The Debt 10 (Club Alpha)

The
Debt 10 (Club Alpha)

By Kelly Favor

© 2015 All Rights Reserved

Faith really didn’t understand how she’d
ended up in this situation.
 
Her
mind simply wouldn’t accept the reality of it.
 
 

So she tried to break it down to its
simplest terms.

I’m
sitting in a car right now.
 
It
might be a 2015 Alfa Romeo, but it’s still just a car.
 
Like any other car, it needs gas, and
regular oil changes.
 
Sometimes it
needs to get taken in for a tune-up, or for new breaks.
 
It’s just a really really really nice
car, but nothing more.

That was good.
 
That was something she could hang onto,
something to calm her racing thoughts.

And
I’m sitting in this car next to a guy.
 
He’s just a guy.
 
Yes, he’s
Chase Winters, the number-one draft pick and first-string quarterback of the
New England Nationals.
 
Sure, he’s
handsome and sexy and every woman wants him and most men want to share a beer
with him—and yes, almost every guy wishes they could be like him.
 
But at the end of the day, Chase Winters
is only a regular old human being.

But as much as she tried to tell herself
these things, Faith’s ability to believe them was faltering.
 
Because right now, she was sitting in
this insanely expensive sports car as Chase Winters drove through the streets
of Boston.

And if she was being totally honest with
herself, there was absolutely nothing normal or ordinary about him.
 

There also wasn’t anything normal about
the situation she was in right now.

Faith could try and soothe herself with
the notion that this car was just a car, and this guy was just a guy—but
in the end, it wasn’t really true.
 
Chase Winters was like a comet blazing through the sky once every
hundred years, and she didn’t want to miss her chance to experience it.
 
As scary as that might be, she was going
to stand next to him for as long as possible and hope that she didn’t end up
getting burned to a crisp by the heat he generated.

For
some crazy reason, he wants me in this car with him right now.

For
some even crazier reason, he kissed me back in that parking lot.

Of course, he’d done a lot more than kiss
her not so long ago.
 
But that night
already seemed like a past life to her now.
 

This was something different.
 
Chase had sought her out, found out
where she worked, and came to see her there because he wanted to be with her
that badly.

“You’re so quiet,” Chase said, as he
shifted the car into a higher gear and shot ahead of three cars by getting into
the left lane and then scooting quickly back into the right lane when another
car stopped to take a turn.

“I’m just thinking,” she said, trying to
sound casual.

He gave her a quick glance, and now with
the hoodie on his sweatshirt down, she could see the bruising below his eyes
more clearly.
 
And his split lip,
that was healing but still swollen, the cut scabbed over.
 
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She shrugged.
 
“I don’t know.
 
Just how weird this is.”

He laughed.
 
“What’s weird?”

“Ummm…you showing up where I work out of
nowhere, getting me fired—“

“You didn’t get fired, you quit,” he
said.

“No, you quit for me,” Faith corrected
him.
 
And that reminded
her—what was she going to do now?
 
She needed that job and that money.
 
As it was, she’d barely been keeping her head above water, and now
things would be even more dire.

“You don’t need to work for an asshole,”
Chase said.
 
“I should’ve slapped
him around a little bit.”
 
He
grinned.
 

Thinking about slapping around her old
boss seemed to make him happy.

“I wasn’t working there for fun,” she
said.
 
“I needed the money.
 
I still need the money, actually.
 
Only now I won’t be getting any, and
it’s going to be a big problem.”

She shook her head in dismay.
 
The last thing she wanted to be doing
was whining about money to Chase Winters.
 
She wanted to be kissing him, to feel him inside of her again.
 
That’s what she wanted to be
doing—and if not that, at least flirting and being appropriately sexy.
 
But somehow she was bitching about her
finances to him instead.

Complaining
about money is definitely not hot
,
she decided.
 
I need to step up my game.

But Chase didn’t seem to mind.
 
“I learned something a long time ago,”
he said, continuing to maneuver in and out of traffic like he was in fast
motion and everyone else was in slow motion.
 
And maybe that was entirely the case.

She hoped she wasn’t in slow motion like
the rest of the world.

“What did you learn?” she asked,
genuinely curious.

“I learned that it was never a good idea
to just settle for the easy road.”
 
He gave her a meaningful glance before looking straight ahead once more.

“You’re saying I was taking the easy road
by working a temp job to pay my bills?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That’s not true.
 
The easy road would have been for me to
live at home like my parents wanted me to, and to work nearby, and hang out
with the same people and date the same guys—do all the same things
everyone I knew was doing.
 
That
would have been the easy road.”
 
She
felt her stomach tensing as she tried to defend herself, not even knowing why
she was so offended by his rather innocuous comment.

“If you say so,” he replied.

“You’re judging me.”
 
She shifted in her seat, trying to relax
but not succeeding.

“I’m giving you some helpful advice that
I wish someone had told me when I needed it.”

“Well maybe I don’t need your
advice.
 
You barely even know me.”

He smirked.
 
“I know a lot more than you think I do,
girl.”

She glared at him.
 
“What is it you think you know?”

He laughed.
 
