Fair Game: A Football Romance (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Adam

Swallowing back the pain, I beg Dr. Moto to reduce the morphine.

“Doc, I’m fine really. Please turn that shit off. I hate the way it clouds my mind. I’ll take the damn pills if you want me to, just no more morphine,” I say, pointing to the pump attached to my IV that’s constantly pumping me full of poison.

“Adam, I understand your concern with addiction, but the dose we are giving you is simply keeping you comfortable. You’re not dosing yourself with your button, the amount …”

“What do you mean my concern with addiction? I have never touched drugs, and I only have an occasional drink when I go out. Whom have you been talking to?”

Those fucking sharks better not be feeding my surgeon information about my family. In all the years I’ve been dealing with them, they’ve stayed quiet about all that shit. I don’t need the media converging on my family or Ame.

“Calm down, Adam. Amethyst merely mentioned that you have a brother who overcame an addiction and that you were concerned for your own health. I’m impressed actually. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t take something like this so seriously.”

Thank God it was Ame and not an outside source. She must have remembered my fear of addiction. It’s good that she hasn’t forgotten details like that.

“I don’t take anything more serious than my health, Doc. So you gonna shut it off or what?”

“I’ll have the nurse come in and discontinue it, but I don’t think it’s the best idea. I have a feeling you might pull out the line yourself anyway.”

I smile a you-read-my-mind smile, and he shakes his head.

“Thanks. If I take the pills, can I go home tomorrow night?”

Dr. Moto sighs a heavy sigh.

“Why don’t we wait and observe how you tolerate them first. I’m not making any promises, but I won’t rule it out.”

“Yes!” I say, raising my hand to the doc for a high five that he returns weakly. Guess he doesn’t want to mess up his moneymakers. One of my moneymakers is wrapped up in a stupid brace. The sooner I get on my feet, the sooner I get on the field and get my girl back, on her back … and her front and her side.

That right there is all the motivation I’ll ever need.

Chapter Ten

Amethyst

The professional in me knows I should stay the night and make sure he’s comfortable and attended to. The nurses are understaffed, and Adam can be a handful to say the least. It would be helpful to them if I stayed, and it would make him happy. That’s the part I’m grappling with—making him happy. It’s my job to do everything within my power professionally to help my patients recover, but damn it, I don’t want to let him suffer.

I sit and watch him sleep thinking why would he be so stupid to demand nursing care from a woman he cast aside like yesterday’s trash years ago. Why did he keep the pictures of me on his mantel? Why the hell does he sleep with garbage like Cherry? Why, why, why, there are too many whys with Adam.

I decide to do what’s right for my career and wrong for my heart. I stay and sleep, and I use that term loosely, in a fat recliner next to his bed. I’ve slept in more uncomfortable places. It’s not the chair. It’s Adam’s presence that causes me to wake every fifteen minutes all night long.

At four a.m., I wake up for the hundredth time, and I’m sweating. I slip out for a drink of water and to use the bathroom at the end of the hall.

Before I exit the bathroom, I am aware of Adam yelling, and I sigh. Can’t he try to be nice for five minutes while I pee?

When I exit, there is a light flashing over the top of his door, indicating he pressed the emergency button on his call light. Nurses are rushing from all directions to his room. I break out in a run trying to decipher what he’s yelling about and realize it’s not angry, bossy yelling; he’s frantic.

I enter the chaotic room. The scene is frenzied yet heartbreaking. Adam is still in the bed, thank God. I was afraid he had tried to get up and fallen. He is covered in sweat, swinging at the nurses who are trying to help him.

“Get your fucking hands off of her!” he yells.

His eyes are closed. He’s not even awake. He’s having a nightmare, or a night terror to be more accurate. I’ve never seen anyone become so agitated and distraught during a dream.

“Ame!” he yells, and I freeze.

He’s dreaming about
me
? I step to the bed, and the three nurses risking their lives gladly step back to let me deal with him.

One, a young pretty girl, seems to be more determined to wake him until he backhands her, catching her in the eye with his knuckles. She gasps, and her hand flies to her eye. Covering one side of her face, she retreats to the door. The other two stay but at a much farther distance.

“Adam? Hey Silver, what’s wrong?” I say softly, not getting too close myself. His arms stop waving, suspended in the air, but still now.

He kicked his covers off with his good leg, and I’m concerned about his bad one. I hope he hasn’t done something to set back his recovery. He’s panting when he drops his arms to the mattress, still yelling at invisible intruders, who are touching someone he’s trying to protect.

