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“Not so close, though.” He put his arm around me, encircling my hips. “Usually I’m listening for you out in the living room.”
“Do I wake you up a lot? I’m sorry.” I sighed. “I wish my sister had taken you off the wedding guest list when Bill made her narrow it down.”
He opened his eyes. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in all my problems,” I explained. “I hate that I’ve done this to you.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“Yes, I did,” I answered. “I let you take me to the hospital—”
“You couldn’t even walk!” he told me.
“And then I kept seeing you afterwards. I invited you over and I…I went and looked for you, that night when we saw each other in front of the Pineapple Lounge,” I confessed. I hadn’t even admitted that fact to myself, not before this moment. “I drove to Traverse City hoping that I might see you, imagining it. I shouldn’t have done any of that. Now you’re sick because you haven’t been getting enough rest with me whining out on your couch, and probably you’re not eating well because you’re worried, and it’s going to affect your job. I think about Ward coming after you, too, maybe not head-on because he’d be too intimidated because you’re, you know, the size of a bank truck, but he can be very sneaky. Like how he was taking money from his grandma. He’s been stealing from her for years from an old retirement account and something with her life insurance.” I’d known that for a long time but I hadn’t admitted it before, either. I took a breath, overwhelmed by it all.
“I’m fine. I’ve played through worse than this, and I will again this weekend if I need to,” Bowie told me. “And no one is going to come at me, not in any way.” He reached and tucked back a piece of my hair. “Were you really looking for me that night?”
I nodded, embarrassed.
“I was doing the same thing.”
“What?” I asked. “You were?”
“Remember how I ran into you outside of the stadium when you were leaving practice? It was your first time back on your foot.” He smiled a little. “I checked with Lyle from the team security department and he said that the Wonderwomen would be out on that field. So I was waiting around to see if you were ok. I knew your injury was bad and I’d been asking Lyle to find out about you, too, to keep me up on how you were doing.”
That was just how nice he was, how decent. It said so much about him that he was worried about a stranger, someone he’d met for only a little while at a wedding. “Thank you for doing that.”
“You don’t think it was…”
“What?” I asked.
“After what you’ve been living with, the tracking and all that, I hope you don’t think it was the same thing.”
“You were looking out for me because you cared, not to control me,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right. I did care,” he answered. “I do.”
“Me too.” I turned the washcloth and found a cool spot, and I carefully swiped it across his forehead. Then I held up the water glass so he could drink. “You need to rest.”
“You do, too.” He patted the space next to himself. “Just in case you talk in your sleep, I won’t have to get up.”
I didn’t want to leave either. It was somewhere before dawn and I was so tired, and sleeping in this bed seemed like a great idea. I crawled across the bottom of the mattress and gratefully put my head on the pillow, then I turned so I could look across at Bowie. “Do you need anything?” I whispered.
His eyes closed again. “I’m feeling much better,” he whispered back. But his whisper was more like how I talked if I wanted to be overheard in the tunnel before we ran out onto the field at Woodsmen Stadium. It made me smile, and I fell asleep like that, all the fragments of the bad dream gone from my mind. I slept the whole night, undisturbed, until—
“Oh, damn. Damn!”
I sat up on my elbows and watched, confused, at Bowie stumbling out of the bed next to me. “What?” I asked him. “What’s happening?
He stopped and coughed. “We’re late. You’re late for class, and I’m late for practice.” He tripped as he pulled on a pair of pants, and coughed again.
I sat up straight. “Get back in this bed, right now,” I told him. “You’re not going anywhere if you’re still hacking like that.”
He stopped again, but to smile. “Listen to you, Lissa, telling me what to do.” He held out a hand and helped me from the bed. “I’ll go to practice, but I’ll sit out. How does that sound?”
“Is that true?”
“Well, it is true that I’m going.” He laughed, but it turned into another cough and he let go of me to blow his nose. “Come on, I’ll walk you down to your car.”
