Blind Side

B
LIND SIDE

Copyright © 2016 by K.B. Nelson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

T
his edition
of Blind Side includes the first five full chapters from Bad Reputation as bonus content.

I
was
young when I fell in love for the first time. Back then, my sanity and happiness depended on the one thing the deepest aches within my bones told me I couldn’t live without.

Love.

I loved Brock Hamilton the way we all loved someone when we were young—when we were naïve. But our relationship was different; that’s what we told ourselves. That’s what we believed. We spent years together, living a life painted under a blinding tapestry of blissful ignorance. We never saw it coming, but there was one obstacle we could never overcome.

After college, we moved back to our hometown and everything fell apart.

What—and who—I once lived for became the shackles holding me under while I fought to kick my way to the surface, if only to scream. And as each Friday night faded into Saturday hangovers where the temporary high of winning unmasked our pain once more, I fell further down the rabbit hole of loathing and despair.

I was trapped in a loveless marriage, of which the man I had once loved transformed into a vision in my imagination of what a monster looks like. There was no discernible reason for our own disconnect, but I resented him for dragging back into that same small town I clawed myself away from.

I was supposed to be somebody, and instead I became just another typical nobody. There was no way out, and just when I thought of pulling the proverbial trigger, he appeared to me.

And he saved me.

He was the student…

And I was his teacher.

* * *

There’s fear in his eyes, because he’s seen a vision of his world crashing down. He’s only seventeen, but he sees this as the end. My heart races, punching against my chest in an escalating dance as his foot presses harder against the accelerator. He doesn’t say a word, but the gentle tears caressing his cheeks are deafening.

It’s when the lights flash behind us, illuminating our reflections in the rearview mirror in a red and blue disco, that I begin to understand the seriousness of the situation. All the warning signs were there, but I jumped into the car anyway. Because I care too much, some would say with the sharpest of sneers. To which, I’d reply,
that’s the fucking point.
But as the mile markers fly past us in a blur, the point becomes murkier and murkier, stained with no promise of absolution.

I turn to him with the presence of fear in my own eyes. I’m mournful for his crushed soul, and the thought of his life being cut short. I’m mournful not because I’m afraid of dying, but because I’m afraid this only ends one way—with the death of my child I haven’t yet told my husband we’re expecting.

I cradle my palm against my stomach, trying to shield my unborn child from the weight of this world, as if my hand alone would be enough to protect him or her.

I peer over to the dash of the car and take notice of the speedometer. Ninety miles per hour on a one-way highway, barreling straight toward nothing but pain and sorrow. Straight to hell we go, and the only recourse I have left is basic human reasoning. Emotion. It’s the reason he jumped into the driver’s seat intoxicated. Emotion. It’s the reason I couldn’t let him drive away on his own. Emotion. It’s always fucking emotion.

“Do you have a game plan?” I question. “Or are you going to let these cops chase you around this city until you either run out of gas, or they outplay you?”

“The only thing I know right now is that I’m not afraid of dying.” He shakes his head, with no intention of taking his eyes off the road ahead. His grip tightens around the wheel. “You shouldn’t have come with me.”

“You’re right.” I nod my head in agreement. “But I did, and that’s the end of that.” I crane my head to look behind us, and notice a string of police cars joining the first. “Do you care about me?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles under his breath, and without conviction one way or the other. “I guess.”

“That’s good enough then, to stop the car, right?”

“There’s nothing to go home to,” he says lowly, void of hope or promise. From the outside, he’s dead inside—a tragic loss of innocence. The world has ripped his heart from his chest before he’s even crossed the arbitrary threshold separating childhood from adulthood.

“I know it feels that way right now, and I know why it feels that way.” I close my eyes and swallow a nervous lump in my throat. I grow more and more nauseous with the passing of each mile. “It gets better, not because life is fair, but because you have the power to change the trajectory of your life.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he scoffs at me, with a quick look of disdain before his eyes are shifted back to the dark road ahead. “Naïve?”

I reach my hand across the gearshift, and place my palm on his thigh. We’re well past the point of teacher-student misconduct, and all he really needs is to know that someone in this world cares for him after he was betrayed by an educator, and his parents threw him out onto the streets—the ultimate betrayal. “I think you’re hurting, and I think nothing else matters.”

