The Debt 9 (Club Alpha) (11 page)

“Can’t I just come and live with you?”

“That wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve been over this.
 
You need to be near school, and Mom and
Dad would never allow it.”

“I hate my life,” Krissi repeated.

Faith was about to respond, but the game
was starting up again, and instantly she was enthralled.

Okay
, she thought, smiling a little and
sipping her drink.
 
He’ll have regrouped and figured out a plan
by now.
 
Chase is smart and brave
and so talented.
 
He can do this.

Just thinking that felt good.
 
She believed in him, she knew he could
do this.

Why
do you care so much about him?
 
The
guy used you for an easy lay and then didn’t even call or ask you out again.

But Faith didn’t feel used by him exactly.
 
She felt
connected to him
—which she knew logically didn’t make any
sense.
 
She cared about him, even
though their time together had been short and confusing.
 
It still had been the best sex of her
life, and the truth was, she was enamored with him.

You’re
like an addict, and you’re just rationalizing your addiction
.

Maybe that was all this was, but Faith
couldn’t change her feelings.
 
She
leaned forward again as New England ran the kickoff back to about mid-field,
their best field position in some time.

The offense got set and Faith thought she
saw different body language coming from Chase this quarter.
 
He was standing tall, confident, despite
the way he’d performed so far that day.
 

His first play of the second half, the defense
rushed again and chased him out of the pocket, but he scrambled out of bounds
having gained three yards.
 
Faith
began clapping, shouting her approval at the TV.

“You’ve really lost it,” Krissi said, shaking
her head sadly.

Faith didn’t care, she was so proud of
Chase for continuing to fight even after having such a bad start to the game.

The next play, Chase faked the pass and
handed off to a running back, who gained minimal yardage.

“Okay,” Faith said, putting her hands out
as if to calm an imaginary crowd down.
 
“Okay, it’s third down and we only need six yards.
 
Six, any short pass will do it.”

“I’m rooting for Green Bay to stop him,”
her sister announced.

Faith ignored her.
 
She had tunnel vision now, watching the
TV, willing chase to do this—to turn things around.

The ball was snapped into his hands, and
Chase faked a handoff to the running back, and then cocked his arm to throw.

“There’s an open man!” Faith yelled,
pointing.
 

But Chase hesitated, and then the rush
was on, and he was forced to move, as one of the defensive players began
chasing him furiously.
 
Chase faked
left, then right, causing the main defender to dive and miss him.

“Shit!” Krissi said, pounding her fist on
the arm of the couch.

Another defender was in hot pursuit
though, and Chase was running again, and getting perilously close to going out
of bounds and losing precious yardage.

But at the last second, Chase cocked his
arm and threw downfield, a pass that was shocking in its power and distance,
given the fact that Chase was on a full run towards the sidelines when he made
the pass.

“Come on!” Faith shouted, jumping to her
feet, arms outstretched.

The receiver was wide open on the Green
Bay thirty-yard-line by the time the football reached his outstretched
arms.
 
It was a perfect pass, a
thing of beauty, a spiral that landed in the New England receiver’s
outstretched hands as if it had been magnetized to him.

“Wow!” Krissi yelled.
 
In all of the excitement, she’d
forgotten her pledge to root against Chase Winters.
 
 

And then, just as the New England
receiver started to pull the ball in to run for the easy touchdown, the
unthinkable happened.

One moment he had the little brown
football in his hands, and the next, it had popped out, and he bobbled the
thing for an unspeakably long, drawn out moment of horror.

The ball dropped to the ground and the
referee waved the pass off as incomplete.

The announcers were beside themselves,
their voices raised as they said how bad the drop had been, how deflating for
New England.
 
The camera cut back to
Chase, standing there with his head bowed, and Faith couldn’t believe it.

New England was forced to kick off, so instead
of having scored a touchdown to bring the team within three points of Green
Bay, they’d had to punt from inside their own territory with no points scored.

It was a horrible comedown, and it was
also the beginning of The Nationals unraveling.

From that point on, Green Bay took over,
scoring on their next drive, and then stopping Chase and his offense within the
next set of downs, forcing them to punt yet again.

By the time the fourth quarter started,
Green Bay was up by a score of 20-0 and Chase’s offensive line was consistently
letting the Green Bay defensive rush in, which forced Chase to make more bad
passes and scramble so as not to get sacked.

He made one last, long drive downfield in
the closing minutes of the game, when it was clear the Nationals no longer had
a chance of winning.
 
Now, they were
just trying to salvage a little bit of dignity in the loss, having been shut
down and shut out thus far.

By now, Faith’s sister was fully rooting
for Chase and the team.
 
Both she
and Faith were yelling, cajoling, pleading with the gods of football to let him
get this touchdown.

After a long and persistent drive
downfield, during which Chase was sacked once, harassed by multiple defenders
chasing him almost every time he attempted a pass—he’d finally brought
New England within fifteen yards of the goal line.

The clock was winding down now, and Green
Bay had won, but it was obvious they hadn’t let up.
 
Chase Winters had made the other team
angry.
 
