Daylight, page 9
Reality hasn’t hit me yet, not really. Part of me thinks this is some crazy, fucked up dream and I’ll wake up in the morning at my hotel in San Francisco. Elle will be sleeping soundly beside me, and all will be well in the world.
Deep down, I know that is not the case. I know this is real life, and sixty seconds before I should’ve been walking off of the field with my first conference win, I tore my ACL.
Recovery is going to be the worst part. That’s when reality will sink in, and it all will hit the fan. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified.
As I stare at the pristine, white ceiling above me, I think back to Sunday. I don’t remember much from the night of the game after I went down, but I do remember Elle not leaving my side until she was forced out of the locker room. She called me this morning, saying she’s flying into Chicago tonight to help me through the worst of my recovery—the first few days after surgery. I was too out of it, too beaten down to fight her on it. Her company will be nice, though.
The door to my room opens, and the light in the room intensifies.
“Good morning, Mr. Bradford,” a man in a white coat boasts as he walks into the room. I need a shot of whatever he’s having because no one should have this much energy at six o’clock in the morning on a random Tuesday.
I give him a faint nod of my head, tossing my hand up in what could be considered a wave, but I didn’t put my heart into it. Given the circumstances, I think he’ll be understanding.
“I’m the surgeon who will be working on you. I just wanted to come in and tell you what we’ll be doing, and assure you that you’ve got the best team in all of Illinois,” he smiles, and somehow, his assurance makes me feel worse.
I tune him out as he drones on, having no desire to learn the gory details of exactly how they will be cutting me up. He must sense that he’s losing me because he wraps it up much quicker than I anticipated, telling me that he’ll see me soon.
He’s gone with a smile and a wave, and I just lie there motionless.
More time passes, how long I’m not sure. I make a game out of counting the tiles on the ceiling. The rule is that I have to restart when I lose track of where I started, which is usually somewhere around tile twenty-nine.
My hand falls to the chain around my neck, and my thoughts linger to my grandparents. I wonder what they think of me right now. After years of no contact because of a fundamental disagreement on faith— one that I wasn’t even old enough to have a part in— I lost everything that my dad and uncle worked so hard to build me for.
I wonder what my dad thinks of me right now.
That’s a line of thought I don’t really want to explore, but curiosity gets the best of me. His career in the NBA ended after four years due to a knee injury. I’m in my second year, sitting here with what could be a career-changing injury. Some people never come back the same from these.
The thought that I could be following down the same path as him causes something to tighten in my chest.
The door opens again. More bright lights.
Another man in a white coat.
This one I can identify as the anesthesiologist, thanks to the identifying badge on his coat. It must be time to go under.
Part of me wants to scream out for what I’m losing as he approaches my bedside, and the other part of me is ready to let go and succumb to the worst of it.
“Ready, Alex?” The anesthesiologist asks, referring to the anesthetics he’s about to administer. I study his face for a moment. This man looks old enough to be my grandfather, with the same grayed hair and thinness in his face. He’s probably administered a lot of anesthesia throughout his lifetime.
I trust him not to fuck this one up.
“Hit me, doc,” I shrug.
It doesn’t take long before everything starts to fade.
Chapter Fifteen
Elle’s Point of View
“Hey, Ms. O’Connor,” Coach Portwell nods as he rolls Alex’s wheelchair into the apartment. It’s a strange sight, but I don’t have time to process it.
“Oh, please call me Elle. How is he?” I ask, sadness overcoming me at the slumped down, passed out Alex that sits before me.
“Still pretty loopy from the anesthetic. The doctors said that he’d come out of it later this evening. I forwarded what the doctors sent to me to your work email. It was a lot to send over text,” he says.
And, there it is. I didn’t expect this confrontation to be so soon.
“Ah, I actually don’t have access to that anymore. Let me get you my personal email if that’s okay,” I say, slightly embarrassed.
“Oh, shoot. Sorry, I hadn’t realized,” he sounds just as embarrassed as I. “I’ll go get him set up in the recliner while you do that.”
I nod my head, retreating to the kitchen to find a paper and pen. Nick Portwell is a pretty laid back guy off the field and cares for his players like they’re his own blood. On the field, he’s a beast. I genuinely respect the guy, which I can’t say about the vast majority of coaches in the league. That respect has tripled after seeing how he’s taken Alex under his wings, taking him to and picking him up from the hospital.
“He stirred a bit, but didn’t really wake up,” Portwell says, entering the kitchen.
I nod, handing him the paper with my email. “I didn’t get fired, by the way. I quit,” I say quickly. I don’t know why I feel compelled to put it out there, as if it clears me, or my name. But, Nick Portwell is one of the few men in this industry who I look up to. “Not that it really matters.” I quickly add, shaking my head.
“I think it does matter, and honestly? I think you should still have a job. You’re the only sports reporter since Manthaw retired who asks good questions. Who cares that you’re maybe involved with a player? So was she. That being said, personal lives shouldn’t even be brought into it. It doesn’t impact the way either of you does your job. If you guys pursue a relationship off of the field, I feel as though that’s your own damn business. I swear to god, it’s like admin is stuck in the 1950s sometimes.” He shakes his head, typing my email address into his phone.