Up ahead, a sign on the side of the road signals a speed limit drop, from sixty to forty-five. Danger beyond that line is more imminent, where cars are lined up behind red lights, waiting to accelerate through intersections that are not safe from the speeding bullet I’ve found myself in.

“I’m pregnant,” I say deadpan, with no heft to my words. It’s an uneasy revelation that I’ve been too afraid to say out loud for fear of jinxing myself. In the back of my mind, I’ve been afraid that it was a cruel prank. The last time I was pregnant, I lost the baby in the first trimester before I ever had the chance to learn the gender. It’s hard to mourn the loss of someone who never even had a name. “So you need to stop this car, because like you, I can live with dying, but I can’t live with losing another child.”

Guilt sinks into his eyes like storm clouds rolling against oceanic skies. “Another child?”

“Yeah,” I nod and purse my lips, straining hard in an effort to hold it all inside. Fucking emotion, I told you. It’s always there, threatening to burst through the seams. “Stop the car,” I plead with him once more.

He twists his head to look at me and the tears flow, glimmering under the harsh glow of city lights. He nods a slight nod, and we reach a silent understanding as he lowers his foot against the brake.

My head is thrown back against the seat and I hold on tight to the handle bar
as we begin to slow. I close my eyes and heave a short sigh of relief. I don’t know what comes next, but we’re alive.

This kid doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to him, but at least he’ll have the chance to heal from the pain. Maybe they’ll go easy on him, considering the circumstances, and give him a few years of probation instead of throwing him in the slammer, and then throwing away the key. Maybe they won’t.

But he’ll be alive, all because I did what I know I shouldn’t have done. I never should have jumped into his car, knowing he had been drinking—knowing that he was one of my students.

But I did, and a burden is lifted from my soul. This is why I became a teacher. To matter. To change lives. To save them, the same way a teacher had once saved mine.

I look at him with adoration, silently praising his strength even after the rug was ripped out from under him. And then my eyes drift to the yellow light ahead of us, while we’re still speeding too fast to stop.

Red light.

Screeching tires.

Blinding lights.

A collision.

Metal torn like paper.

Sirens.

Silence.

Blurred vision.

Bright lights.

Hospital room.

A painful scream. Not from injury, but from heartbreak.

F
riday nights
in a small town carry with them the heft of the only thing that seems to matter—winning. Score a touchdown? Winning. Score an interception? Winning. Tackle the opponent’s quarterback? Winning.

Always winning. It’s what this town does, even if it’s only on Friday nights. Half of the crowd goes wild—the half that engulfs me on the chilly steel blenchers in the home section. A sea of familiar faces are lost in the conformity of purple and white as the shadows of the dying sun brush against each and every one of us.

Screaming. Chanting. Winning. I pretend as if I’m invested in the game and cheer along, but inside I’m screaming because I don’t remember what it feels like to win. I can’t begin to pinpoint the exact moment when it all began, but it seems as if I’m always losing.

I’m stuck in place, with the precarious addendum that I’m able to move my feet. I should run. I want to run, and perhaps never look back. But I can’t. There’s a pool of emotional quicksand at my feet.

My eyes scan out to the field where the coach has his best players huddled into a circle. They’re planning their next play, and I remember when I used to look down on that damn field with admiration and adoration in my eyes. I don’t remember the exact moment those feelings vanished either.

The players and the coach break from their huddle and the crowd goes wild. For what? Don’t know. Don’t particularly care.

I look to the scoreboard, not knowing how long I’ve been standing out here in the chilly autumn weather, but hoping the night will be over soon. I let out a loud yawn and my eyes shift to the concession stand on the other side of the field. I take one last glance at the scoreboard before standing to my feet.

* * *

I
reach
the end of the line of the concession stand that’s about fourteen people deep and stand in place with my arms folded against each other, trying to warm my body. I should go grab my jacket from the truck, but I know if I leave the field, I’ll fall asleep in the cab.

Mr. Coach wouldn’t be happy about that. What would it look like if his prized wife should disappear in the middle of a game? Everyone would talk. That’s what people do in small town, USA—Ridgefield, Ohio, to be exact. They talk and talk until they can talk no more, but the damage is always already done.