The words that come out of my mouth next shock me. I don’t realize I’ve said them until he stops yelling and mumbles something about “his Ame.”

“Baby shush, everything’s okay. I’m right here.”

Where the holy hell did that come from? I called him baby when we dated in high school, but this man, the man he’s become, is a person I can’t stand.

“Ame?” he says, opening his eyes and reaching for my hand.

The nurses seem nearly as shocked as I am. Both of them are staring at me, bug-eyed and slack-mouthed. I look at Adam and then at each nurse individually, scrambling to come up with some sort of excuse for calling my boss “baby.”

God, I hope neither of these women thinks to leak this to the press. That’s all I need. I’ll be flushed down the toilet right along with my career so fast I won’t have time to hold my breath.

Everybody at MBS knows it’s the biggest no-no to get involved with our patients. Even if I weren’t a NP taking care of Adam, I know it’s stupid to associate with him.

My parents would die if they knew I was hooking up with the biggest player in the NFA. They disowned him when he walked out on me. No one in our house has spoken his name in all these years, and football is a forbidden topic.

My dad was less than thrilled that I wanted to go into sports medicine. He worried for the first two years of my career about this exact scenario happening. Well, not this
exact scenario
. I’m sure he never thought I’d call Adam “baby” again. 

Dr. Moto enters the room, effectively popping the bubble of tension in the air.

“I’ve got a nurse out there with a black eye, Adam. What’s going on in here?”

Dr. Moto is readily available in the middle of the night since he’s only visiting. He must have a doctor sleep room nearby. Most surgeons go home on call in the evenings. But I guess when you’re as rich as Adam, people are at your beck and call at any time of the day or night.

“I think he was having a night terror. I’m not even sure he’s totally awake yet,” I say. I don’t like defending him, but it’s the truth. He didn’t know he was hurting that nurse.

“I’m awake.”

I switch my gaze back to Adam from the doctor who is approaching and the nurses who are retreating.

“Do you know what happened?” I ask.

“Bad dream, it’s nothing. I have them all the time,” he says, but it’s obvious it’s not nothing. He’s covered in sweat. His heart rate is 120 BPM, and he’s still panting.

“Seems like something to me. You’ve got the whole floor awake, asking what the hell’s going on. Well, not everybody, I guess there is that guy in room ten who’s in a coma.”

I like Dr. Moto. Anybody who can make a joke in the midst of all this has a pretty awesome bedside manner. That’s rare these days. Most of the doctors I know are only in it for the money.

Adam notices he’s holding my hand and lifts them up together.

“Must have been bad. My nurse is holding my hand,” he says with a shit-eating grin on his face. Any sympathy that was growing inside of me goes up in a puff of smoke, like dry tinder in a campfire. I shake free and roll my eyes.

“You punched a nurse,” I say.

“Gave her a black eye,” Dr. Moto says.

“And you woke everybody up,” I say.

“Including me,” Dr. Moto says.

“Damn you two. Can’t a guy have a bad dream without people ganging up on him? I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Tell the nurse I’m sorry. I’ll pay her medical bills if she has any and shit, throw in a new car or something. That ought to make her happy.”

Adam waves his hand dismissively, like this is all a casual misunderstanding. Maybe it is to him, but it’s not to me.

“Do you solve all your problems by giving people extravagant gifts?” The double-sided question wasn’t originally intentional, but once it was out of my mouth, I was really interested in hearing his answer. If he thinks a bottle of wine and some clothes are going to make up for what he put me through, he’s going to have to find another nurse.

“Shit, Amethyst, I’m trying to be nice here. Give me a break.”

“I think a face-to-face apology and an explanation might work better than an expensive car. She might want to know what was happening to you and why you did what you did.”

Dr. Moto is lost, and I’m so angry my blood is boiling in my veins. The dam is about to break if I don’t get out of here. Adam’s nightmare is going to look like a fairytale in comparison to the wrath I’m about to release.

Before he can answer for himself, because if he does, I may kill him, I grab my purse and sweater to leave. I come close to trampling a nurse on her way in when I exit in a blur of tears and fury.

I’m hardly out of the hospital when my phone rings in my purse. It’s freezing outside, but the below zero temperatures aren’t even cold enough to cool my rage. Tears freeze on my cheeks as I storm toward the parking garage, digging in my purse for the key fob and my phone. I answer the phone without looking at the screen.

“What?” I yell to whoever has dared to call me in the middle of my breakdown.