I open my mouth to speak, but he continues. “Let me know before you apply somewhere else. I’m assuming you’re going for a network job?” He asks. I slowly nod. “I’ll put in a good word for you, or you can use me as a rec if you want.”
“Sir, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” I shake my head, slightly in disbelief.
“Oh, nonsense. If one of my players loves you like family, then hell, so do I. Consider it a favor for helping my quarterback get back to.” He nods. “Okay, it’s sent. Now you have my email and my phone number, in case you do wish to reach out.”
“Thank you, so much.” I don’t think I will ever use either unless it pertains to Alex, and even then… the thought of me using him as a reference makes me incredibly uneasy.
“I’ve gotta make it to the tail end of practice, but I’ll check in later this evening and again in the morning. I’ll make it back out a few more times before we leave for Tampa Bay,” he sighs, walking toward the door. He hangs his head low for a moment, before regaining his posture as he continues moving toward the door.
“Sounds good. I’ll text you with any major updates. Have a good night, Coach,” I say as he opens the door, and I can sense his apprehension about leaving as he places his hand on the knob slowly, stopping for a moment as he turns it.
“You too, Eleanor,” he nods at me, putting one foot in front of the other and exiting without second thought. I walk over to the living room where Alex lies on the recliner passed out. An ache shoots through my heart. I hate seeing him like this. It makes my heart physically hurt.
I retrieve his medications from the bag he took to the hospital and set them out on the counter so they’re ready when he needs them. He’s been prescribed some intense painkillers for the first few days, and then tapering off to ibuprofen as needed.
Having been surrounded by athletes for the last six years, I’ve seen my fair share of gruesome injuries. Typically, I would cover them for a day or two, and move on to the next story. In a few months, we’d do a feel-good story about their comeback, and then we wait for the next one. It’s a viscous cycle.
Curled up on the couch with a book, I spend the next several hours watching him while I pretend to read. He stirs on the recliner, never fully waking up. He’s slowly coming out of the anesthesia, but still sound asleep.
My eyes stray toward him every few minutes, watching for the rise and fall of his chest. I study how it dips with each exhale, and lifts with each inhale.
After zoning out for a few minutes, the vibration from my phone on the coffee table startles me, sending a loud rumble through the silent room. I lean forward to grab it, the name that’s on my screen making up for my racing heartbeat.
How’s he doing?
Still asleep.
How are you doing?
Fine. Tired.
Get some sleep.
I will once he’s awake. I just want to make sure he comes out of the anesthesia okay.
You’re such a mother hen. Let me know if I can send you guys food or anything. I want to contribute in anyway I can.
Will do. We should FaceTime tomorrow maybe when he’s awake. I bet he’d like that.
Now that you’ve put this idea in my head, we are absolutely doing it. I gotta go. Love u EO
I’ll hold you to it. Love u too Q
I smile as I put my phone down. Conversations with Quinn always cheer me up, even when she’s halfway across the country. Part of me yearns for when times were simpler, when it was just us against the world at Illinois.
The first time we went out together, it was basically me telling her to get dressed because I was going to sneak into the bars and needed someone to go with me. We still hadn’t totally warmed up to each other, but she said she didn’t want me going out alone on my second day on campus. Her exact words were, “I don’t want a criminal roommate!” I don’t know if she thought that aiding and abetting me would make her any less of a criminal, but she was happy with her logic.
There was no sneaking into bars. The whole time, it was a trick to get her to hang out with me. I knew she wouldn’t let me go and be destructive, so I made plans for us to go get dinner and created our own walking tour around campus. I was determined to make her be my friend one way or the other, and it worked.
From that day on, we were rock solid.
As it turned out, Quinn was the sneak into bars friend and I was not, which made us the perfect pairing. We couldn’t be more different, which made it so much weirder that we got along so well. Quinn being an economics major means she hated everything I stood for. She could not fathom that I willingly dedicated my time to studying sports. I countered her arguments with, “I can’t believe you spend your time playing with numbers”, to which we then get stuck in an endless argument back and forth.
She grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I grew up in a small town in Illinois. She grew up with a mom and a dad and two siblings, and I had my grandparents.
In our dorm, she had to sleep with noise-canceling headphones on because I had to sleep with a box fan on. When we moved into our apartment, I stole her noise-canceling headphones because she would accidentally fall asleep with true crime documentaries on her TV. True crime terrifies me, but she lives and breathes it.
Our differences, while so vast, are the reason we fit together so well.
A few months into our freshman year, we added a dark-haired, affable but broody, star quarterback to the friend group.
I introduced Quinn and Alex after I’d known him for a few weeks, and their friendship started much like Quinn and my own did. The clashing of personalities was hard for them to swallow, but after the first couple of hours, they both got over it.
