The Quarterback by Tal Bauer
Chapter Three
They calledthe cart for him. In all the years Colton had played football, he’d never been carted off the field.
He was woozy, the world fading in and out of focus. Darkness ringed his vision, and sound came in peals of thunder. He heard Wes’s voice, stretched thin and then roaring too loud, and he flinched away even as he opened his eyes and saw Wes sitting next to him on the back of the cart, holding his left hand tight against his chest.
They drove him right into the athletic facility, steering the cart down the wide halls to the medical suite. The team doc was already there, ready with a wheelchair. Colton remembered the move from the cart to the wheelchair like a series of snapshots, moments frozen in time: Wes hauling him into a sitting position, then pulling him forward, making Colton lean all his weight against Wes’s broad chest. He whimpered into Wes’s pads, felt the salt sweat of Wes’s neck and the cool air from the AC blowing against his own wet face. Was he crying?
He grasped Wes’s jersey as the doc and the medical team pulled him down into the wheelchair. Wes moved one of the trainers out of the way and pushed Colton’s wheelchair himself, following the doc and the radiologist into the X-ray room.
They cut his jersey and his pads off him.
He screamed when they laid him on the X-ray table. Screamed again when they rolled him left and right, repositioned him for different angles. Wes lay on his legs to hold him still as Colton bit down on the knuckles of his left hand and tears rolled down the sides of his face.
“Dislocated,” he heard the doc say, reviewing the digital X-ray behind the partition. Wes was beside him again. Colton curled toward him, balling himself up as if he could make the pain go away if he was small enough. “We need to reduce the joint. There’s far more damage than just a dislocation, though. Judging by the arm position, I think we’re looking at multiple torn ligaments. Maybe a torn labrum, as well.”
Torn ligaments. His throwing arm. His million-dollar arm. His shoulder that carried every one of his hopes and dreams. Colton squeezed his eyes closed. It was just a nightmare, and he’d wake up soon. He’d wake up. He would.
“Prep the MRI,” the doctor said. “And get a syringe ready. He’s not going to like this.”
Colton watched the doc cross back to the exam table. One of the nurses trailed behind him, a guy Justin knew, someone Colton had said hey to a few times with a syringe in one hand. The doc looked at Wes and nodded, then turned his attention to Colton.
He felt Wes’s arms wrap around him, hold him down in a grappler’s move.
“Colton, I’ve got to reduce your shoulder. It’s dislocated.” The doctor’s cold hands landed on Colton’s elbow, his upper arm. “On three, I’m going to shift it back, okay? One—”
He yanked before three. False start, Colton wanted to shout. False fucking start, ten yards and a fucking punch to the face. He roared, bucking against Wes, bicycle-kicking his legs in the air as he arched off the table. Something pinched his arm, a bee sting he barely felt amid all the other pain, and then he felt Wes’s forehead against his own, heard Wes’s voice in his ear telling him it would be all right, it was going to be all right, he was there with him, and then—
Nothing at all.
* * *
Twenty-four hours passedin a narcotic haze.
He was moved to the university hospital and put in a private room on the surgical prep floor, doped up on an IV with his arm in a complicated sling and immobilized on a pile of pillows. He opened his eyes, and Wes and Justin and Nick were there, bunched in the corner and talking softly. He closed his eyes, and when they opened again, it was dark outside the windows and the lights were turned down, and Wes, out of his pads and uniform and wearing workout shorts and a hoodie, was sleeping in a chair by his bedside, face mashed up on one fist.
Memories of the doctor’s conversation with him floated like bubbles through his drugged mind. Surgery, as soon as the morning, to investigate what was wrong in his shoulder. He’d been put in the MRI tube after they’d knocked him out, and he’d woken up to the doctor showing him a slice-by-slice black-and-white movie of his insides. Torn ligaments, chipped bone, a tear through his labrum. So much ruin. It had happened so fast.
His shoulder was numb, a mass of deadened, tingling nerves. His arm felt alien, like an anchor weighing him down. He stared at his fingers and tried to wiggle them, but they stayed still and fat on the top of the pillow, swollen like balloons.
He squeezed his eyes closed again when the tears started to prickle. Twin tracks of burning salt rolled down his cheeks, and he wiped clumsily at them with his left hand. Wes snored beside him, shifting his leg slightly in his sleep.
How many hours until surgery?
What would happen after? The doc hadn’t been able to tell him anything about recovery times or when he’d be back on the field, and that, more than anything else, made Colton’s stomach shrivel. Every injury had a timetable. There was always a recovery plan. Two weeks, three weeks, one month—hell, even six weeks. Every day could be charted and mapped. Days were X-ed off the calendar in a set plan after the physical therapist was brought in to design a conditioning routine for every morning and afternoon of healing. Colton had twisted his knee and rolled his ankle and sprained his elbow and torn his muscles more times than he could remember, and there was always a plan.
