Qualified: A Sports Romance (8 page)

She could do this. Sure.

Allie set her alarm so that she
could be back down to the garage early. She wanted to familiarize herself with
the car before the guys showed up to get their lift to afternoon practice. Adam
was one of the three in the building who’d already been living in the area, so
he hopped up front to help Allie in addition to the car’s navigation system.
The usefulness of his input was questionable in threading through the afternoon
traffic. Allie hadn’t ever heard anyone argue with a robot with quite so much
enthusiasm before.

The older guys mostly seemed content to catch a nap
in the back. All of them except Marc, whom Allie periodically caught looking at
her when she checked her mirror. By the time she pulled into the parking lot
her skin was tingling from the sense of being watched. At least Everett’s
convertible provided a familiar reference point for her to focus on as she
pulled into an adjacent stall. Right behind her arrived a fancy sports car
marked by a badge Allie didn’t recognize and driven by a blond she did.

“She’s arrived,” Blake grinned at her while they
were all slipping out of their vehicles. He was distracted shortly thereafter.
When Marc opened the team car’s door it came millimeters from scratching the
paint of Blake’s ride.

Allie put on a smile and tried not to make too much
of the way the two guys bristled at each other. “Just this afternoon,” she said
lightly, hurrying everyone out with their bags so she could click on the alarm.
Shouldering her purse, she followed the pack of water polo players into the
facility. Marc’s longer strides had put distance between them so that he was
lost to a far corner of the pool deck before she even made it into the front
entry hall.

“Allie?” The familiar voice of the team’s physical
trainer distracted Allie before her dwelling could ruin her mood too much.

“Hi Lindsey.” Allie didn’t have to fake her smile
for the older woman. She let her path diverge from the guys’ to head over to
where the PT leaned out of an office doorway.

“Everett said your journey went smoothly? I’m so
glad to have you here.” Lindsey’s smile crinkled at the edges of her eyes. “And
not just because you’re an extra pair of hands, though it might be hard to tell
because I have loads of work to pile on you straight away.”

Lindsey wasn’t kidding. There was a whole host of
information for Allie. They were in the process of transferring a lot of files
from the national water polo organization’s office. She would be a part of the
staffing team in charge of managing the paperwork specific to the guys’ summer
games bid. One of Allie’s tasks would be keeping the records for the athletes’
compliance with the international anti-doping standards, which was both a
flattering vote of confidence and a daunting responsibility.

On top of that, she would be assisting Lindsey with
the day to day oversight of the team’s training and recovery programs. It was
work that the sports medicine clinic had well prepared her for. Likewise,
coordinating appointments with outside specialists such as the nutritionists
and sports psychologists was solidly in her skill set. There was just so much
to do, and it all was in addition to her contributions to the research project
which Doctor Kaitech had specifically sent her to California to continue.

By the time the guys were done with their afternoon
pool workout, Allie felt like she’d had an equivalent mental workout trying to
come up to speed with all her duties. The drive back to the house was quiet,
and even Adam did not do much more than rock his head along with the playlist
he linked into the car’s stereo system.

“Hi guys!” Troy’s girlfriend was
waiting in the lobby of the apartment building to greet them when they arrived
home. She was the kind of girl who could make lounge wear look good. All she
had on was a skimpy tank top and drawstring pants with her business school’s
letters stamped across her top-tier ass. “How was practice, honey?”

Allie felt too conscious of Marc at her elbow when
the couple wrapped around each other and kissed.

“Just please don’t tell me how many more days of
this we have,” Adam groaned. “Is there any food?”

“Meal delivery just came through about fifteen
minutes ago,” Troy’s girlfriend answered. “I showed them in. Everything should
still be warm.” 

Adam dove into the elevator and smacked the button
for their floor so fast that the door almost closed on the rest of them. He
wedged impatiently into the corner as the rest of the group smashed in.

Unselfconscious of the crowd, Troy’s girlfriend
ruffled his still-damp hair while he held her close around her waist. “I
remember when you used to be like that.”

“What are you talking about, I’m still like that,”
Troy murmured against her skin. She squealed as he took a bite of her neck,
catching her arms around him as they swayed from the elevator stopping at their
floor.

Allie ducked her eyes away as she felt a blush
picking over her cheeks, but it only got worse when she noticed Marc watching
her from the corner of her eye.

There was absolutely no chance of ‘ladies first’
when the doors opened. “These guys have no manners,” the other woman sighed,
setting her hands on her hips as Troy left her to rush to dinner with the rest
of his teammates.

