He stopped, the ball clutched in his fingers. Judith stood not far away, a small, still figure in black, staring at him from underneath her fringe. And he wanted to tell her that he couldn’t do this. He didn’t want to share secrets with her, or give pieces of himself away.
But the words came out before he could stop them. “No,” he said hoarsely. “He didn’t choose me. You want to know the details? The day I got my first sponsorship deal I was rapt because finally I could afford to send him to this US clinic I’d been researching. It had great results with getting people off the booze and I thought…” Purposefully he didn’t look at her, didn’t meet her gaze. “I thought I’d get my dad back finally. When I came home to tell him, he wouldn’t look at me. Told me that he didn’t want my help. That he’d never wanted my help.
“I thought it was just the booze talking, thought he was giving me his usual alcoholic bullshit. But no, he was as sober as he could get. I asked him if he’d rather drink himself to death and he said yes. So I thought, ‘go for it, you old bastard’. All those years I spent cleaning him up, getting him sober, saving his bloody life, and he didn’t care. Not about any of it.”
There was a silence and he could almost feel her sympathy and hurt on his behalf. Blessedly she didn’t voice it. Almost like she knew that sometimes it was easier to talk about this kind of stuff when there was silence.
Then she said quietly, “I tried to track Mum down once, a couple of years ago. Even got a phone number that was supposed to be hers. I just wanted to ask her why she left, and if she ever thought about us. If she ever cared. Though…I didn’t call her in the end. I think I was afraid that her answer would be no, she never cared.”
Oh Christ, he knew how that felt. Intellectually he knew his father’s alcoholism was an illness, an addiction that caused people to say all sorts of stuff and behave in ways that perhaps they didn’t mean. But the boy he’d once been was all emotion, not intellect, and that boy had been hurt. Terribly. And he hurt still.
Caleb met her gaze. She understood. She was the only one who did. “No one will ever make you feel that way again, Jude,” he said, putting every ounce of determination he possessed into his voice. “Do you understand? Or else they’ll have me to deal with.”
A ghost of a smile curved her mouth. “Thanks, Cal.”
For a long moment they said nothing because nothing needed to be said, only looked at each other.
Then he said, “You want to kick this ball or what?”
Her smile deepened. “I think I want to kick this ball.”
…
Judith could have sworn that Caleb kept moving the ball, because every time she went to kick it, she kept missing. It was starting to get frustrating.
Yet Caleb—much to her surprise—seemed to have an endless supply of patience. Setting up the ball with careful hands for what seemed like the umpteenth time, he said, “Stop trying to stay in control of everything. You’re too busy thinking about that and not thinking enough about kicking the ball.” He glanced down at her feet. “Your shoes, for example. Quit worrying about the mud.”
Caught in the act of brushing mud off her boots yet again, Judith pulled a face. “These shoes cost me seven hundred dollars.”
“Take them off then.”
She frowned. “But I’m wearing tights.”
“So? Take them off, too.”
“The ground is muddy.”
Caleb, crouched near the ball, rose in a fluid movement. He crossed his arms and gave her a look. “Oh, come on, stop being such a girl, babycakes.”
“Hey, I am a girl.”
“Not when you’re kicking this ball, you’re not. You think I care about getting mud on my shoes in front of a crowd of half a million people?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing. All I care about is putting that ball between the posts.” His eyes glinted. “You want to know what I think about when I take a kick?”
Judith tried to remember all the player interviews Caleb had done where he was asked this very same question. “Don’t you use creative visualization or something?”
He smiled at her, but not the cocky smile he used when he was being evasive. This time it was the mischievous one that always made her heart beat fast. “That’s the story the media gets.”
“So that’s not what you do?”
“No. I pretend the ball is Dad’s last vodka bottle. Then I kick the bastard as hard as I can.”
Her heart expanded a little in her chest. Because she knew that was something he’d never tell anyone else. In fact, there were many things he’d told her tonight, things she guessed he hadn’t told anyone else. And she liked that. No, she loved that.