“Amethyst, don’t drive when you’re angry. Promise me you will sit in the car and cool down before you go anywhere. I mean it. Promise me right now or I’ll drag my fucking leg down the hall and into the parking garage and hunt you down.”

Adam’s commanding voice is different somehow. I stop short in the middle of the empty street and watch my breath puff out like a locomotive.

His cocky womanizer attitude is gone, and he sounds like he did the night he tried to convince me not to drink and drive after a party in college. He sounds like he really cares about what happens to me.

“Ame?” his voice booms in my ear, and I jump.

“Okay, I promise,” I say, stunned at the genuine care in his voice.

“Good girl, thank you. Now go warm up in the car. You’ve got to be frozen solid. And, Ame?”

“Yeah?”

“Put on your sweater, honey.”

I look down at my sweater still draped over my arm. How does he know I haven’t put my sweater on? The call disconnects, and suddenly the cold hits me like a wall. I can’t stop shivering. I force my legs to move again and slip my arms into my sweater, but it’s too late. It’s already frozen. It wouldn’t have kept me warm in these temperatures, anyway. My only hope of warming up is in the Ghost.

My stiff fingers locate the fob in a side pocket of my purse as I reach the car. Sliding into the front seat doesn’t feel as good as it did in Adam’s heated garage. The leather crinkles in protest, like it’s never been exposed to the elements.

I start the engine and sit under the twinkling lights, trying to process what happened as the warmth of the heated seat spreads out under my ass. Heated seats make me feel like I’ve wet my pants. I usually don’t care for them, but tonight, I’ll take any source of heat I can get.

I promised him I wouldn’t drive until I’m calm. I don’t owe him shit, but I’m not in the mood to die wrapping myself around an electrical pole, so I sit. And I sit some more until I realize my face is wet with thawed tears and I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles are white.

Relax, Ame, breathe and get the hell out of here. I brush the tears from under my eyes and pull out of the garage. I wish I were going home to my apartment in St. Louis and not his house. I want my own bed, a box of Milanos, Brea, and my favorite sweat pants.

Back at the guesthouse, I bypass the main house and the chance of running into motor mouth Casey. She’s sweet, but I can’t take her right now.

Right now, I need peace and quiet and time to think. I make my way through the house, turning on lights as I go until I’m in the bedroom. I slip off my shoes and crawl under the thick duvet and look around the room.

I think about Cherry living here. Why would Adam have his girlfriend living in the guesthouse and not the main house? If they were serious, I’d think she would have been sleeping in his bed with him, sharing his home, not bunking in the guesthouse like, well, like hired help.

Like me.

Cherry should be the least of my worries right now; I need to wrap my head around Adam’s dual personality issue and my clashing feelings toward them both.

Tonight on the phone in the parking garage was the first time I recognized the old Adam. He was thoughtful, commanding, kind, and genuinely concerned about my welfare. All the things my Adam was. It was as if he were putting on a show or a front the other times we’ve spoken, and for what?

Dozing off after a long, exhausting day, I notice the bottle of wine and a glass on the bedside table. I’d been more concerned about getting warm than anything when I got in bed. Someone has been in here, and I’ll bet the clothes are neatly hanging in the closet and all of the jewelry in a box on the dresser. Casey.

Well, what the hell? I’m alone and sad and confused—may as well add drunk to the list.

I scoot closer to the table, sit up, and grab the corkscrew and the bottle. I get it open in ten seconds flat. Brea and I used to have contests to see who could get a wine bottle open faster. I always won.

I pour a glass, which as it turns out, is half the bottle. Adam has big wine glasses, among other things. I snicker at my own joke and nearly chug the whole glass.

The faster I drink, the faster it will affect me, and hopefully, the faster I’ll be asleep. I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them, still holding the glass. What a life. This could have been my life if Adam hadn’t left me behind.

Would I have wanted this lavish lifestyle? No privacy, no way to know if your friends are real or riding your coat tails. Being picture ready at all times. No secrets, everyone knowing the most intimate details of your life. If the press couldn’t dig any up, you’d be appointed some juicy new ones.

No, I wouldn’t have wanted any of that, I’m sure. But if Adam hadn’t left me, we would have figured out a way to navigate our way through it together.

That’s what hurts the most about his disappearance, the fact that we would have been so good together. I would have supported anything he wanted to do, including being an NFA player, and he knew it. So why?

I chug another quarter of the glass while I wonder why about a lot of things.

My phone vibrates on the table, startling me. When I look at the screen, it’s the same number as the last incoming call. Adam.