Gossip is dangerous. It’s deadly when slipping from the lips of people who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. I remember the whispers after the wreck. If it weren’t for my celebrity husband, I would have been dragged out into the town center and stoned to death, while a crow of rednecks stoned me, screaming
whore.
But he stood beside me, like good husbands do.

That was a public façade. Behind closed doors, everything has fallen apart. And why wouldn’t it? A healthy marriage isn’t built on lies and malice, which is exactly what the foundation of our once ironclad love has become. Cracks in the floor beneath us, holes in the walls around us, and a crumbling roof above us. We stand in a house of broken hearts, but it beats being out in the cold.

That’s what I used to believe. I’m not so certain anymore, about that or anything else.

I am certain however that the two soccer moms standing behind me should learn to mind their own business. They think I can’t see them. They think I can’t hear them.

I can.

I see them turn to each other, and hear them whisper. “That’s her,” the brunette says.

The blonde-haired one shushes her friend, and then without skipping a beat, their eyes are narrowed in on me, burning holes of judgment through my back. Somehow, I’m to blame for what happened that night last fall. Facts don’t matter much in the court of public opinion, which is the reason I remain tight-lipped about what really happened that night.

“Next,” a grating voice calls out and I groan to myself, but slap a stupid-wide smile on my face. “One creamer and one sugar?” she questions as she reaches for a foam cup.

“That’s just the remedy.”

“Isn’t it always?” She fills the cup and pushes it across the counter.

I dig into my back pocket and retrieve a twenty. Before I can even slap the bill on the counter, she’s nodding her head. “That’s not necessary.”

I’m not a fan of receiving preferential treatment, but when it comes to someone like Wendy Carr, I’ll take what I can get. To her, I’m the mistrusted wife of the coach who may or may not have been banging one of her students. To me, she’s a status-obsessed mean girl who never left high school. Fitting then, that she spends her weekends slinging coffee and hot dogs made of rubber.

Nobody escapes this town. I did, once. But we’re all pulled back into its abyss at one point or another.

* * *

M
y head begins
to throb with short pauses between rhythmic punches. There’s aspirin in the truck, but once again, I know how that story ends—with me slumped over the seat, snoozing until awakened from a peaceful slumber by an enraged husband.

I maneuver around the back of the home bleachers, where an open field of grass is hidden from the revelry of the game. A dark shadow hangs over the field, while the other half is engulfed in the burning light of the game lights above.

I take a short sip of my coffee. Still too hot, it burns my tongue. I overreact, as I sometimes tend to do, and the cup slips out of my hand and onto the damp autumn ground.

I lean down to retrieve the cup, if for no other reason than to toss it into the trash. It’s a pleasant surprise that the cup remains intact, and half full. Crouched down, and hovering above the ground, I swipe the cup into my hand and take notice of someone sitting underneath the bleachers. The soft light from the field beyond the bleachers filters through the spaces in between seats, casting an angelic shadow around a blank silhouette.

For a second, I think about running. The memories a year out are still all too fresh. The pain, as sharp as a needle, threads around the four corners of my heart, but I’m drawn to the shadow. Drawn to the pain. Drawn to someone that’s hiding from the game the same way I am.

I begin a slow march to the figure, with no set game plan once I arrive. A part of me hopes it’s
him,
the guy that was with Nathan the night before his life was shattered into a million tiny pieces. The wreck destroyed me and it destroyed Nathan. I wonder how it affected the other
him.

I duck under the first row of steel bars, and the shadow’s features become more prominent. Young male with dark hair, wearing nothing but a dark black cut-off and jeans. Basically, the probability that he’s trouble is astronomically greater than the odds that he’s who I’m looking for.

Still, I continue my slow approach from behind until I see him raise his hand to his mouth and take a sip from a can. That makes sense. Back in high school, the bleachers were where all the action was.

A loud horn sounds. Someone has scored a touchdown. From the feet stampeding against the steel above me, and the fibers of dust billowing through the thin strips of light passing through the bleachers, I believe it is The Chiefs—our team—who’s scored. The all-too-familiar voice over the busted speakers confirms it.

“Bravo,” the stranger in front of me claps one hand against a can in the other.

“You’re not supposed to be drinking on school property,” I yell from behind him.

“Oh, shit.” He throws himself to his feet and tosses the can to the ground. He twists to face me, with a shit-eating grin. “You caught me.”