up here.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh come on, we know that this is just something you need to do, but you belong up here with your people.”
“My people? Helen, I’m from Washington State. If you want to talk people, staying with LA Galaxy would have been my people.”
“Okay, well maybe I miss you.”
“You could have just said that instead of bringing Stew into it. Why did you see him anyway?”
“He was over for dinner.”
Lord, I’m going to hang up the phone.
“Thalia,” she goes on, “you know we have dinner together often. I can’t stop being friends with him because he…because you divorced.”
“Because he cheated on me repeatedly. You can say it. It’s the truth. There would be no divorce if he hadn’t done that and publicly dragged my damn name through the mud.”
Silence. Manuel eyes me in the rearview mirror and then quickly looks away. I like the man, but conversations like this are perhaps a good reason to get myself a car soon and drive myself to work.
“Okay. Sorry I brought it up,” she says in a clipped voice. “I just haven’t talked to you since you got there, and I know you like to get locked in your head and push people away. I didn’t want you to do that with me. Good luck with your game tomorrow.”
“Helen,” I say, but she hangs up the phone.
I sigh and throw the phone into the bag and then wait for the drugs to kick in.
It’s not ideal taking anti-anxiety medication right before work, right before a big game, but I need it this time.
And as Manuel drops me off and I make my way through the building, I have to say I’m grateful for it. I thought I would be the only one here this early, but everyone is here already and the tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
I pass a few players in the glowing white hallways, and their smiles are either tight or full of nerves as I greet them. I go straight to my office and start going over a plan for the day. Basically, me, Doctor Costa, and the rest of the therapists will have a meeting in a bit and go over every player’s profile, the types of training they’ve been doing, workload, and discomfort. Then we’ll go to our assigned players and follow up, adjusting the workload and training with Mateo and the trainers to any discomfort they are having.
Despite the nerves and the fraught atmosphere, we head into the physio room to settle into roles that are slowly starting to feel like second nature. I work on Luciano’s shoulder because he was complaining of pain again there, and I do the goalie’s hamstring with a steel myofascial releaser. Pretty sure he still doesn’t like me.
It isn’t until I’m done with them that David, one of the therapists, waves me over.
Alejo is lying on the table beneath him on his stomach, shorts rolled up to his extremely firm ass, and his legs are slick with the coconut oil we use to rub and massage. Alejo turns his head to see me approach and I give him a tight smile, trying to ignore the butterflies in my stomach at the sight of him.
Of course they aren’t butterflies. Just nerves. Nerves because of the match, nerves because of the players, because of Helen and, yes, because of the way he was around me last Saturday at the bar.
I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but he actually got under my skin.
Just a bit.
When he told me that had we met in the bar, as strangers, I would have gone home with him…my body reacted. Yes, I nearly choked on my drink out of disbelief because it was totally out of left field, but it was my body that grew increasingly warm, like I was internally salivating at the thought. I don’t think I’ve felt any sort of pleasurable, wanting sensation like that for a really, really long time, so I guess I should take it easy on myself and be grateful that my lady bits are up and running again but — and this is a big but — that was extremely inappropriate.
Despite what I said, he was intimidating, too. Not in a bad way per se. Just in a way that I wasn’t sure which direction he was going to go or how I was going to handle him. I’m not used to men being that forward with me, and even though I have