Page 40

CHAPTER 40

LOGAN

I come to my senses with a jolt. Stabbing pain on my left flank immobilizes me and I swallow down a curse. Bright lights above me dance like they’re mocking me.

“What the…” I murmur, trying to sit up.

“Welcome back, Kim.”

Rather than trying to get up again, I just lay where I am and turn to the source of the voice. The head of the medical team is nearby along with McDonald and Socci, and a bunch of other staff members. I blink hard, trying to clear my vision but it doesn’t work. The dancing lights aren’t the ceiling fixtures, they’re the beginning of a migraine. Good thing I’m in the clinic, huh?

“What happened?” I ask. That’s when I notice that my voice is muffled by something. I paw around my face and feel the oxygen mask strapped around my head.

“You had a panic attack that made you pass out,” dude says with all the chill in the world, like he didn’t just voice my own worst nightmare.

“I— what ?”

“Yeah, the guys took you off the field but we couldn’t get you under control in the clubhouse.” He’s scrolling through his iPad next to my bed, no doubt reviewing my chart. “I think we might have to change your medication and get you in therapy again.”

That’s—That all is fine, I don’t care. It wouldn’t be the first time I relapse. Something else is more pressing, though. Grunting, I brace my hands on the edges of the thin bed to lift my torso until I’m sitting. My side and my head pound just as strongly, but asynchronously. I peel off the oxygen mask and remove it, leveling a look at the doctor.

“Was I alone?” His eyebrows scrunch in confusion. I clear the grogginess off my throat and clarify, “When the panic attack happened. Was I by myself?”

“Ah.” He nods like he now understands with that big brain of his. “No, the team was there.”

“The team was…” I run a hand down my face.

“We have a really good crop of guys this year, to be honest. I’m really proud of the way they wanted to support you,” Socci says, smiling from ear to ear.

McDonald nods. “Machado surprised me, actually. I wasn’t expecting him to take control of the situation the way he did.”

“Sure made my job easy,” the doctor says with a chuckle. “I really thought for a second that the social media girl was gonna get you through it, but I guess it had already been too long with irregular breathing. How are you feeling now?”

“Rose?” My eyes go as wide as they possibly can. “She was there too?”

“Oh yeah. Wouldn’t let you go. We practically had to pry you off her to bring you here.”

“I thought the whole thing between you two was for show?” Socci’s eyebrows rise.

“I don’t think it is.” McDonald smirks at him.

Slowly, because my side is absolutely killing me, I bring my hands up so I can bury my face in them.

Maybe it shouldn’t matter to me if she saw me at my weakest. I’ve already taken myself out of the race. This might also be a blessing in disguise—she’ll finally understand that warning her off came from an honest place. This will make her move on and forget that I exist.

“Glad you’re awake,” a newcomer says. Beau’s entrance into the clinic filters in some of the noise in the clubhouse and I can clearly hear someone asking “how’s Kim?”

“Wait, the game is still on? I have to—” I swing my legs over the bed to get up.

“Nuh uh. You’re not going anywhere.” The doctor stops me with a hand on my shoulder—my bare shoulder. I look down at myself and find that I’m shirtless and there’s a massive ice pack strapped around my torso, directly over the area that hurts the most on my side.

“I’m placing you in the injured list,” Beau says, and if the revelations of the past few minutes weren’t already absolutely shitty, this is worse. “I don’t know which list yet, we needed you to wake up so we can run some tests.”

“I can’t go on the injured list. What about the series? What if this throws the whole season?”

Beau doesn’t mock the obvious dislike in my voice over this decision. He also doesn’t shoot me down as he could, because who the hell am I to question the manager? Instead, he says something even more lethal.

“This team isn’t as weak as to crumble without you.”

“But…” I splutter and a new ache squeezes my chest hard enough that I almost double over. My mind races with colliding thoughts, setting off sparks that threaten to burn down my flimsy sense of worth. “But I thought you needed me on the team.”

“Oh, I do. We do.” He motions around. “The team knows that losing you is a big blow, so they’re playing even harder. I think this will force them to evolve even faster, and by the time you return to the roster we might be unstoppable.”

Behind Beau, the other men glance at each other like they can’t quite comprehend what he’s talking about.

I do. He and I are the same type of people who can manipulate situations, even accounting for the variable behaviors of people.

The difference between us is that—first, the obvious fact that he’s a sixty something Black man with a wife and kids around my age. And second, that he’s genuinely at ease with himself. There are no edges or shadows to Rob Beau. He’s a steady, dependable rock. Of the diamond kind.

He’s everything I wish I was, and the respect I have for him is why I finally suck it the hell up. If Beau says this, then it is what it is.

I slump a little. “Is the game over?”

“No, bottom of the fifth. We’re leading by two.”

I was out that long? My eyes widen slightly, but more light aggravates my head and I wince.

“We’ll leave you to rest for a bit while we get the X-ray machine ready,” the doctor says.

Beau pats my shoulder before signaling to the other coaches to follow him, and everyone clears the holding room so they can go do their jobs.

Alone, I stare at the floor for a while.

“Damn it.” The facade I carefully maintained for years finally crumbled. Now everybody knows that I’m an impostor and that I’m actually a walking shitshow. I try not to wince as I lean on my bad side so I can lay back down, and throw my arm over my face to block out the light.

The door opens again. Sighing, I drop my arm. “Already coming to take me for X-rays?” A caveman grunt comes out of me as I pull myself back to sitting.

