Delay of Game (9 page)

I WOKE UP
at dawn with Sara’s firm bottom pressed into my groin. Somehow I was even harder than I had been last night when I was trying to sleep, and the way we were curled into each other—like spoons in a drawer—wasn’t helping matters any. She’d pulled my arm over her waist and her fingers were threaded with mine. Buster, the little bastard, was snuggling on the pillow with her, one paw resting on her cheek. He was supposed to be between us. He was supposed to be that buffer, so I wouldn’t end up like this.

I tried to ease myself away from her without waking her up, but I’d barely moved an inch when she shot up in the bed and started flinging the blankets off.

“Shit! Bathroom?” Her voice was high with panic.

“Through that door,” I said, but she’d already tumbled off the bed and was running directly for it. The door slammed closed, but that couldn’t do anything to hide the sounds of her puking her guts up.

This was just fucking great. So now she was sick on top of everything else?

The toilet flushed, and then I heard the faucet running, so I knocked on the door. “Sara? Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine,” was her terse response.

Fine my ass
.

“I’m going down to let Buster out. I’ll make you some toast.” Toast and hot tea had always been Mom’s answer for an upset stomach.

She still looked green ten minutes later when she sat down on one of the barstools and reached tentatively for the saucer I’d put her toast on.

“Do you want anything on it? Butter? Jelly?”

Sara shook her head cautiously, as though every movement was a challenge. That was probably better anyway. Dry toast, plain rice—bland things. Those were safer than any other things.

I heated up a mug of water in the microwave and set out some teabags for her to choose from. “Will the smell of coffee bother you?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Earlier, she’d seemed panicky. Now her voice was weak. I didn’t like the sound of either of them on her. They didn’t fit her, and hearing her that way only served to piss me off. I couldn’t be mad at anyone but myself, though.

While I brewed my coffee, she put a teabag in her mug and let it steep, all the while picking at her toast, barely eating any of it.

“You don’t look so good,” I said. “Maybe you should stay here and rest.”

“I’m going to the fucking hospital.” Sara’s blue eyes sparked at me, a combination of defiance and sass. That was the first time she’d looked like herself since everything went down last night. Hell, it was the first time she’d
sounded
like herself. That didn’t mean she had any business going to the hospital and making her father sick, though.

“If you’re sick, it might be better for you to stay home. You don’t want to get your dad sick.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Bullshit.” I took down another mug and filled it with my coffee. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to infect him with whatever bug you’ve got right now?”

She still had a bit of toast in one hand, but she tossed it down to her saucer and crumbs went flying for Buster to clean up. “Fuck you, Jonny. It’s not a bug. I’m not going to get him sick.”

“Then what is it?”

“None of your fucking business is what it is.”

“I doubt his doctors would appreciate you passing on whatever you’ve got.”

“Last I checked, pregnancy wasn’t fucking contagious. I can’t sneeze and put a baby in your belly.”

Pregnant? Hell.

I didn’t think she had been dating anyone. Not seriously, at least. Not baby-making serious. She was always going out on dates with some dickwad or another. None of them were good enough for her, at least the way I saw it. This son of a bitch, whoever he was, definitely wasn’t good enough for her if he hadn’t even bothered to be with her last night. My right fist itched to teach him a thing or two about how to treat a woman.

“Fuck,” she muttered, fresh tears in her eyes. She clambered off the barstool and rushed out of my kitchen.

“Sara, wait,” I said, but she didn’t stop.

She slammed the door to the downstairs bathroom and locked it. By the time I got there, it was too late.

“I didn’t know.”

“
Nobody
fucking knew,” she said. She was full-out crying now—I could hear her sniffling and hiccupping through the door.

Twice in less than twelve hours, I’d made her cry. God, I was the biggest fucking ass in the world.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

Maybe she realized the asshole who’d knocked her up didn’t deserve her. I still wanted to rearrange his face, though.

“Is he—”

She ripped the door open so fast I almost fell through onto her. “I don’t want to talk about this.” Her eyes were still filled with tears and her face was splotchy, but a fierce resolve had returned to the set of her jaw and the hardened line of her lips.

“Okay.”

“And you don’t know a fucking thing. I swear to God, Jonny, if anyone finds out without me telling them—”

“I won’t say anything.”

Her glare never wavered. After what felt like an eternity, she nodded.

“Come on,” I said. “You should try to eat.”

Sara sniffled again, but she walked past me and returned to her barstool in the kitchen. Buster was hanging out by her stool, hoping for more crumbs. I followed her in with a thousand questions I couldn’t ask racing through my head. She was right, though. It was none of my fucking business. I kept my questions to myself. Well, most of them.

“Do you think you can eat anything other than toast?”

“I don’t want to try right now.”

I nodded and took another sip of my coffee. “Will the smell make you sick if I fix my breakfast?” I didn’t know the first thing about morning sickness.

She shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

I took out some eggs and fruit, trying to put together a reasonable breakfast for myself. I might not be able to play for a while, but I still had to keep my body ready. That meant I had to keep fueling myself like I would if I was playing, and I had to get in enough workouts to mimic the physical output of being in games. It wasn’t going to be easy. Ten games in the playoffs could be two or three weeks, maybe more. If the Storm got eliminated before those games were up, I’d have to finish serving my suspension next season, but if the guys kept us in the playoffs for a while, I could be called on to play again sooner rather than later.

Sara was still picking at her toast and sipping her tea, not really making much of a dent in either. She wouldn’t look at me.

“I thought I’d take you to the hospital and then see if I can track down your purse before my call with the League,” I said. “I can come back to get you after.”

