Running Game(16)

But now, she’d turned into some sort of Nurse Ratched. She was pulling on my leg, forcing it to move in ways that it wasn’t ready to move.

“It fucking hurts,” I grumbled.

“Have you been taking your pain meds?”

“No. Fuck that stuff. I don’t like drugs. I gotta stay sharp,” I replied.

“You just had surgery. Are you insane? If you don’t take the meds, we’ll never get anywhere.”

“And if I do, where will we get?” I asked, flashing her a smile that had worked magic on dozens of women before. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. Hell, I might as well have been a big, steaming pile of dog shit, as much as she seemed to be opposed to my presence.

“We’re both here to do a job, Jesse. I’m here to help you get better. But I can’t do it on my own. You have to take your meds. You have to do your exercises. You aren’t invincible, despite what your adoring fans probably tell you. Now - lift!” she demanded, pulling my leg up and bending my knee. I was laying on my back, staring up at her as she kept moving and stretching my leg.

“Where’d you go?” I asked, changing the subject. Of course I would do my part. That much was a given. I had millions of dollars on the line here, and I wouldn’t jeopardize my career by not taking this recovery seriously. I’d take the fucking pain killers, sure, but probably only half the prescribed dose because I wasn’t a total pussy. Besides, I didn’t want to lie to Maisey, or piss her off by not taking the damn things.

Which was insane, because really, what did I care how she felt? But for some reason, I did. Shit, I should be the one that’s mad at her for standing me up all those years ago, but she was acting like I was the one that’d done something wrong. That was pissing me off…

And making me even more curious…

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“When you took off from Ault. Where’d you go?” I asked. I’d asked around back then a little, tried talking to her few friends, once I’d even seen Clyde at the corner store buying beer and I’d asked him where she’d gone, but nobody ever had any answers. She’d just disappeared. As if she’d never been there at all.

“I moved to Denver,” she replied, then clamped her mouth shut. “Let’s do your other leg.”

She walked around me and her hips swayed with each step. She’d turned into such a beauty. She was feminine yet strong. Her attitude towards me was hard, yet there was a lingering softness just underneath the surface. Or, maybe I was just projecting the past onto the present, I don’t know. Something about her made me want to get to know her better, made me want to get to the bottom of the What-Happened-to-Maisey-Jayne mystery.

Maybe it was the fact that she was the only woman who’d ever left me hanging.

Or, maybe it was because she represented something I’d lost a long time ago.

Those years in Ault were magical. An innocent time before my life changed so drastically. I’d been so close to my family. My parents were kind and supportive, letting me and my little sister, Nina, experience the kind of love that every child needs to become a happy adult. Nina and I were the best of friends, even though she was so much younger than me.

I’d graduated and gone off to college full of naive dreams that my life would always be perfect, that nothing bad could ever touch me.

But then, everything changed. Nina died suddenly one night during my sophomore year in college and our world turned upside down.

Maisey was there in the middle of the calm before the storm. She was someone who’s memory was bathed in that era of my life when everything was just as it should be right before everything fell apart.

And I desperately wanted to hold onto that memory…

Yeah, my life is amazing now, but I’d give anything to go back and have those days with Nina again. She was such a spunky kid, full of life, in love with everything under the sun. Nobody could make me laugh like she could.

And nobody was ready for her passing. A healthy girl isn’t supposed to just… Go…

It turned out Nina had a genetic heart condition so rare that nobody at the hospital had seen it in person. One tiny little gene out of place put a ticking time bomb in her chest. If we had known our family had a history of this sort of thing maybe the doctors could have done something to help, but my father was adopted… We couldn’t have seen this coming.

My parents were devastated. I was devastated.

Everything was ripped away from me. The innocence I’d believed in. That belief that everything would always turn out all right became a joke. I’d been jaded and broken hearted ever since.