“No,” a feminine voice responds.

I lift my face. My eyes grow wide. “Rose?”

She leans against the closed door, her hands behind her but watching me like a hawk. Her attention stays glued on the ice pack. “How are you feeling?”

Subhuman. Worse than garbage.

Actually, like a garbage truck ran me over and left me in the middle of the road. And that’s just on the inside—in the throbbing in my chest.

“I’ve been better,” I respond in a low voice, trying for diplomacy. I let my eyes fall to her sneakers and stay there.

“Yeah, I imagine it can’t feel too good being rammed by a runner at full speed.”

I run my right hand through my hair. “Did you see the whole thing or only the part where I freaked the hell out and humiliated myself in front of the entire team?”

With a huff, she picks herself up and stomps over. I lean back as if that could add any real distance between us, but Rose stops a step away from me. Or maybe less. If I close my legs I could trap her between them.

“I need you to listen to me carefully,” she says with a not so veiled threat underneath. “What happened—that episode you suffered—it did not diminish the opinion anyone on the team has of you, do you hear me? If anything, the guys seem to be divided between worrying about you and guilt.”

“Guilt?” My forehead scrunches up, upper lip rising in the ultimate huh? expression.

“Yeah, like Cade for example. He seems to think that he could’ve prevented it somehow. That he failed you.”

“What the hell?” I snort. “He did not—he doesn’t even know?—”

“Exactly,” she cuts me off sharply. “He had no idea what you’ve been going through all by yourself. I sure as hell don’t either, right? You made sure of that.”

I snap my mouth closed tight.

She’s not done, though. “You purposely put your real self behind closed doors—scratch that, inside a damn vault. And if you don’t let us in, how can we possibly help you?”

“I don’t need?—”

Rose grabs my face in her hands, smooshing my cheeks until it’s hard to form words. “You do need help, Logan. You need us. And we want to be there for you, but you have to let us in.” The last part she says through gritted teeth.

I shake my head slightly, trying to free myself but she doesn’t let off. I grab her wrists and try to tug gently. But she still won’t let go.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if it’s a metaphor of some sort, of how she refuses to drop me. I can’t stand the damn hope itself making my heart gallop violently in my sore ribcage.

At least she eases enough that I can talk again. “It’s better off this way. You don’t want to get… contaminated by my mess.”

“Contaminated?” Rosalina scoffs and rolls her eyes so big, it’s a wonder she doesn’t get dizzy. “You seem to think I deserve to be put on a pedestal or something, when you know probably better than anyone here just how messy I really am. Why’s that, Logan?”

“Why’s what?” I swallow hard.

“Why did you punch my ex?” Rose waits but I can’t speak. Or more like I don’t trust myself to speak. Her hands slide away from my face, going over my ears until her fingers find my hair. Her fingers close around strands of hair at my nape, holding me in place. “What did he do to deserve that?”

I can’t imagine that she’d be defending Ben Williams in any circumstance. It makes me suspect that she knows and is fishing for confirmation. Fessing up would be like flying too close to the sun, though.

“He was mocking Starr.”

“Liar. He said I’m not the best he’s ever had and to enjoy his leftovers, didn’t he?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Miguel was mic’ed up.” Her lips curl in as menacing a smile as someone as beautiful and sweet as her could possibly get. “I went up to the broadcasting room and it turned out the whole damn team heard that. So now everyone knows I was with Ben and that apparently I’m a bad lay.”

Volcanic heat rises up my belly and to my chest. I try to get up. “I’ll murder that son of a?—”

“And there it is again.” She lowers her forehead to mine, pulling at my hair just a tad and keeping me prisoner on this hospital bed. “How come you care so much about me that you’re willing to fight for my honor all old school, but you can’t say it to my face?”

And there it is.

The last ruse is finally up.

I grit my teeth hard and squeeze the edge of the mattress with my hands. “You know why.”

“No, I truly don’t. It’s why I’m asking you, and I deserve to know why.”

I close my eyes, not being able to stand the prying intensity in her eyes anymore.

“You know why,” I repeat, growling. “You deserve the world, Rose. You deserve safety and love and stability, and I can’t provide any of those. I can’t be the man you deserve. I’m too broken and all you see is fake—I’m barely holding it together. I’m medicated. I’m deathly terrified of turning into my father or my mother or my brother. I don’t know how to be a good person, I didn’t have a single good example to learn from growing up. I?—”

I gasp, my words stopping because my lungs are struggling for air again.

And then Rose tilts my head back, forcing me to open my eyes to see her and not the shadows in my head.

“You are a good person, Logan. You’re not perfect, but you know that and you work on it.” Those words slam me harder than the Riders’s runner. “You didn’t send me packing when I asked you for help with my job. You open doors, protect me from strangers and from exes, and even from your own relatives. You make sure I get home safe and you feed me.” She breaks off for an incredulous laugh and shakes her head down at me. “All you’ve done is prove over and over that you’re a good man—the right man. For me. I wish you could just see it the way I see it and stop getting in the way between us.

“We could be great, Logan,” she whispers, her nose lightly nuzzling mine. “We could love each other. But you have to let it happen.”

I choke on nothing, and then her hands ease off and she pulls away.

Rose gives me a solemn look. “I’ll be waiting for you, Logan.” And with that, she calmly walks out of the clinic without a backward glance.

If she had, she would’ve seen the devastation in my face because what she just said—all of it? It has destroyed every notion of who I am. Who I was before her.