels to break open coconuts to get at the milk. Right, Hortense?” I nodded and burrowed.

  “I thought you said your name is Tatum?” the doctor asked. He sounded a bit confused. “And you’re Nico Williams, right? Our newest Cottonmouth?”

  Nico ran his hand over my braid and rubbed my back, and I tried not to think about the needle pulling my skin back together. “It is Tatum,” he answered. “She’s Miss Tatum Smith, I’m just the escort.” He murmured something else that I didn’t catch, and put his cheek against my head. “Ok, there?

  I nodded and cuddled. Nico went back to his off-key humming, and despite the two-inch gash in my hand, I was presently doing great. Part of that might have been from the big swallows of rum that I’d drunk from the bottle in the beach bag to deal with the pain of the coconut injury. But most of it was due to being with him.