Before I could pick up my drinks, my phone chimed.
MIGUEL
Where are the extra eggs
Shit, I really needed to get there. I fired off a response, grabbed the drinks, and speedwalked out of the café. Contact with Royce was now inevitable if I wanted to get into work faster.
Much like everything else he did, he wasn’t going to make it easy for me to hide from him. He zig-zagged across the sidewalk,bouncing between the curb and the building to our left. Snow flurries scattered around us and swirled in frosty clumps in the middle of the road. I was close enough to hear his phone call now.
“You can’t keep calling me like this.”
My cappuccino sloshed out the sip spout, and I bent to drink some off the top.
“I told you it was over. I gave you time to get your stuff. I had a right to change the locks.”
If he had to keep me from getting to work, at least he was entertaining me.
“If I find anything, I’ll mail it to you.” He paused to listen. “Maybe you should have thought about that when you were having me followed!”
Goddamn. I hadn’t seen his girlfriend at the last team event, but didn’t think much of it. If anything, he’d been playing better since November. I just assumed they were trying something new with the training staff.
I peered around to see if I could jaywalk and get around him on the other side of the street. No such luck. Sidewalk closed for the ever-present construction.
The corner was coming up. While we waited for the walk light, I could blast out in front of him.
But Royce didn’t stop at the corner. He stepped out into the street without a glance in either direction. Did his mother not drill looking both ways into his head? He was too absorbed in his phone call. There was no way he saw the bus barreling toward him.
“Royce?”
He didn’t hear me. If I didn’t move now, he was going to get hit by a bus. Hate him or not, I didn’t want him to die. I couldn’t live with myself if he got hurt and I didn’t do anything to stop it.
I ran full tilt into the street, trying to catch up to him. “ROYCE!”
He whipped around to see who was calling his name. The bus slammed on the brakes and laid on the horn, but it was too late. I charged and jumped, sailing through the air, I imagined, like a superhero. My arms wrapped around his tall figure at the waist and I tugged hard, tackling him to the curb.
The signature clatter of a dropped phone and the hollow thunk of spilled drinks registered as we too hit the ground. My momentum placed me on the bottom of our two-person dogpile. My bones crunched against the pavement and I vaguely wondered if this was how NFL players felt.
No, this couldn’t be how NFL players felt. NFL players had the benefit of padding and grass. Astroturf at a minimum. I had a brick sidewalk and a stone curb that bit into my spine on the fall. My winter coat served as my only padding.
Royce’s phone and our poor, barely consumed coffees lay crushed in the street as he sat up, a stark reminder of what could have been.
“Oh my god.” I always heard him goofing off with his teammates or giving me hell about something or another, but here, he sounded raspy, rattled. Rightfully so. He almost got hit by a bus.Wealmost got hit by a bus, but I saved him. His beanie was knocked askew, his jet black hair sticking out haphazardly beneath it. His pupils were tiny dots when he whirled to look at me. “Holy shit. Chef. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. In truth, my back hurt like a bitch from where it smashed against the curb with probably a two hundred pound man on top of me. I sat up slowly, sitting like a forgotten doll with my legs out in a V-shape. At least I could feel my legs, and beyond the burn of a scrape and an impending bruise, I didn’t feel like I had some major injury.
Royce clutched my upper arms, his head dipping to look into my eyes. I never took the time to really look at him. His eyes were gorgeous. I’d previously thought they were brown, but up close like this, I could see they were a marbled midnight blue. The concern in them now made me think I must be more hurt than I thought. On instinct, I touched his cheek, checking his face like it would tell me if he was injured. Finding nothing, I blurted out my first thought.
“Didn’t your mom teach you to look both ways?”
Royce coughed out a laugh and a genuine, wide smile broke over his face. I laughed too. We were alive. What started as a humdrum day became a brush with death that left me tangled on the ground with this man. Harlan and I did not make a habit of laughing together, always one of us laughing while the other was peeved. A constant back and forth, antagonizing each other—or at least, him antagonizing me, and me not accepting his bullshit.
“My god, Emma.”
Emma. He usually called me Chef. Nothing but Chef. My stomach swooped at the use of my name, the way his eyes flashed over my face like he was absorbing every detail, the way he had my upper arms in his massive hands.
On a mix of a sob and a laugh, we fell into a hug. My stomach tightened further when he pressed his cheek to mine and cupped the back of my head.
Harlan Royce was normally a walking snark machine, forever with his upper lip curled and ready to deliver some annoying criticism or joke. Here, in the street in front of the arena, he was tender, kind even. It was disorienting. Or maybe that was the potential head trauma.