They wanted to hurt him,
they wanted to beat him into the dirt and expose him as being all hype.

There had been articles and news stories
about the resentment around the league that was felt towards Chase.
 
Resentment that he’d gotten a windfall
of a deal—not to mention endorsements and publicity—before playing
a single professional game.
 
Resentment that all anyone in the media talked about was Chase
Winters.
 
There was anger and
resentment that he’d gotten an easy ride to the top.

The Green Bay players all had a chip on
their shoulders and it showed in the way they talked smack to him after hitting
him or making him miss a pass.
 

It showed and it made Faith want him all
the more, want him to succeed, want him to prove that he was the real deal that
she knew he was.

Fifteen yards from the goal line, Chase
took the ball, dropped back, and prepared to throw a pass to the open receiver
waiting to catch it.
 
The receiver
had gotten completely free of the defense and was inside the end zone, ready
for the pass.

And Chase saw him—he was cocking
his arm back again to throw.

At that moment, a defender that had
broken into the backfield hit Chase from the blind side and Chase fumbled the
ball as he went face first into the turf.

He lay unmoving on the field as the
opposing team picked up the fumbled ball.
 
One of the defensive players ran all the way back and scored a
touchdown, making the final score 27-0.

But Faith was only concerned about what
thing.
 
Chase was hurt.

He didn’t move for what felt like
forever.

“I think he might have gotten paralyzed,”
Krissi said somberly.

“Krissi, shut up.”

“Did you see how hard he got hit, Faith?”

“Yes, I saw,” Faith said, tears coming to
her eyes.

But Chase did start moving, and
eventually he got up, looking worn and beaten, limping off the field to a
chorus of boos and chants raining down on him.

The announcers weren’t flattering
either.
 

“This was a game that really illustrated
the difference between a seasoned NFL quarterback and someone coming in from
college…”

“A very good player,” the co-host
interjected.

“Yes, a good player, but one who clearly
lacked composure and the ability to read what the defense was showing him.
 
They cleaned his clock and it wasn’t
pretty.”

“No,” the other announcer agreed.
 
“It wasn’t pretty and you can bet what
we saw today has all the other teams around the league salivating and wanting
to get their paws on Chase Winters.”

“He’s a marked man.”

***

Faith hadn’t been able to stop thinking
about Chase, or the way he’d been hurt at the end of the game.
 

She’d just barely restrained herself from
texting to ask if he was okay, and all night long, into the morning, she’d
listened to every bit of sports radio and watched football highlights to get
any news or discussion of Chase Winters.

Even at work, while scanning, she’d
plugged in her ear buds and listened to streaming satellite from her cell
phone.

Greg hated it when workers listened to
music, and normally Faith tried to please her thoroughly un-pleasable boss, but
this time she just had to listen to the radio at work.

The absolute destruction of Chase and the
vaunted New England offense was basically all anybody wanted to talk about in
the sports media world.
 
Chase
hadn’t been able to go to the post-game presser because he’d been getting
checked out for a concussion at the hospital.

But Coach Ryan “Buck” Dennings had talked
at great length about how he wasn’t at all discouraged by the team’s
performance as a whole.
 
He’d called
the game a “learning experience” for everyone, and claimed that nobody was
taking the loss so hard as to believe it said anything about Chase’s future.

Still, Faith thought that at times,
Chase’s coach had voiced notes of displeasure about his quarterback’s
performance.

“He needs to learn that composure, that
ability to be the eye at the center of the hurricane,” Buck had said at one
point in the press conference.

Faith hated him a little for saying that,
because it wasn’t Chase’s fault his offensive line had been caving in play
after play, down after down, giving him no time to complete a pass.

The media was so quick to blame Chase for
the result, when she thought it was obvious that his team simply was
overmatched by Green Bay.

She took a long lunch at Panera and listened
to even more talk radio, before finally returning to work at well past one
o’clock, determined to buckle down and scan more efficiently for the rest of
the day.

Faith took out her ear buds and got to
work, noticing that Greg kept passing by the cubicle and giving her the evil
eye every fifteen or twenty minutes. She tried to ignore him, but it was hard
because she knew he was just waiting for an excuse to lay into her about
something.
 
It didn’t matter what
she did, he would always find a way to criticize her for it.

At around three o’clock, she was finally
sinking into the rhythm of scanning, her mind on the task at hand, mercifully
not worrying about Chase or Greg or Krissi or her parents.

And that was when her phone started to
buzz, a series of buzzes, which meant someone was calling her.

She reached into her purse and pulled out
her cell phone.
 
Faith’s eyes
widened with shock.

It was Chase Winters, calling her.
 
Not texting—calling.

She wasn’t supposed to answer the phone
in the office, and she wasn’t really allowed to even talk unless on break, so
Faith got out of her seat and grabbed her purse, walking down the aisles of
cubicles.

Answering the phone before Chase hung up
or went to voicemail, she muttered a strained hello.

“Faith, is that you?” Chase asked, his
voice deep and sexy hot, sending a shuddering vibration through her entire
body.

“Hold on,” she whispered, hurrying down
the aisles and finally scooting out the door and into the main common area of
the building.