Ryan
Week Five
Running at six o’clock in the morning does something to my mind, my mood. I have a busy, shitty brain that never shuts up, especially about stupid shit: things I’ve done wrong, things I probably missed, things that could go wrong today or tomorrow, things I’ve never done wrong but probably could have, given the chance. Just because I think a lot doesn’t mean I’m smart—I’m not. I just have a brain that never. Shuts. Up.
Running at dawn shuts it up. So does sex. But for the last five weeks there was only one woman who made me think about sex, and I still hadn’t gotten her naked again. So I ran my ass off.
It was just me and the pavement, my feet pounding, my breath in my lungs. One of my first coaches used to shout three words at us every time we started a warmup: Fire it up. Fire it up! he’d bark while we groaned through situps, pushups, squats, those devil moves called burpees. Fire it up! Years later I could still hear his voice in my head every time I started a run, every time I felt my legs start to move and my lungs start to burst. When I felt that resistance in the back of my brain telling me to stop, I always shouted it down: Fire it up! And I ran.
My muscles took over, and my brain shut up.
I pounded through my nice suburban neighborhood, the one I could no longer afford. I ate up the ground around the corner and across the path to the local high school, which had a track behind it. At six thirty it was deserted and I could get my laps in until sweat soaked my back. My shoulder ached, and then it screamed, and still I ran. Fuck you, shoulder. This is none of your business.
It was a damp, cool summer morning, which was perfect. When it’s cold, you keep running to keep warm. And right now I was so warm that sweat soaked through both of the shirts I wore. And still I kept going. I didn’t want to stop.
Kate Washington was driving me fucking crazy.
She shouldn’t. I knew that. Kate was nice and smart and good-hearted. She was responsible. She was good with Dylan. She worked for next to nothing, and—except for the constant rash of bossy Post-It notes all over my house—she didn’t complain. Any idiot would know they had a good thing going, and no idiot would mess it up. I should leave her alone. I shouldn’t touch her. Ever. At all.
I wanted to touch her everywhere.
I wanted her naked so I could lick every inch of her. I wanted to hear the sounds she made, because I had heard them before. I wanted to feel her body give the slow, hard little pulse it gave right before she came, because I’d felt it and I remembered every fucking second. I wanted to be inside her again, because when I was inside her five years ago it had been incredible. I got inside Kate and I forgot everything—baseball and money and whatever stupid things preoccupied my mind. None of it mattered and I was just there, completely there, feeling her and tasting her. There was no awkwardness, no weirdness, it was just hot and easy and we both came, her knees wide and my face against her neck, both of us sweating and happy.
I wanted that again.
I was hard up for sex. It had been three long years of me trying to be Good Guy Ryan Riggs, the former player who was suddenly a dad. At first I was exhausted all the fucking time—having a toddler is no joke, and the last thing you feel is horny. Then, when Dylan got older, he got smart. I knew full well that he’d notice if I was off spending my nights screwing women, or if women were coming over to screw me. He’d know if I was going on dates or seeing someone, because I was the main thing in his life and he was an observant kid. He was also terrified that I would get a girlfriend and desert him. So the trend continued: no sex for me.
But that wasn’t the reason I wanted Kate. If I just wanted sex, I would feel horny for, say, the female fans who still came on to me, or any of the women who gave me the once-over in a given day. Opportunity wasn’t the problem. The willingness of the female sex wasn’t a problem. The problem was that, even when I considered it, I didn’t want to lick any of those women. I only wanted to lick Kate.
She shouldn’t want me to lick her. In fact, if she knew how badly I wanted to lick her, she should probably quit.
She had those big dark eyes. That red hair. The curls that sometimes lay against the line of her neck. The line of her mouth was fantastic—I had a lot of dirty fantasies about Kate’s mouth. Her lips. I had even more fantasies about the dip of her waist and the shadow of cleavage when she wore a V-neck T-shirt. I remembered those breasts: they were C cups, perfect in my hand, the nipples light rosy pink. I had fantasies about those too.
This wasn’t new. I thought Kate was smoking hot when I first met her five years ago. I still thought she was hot. The problem was, I couldn’t have her.
I slowed my run and stopped, putting my hands on my knees. My shoulder was screaming and sweat dripped from my forehead. Kate would be at my house by now, in my kitchen, helping Dylan make his breakfast before day camp. He preferred when she did it. I could stay out here and avoid her, like I’d been more or less doing for five weeks now, or I could go back and face her.
I straightened, heading back and taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t look gasping and pathetic when I walked through the door. In the pocket of my running shorts, my phone beeped a notification.
I took it out and looked at it. Meeting with the league rep, eleven o’clock.
My shoulder throbbed, and I pulled the small vial of pills from my pocket. The league rep had left me four messages yesterday, and when I hadn’t replied he’d simply scheduled a meeting and sent it to my phone, like he owned me. Which he did.
But not for much longer, most likely. I had no illusions as to what this meeting would be about: I couldn’t play baseball, the only thing the league paid me to do. I had taken too long, been a liability too long. My shoulder had been fucked for too long, therapists or no therapists. Pills or no pills, I still couldn’t pitch a single ball, let alone a nine-inning game.
The meeting would be to tell me I was off the roster. But they couldn’t tell me I was off the roster if I didn’t go.
I deleted the appointment and kept walking home, my muscles iced up now. Fuck the league and their appointment. They could shove it.
The Riggs boys have always had a problem following rules.
They tell us it’s part of our charm.