Her eyes flickered up to me for a moment. Just long enough to pierce me. “You don’t have to do all that, Jonny. I’m sure Dana can come get me to take me to the hospital. Or Laura—”

“I’m sure they could, too. But I want to.” There were a lot of things I needed to make right. Being sure Sara was looked after was only the tip of the iceberg. Especially now that I knew she was pregnant.

She sighed, a huge, heaving breath. “You really have to stop trying to make up for last night, you know? It wasn’t your fault.”

She was still wrong about that.

In the end, she let me take her to the hospital. I stayed with her until they took her back to see Scotty, and I stuck around a little longer—until Dana showed up to wait with her. Then I headed to the Moda Center. Jim wasn’t expecting me at his office for a couple of hours, so I had plenty of time to find out if Sara had left her purse at the arena. She had. The security guards all knew me and Sara both, and they’d heard what had happened with Scotty last night, so it was easy enough to convince them to give it to me. It had been under her seat in the owner’s box when the crew went in to clean up after the game. In her haste to get down to her father, her purse had surely been the last thing on her mind.

I sent her a text message to let her know I had it and would bring it to her that afternoon. Then I headed over to the practice facility.

When I got upstairs, Rachel Shaw was on her phone just outside Jim’s office. His door was closed. She lifted a finger in my direction, begging for just a moment of my patience. I nodded.

After she hung up, she said, “Jim’s meeting with Bergy and Hammer right now, Jonny. They’re sorting out who’s going to take over for Scotty for now.”

“I’m early anyway.” I just didn’t know what else to do with myself.

She gave me a kind smile. “Brenden and a few of the other guys are in the weight room. You can go spend some time with them.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hang out with the boys right now. I didn’t really want to be with anyone. They’d just try to convince me that everything was all right, but it wasn’t.

She opened a file drawer in her desk and filtered through it, searching for something. “How’s Sara doing?”

Awful
. “She’s as good as can be expected.” Considering I’d nearly killed her dad. And he was having surgery today. And she was pregnant.

I couldn’t talk about that, though.

Rachel bit her lower lip in concentration and nodded, her eyes roving the files in her hand. “That’s good. Brenden is going to watch the kids tonight so I can go be with her for a while. We don’t really want her to be alone right now…”

I understood that better than she could ever know.

“Do you mind if I just take a seat and wait out here?” I asked, indicating a few chairs along the wall near Jim’s office.

She shook her head, a curl of red hair falling free from her ponytail and dropping in front of her eyes. She brushed it away distractedly. “Do what you need to do, Jonny.” Her phone rang, and she went back to work.

I took a seat and waited for Jim to finish up with the coaches. The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sara. About what she’d do if she didn’t have her father. About the baby she had on the way and the son of a bitch who wasn’t there for her right now when she needed someone the most. About how I could make sure she was taken care of. Sara was twenty-three, the same age as Corinne, four years younger than me. I tried to imagine what I would do if my sister were in the same position as Sara, but it only made me angrier.

Finally, almost an hour after I got there, Jim opened his office door and waved me in.

“Come on, Jonny. Let’s talk before we get the call.”

I nodded and lumbered in. Jim clapped a hand on my shoulder, and both Bergy and Hammer stayed in their seats with commiserating expressions. Jim closed the door, and I sat down across from the coaches.

“You’ve never been suspended before,” Jim said. He skirted around his desk and took a seat in his chair. His glasses were folded and sitting next to his computer monitor. “You play on the edge sometimes, but you don’t really go over the line. I don’t know if that will be enough to get them to cut down on the suspension, but we all think it’s worth a try.”

“I thought it was automatic.”

“It is,” Bergy said. “But a hearing wouldn’t be part of the deal if there wasn’t at least some small chance we could change things.”

Hammer nodded. “So that’s what we’re going to try to do. Because we’re already going into the playoffs down a head coach. We need you.”

“Right,” I said. There wasn’t a chance in hell the League would rescind or shorten this suspension. The rules were as plain as day. Maybe it made these guys feel better to try to change things, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

“So let’s lay out our game plan,” Jim said. He pulled out a legal pad and pen, and we got to work.

DADDY KEPT TRYING
to smile for me, to reassure me, but he was in too much pain for the smile to really come through. I’d only been with him in the ICU for five minutes, but he was already exhausted. He could hardly keep his eyes open. This had all been too much, even just a few minutes of talking with me. He had collapsed back against the pillows despite the bed keeping him somewhat upright, and his hand was loose in mine.

I supposed that was to be expected—the overwhelming exhaustion—since he’d just undergone triple bypass. The surgeon had assured me while Daddy was in recovery that all was well, despite the fact that it had been a triple bypass and not the double they’d initially hoped he would require.
Better to do it now, while we’re already in there
,
he’d said to me, as though that could somehow comfort me. I was beyond any reassurance until I saw him.

“How long will he have to stay?” I asked the nurse who was in the room with us. I had already asked the doctors, but nothing had sunken in. Until I had seen my father and known that he was still alive and breathing, nothing had broken through the fog.

The nurse was still situating all of the tubes and wires around his bed, making sure the beeping machines were beeping properly, it seemed. “Two more days here in the ICU,” she said. “After that, he’ll be moved to a regular room for the rest of his stay—probably another three to five days after the transfer.”

Pretty much another week, then, in total. I nodded. A tear slipped free, and Daddy squeezed my hand. Only the way he gripped me wasn’t
normal
. Usually, when he would squeeze my hand, I could feel all his strength in the touch. His grasp felt weak just now, as if I was the strong one. I didn’t want to be the strong one.