Page 76 of Base Block

The chair had been another issue. Every time I looked at it, I got the urge to cry. “Rainey, it’s ok,” Callum had promised when he’d noticed that. “It’s just a chair. He didn’t mean to.”

But it wasn’t just a chair, it was our first piece of furniture. It was just like how the flip-flop that Maverick had also chewed had been more than a shoe to me, because it was a symbol of a past that I wanted now. They were like the pictures that had belonged to my grandma, the albums she’d kept of relatives that I hadn’t known but were important to her. Those had disappeared when I’d gotten robbed in Los Angeles, about an hour after I’d stepped off the bus there.

Now, I wanted keepsakes and memories. I wanted the flip-flops, the chair, and the orange juice bottle. I was saving the note that Callum had written before he’d gotten a phone to text me on, back when we were staying at the motel. “Have a great day. I’ll be thinking about you,” he’d said.

I was thinking about him in the orange Woodsmen plane on its way to Michigan. I was also considering guinea pigs and horses and how they responded to threats and fear. I waited in the ripped chair (I’d covered the sad part with a blanket) for him to get home, thinking.

I heard him coming from the parking lot. He was light on his feet when he played, so agile and quick. But in the echoing pathways of these condos, I could identify him from at least a tenth of a mile away. He walked up the steps, coughed, sang a little, then mumbled something as he opened the door.

Then he walked in, still coughing, and yelled, “Hell!” He rubbed his face and shook his head. “Why are you awake?” he demanded. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“I was waiting to tell you what a good job you did and how proud I am.”

“Were you?” A huge smile lit his face. “I love coming home.” He kicked off his big shoes and walked to the chair. “Scoot over.”

I got up instead, so that I could sit back down on his lap. “That was a great game.”

“I thought it went well and it could have been all that mind-melding that we’ve been doing. Whatever works.” He sighed, though. “It was a tough flight home.”

“Why? Turbulence?”

“No, because we started hearing rumors about next season.”

I didn’t do the mask of calm, but I did force my body to stay relaxed. “Yes? What about it?”

If the whispers were correct, several players were already on the chopping block. He didn’t mention himself or Demitrious, so I actually did relax. But one of the guys was Jenae’s boyfriend, the wide receiver at the bottom of the Woodsmen depth chart.

“Jenae had her own box at that stadium for the game today,” I noted. She’d held a big party there but Anara and I hadn’t been invited. “It must have been so expensive.”

“Hopefully, she has a good job herself and he’ll get picked up by another team.”

“Beau and I talked about my job,” I mentioned. “We were trapped together on the plane for several hours and he couldn’t get away, so we went over a lot. One thing was that I work full-time hours and I think that I should be an official full-time employee. He agreed.”

“That’s great. He should have done it before.”

“He has a hard time with management,” I said. “It’s lucky that I can self-manage.”

“It’s not luck. You’re smart and you’re a hard worker.”

“Thank you. The other good news is that we decided that I definitely could do my job remotely, like, fully remote. So if you want to move away when the season ends, I could do that. If you still want me to come.”

“I didn’t think that you wanted to.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s because I was trying to figure out if I could do it. I didn’t want to go like a horse or a guinea pig.”

“Are you talking about being prey-able?”

I nodded. “But then I was thinking that those guys are doing ok. Everybody loves horses and lots of people have guinea pigs. They live in the wild, too, and they get by. Anara says that it’s a different species but you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you don’t need to be the king of the jungle,” he agreed. “You only need to survive it, like everybody else is trying to do. I’ll help you just like you help me.”

“Good. That’s what I want,” I said. “Maybe I would want to get some college classes in, too. We could go back together.”

“We could do that here,” Callum mentioned.

I sat up. “Why here?”

“Jory and I talked for a while. He’s going to retire after this season,” he said. “He feels like it was a great career, but he wants to spend more time with his family and he doesn’t want to risk getting hurt more. But he said if I stay up here, he’ll train with me. He thinks that I can take his place next year as the starter.”