Playing Hurt

Chelsea

brick





I’m still dizzy from my near-miss with Clint when I meet up with him in the lodge around noon the next day. All we’re doing is splitting a club sandwich, but as our knees touch under the table, I swear the whole world starts to sparkle like sapphire light on the lake.

Kenzie, the girl who’d popped up out of nowhere during Willie Walleye Day to warn me that Clint would never fall in love with me, steps out from behind a door branded Office. She glares at me and Clint like we’re a couple of high school freshmen engaging in some heavy PDA.

I glance back at Clint, worried we’re being horrendously obvious.

But my worries evaporate soon enough. Because once we finish up lunch, my thoughts are only of the gorgeous, edible man who pushes me through a door marked Staff Only, then presses my back against the wall, sinking a kiss deep against my mouth.

Ha, ha, double ha, I imagine spitting at Kenzie. Clint starts to pull away from me, then comes back for yet another kiss.

“See you tonight?” he asks, while the clank and bustle of the lodge—no, of the entire external world—comes to me muffled, distant.

I’m having to get really creative with my excuses for seeing Clint at night, but I don’t care. I could write a book on lying at this point. I nod, still spinning from his kiss.

“Coming with me when I take a group out orchid hunting this afternoon, too, aren’t you?” he murmurs into my neck.

Yes, yes, yes—anywhere. I’ll go anywhere with you.

We ease ourselves out of the narrow hallway that leads to the break room, drop each other’s hands, and walk oh-so-innocently into the lobby.

“Chelsea,” Earl shouts, waving me over to the pay phone. “Just in time. You have a phone call.”

“That’s weird,” I say with a light shrug.

Clint nods once toward the bulletin board on the opposite end of the lobby, an I’ll wait here motion. Stands below the picture of me and my walleye—still the #1 biggest catch of the summer.

“Chelsea?” the familiar voice barks as soon as I pick up the receiver.

“Gabe,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Clint turns on his heel, staring at me with eyes like open wounds.

I chastise myself. Why’d you have to blurt his name? You can be so dumb …

“Listen, I’m still at work,” Gabe says, “and I don’t have much time, but something’s been on my mind and I just—I’m sorry. This probably sounds really possessive and paranoid, but is everything okay?”

My head turns into a giant scoreboard, like the one in the Fair Grove High gym. And over my name, the score is a great big glowing zero. Chelsea Keyes is losing, losing.

And don’t I deserve to?

“I—what—you—what?” I babble. I don’t know if I should scream or beg or start crying. How does Gabe know this—Wait. What, exactly, does he know? Has Brandon called him? What is going on?

“I guess—I mean, I’m just used to us talking on the phone for hours. And even when we weren’t talking, it sounds hokey, but you used to drop all those notes in my locker. Love notes. You used to say it all the time, the way you felt about me. We said it all the time. Love, we said. We used that word so much, it shouldn’t have meant anything at all—it should have been watered down and worn out, the way we used it. But I haven’t heard it once since you left. I didn’t even get a ‘love you’ on my birthday.”

Oh, my God, Gabe, no!

“Chelse? You still there?”

“Yeah,” I mumble, staring at Clint while my heart clatters around inside me like a dropped plastic plate flopping and twirling on a kitchen floor. “I’m here.”

“I know you said that you get bad cell reception and all, but it just seems like—like you just don’t want to talk to me. I can’t help it—I just wonder if something’s up. I think about you all the time.”

A giant tear escapes and rolls down my cheek, even though I’m trying to tug it back. “I do, too,” I whimper, my voice all shuddery.

I can’t stand to look at Clint. I wipe my cheek and turn my back to him, lower my face down toward the gleaming front of the pay phone, my heart drumming away like an entire marching band. How can this be happening?

“Are you okay?” Gabe asks, while Clint’s eyes bore hot holes into the back of my shoulders. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m a jerk, Chelse. Okay?”

