Page 81 of Near Miss

Seeing as I can’t have her, I might as well win.

“I want to win. I want the record.” I grin when I say it, and I do mean it, but I think I know what Greer means when she says she’s empty, because the words just ring out into all the endless space inside me I wish she occupied.

Greer

For the first time, it’s not this unique brand of butterflies flapping their wings alongside the beats of my heart where it sits in its cage before I knock on Beckett’s door—it’s hesitation and the sound of the screeching brakes of my brain.

Not because I’m nervous to go inside. I probably should be after today. After I sat with my father while the antibiotics emptied into him and I listened to his lungs crackle on the other end of my stethoscope.

It seemed like, maybe, the idea that the consequences to my actions were this abstract sort of thing because no one was literally asking for another organ.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the human heart—they serve this literal, life-giving purpose in your body. But there’s this abstract function of love, and I think that’s meant to give us life, too.

But the crackles on the other end of that stethoscope, the oxygen mask, the antibiotics, and the fever burning along myfather’s skin remind me there are consequences, and they’re real.

I shouldn’t be as comfortable with Beckett as I am, I certainly shouldn’t be as intimately familiar with his apartment as I am, those butterflies can’t fly so close to the bars, and my heart needs to stay in its cage. It can’t serve this abstract function for me, it needs to keep me alive, because I still need to keep my father alive, too.

I’m late getting here. My father was discharged like Dr. Rawdat promised, and he’ll be fine in a few days. But I’m feeling a bit exposed, and I think Beckett might be, too.

I told him this thing I never tell anyone—mostly because I’m scared that when they hear the whole ugly truth of it, they’ll never look at me the same.

That they’ll judge me, they won’t be able to understand why I did it even though I didn’t want to, and they certainly won’t understand how I ended up here.

There were a lot of things in the lines of Beckett’s face that night, behind his eyes. But none of them were those.

And then I saw it, in real time—all these things he’s alluded to that made him into this person who just sort of ... was.

I think I’m a little sad that we can’t be anything more than we are, but my brain speaks louder than whatever whispers my heart wants me to hear.

He can stay, but he has to stay where he is.

I roll my shoulders back, and I do knock, but it takes him a minute to open the door.

“Sorry, I had these stupid things on my legs for recovery. Took a minute to get them off.” He smiles, but his eyes linger on my mouth before he swallows, muscles in his neck tensing, and he rakes a hand through his hair. “I can make you a copy of the key. I have the keycode to your place.”

He jerks his head back into his apartment before turning back inside, and I follow.

“A physical key isn’t—”

“Very friendly?” he calls over his shoulder, voice dry.

I nod, trailing after him into the living room. “Precisely.”

He raises his eyebrows when he drops down onto the end of his couch.

It’s quieter in here than usual. He usually has the TV on, or at the very least, music coming from somewhere.

He seems quieter than usual, too.

I sit beside him, tucking my legs underneath me.

“Are you sore?” I point to the abandoned puffy black boots, sitting haphazardly on the floor by the couch. “You don’t usually wear compression boots, do you?”

“What? Oh.” He’s distracted, but his eyes follow my finger to the floor. “No, I don’t. You know the new dynamic kickoff rule I told you about?”

I nod. I do, and even though he prefers that we don’t talk about football, I looked up all the rules and tried to learn everything so I could, if he changed his mind.

“It was meant to help increase the chance for a kickoff return. It’s an opportunity to score, a more exciting play. It’s not likely a team I’m kicking against is going to get the opportunity. I can—could—” He flinches when he corrects himself, and I can feel it in my chest. “I could put the ball anywhere after a kickoff, and definitely far enough away from the opposing team’s best returner. I’m not consistent right now, but I’m fast because I spent half my football career running, so Coach has us practicing drills where the kickoff gets returned and I’m tackling. A unique way to put some of my other skills to use, so he says.” Beckett shrugs. “I ran more in practice this week than I have in all of last season’s games combined.”

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