Page 9 of Player Misconduct
By the time we push back our chairs, Serendipity’s has thinned to laptop people and a man reading the paper like it’s still 2006. The air outside is damp, per Seattle in April. We hug good-bye in a knot of cross-body bags and promises to text when we land.
My apartment is neat in the way you only achieve when you’re never there. I drop my keys in the bowl by the door, kick off my shoes, pull my team-issued suitcase from the closet. Packing is muscle memory at this point: scrubs, flats, running shoes, a black dress that always rides along like it’s waiting for anightclub that never comes, and of course, my faithful bikini that has yet to feel the warmth of a bubbling hot tub. Toiletry bag, med kit, and some romance book that Cammy was raving about that I got at our girls’ elephant gift party over Christmas.
I stare at the packet of salmiakki from last night that still sits unopened on my dresser like a dare. I shove it into the side pocket and tell myself it’s as good a place as any.
My phone buzzes on my comforter. The name flashes across my screen. One I haven’t seen light up on my phone in over two years since our divorce finalized, and I’ve liked it that way.
My stomach goes cold and hot at the same time.
That gut-churning feeling you only get when true dread hits you.
Tarron:Saw you on TV last night when Easton went down. You look good.
I set my phone down slowly, because if I don’t, I might launch the phone into orbit. The name is the same but the contact photo is gone—the one with us on vacation in the Cayman Islands during one of his season breaks. Deleted in a fit of dignity that felt like victory and loss all at once. He doesn’t deserve a face on my screen again.
I could just… not reply. That would be normal. Healthy, even. I could typeLose my numberor just block him altogether.
Instead, I do nothing, as if that’ll somehow make this all go away. I take a deep breath in, shut my eyes, and let it out slowly, focusing on the sound—the feel—the way I tell rookies to breathe in the quiet room when the world is tilting and they need a focal point.
The thing about trauma is that you think you’ve resolved it, buried it, or better yet, locked it in a box and tossed it into the deep abyss of the ocean. You think you’ve grown out of it. That it no longer has a hold on your life or the decisions you make now.
And then a text pops up, and suddenly that deep, dark abyss isn’t so deep after all, and that locked box just washed up on the shore.
It buzzes again—face down like I’m trying to suffocate it out of existence. I don’t flip it over. I don’t need to. I know his cadences. I know the apology that never comes. Just excuses, smoothed over with no shred of accountability.
I cross the studio apartment. There’s not enough room here to actually get away from my phone. There’s barely enough room to breathe sometimes. This space, and the debt hanging over me, is the fallout he left behind when he partied too hard with his new cheerleader girlfriend, got into drugs and drinking, and got kicked off the team.
With his income gone, the liabilities and credit card debt in both our names became mine. The creditors, too.
This tiny apartment is an ever-present reminder that I’m still not out of it. The debts have been finalized, paid off… but I’m just now shifting that money to the medical school debt I haven’t been able to make a dent in. It will be years before I ever see the end, but I’ll get there… someday. And the salary that Penelope agreed to goes a long way to help that.
I grab a glass, fill it from the sink, and take a long drink. The distant thrum of traffic from the Seattle night presses in through the window.
For a moment, I’m somewhere else—a different kitchen, a different city—watching a different man shove clothes into a duffel while divorce papers lie on the counter, his signature already dry on every line required to end our marriage.
I slide the phone into a drawer and shut it. The sound of the draw closing is satisfying in a way that almost makes me laugh.
A long shower helps. So does laundry and making a list titledRoad Trip Things I Can Control.It’s short: pack snacks, update med inventory, bring the good bandage tape because the otherstuff frays. I make a list of things I need to go over with Theo on the plane tomorrow, which will help keep my mind off of my teeny tiny case of claustrophobia.
Theo’s always good at keeping me calm since he knows I struggle with it.
It’s not the flying or being thirty thousand feet above ground like most people think. It’s the fact that I’m locked in a small space with other people and no way out, other than a parachute, that has me clawing at the armrest. Scottie’s Dramamine trick has helped, though. I just knock myself out and hope to sleep the entire flight. I double-check to make sure a bottle of it is in my carry-on, and sure enough, it is… in the front pocket.
When I finally crawl into bed, the city outside is doing its low, sleepless rustle. I kill the lamp and roll onto my side, and there in the dark my brain does the thing I was trying to avoid: it flicks to a grin I do not want to admit I can see with my eyes closed. The grin is attached to a man who brings under-eye masks on planes and hands out trivia like mints and winks as if he invented the concept. A man who, if you let him, might make even a cramped metal tube at thirty thousand feet feel less like a trap.
I bury my face in the pillow until the temptation to smile passes.
Tomorrow is travel day.
Aleksi is off-limits.
And Tarron is just a ghost.
Chapter Three
Aleksi
Seattle morning fog hangs low over the private terminal as we load the Hawkeyes jet. Out on the tarmac, the wind tastes like rain and jet fuel; inside, we’ve got the usual team soundtrack. Some guys are already asleep against their pillows, some are hyping up with headphones blaring, others go over plays with assistant coaches.