“I just miss you is all,” I murmur, using the tears to my advantage and hating myself for it at the same time. Because I’m also hoping to God that Clint can’t hear me. “I do love you,” I whisper. “It’s been so hard to be away from you.”

“Love you, too, Chelse. It’s so good to hear your voice.”

“Yours, too.”

“Look, just forget I brought it up,” Gabe says. “You enjoy the rest of your vacation—I’ll see you when you get back, okay?”

“Okay,” I mumble, digging a fingernail nervously into the phone cord. “Love you,” I whisper again.

Gabe sighs loudly into the phone. “I love you so much, Chelse.”

I bite my lip until I can taste blood, until the pain radiating from the clamp of my teeth takes my tears away.

When I turn, Clint’s face is maybe an inch away from my own. Earl is gone; the front counter is empty.

“Did you—you heard—he’s just—I can’t—”

“You love him,” Clint says.

“But I—you knew I had—”

“But you love him,” Clint repeats. “That’s what you just said, anyway.”

I’m in the last moments of my last game, all over again. I’m in my Eagles jersey, and I’m jumping, twisting my pain-racked body, bringing my arm behind my head. I’m falling.

“But you knew,” I insist.

“What are you doing with me?” Clint snaps. “You act like—like there’s this undeniable thing between us—and then you turn around and talk the same way with him. I don’t understand. I thought—you know about me, too, about—what I’d been through—and here you are screwing with me.”

“I’m not—I’ve been completely—”

“Do you love him?” Clint asks.

My jaw swings open, shuts again. I’m actually disappointed for a second that no words have magically poured out all on their own to explain the entire situation.

“Damn,” Clint says, running his hand through his hair. “Thank God it didn’t happen last night. Thank God I didn’t let you run right over me—”

“That’s not—I wanted—”

“From here on out,” Clint hisses at me, “I’m your trainer. Got it? You only have a few more days left of your vacation left, anyway. Your trainer. Period. Your trainer, who takes you on the most boring walks through the countryside.”

“You haven’t,” I insist. “I’ve been trying!”

“Your trainer,” he continues, “who is helping you throw your vacation away, because you’re the most frightened little girl I’ve ever met.”

“I’m—?”

“The most frightened. You don’t even have the strength to choose between guy number one and guy number two. So I’ll help you out. I’ll choose for you. Trainer, Chelse. That’s it.”

My tears come as soon as he’s stomped out through the lobby door. I try to rein them in, but it’s harder than pushing a thunderstorm back up into the sky.

When I finally get some sort of control over my blubbering self, I wipe my face and hurry to the gift shop around the corner from the dining room. I make a beeline for a rack of postcards, spinning the metal display as I pick out different shots of the resort.

I pay for the postcards and a pen, then wander toward the bench next to the front door.

XXXXXXXXX, Chelse, I write on one.

One more day closer to you, I scribble on the next.

Don’t forget—I love you more than Scratches.

“There you are,” Brandon says, bursting out of the dining room. “Look, tell Mom when you see her that I’m going straight to Pike’s after band practice, all right? What’s the matter? You look like you’ve been crying.”

“Go away. I’m busy,” I mutter.

“What’re you doing?”

“Writing postcards to Gabe. One for each day we have left of vacation. I’m going to drop one in the mail every morning. To show him I’m thinking about him every day.”

“Uh-huh,” he says in a knowing tone. “Only by writing them all now, you don’t have to think about him every day. Which is the point, right?”

“No. I just want to get them all done.”

“You don’t look too happy there, Chelse. Kind of looks like you’re doing a homework assignment you forgot about until two minutes before it was due.”

“I’d think you, of all people, would be proud of me,” I snap.

“Proud of you for finding a way to snow your boyfriend?”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” I grumble. I scribble Gabe’s address on another postcard.

“I’ve seen you and Clint together,” Brandon says coolly. “And believe me, I could say a lot worse right now.”

I’d kill him for that remark … if it wasn’t so true.