Thinking back to the first time we hung out with each other outside of our sports marketing class, I remember being confined to the four walls of my shared dorm with Quinn. She was working, so we had the afternoon to ourselves. Our plan was to study, but I knew we wouldn’t be doing that for long. I had this overwhelming urge to be friends with him, so getting him to hang out with me under the ruse of studying was the best thing I came up with.
Clearly I only knew one way to get people to be friends with me back then, but if it worked…
On the outside, he was reserved, yet confident. He had this way about him that drew me to him. I wanted to learn everything about him and find everything under the surface.
Growing up, I found it funny how all of my closest friends were always exact opposites of me. Even as I got older, that never changed. Not until Alex. It was always hard for me to get along with people whose personalities were too similar to my own, though I never understood why. I never questioned it with Alex, though.
As I watch him from across the room, waiting for each rise and fall of his chest, I feel something stop.
I think back to my past relationships, all of them have gone up in flames. We were always opposites because I figured if it worked in my friendships, surely it must work in my dating life, too.
Oh, how wrong I was.
I’ve wasted years dating my polar opposites when I had it backward the whole time. My friendships are so solid because we embrace our differences. As I’ve learned, time and time again, it doesn’t work that way in romantic relationships, but that never stopped me from trying again and again and getting burned again and again.
Alex snores softly, just a few feet away from me. A bitter ache breaks out across my body, and I realize I’ve been ignoring what’s been right in front of my face for five years.
I think back to early on in our friendship, one night at the beginning of our sophomore year. I had just started hanging out with a guy whose name I barely remember, but had standing plans to meet Alex at a restaurant near his apartment before he left for a long weekend away in Maryland. It was the middle of the football season, and we were used to him leaving for games and me being there when I got back.
In hindsight, my bringing a date to our hangout was shitty. There were a lot of things about that night that if I could change now, I would. Looking back on it now, thinking back to the urgency in Alex’s texts when arranging the last-minute dinner…
It’s almost as if-
No, there is no way.
“Elle?” A groggy voice calls out quietly. It startles me, I’ve been so caught up in my own mind I didn’t notice Alex has woken up from his anesthetic coma.
“Yeah, Alex?” I ask softly, getting up to be by his side.
“I need some water. And maybe a Vicodin or ten?” He says with a small laugh.
“I can get you water and one Vicodin,” I amend, an eerie feeling of panic washing over me. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” he sighs. “Weird.”
I frown because I know he’s the opposite of okay. Portwell told me that he broke down, partially due to the morphine the team doctors gave him, partially due to the weight and realization of everything. Portwell texted me saying, “I already bought a ticket, please fly to Chicago, he needs you.” I thought it was a prank, but I knew it wasn’t. I planned on going there to be with him, but I couldn’t afford the last-minute airfare. Not wanting to wrack up more credit card debt in the form of plane tickets, I was ready to make the drive from New York to Chicago until he texted me.
I get him a cup of water, the medication he requested, and deliver it to him at the recliner. I pop down on the arm of the recliner, looking at him. “Wanna talk about it?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he shakes his head. “I will. Just not today.” I nod, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Did I hear you and coach right? You quit?” He asks softly.
“It’s a long story,” I shrug. “Let’s not talk about it.” I don’t want to unearth that can of worms so soon after everything that happened.
“Elle, come here,” he sighs, using his arm strength to scoot to one side of the recliner. There’s just enough room for me to slide in next to him. I instantly feel centered, our sides connected, his arm around my shoulders. He just feels like home to me. He always has.
“Would now be a bad time to ask you a question?” I ask softly, resting my head on his chest. I feel him nod his head. “I’ve had far too much time to think.”
“Trapped in that big head of yours?” He asks.
“Hey!” I exclaim.
“That did not land right. Blame the painkillers and the anesthesia.” He shakes his head. I let the joke roll off, the tension in my chest not going away as I prepare to ask him a question that has the power to change a lot of things if we let it.
“Do you remember that night in our sophomore year, the day before you left for Maryland? We went to dinner and I brought a date?” I ask, the questions I have eating away at me. If I don’t get them off of my chest right now, I will keep spiraling.
“Whoa, okay. You really are deep in the vault of thoughts, aren’t you?” He laughs softly. “Um, yeah. Yeah, I remember.” He nods, solemnly.
“You… uh, okay. I might be totally off here, but you weren’t planning on…” I trail off, the words escaping me.
“I was,” he says so softly, I almost miss it.
“You were?” I ask, my voice quivering at the admission.
We sit there, neither of us daring to break the silence that’s fallen over us. His words hit me like a thousand pounds of bricks, and now I have to figure out what to do with them.
Chapter Sixteen
Alex’s Point of View
Elle’s company is the only reason I haven’t stuck my hand into a fucking blender over the last few weeks. I lost everything I’d been working for two weeks ago today. In an hour, I have to watch my boys fight for the Lombardi with a second-string quarterback at the helm of the team while I sit at home, barely able to get off my couch without assistance.