“Priorities,” Marc said lazily as he, too, beat
them into the hall.

Troy’s girlfriend rolled her eyes and flattened a
palm over the door’s sensor to keep it open for Allie. She held out her other
hand in belated greeting. “I’m Candace by the way.” She might have been a
bottle blonde, but there was nothing fake about her smile. “Or Candi. That’s
what you’ll hear them call me.” She shrugged a suntanned shoulder. “I’m trying
to shake the nickname for business school, but there’s little chance of it
around this lot.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Candace,” Allie made a
point of saying as she grinned back. “I’m Allie. Are you going to business
school now? I hope to apply to graduate programs and start next year.”

“Oh, that’s right, I heard you’re looking at med
school. That’s awesome.” Candace touched at her elbow with companionable
warmth. “I’m in my second term. We should share study spots. Troy and I lived
closer to campus when we were in undergrad, so I’m still finding good spots
around here.”

“That would be great. I have the MCAT to prep for.”

“I’ll point some out this weekend,” Candace decided
with a beaming smile. “Now I should go make sure Troy is chewing his food. He
comes home from practice and, I swear, is all reptile brain.”

Allie hoped her laugh didn’t sound forced. She
tried to avoid thinking too much about water polo players’ appetites and
priorities
.

As it was, everything went out of
her head as soon as Allie got to her apartment and opened the door. “Oh my
gosh, I’m sorry!”

“Mmph. Is that Allie?”

“Yes?” Allie peeked cautiously through the fingers
she’d flung up in front of her face.

“Roomie! I’m glad you’re finally here, come in,
come in.”

Allie lowered her hands to see the older girl
beckoning her in with the spoon she had been using to eat a cup of yogurt. It
wasn’t her new roommate’s dietary choice that had alarmed her, but rather her
state of undress. “I’m just getting ready to go out,” Kelsey explained. It
did
kind of explain the lacy red lingerie.

“Oh … that’s … I just got in today,”
Allie stammered uselessly while she tried to figure out where to set her focus.
It seemed rude to look away into the empty safety of the living room, but when
she turned back to offer a smile there was so much cleavage in view.

“Yeah, my little brother texted me.” Adam’s sister
breezed around the end of the kitchen counter as if she were used to welcoming
people in her underwear. Maybe she was. Allie remembered how Marc said Kelsey
had been on the women’s water polo team and wondered if the girls changed from
their suits in their towels like the boys. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.
I’ve heard such good things.”

“Have you?” Allie got a funny smile trying to
imagine what Adam’s description of her would be like.

“Are you surprised?” Kelsey grinned and took up a
perch on the back of the couch. “Anyway, it wasn’t just my brother. I know as
well as anyone he’s prone to …” She waved her spoon in a gesture of
extravagance before scooping up another bite.

Allie nearly had time to ask if that meant Marc had
said anything about her, but she kept the question bitten to silence on her
tongue.

“I know Austin pretty well. The goalie? We were on
our university’s squads at the same time and then on the national teams. He
vouched for you too. Said you don’t seem crazy.”

“That’s … nice.” Allie still was a bit
stilted, but she was finding her good-humored smile again. Being more relaxed
meant her curiosity almost escaped. “Were you …” She wanted to know if
Kelsey knew anything more about Marc. She didn’t know Austin well, but Allie
did remember he was an alumnus from the same university as both Adam and her
study subject. But it wouldn’t do to seem so desperate to know about him. After
a fish-mouthed moment, she found something else to ask. “Happy? To have your
little brother follow to your same school?”

“I guess it was fine.” Kelsey didn’t seem to notice
the awkward pause. “Maybe I would have been less thrilled if we were on campus
at the same time, but I was out of state by the time he started. It saved mom
and dad from having to get another ‘proud parent of’ sticker for their car.” She
winked while her spoon scraped the bottom of her yogurt cup.

“I should finish getting ready,” Kelsey said with a
small sigh as she hopped back to her feet. “Shouldn’t be late for the blind
date my coworker set up for me.” Despite the red lace, there was skepticism in
the wrinkle of her nose. “Anyway, you’re probably jet lagged. But we should do
drinks sometime. Girls’ night.”

“Yeah, I’m about to drop. But I’d like that.” Allie
stretched a wide smile. “I’m going to need an escape from all this testosterone
or I’m sure to go crazy.”

Allie barely got her feet under her
before the team cranked up to full-time training. That meant the guys were
under the direct watch of their coaches six days a week. They had two pool
practices a day plus dryland workouts which included cardio and weights and
whatever new teambuilding activity the coaches could dream up to throw at them.
She was in the thick of it. After driving about half the team from the
apartment building to the pool every morning, Allie would spend the majority of
her day at Lindsey’s elbow.

