Page 53 of Gridlocked on the Gridiron

“Yeah, but not like that. I wanted to go to the board about it. I had never been so mad. We were supposed to make playoffs that year too.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, Colton. I really am.”

“I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that I was so sure of how good we were that I believed him, or the knowledge that you guys won because you were better.”

She resumed stirring the pasta as it started to boil over the pot. “I know this might not be the right thing to say, but who cares? You won the Super Bowl last season. He has yet to do that. And if we’re being honest, you’re a far better quarterback than him.”

His heart hammered in his ears. Lucia’s compliments were only given when she felt they were worth giving, so his chest swelled.

“How have you been since he called?”

She strained the pasta and readied the chicken and sauce before she responded. “I’m okay. It definitely made me realize how much shit I took from him while we were together. I’ve been going through and analyzing it all, trying to figure out why I stayed for so long when he treated me like that. I had a lot of opportunities to leave, but he always found a way to keep me there.”

She placed the pot in the sink and then added the sauce and pasta to a bowl. “I think I was always going to be his backup. And that’s why he’s struggling so much with me moving on. I’m just glad I didn’t marry him.”

Me too.

Colton added all the parts of the salad into a bowl and mixed it, then walked the bowl to his dining table as he thought over her words. He couldn’t imagine Lucia being anybody’s backup. She was the most ambitious, intelligent, and beautiful person he’d ever met. He wondered if things would’ve been different if he and Lucia had gone to the same college. If he’d met her first.

“Abusive relationships are hard to navigate, especially when you don’t recognize that you’re in one.” As he spoke, he thought about his parents and how much his mother suffered by staying with his father.

“You sound like you’re talking from experience.”

He shrugged, watching her dump the pasta into another big bowl before placing it on the dining table beside the salad. “My parents weren’t happy together. My mom never said anything to me about it, but I think if she was guaranteed full custody of us, she would’ve left him.”

For as long as he could remember, up until his mother got sick, his parents hadn’t agreed on much. His father had always wanted him and Landon on the football field, and their mother had wanted them to go to school and have social lives. His father had wanted them to do drills and watch games, and their mother had wanted them to see her side of the family and learn her culture. She’d wanted to give them a well-rounded life filled with more than just football, but as with everything, their father had won.

“Will you tell me about your mom?”

Colton grabbed a set of plates and two sets of silverware as he thought about how he wanted to respond. “What about her?”

“What was she like?”

Lucia took the plates from him and began piling pasta and salad onto each before walking them into the living room. He followed her, mulling over her question as she set the food on the coffee table and sat on the ground in front of the couch. She took a bite of the food and hummed contentedly.

He sat beside her and finally answered her question. “She was…she was amazing. The funniest person you could ever meet. Even after she got sick, she was cracking jokes to try to make things easier for all of us. You know, my dad always talks about how he’s been at all of my games since I started playing football, and that might be true, but my mom was there too, and she never expected anything from me for showing up. She was just happy I was having fun. Just happy to watch her children do what they loved.”

“What was she like while you were growing up?”

That was a little tougher to answer. More complex. “I can’t lie, it wasn’t always easy. My mom was the best mom, truly, and she put her life on hold for us and my dad. She had three kids, all of whom played very high-level sports, and she was always the one to shuttle us to our many practices, feed us, and honestly, love us. But a part of me always resented that I’m half Indian.”

Lucia’s head whipped around to face him. At her questioning look, he continued. “It was hard to fit in, even in California. I went to a school with a lot of white people, and even if they didn’t mean to make me feel that way, it was always clear that I wasn’t one of them. My name may not sound ethnic, but one look at me, and you can tell I’m different. And, not that I had much contact with other Indians, but when I did, it was clear I wouldn’t fit in there either. I didn’t speak the language, didn’t practice the religion, and barely knew anything about the culture.

“My mom tried to teach us, and our grandparents wanted to see us more and teach us all about our culture, but our dad was very strict with me and Landon growing up. We rarely had time to do anything outside of school and football. And football, it kind of took it all away. It didn’t matter that I didn’t fit in with any group of people, because the moment I got out on that field, it went away. People stopped caring as much when they saw what I could do with a ball. And I think, after a certain point, I just didn’t really want to learn anymore because I’d found where I fit in. I was scared that learning about my culture had the potential to remove that for me and thrust me back into that same confusing place I’d grown up in.”

He smiled sadly. “Now that she’s gone, I regret that part of my childhood immensely, but as a kid, all I could see was the fact that others saw me outside of their predetermined boxes.” He shrugged as he watched her hand hover dangerously close to his. “I rarely deal with anything like that anymore. But in high school, and college, and even when I first started in the league, everyone had something to say about my ethnicity. They love putting people in boxes, don’t they?”

He was trying to lighten the mood after the surprisingly deep confession he’d made to Lucia, one he hadn’t even talked through with his siblings, people who probably felt the same as him. But something about Lucia’s question had seemed so genuine that he’d wanted to tell her how he’d felt all those years.

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m sorry anybody ever made you feel that way. You deserve so much better than that. And if you ever decide you want to learn more about your culture, I’d love to learn, too.”

Colton’s cheeks burned at her words. “Thank you,” he whispered back as he picked up the remote and clicked on the first streaming service that popped up. It’d been so long since Colton used his TV that he had to type in his login.

Before he pulled up a movie, he set the remote down and turned to her. “And I’m sorry about everything with Clark. I really am. You deserve so much better than what he gave you.”

She shrugged, taking another bite of the food in front of her and refusing to meet his eyes. “Thank you. It sucks, but the whole thing just proved to me that love isn’t real. Or if it is, it doesn’t last.”

“You really think that?”

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