Page 13 of Near Miss

She gives me a flat look. “There’s more of that in the east end. Where do you live? Yonge and Eglington?”

“Ouch.” I grip my chest. “I’ll have you know, I live in the west end.”

A mocking sort of gasp comes from her, and she makes a surprised face. “Oh? Are you secretly a big, crunchy hipster? What with this massive gas-guzzling truck?”

I raise my eyebrows and give her a noncommittal jerk of my chin. “Nah, it’s just close to the field.”

“Well.” Greer tips her head, studying me, before turning to the door. “Thank you for dinner. Even though I think we have legitimate cause to be concerned about E. coli.”

“Good thing you’re licensed to practice medicine.” I bring my hands back to the steering wheel. I don’t really want her to go. I’m not good at being alone anymore. “Wait—can I get your number?”

“You’re asking for my number?” she turns and repeats, voice deadpan and eyes sharp.

I hold my hands up before pulling my phone out of my pocket. “Business only. I’ll text you when I think I can come by the hospital, and we can try to coordinate?”

“Business only,” she agrees, plucking my phone from my outstretched hand. Her fingers fly across the screen, and her eyebrows lift when she hands it back to me. “Here you go. I don’t give unsolicited medical advice, and I don’t write prescriptions for painkillers or sedatives, so don’t bother.”

“I’ve got a team doctor for that.” I hold up the phone. “I’ll text you.”

Greer tips her head, and her ponytail falls across her shoulder. Her nose wrinkles, but it’s not out of distaste this time. “But if you find yourself lying awake at night, crushed under the expectations of a city and its sports fans alike, and you want to talk to someone who doesn’t care, who doesn’t hate you—that counts as business, too.”

A grin stretches across my face, and it’s not the one I’ve grown to hate. It’s the one I think I used to make all the time. “You want to tell me bedtime stories?”

“No, I’d be terrible at that.” She looks at me for a minute longer, before finally opening the door and jumping out of the truck. “Good night, Beckett.”

“Night, Dr. Roberts.” I lean forward, about to grab the handle of the door, when she turns back, rolls her eyes at me, and slams it shut.

I wait and watch to make sure she gets in safely, even though a potential intruder should probably be afraid of her.

But I think I might actually wait to watch her a bit longer because she’s not as mean as she thinks—she’s actually quite thoughtful, and she’s actually quite beautiful.

Bile in her hair and all.

“Again. Sixty yards this time.”

Coach Taylor’s voice cuts across the field, and one of the equipment managers runs out to set up another ball 3 yards back from the last one.

My quads are on fire. Kickers don’t often break a sweat, but I’ve been sweating on this empty practice field under a particularly oppressive August sun for the last two hours. I lost count of how many kicks he’s asked me to attempt, each getting progressively farther back, and I have a feeling he’s making his way back to that record-breaking 67 yards I’ve hit before—just not when it mattered.

“I need him for kickoffs on Friday morning. Don’t kill his fucking legs,” Darren calls from the sidelines. His voice is sharper than it should be when he’s talking to his boss, but technically, he manages me. Not Coach Taylor.

“Last one then, Davis.” Coach Taylor’s eyebrows rise, and he eyes the football, innocuous and propped up there on the stand. He holds up a hand to stop me before I can start to line up, and he whistles to get the attention of the equipment manager, beckoning him back across the field. “Move it to 67 yards.”

“Is that really necessary?” Darren cuts in again. I can see the whites of his knuckles against the grip of his clipboard from here. “The last thing we need is him”—he punctuates his words by jerking a thumb at me—“losing confidence before preseason even fucking starts. He’s broken the record, we’ve seen it. Leave it.”

Coach Taylor’s lips pull into a thin line, nostrils flaring. But before he can reprimand Darren the way he probably should, and before they can keep talking about me like I’m not even here, I follow the equipment manager down to the 67-yard line. “I can do it.”

“See?” Coach Taylor raises his shoulders before clapping his hands in that weird, sharp way only coaches ever seem to. “Let’s see it then, Davis.”

I’m actually not sure I can do it. At least not this version of me. The other version of me—whoever that was, because I’m not sure he was a real person at the end of the day if he crumbled into nothing so fucking easily—he would have been pretty confident.

And he was pretty confident when he stepped up to kick during that game last year. But the second my foot connected, I knew it was wrong.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m thinking about it now, while I swing my leg and pound my fist into my quad to try and delay the inevitable cramping that’s going to have me in an ice bath for hours. I’m not sure where I went wrong in my approach, I did the same thing I always do.

But I don’t think about it.

It feels okay when my foot connects. It goes far enough.

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