Speedos swiftly became less of a shock and she
started to recognize the team just as well in those ear-cupped caps as without
them. Amongst the guys outside her carpool, she knew Blake and Ivan best. There
were two more teammates from Northern California living with them at Blake’s
apparently amazing beach house. The team’s youngest player was living with his
parents south of the facility, and then there were the other senior veterans:
Kelsey’s friend Austin, the team’s captain Chad, and the oldest teammate Vince.
The three of them had been to multiple summer games like Marc, but unlike him
they all had families who were living with them in houses close to the aquatic
center.

Overall, it was a good group of people to work
with. The head coach terrified Allie, but perhaps that was needed to keep so
much over-revved aggression and energy in line. Even Everett could be scary
when he boomed his instruction at the group of guys. There was a lot on the
line. Not only were they preparing for the big event in August, but a number of
international tournaments would occur in the months before. However, the one
looming largest on their schedule was the qualifying tournament at the start of
April that would be their last chance to earn a spot at the summer games.

Everyone was so busy and applied to their work,
pushing so hard, that it wasn’t difficult to stay on task. In the dim of dawn
Allie would see Marc in his warmup gear while everyone trundled blearily down
the elevator and into the car. She’d get the engine going and navigate the
quickly-familiar streets while the guys woke each other up with jostling
shoulders and friendly insults and gnawed on energy bars for breakfast.

Towards the end of that first full week, Allie caught
up enough with the tasks from Lindsey and Everett that she had time to go
outside to the bleachers and watch the end of afternoon practice. Maybe the
spectacle became more familiar, but that didn’t mean Allie failed to appreciate
it. She found it impossible to develop immunity to so much water-slick muscle
gleaming in the Southern California sun. With her new Hollywood-ridiculous
sunglasses worn against the glare, Allie hoped her particular obsession wasn’t
obvious. Maybe her fixation was only natural. Marc was a dominant presence in
the pool, no question.

Oh sure, Austin the veteran goalie called out
impressive orchestration from inside
the cage
, as she now knew they
called it. Chad and Blake would both rise towering out of the pool and send the
ball screaming into the goal with force that would have been impressive even if
their feet were on the ground. It was all the more amazing when one remembered
they were half-occupied by a fight to tread water. But Marc seemed all that and
more, ever in the middle of the most aggressive plays, and she couldn’t keep
her eyes off him.

He looked huge, even in the water. It didn’t stop
him from being fast, since Marc was one of the quickest swimmers when it came
to sprinting up and down the pool length. They were all world class, but Marc
usually looked like he was getting the upper hand. Allie couldn’t know if it
was the nature of the position he played, or just the nature of how the other
guys saw
him
. The big dog to be taken on to prove themselves. They’d
roll and thrash in a whitewater of pitching shoulders and jamming elbows and
time and time again it’d be Marc controlling the ball above the fray, skipping
it into a net-caught shot or arrowing a tightly aimed pass to one of his
teammates. The power on display would leave her breathless.

After the team pulled themselves free from the
water’s greedy suck, Allie would see the after-effects of their scrimmaging
while she worked beside Lindsey. As a group, the water polo players seemed
largely oblivious to the patterns of violence which marred their skin. Stray
scratches left red streaks dubiously close to the hems of their suits. They
often had welts on their shins and along their arms from the contesting
collisions.

On the second day Adam jammed his finger. It must
have been an hour of evaluation and icing and tape. Through it all, Adam was
begging to get back in the pool. Another day Ivan only reluctantly let himself
be dragged out onto the deck when he couldn’t catch his breath. Lindsey had to
palpate his ribs beneath the knee mark they found to be sure that nothing was
broken.

Luckily Allie’s time at the training center’s
clinic provided excellent preparation. When the PT needed to devote herself to
the more acute cases, Allie could take on oversight of the general recovery
sessions. Lindsey also complimented her judgment on which things were small
enough to deal with alone and when it was best to ask for help. It wasn’t
always easy for Allie to make the call, especially when the guys were reluctant
to show weakness. They knew that the qualification was on the line for the team
and, to some extent, for themselves. The final roster for the summer games
wouldn’t be decided until after the qualifying trials.

“Belmont, we need to talk. When
you’re done.” The head coach was short if not particularly sweet as he leaned
in the doorway of the room Allie had waved Marc into.

