Her luggage had arrived a couple days after she landed. Her wearing my clothes while we waited for her bags to be delivered to the house had stirred up all kinds of feelings I’d worked too hard to smother. It hadn’t worked. The shorts inched up higher as she shifted her legs. Her smooth legs that had been all tangled up with mine under the blankets last year. The ones I wanted to run my hands over and finally show her how much I’d missed her.
She drew her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and dropping her head to her knees. “What do you think? Should I go for it?” She nibbled on the inside edge of her bottom lip.
Shit. She’d been talking the whole time and I’d been fixated on her legs.
“You loved Venice, right? Spending more time there would be a lot of fun. You could explore even more old paintings and sculptures.”
Her breath hitched and she stared at me intently like she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right.
“Every time we talked you kept bringing up how hard it was to leave. Going back seems like a great opportunity.”
We’d have the spring semester after the Combine in April after I’d signed with a team, if I ended up getting drafted at all. A month and then the summer off and as long as I needed to convince her how much she meant to me.
Once her Italian summer was over she’d come back in time for my first pro season to start. With her away in Venice, focusing on training camp would be my sole focus.
“And you’d be fine with me going?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not like I’m not going to be busy. A new season. A new team. A new city. Who the hell knows where I’ll end up? We probably wouldn’t get to see each other much anyway.”
She slid off the bed and kept her back to me. “You’re right. It was stupid to second guess it. It’s an amazing opportunity” Folding her arms over her chest, she cupped her elbows and glanced over her shoulder at me. “Night, LJ.”
“Night.”
As I lay in bed, a new set of implanted Marisa-centered images filled my head. Marisa’s new sleep shorts. That birthmark high up on her thigh that I hadn’t seen since the summer between seventh and eighth grade when she swapped from her one piece bathing suit to swimming trunks and a bikini top with a rash guard shirt.
The summer she jumped from ‘is Marisa getting boobs’ to ‘holy shit, guys are literally tripping over themselves in the hallway to watch her walk toward them’.
Maybe we could take a trip after graduation. A slow meandering few weeks before she went to Venice for the summer and my workouts intensified. She could show me all the spots she’d explored this summer and I could set up some surprises along the way. I could make it a trip we’d both never forget.
“I need more footage if we’re going to get you the invite to the Draft Combine in April. You were only on the field for one play in the last game.” My agent—it still felt weird knowing I had an agent—sounded even more upset by the one play I’d been on the field for in my last game.
Inside the darkened interior of my car, parked in front of a white, two-story house with a Fulton U football flag staked in the front yard by the steps, I tried to calm him and myself down.
These streets were quiet. It was mainly professors and other college staff here; no students streaking down the sidewalks or the low thump of bass rattling windows. I’d parked on a tree-lined road with manicured lawns and two-story houses with blue-and-white shutters.
“I know.” I rested my head against the headrest, trying not to think about how just by being here, I was shoveling even more dirt for my own grave. But the couple dinners I hadn’t shown up at had required a double s’more recovery with Marisa after she swore her dad was going to pull her tuition waiver. It’s why I’d started coming. It’s why I had to keep coming until she got the final one for her last semester, which was also at the end of the season.
“Are your workouts going well? What’s the friction you have going on with the Coach?”
“There’s no friction. Everything is fine. I’m actually…” I stared up at the house. “I’m heading to dinner with him right now.” Our first in three weeks.
Every dinner Coach seemed to say the wrong thing. Remembering the wrong major. Mixing up her time in Venice with Rome or Florence. Not to mention the times he’d had to cancel. But the two of them were locked in a battle of the wills on who could outlast who in the not moving an inch department.
“Good, maybe you can ask him why he’s not playing the best inside linebacker in Fulton U history and why he hates shutting down offenses by not putting you on the field.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
A message came into my phone.
Marisa: At the end of the block. Are you here?
I swapped the phone to speaker.
Me: Yes, I’m parked out front, just finishing up a call with my agent.
“Are you listening, LJ?”
“Sorry, yes, I’m listening.”
“Do I need to send a bottle of whiskey or scotch for you to give to your coach?”
“I don’t think he’s much of a drinker.” He hadn’t even taken a sip of the celebratory champagne after a championship win. If he got drunk, it would probably involve unbuttoning the top button of his polo and scribbling football plays on the windows with grease pencil. A regular party animal.
A Marisa-shaped shadow walked past the back windows of my car and toward the mini-lantern-lit walkway to the house.
“I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
I ended the call and jogged up the walkway, following Marisa.
The front door opened.
Coach Saunders’s face softened. “You’re here.”
She nodded. From the tightness in her neck and shoulders, the frown she wore had to be as deep as the Grand Canyon.
He pushed the door open wider, his reed-thin smile staying in place until my foot hit the bottom step leading up to his house.
“And LJ.” He stared at me like I’d brought a casserole of dog shit to his front door, so exactly what I expected. After the first couple Monday dinners, it had sunk in that Marisa planned for me to come along to all of them, and that’s when things had gone south on my playing time.
“Coach.”
We walked inside. The second hand of the clock in the living room echoed in the silence of our steps.
Marisa unzipped her coat, but kept it on, shoving her hat into her pocket and sitting in the chair beside the one at the head of the table. There were only three place settings.
I took my coat off and hung it up on the back of the chair facing hers.
Coach went into the kitchen and brought out a pan of lasagna in a foil tray from the straight-to-oven section of the supermarket, along with a loaf of garlic bread. There was a pitcher of water and iced tea at the center of the table.
He sat down and slid the napkin off the table and onto his lap before jumping back up and rocking the tea out of the pitcher. “Damnit.” He grabbed the napkin and mopped up the spill. “Marisa, do you want some parmesan cheese? I’ve got some of that too.”
Leaving before she could answer, the kitchen door swung shut behind him.
“Can we try this time to be a little conversational?” I sliced into the lasagna and served out a chunk of the barely-bubbling block of pasta, sauce and cheese to Marisa and myself.