Page 33 of Provoking the Punter

Then he walked out, the door clicking shut.

It was only then Garrett noticed Chester had left the room key behind.

Garrett stood there for a few seconds, considering going after him. Chester had done the right thing in leaving, and he didn’t want to ruin what had been a good night by forcing him to take it. He closed the wardrobe door and stared at himself in the mirror. He hadn’t turned a year older on his birthday. He’d become a different person. One who was holding his breath and bracing for a collision that may not come.

He didn’t want to spend the rest of his career, if he even had one, living in fear.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Garrett stood on the sidelines, watching the team run through their plays for tomorrow’s game. He was trying not to let it eat him up that he wasn’t playing. The assistant special teams coach walked over to him.

“Are you dying to be out there?” Dean Banfield asked with the tilt of his head.

“I’d be lying if I said no.” Then Garrett remembered Chester’s advice. He didn’t want to be the player that bitched about not playing. “It’s been really good to have this time. To get a feel for how the guys play. Their tells and all of that. It would’ve been difficult to be dropped in on a Thursday and expected to go on the Sunday.”

Banfield glanced at him and nodded. “It’s do or die this weekend.”

Garrett narrowed his eyes as he watched the players. “It’ll be a hell of a lot harder if we don’t win this weekend. We’d need to win every other game and hope two or three other teams make serious mistakes.”

Not impossible, but they’d be unlikely to make the play-offs if they didn’t win this weekend.

“Did you use that accounting degree to work out the likelihood of getting into the play-offs?”

Garrett laughed. “I did the same math as you guys.”

Standing on the sidelines, hoping that the team won was infinitely shittier than being part of it, win or lose. He wasn’t the only one not dressing for the game tomorrow. A couple of injuries, and a couple of spares.

He hadn’t missed a game in his rookie year. Now he’d missed two. The question on his lips: When will I get a chance? What is the point of me being here if you’re not gonna give me a chance to play and show you what I can do?

He swallowed the words, knowing they were not the right thing to say.

What he should do was find Caitlin and have a little chat, but he didn’t want to be the asshole to drop a bombshell right before an important game. It could wait until after. Until Monday.

Then Monday would become Tuesday.

In the back of his mind, he heard the ticking. He didn’t know when it was going to explode, or how far away he’d be, but Chester was right, the truth would come out. All he could do was build himself a shield to deflect some of the shrapnel. Not all of it, but the most fatal pieces.

“Weather forecast is pretty shit for tomorrow,” Banfield said.

“It’s a bit of rain.” He grew up playing football in winter in Victoria and was sure there’d been one season where every single game had been played in the rain, or at least that was how he remembered it. It was the year when some of the boys hit puberty, and some of them hadn’t, so size difference became a thing. He’d been a short-ass and copped it pretty hard. But by the time the next season rolled around, he had shot up, and he hadn’t stopped growing until he was nineteen.

“You like playing in the mud, do ya?”

Garrett shrugged. “To be fair, I’m just punting in it. It’s not like I’m a quarterback and ending up in it.”

Banfield laughed. “True, unless you’re tackled.”

“Mud washes off, and the bruises don’t sting if you win.” And if you lost, it always helped to have someone there to commiserate and put antiseptic on the scratches.

“Let’s put a W on the board tomorrow.” Banfield walked over to Coach Ross, leaving Garrett on the sideline.

Garrett managed to grab a couple of hours sleep on the plane, but he wouldn’t have called them restful. While some of the guys chilled, listening to music or napping, some were getting amped up.

He was learning who fell into which bucket, so he could sit in the chill zone. He also tried to stay as far away from James as possible. It was a different team, but the pre-game day routine was pretty much the same. He ate dinner with everyone else, making a few jokes, having a laugh and talking about the other team, and what their weaknesses were. One guy was showing videos of his kid’s first steps.

Caitlin had been on the plane, not that he wanted to talk to her where everyone might hear, but he hadn’t seen her since. Which was fine. He’d catch her tomorrow after the game. Not on the bus, or the plane. He was trying to work out when the best time was, because now that he said he would, he wanted to get it done, even though the idea made his gut churn.

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