Page 58 of On Merit Alone
That’s as far as I got was “Hey…”
I didn’t send it. I couldn’t. What if he didn’t want to hear from me? What if it bothered him? What if he got back in the game and my text was the thing that distracted him? I couldn’t be that—a distraction, a nuisance, more than he’d bargained for. So instead, I pocketed the phone and rejoined my team as we watched the last quarter of the game play out in hope-filled horror.
Ira never rejoined the game. Defenders lost.
“You okay, Mer?” I heard Emily ask.
“Yeah, why?” I said over my shoulder, barely looking up as she peeked over the seat behind mine.
“Because you look like you’ve seen a ghost, and your guy went down,” Charlie’s voice came next.
Looking up, I was surprised to find the same two concerned faces again. I shook my head. I didn’t know what to do with that. What to do with anything. All I wanted to do was text Ira, but I couldn’t because we weren’t close like that. And looking at these women, I sort of wanted to fall into them the same way but couldn’t for much of the same reasons.
We just weren’t like that.
No one was with me. I needed to remember that.
So I just shook my head and turned my shoulders. “Not my guy.”
It felt like a lie, but what could I do?
And after a while, I was forced to send the only message I’d come up with before our flight took off and I lost my chance.
Me
Hey… I’m here if you need me.
I was biting my nails. I haven’t bitten my nails since before the draft, when I knew I was going to have to do this big, scary, important thing all on my own and I had no idea how to act. But right now, alone in my kitchen, I was biting them. Why? Because Ira hadn’t answered me.
Ira wasn’t one of those guys who liked to play around with his messages. From what I’d learned of him, when you texted, he answered. The fact that he wasn’t answering me after I’d texted him multiple times started worrying me.
The news about King limping out of the game with an entire quarter left and never returning had spread everywhere. Speculation on what went wrong was running through the media like crazy, andthe worst part was that the Defenders had yet to release any information on it.
What if he tore his ACL again? What if it was his other knee now? What if he was done for good?
My stomach roiled at the thought. For some reason the possibility of Ira being done with basketball was giving me the same reaction as the thought of me being done. I couldn’t accept it. He was too good and too special. He was still in his prime. He couldn’t be done.
If he was done then I’d no longer get to run into him, or play with him, or watch any games with him in it. If he was done, then I’d be all alone again…
I picked up my phone and texted him again. While my message before the plane took off had been calmer, more reasonable, all my messages since arriving home and still not hearing anything from him had been borderline frantic. Each going something like:
Me
Hey, I, just checking in on you…
Ira, could you let me know if you’re okay?
Ira, I know you probably don’t want to hear from me right now, but I’m worried.
There wasn’t so much as a text bubble.
Now I paced my kitchen with my phone clutched to my chest, biting my nails. Waiting for it to buzz at any minute now. It wasn’t. Minutes and minutes of waiting and absolutely nothing. No one else used my number. Ihadno one to use it. So I wasn’t worried that when it lit up it would be a false alarm. I just wanted it to ring, dammit.
I pulled up the text screen, my fingers hovering with intention. Should I really text him again? Was I being too… too much? I mean, sure he’d texted me and hung out with me at work, and talked tome in my car, and touched me like he wanted me around. But he was an NBA player. He was used to acting like that, right? He didn’t do any of that because I was anything special, he was just being himself.
And he probably had better people to talk to at a time like this. He wasn’t like that, he wasn’t waiting around for someone, anyone, to come and show him an inkling of humanity. He wasn’t stupid enough to take the first connection he’d felt in however long and latch onto it like a fish caught on a hook.
He wasn’t like me.
