Page 79 of The Red Zone
“Play safe?” she whispered.
I nodded, dipping my head down for a good-luck kiss. “See you after the game?”
“I’ll be here.”
* * *
There were nine seconds left on the clock.
The fans were in an uproar around the stadium.
Both teams were tied, and we had the ball at the five-yard line.
One more touchdown and this game would be ours.
Then, I could go back home with Mae and we could have our own special kind of celebration.
I called out the final play, looking around the group for everyone’s understanding nods.
“Let’s win this, boys. On three…. one… two… three…” We broke the huddle, everyone shuffling into position, ready to drive this victory home.
The ball snapped, and a defensive tackle came out of nowhere, stopping our red zone drive as he knocked into me with the force of a thousand suns at the exact moment the ball released from my hands.
I could feel myself being propelled backward toward the ground. What I knew to be milliseconds felt like an eternity as I watched my life flash before my eyes in slow motion.
When my body finally hit the ground, her face was the last thing on my mind before everything went black.
My Mae.
TWENTY-NINE
MAE
BEEP.Pause.
BEEP. Pause.
BEEP. Pause.
My heart clenched as I stood in the doorway listening to the perpetual sounds the heart rate monitor made. October laid there in the hospital bed with his eyes closed, random wires hooked up all over his body. The bedside table didn’t have any get-well-soon cards or flowers yet, which, for some reason, made tears flood to my eyes.
On a normal day, he was a six-foot-three, two-hundred-thirty-pound tattooed God of the human. Right now, though, laying in this bed under the low light he looked so… small. Fragile. Helpless.
Seeing him like this felt like my heart was being cracked in two while taking a sucker punch to the gut. Even more so than watching him get hauled onto a stretcher and carted off of the field mid-game.
I wanted to run to him, curl up into his arms, and never let go.
But something inside my brain wouldn’t allow me to move. Instead, I stood there, half way between his room and the hallway, shell shocked with my feet planted in place. Afraid that if I made one wrong move as I inched closer to him, that he would shatter into a thousand pieces.
There was no way of knowing how long I stood there like that.
Hours. Days. Seconds.
My knees felt like Jell-O.
Regardless of how long it was, it felt like time had stopped and I was the only person in the building. My heart beat frantically in my chest as I counted for four breaths, then held it, then exhaled.
It was only once a doctor placed a hand on my shoulder and asked if I was all right that I was pulled out of my trance. I gave her a small smile to mask the fact that I was hardly able to stand up right. Any moment, I felt like I could’ve collapsed to the floor and curled up into a ball on the cold, hard ground. All while nurses and other hospital staff buzzed around me.