“I’m just saying—I think you could
be doing a lot more than slaving away at some cubicle farm for a jerk that
makes you scrape and beg like that.”

“Not all of us were blessed with the
natural gifts that you have, Chase.
 
I wasn’t born a boy who’d grow up to be six foot five and two hundred
and fifty pounds, with speed and reflexes and abnormal strength.
 
I’m just a regular girl, and you have no
idea what I had to do to get that job at the cubicle farm and keep it.”

“Fine, if you want to believe that, I
won’t stop you,” he said.

What she couldn’t believe was the tone of
his voice, the arrogance.
 
It was so
incredibly frustrating to her, and she tried to remember how they’d gotten into
this silly argument in the first place—and she wasn’t able to.
 
Somehow, here they were, and she
couldn’t let it go.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” she
told him.

He shook his head almost indiscernibly.
 
“I never called you stupid.”

“But you’re acting like I’m an
idiot.
 
I can’t believe you think
you can give me advice when you basically had every physical advantage handed
to you on a silver platter.”

He snorted.
 
“I did, did I?”

“Maybe if you were five and a half feet
tall and somehow played in the NBA, I’d be more inclined to listen to your
theories about following your dreams.
 
But you’re a freak of nature, and you don’t even seem to realize it.”

“A freak of nature?” he said, chuckling.

“
Nobody
is like you, Chase.
 
Football
is
the easy road for you.
 
If you looked like this and you were a
heart surgeon or a mechanical engineer—that would blow my mind.
 
You being a professional athlete is like,
the
most
sensible thing in the
world.”

She saw his shoulders hunch a little as he
took in her words.
 
“I get it,” he
said, nodding.
 
“So you think every
guy over six foot tall plays pro football?”

“No, obviously not—“

“Then you must think all these fat fucks
who are like six foot tall and weigh in at three hundred pounds scarfing down
Big Macs everyday could play in the NFL.
 
Right?
 
Because that’s what
you’re telling me, Faith.”

“Obviously not.
 
But you can’t deny that you were born
with some genetic gifts.”

“Yeah, I happen to be tall,” he
said.
 
“But there are a lot of tall
dudes out there.
 
There’s a million
guys with size who can’t come close to doing what I do.”
 
He shook his head.
 
“You don’t get it.
 
You have no clue, and that’s why you’re
in the situation you’re in, baby.”

She almost told him to fuck off.
 
Almost.
 
The words were perched on her lips, but
she held her tongue.
 
“That’s
incredibly rude,” was all she said, and then her jaw was locked and she licked
her lips, trying to remember why she was here and how they could somehow come
back from this insane argument.

“It’s not rude.
 
It’s just the fucking truth.”
 
His hands gripped and then re-gripped
the steering wheel.
 
“You know,
there’s a reason that I got to where I’m at.”

“I know that,” she muttered.

“And you think I haven’t heard your
theory before?
 
You think people
haven’t constantly said that if they looked like me, they could be a star
athlete too?”
 
He smiled as if this
was the funniest thing he’d ever thought of.

“Well, it’s kind of true,” she said.

He took a deep breath.
 
“When I was in high school, I was tall
for my age—but I wasn’t jacked.
 
I wasn’t some huge dude who crushed everyone that came near me.
 
I was skinny, tall, and not all that
fast.
 
But I had some talent, yeah.”

“Obviously,” she muttered, but lower this
time.

Chase went on as if she hadn’t
spoken.
 
“But I still remember, a
scout from one of the D1 colleges came around my sophomore year of high school,
and he told me that I wasn’t going to make it to the big leagues.
 
He said that I didn’t have the speed or
the size to play D1 college ball.
 
In fact, he told me I should focus on getting a scholarship to an Ivy
League football program, because maybe they’d take a flier on someone like me.”

Faith turned her head and looked at him,
seeing him differently somehow.
 
“That really happened?”

He glanced over at her, smiling, but his
eyes were hard.
 
“Yeah, it really
happened.
 
You think I had such a
cushy road to the NFL.
 
You don’t
have a clue what I went through.”

“I guess I don’t.”

He sighed.
 
“That scout lit a fire under my ass,
because I realized that he was right about me.
 
I wasn’t that strong or that fast.
 
Not compared to the guys who were
heading to the top colleges.
 
So I started
working my ass off—going out of my comfort zone.
 
I found a strength and conditioning coach
to work with me.
 
I had to pay this
guy to come and kick my ass every day—to break me down and build me into
a football-playing machine.
 
I did
what I needed to do to better my situation, even though there were no
guarantees it would even work.”

“That’s remarkable,” she said, meaning
it.

“And it didn’t end there, either.
 
Every year, every season, I had to get
better and work harder and find ways to switch shit up so that I’d be at the
top of the mountain,” Chase told her.
 
“Waking up early, working hard when I was sick, when my ass was dragging—skipping
parties, saying no to the cute girl that wanted to hang out, refusing to play
video games with my buddies, and all of that shit that made college so much fun
for everyone else.
 
I wasn’t the
most naturally gifted.
 
I just
worked so damn hard that people assume I was.”