“Yeah,” Marc mumbled as he got himself lowered into
the chair. His skin was still damp from the pool, his wet hair dripping runnels
down his neck which made the black licks of his tattoo glisten.

Allie fussed with her kit and tried to focus on her
work instead of worrying about Marc. The expansion of Doctor Kaitech’s study
was to be done in a somewhat abbreviated form, given that the aquatic center
didn’t have quick access to the same facilities as the Colorado training
center. She was to do the field tests weekly instead of every other day. Marc
would then go to one of the nearby universities for his final collection of a
full sample set. They would schedule his appointment about two weeks before the
qualifying game so as to avoid any affect of the procedures on his performance
for his team.

“I bet it was kinda nice to get into the water
today, after all that time on the sand.” Earlier she had picked them up from
the beach after they’d spent a few hours running a team-building training
course by the shoreline.

Marc just grunted, hardly looking at her. He went
through the motions of their previously established choreography as if the last
time they’d done it was just yesterday. It was difficult to tell if he were any
more distant than he’d been when she first met him, since he had always been so
aloof. Allie knew that the strain of training affected the team mentally as
well as physically, though the latter’s signs were more uniform and easy to
see. Sometimes the psychological cracks showed, though, like Adam being even
more wild and over the top with his stories and musical performances. Maybe for
Marc it was the opposite—he was walling himself further into isolation.

It was the kind of thing his coach might be
displeased with, especially after a teambuilding exercise. She thought about
their conversations in Colorado and how he’d seemed concerned for his place on
the team. Glancing to be sure no one was in the door, Allie swayed closer as
she held his wrist. She let her grip linger against his skin while she reached
over to her tablet to tap in the number. “I could take the other guys back
first,” she offered nonchalantly. “If you don’t want us to be waiting at the
door for your meeting to end.”

That got Marc to look at her. Those intense eyes
searched hers and Allie couldn’t guess what they found.

Perhaps it’d been the wrong thing to suggest. She’d
thought it might be preferable to have his teammates unaware of precisely how
long he was getting yelled at. Maybe it’d just make him feel more alone, to
have them go. Her words carried on without her. “Or I could wait.”

His hand twisted in hers, his palm closing about
her wrist. She didn’t know if he was pulling or if she was just drawn to him.
The part of her that so reliably remembered every number she needed to record
was thinking that her own pulse must have risen significantly over standard
baseline.

Another voice echoed from a frozen night and kept
her riveted to him:
What do you want, Allie?

“You shouldn’t wait for me.” Marc’s gaze flicked
towards the door, breaking the spell. “I’ll see if I can get a ride back from
Everett.”

Allie swallowed. It took her a moment to speak.
“Okay.”

Allie walked out to the car with the
rest of the guys trailing her, a mama duck with the burliest flock of
ducklings. Adam was going on and on excitedly about something to one of the
other players, but she was too preoccupied worrying about why the coach might
want to talk to Marc to pay attention.

Blake was hanging out next to some oddly boxy
Mercedes that his driver was using to pick up him and the three other guys
staying at his house. They seemed to still be waiting on one of the NorCal guys
to come out from the locker room. Blake looked over from his conversation with
Ivan as Allie rounded the nose of her car. “Maybe Allie would like to come.
You’re not spoken for, are you, Allie?”

Allie stopped in front of her headlight like the
proverbial deer and stared back at Blake. She felt like Marc’s fingerprints
were still on her wrist. “What?” was all that she could blurt out.

“A lady’s entitled to her secrets.” Ivan smirked
from beyond his housemate’s shoulder.

“I don’t have secrets,” Allie proclaimed, perhaps a
bit weakly. She was trying to go for prim. She got her nose up and resumed her
path to her door.

“Oh, yeah!” Adam had come around from the other
way. “You should come hang out with us, Allie. Can’t work all the time. We have
to give the married guys something to be jealous of.”

“Where am I going?” Allie blinked in confusion.

“The un-Valentine’s Day party. At my place,” Blake
said like it was no big deal. His place, on the ocean, with the hot tub and
pool table and three balconies. That she’d yet to see. His bachelor pad. She
felt her stomach go funny. She’d already been trapped by Blake once.

“Just me and all of you?” Her skepticism was surely
palpable.

Blake slid his smile a little wider, not taking his
eyes off her.

Adam gave the actual answer. “Oh, the women’s team
is coming too. You know, most of the team, not the ones shacked up or whatever.
They’re kinda crazy, but it’ll be awesome.”

“Oh.” Allie felt a little stupid for making a fuss.
“Yeah, sounds great.”