The One That I Want(37)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“No, but I will. Maybe you and Addison can arrange some other way to spend time together. You could ingratiate yourself to her mother. Just open the door for her a few times. Mothers love that.” I mimicked him, leaning on the trunk and crossing my arms for protection against what I was about to say, and how I was going to expose myself. “I was so sorry you didn’t get to come tonight. I realized I looked forward to seeing you more than Carter.” Revealing this didn’t necessarily tell him I had a crush on him, right?

Regardless, I felt a strong need to change the subject before he could grill me about my feelings for him. I nodded at his cast. “What happened to you?”

“Carter told you I wasn’t hurt?”

“He—” I needed to phrase this carefully so I didn’t make things worse between them. I didn’t want to misrepresent what Carter had said. “He didn’t seem sure.”

Max nodded sadly, as if this affirmed bad news he already knew. I noticed then how different he looked from last Friday night. This time he hadn’t grown a goatee or shaved one off. He looked like he’d aged five years. His eyes were hollow and dark.

“Tell me what happened,” I repeated.

Max smiled wanly with one side of his mouth. “You know how there’s a penalty in football for roughing the kicker?”

I cringed. The reason there were rules against tackling the kicker, even touching him, was that he was so vulnerable when he kicked, off balance with his foot in the air. He couldn’t defend himself against somebody coming at him.

“Fifteen-yard penalty, automatic first down,” I said. “Did you get roughed? What did those bastards do to you? I’ll kill them for you.”

In answer, he held up his cast. “I was trying to protect my leg, so I fell on my hand instead.”

I asked dryly, “Was it worth it?”

He looked at me kind of funny. I’d said the wrong thing. Again. Around Max, I never knew how to act. I wanted to be funny so he would like me, at least as a friend. I wanted to act like I didn’t care about him, so he wouldn’t guess that I watched his eyes for any flicker of affection. Sometimes I tried so hard to be funny that I ended up sounding like an uncaring bitch, the very princess I was afraid of being. Which might have been true of me about some things, but not about this. Not about Max.

If he was thinking how cold I was, he laughed it off the next moment. “No, it wasn’t worth it at all. I made the field goal, so we took the points and declined the penalty anyway.”

“That’s sweet revenge. At least you made the goal. Is your arm broken?” To make up for acting like I didn’t care, I went a little overboard. I reached out for his cast. He moved it nearer. I supported it with my palm.

“My wrist,” he said.

“Can you play?”

“Yeah, I can play. My mom doesn’t want me to, but I’m going to. Coach says the next guy on the team who hits me or allows a hit on me is off the team, so I think I’m safe now.”

Nobody should have allowed a hit on him, especially during a scrimmage when they were playing themselves. But to say the next person who allowed a hit on Max was off the team . . . that was saying a lot. The coach saw something in Max and wanted to keep him.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Yep.” I could tell by his curt answer that it hurt a lot.

“Does your hand still work?”

Ever so slowly he turned his wrist over in my palm. The cast whispered against my skin as he slid his hand down. We were holding hands.

No, he was just giving me a demonstration of the fabulous, still intact workings of his digits. And even if we were holding hands, I was in the eleventh grade, and there was absolutely no reason for my face and arms to tingle or my mind and heart to race. I couldn’t slow my breathing, but I tried to pant quietly so he wouldn’t notice.

“Anyway, it’s over now,” he said, as if it wasn’t a big deal that we were holding hands. And maybe it wasn’t. But I was dating his best friend—or at least, I had been—and he was still dating mine.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday date,” he went on. “I was at the hospital getting X-rays. Maybe I should show them to Carter. I guess he thought I was faking.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I prompted him.

Max grimaced.

“Tell me,” I said.

He sighed the longest sigh. “I can’t prove it, of course, but I’m pretty sure it happened because Carter’s always telling the team what a wuss I am. He didn’t actually order that guy to hit me, but he might as well have.”

I nodded. Judging from the way Carter constantly attacked Max in front of Addison and me, Max was probably right.

“Carter’s not the team captain,” Max said. “A senior is, but as quarterback, Carter has a lot of sway. I already knew the damage was done and the team didn’t respect me, but I didn’t realize how bad the damage was until they came after me on the field. I don’t know of any way to undo it.”

I asked quietly, “Are you afraid you’ll get hurt again and you won’t be able to play?”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost my mojo,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I’ll never make another kick. Part of me thinks that if I can’t, it serves me right. The great kickers are the ones who don’t get rattled. That’s football.”

“Kickers aren’t usually hit,” I pointed out, “especially by their own teammates in a scrimmage. You shouldn’t second-guess yourself because of it.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. I could tell he agreed with me, in theory. He knew his team was at fault, not him, but he didn’t feel it, and his mojo had everything to do with feeling it.

He looked up at me for the first time in a while, eyes sad. “This is crazy, but I really wanted to kick for Georgia Tech.”

“That’s not crazy.”

He shrugged. “They’re not the greatest team in the world, but they have their years.”

“They won the national championship in 1990, sort of.”

“Right! They had to share it with Colorado.”

“Some years,” I said, “the kicker might be the only player putting any points on the scoreboard. On the bright side, you’d get a lot of respect from the quarterback.”

Max laughed bitterly, let go of my hand, and tried to run both hands back through his hair to push it out of his eyes. He’d forgotten that one arm was in a cast. He put both hands down.