“We need to wait and see what we find during the surgery,” the doc had said. “We’re going to start arthroscopically, and hopefully we stay that way. But if we find enough damage that we need to move to open surgery, we’ll make the switch.”
Open surgery. His whole shoulder, cut open and exposed. Ligaments sewn together like spliced rope, giant Frankenstein stitches running through his insides. Would he ever throw a football again? How could his shoulder work as smoothly with thread holding everything together? Was he going to stutter and snag when he moved, like a robot who needed oil?
He’d called his mom after the doctor had left, trying to tell her what had happened and that he’d be going into surgery in the morning. She’d been concerned, but when he asked if she could drive up from Houston, she’d said she had three huge days of trial coming up and couldn’t make it on such short notice. But she’d try to get up after.
“Don’t worry about it,” he’d said. “I’ll be out of the hospital by then. And it’s no big deal. I’ll be all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“Do you need any money?” she’d asked. “I can send you some—”
“No, Mom. Thanks. Hey, I gotta go, the doc is coming back.” He’d hung up as she said she loved him, then sat in his empty room, alone in his bed, until the sweet pull of painkillers took him under again.
* * *
Wes and Justinwere there when he opened his eyes before dawn. Wes looked bleary-eyed and ragged, while Justin looked perfectly put together, as always. Justin had brought Wes a coffee and clung to his own cup as he perched on the end of Colton’s hospital bed. “I was told you can’t have anything before surgery,” he said. “Sorry.”
Colton fiddled with the sheet in his left hand, bunching and twisting the cotton in spirals, and said nothing.
“We’ll be here when you come out of surgery.” Wes’s voice was thick and gravelly. Stubble clung to his jawline, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes.
“Don’t you guys have class? It’s finals soon.” Wes and Justin took their classes much more seriously than Colton ever had. They went to most of them, for starters. “Don’t you guys have that big French thing?”
“Oui.” Justin smiled at Wes as he sipped his coffee.
Wes and Justin were the darlings of campus… when they weren’t being reviled and ridiculed by the backward sports fans who believed only real men could play football, and that real men were testosterone-guzzling pussy slayers who ate, breathed, and shit sports and never felt anything more than a curl of indigestion. Certainly nothing that could be described as an emotion. The stereotypes that the world imposed on Colton, on Wes, on their identities as jocks, hadn’t really sunk in until Colton had been forced to face them after Wes’s outing. No wonder Wes had stayed in the closet.
But he and Justin were out now, and their love story had trickled out to the media thanks to the French class presentation they’d made at the end of last semester, holding hands as they described falling in love beneath the Eiffel Tower and navigating the world of Texas football while building a secret life together. Colton had watched it with Google Translate providing the captions, Wes’s deep burr and twang rolling over the loping French in counterpoint to Justin’s delicate accent.
Spring finals meant even bigger presentations, and Wes and Justin, again, were going to be talking about their love story and how their world had changed since the national championships. This time, the university president and the athletics director wanted to film them and turn the whole thing into a big-time media story.
Wes laid his hand on Justin’s thigh. Justin slid his fingers through Wes’s, and for a moment, they were lost in each other’s eyes—like they were all the time, but this time, it slammed into Colton’s heart, a sudden, overwhelming surge of loneliness scraping his insides raw and leaving him empty. Like he’d torn his heart and his lungs and his guts out through his stomach and hurled them on the floor.
He wanted to be petulant, wanted to grab Justin’s coffee and fling it across the room, wanted to force their attention back to him. Wanted to not be invisible, not when his world had collapsed and his future was drip-drip-dripping away with every slow infusion from his IV and he was watching his fingers refuse to wiggle even a little bit as his shoulder throbbed.
He bunched the sheet in his left fist and clenched his jaw hard enough to crack the joint. It sounded like a branch breaking in the silent room.
Wes and Justin turned back to him.
“The surgery could be anywhere from a half hour to three or four hours, depending on what they do.” Justin shrugged, one shoulder rising and falling. “I know one of the nurses for the team, and he said he’d give us a call when you’re coming out. It will take a few hours after that for your sedation to wear off.”
“Want us to bring you anything after? I can pick you up food. Or whatever you want. Just say the word,” Wes said, trying to cheer him up.
But what he wanted he couldn’t have. He wanted to put on his pads and run onto the field. He wanted to suit up for practice in a few hours. He wanted to palm a football and toss it over his head, watch it spiral and soar back into his hold. He wanted to not be scared and alone and feeling like the world was caving in on him. Like the future he’d dreamed of was vanishing and he couldn’t grab hold as it slipped away.
Colton shook his head. “No, I’m okay.”
Justin was going to say something, and he reached for Colton, laid his hand on Colton’s knee, but the doctor and nurses walked in, and then it was a whirlwind of information and questions and no answers for Colton at all. Justin and Wes were asked to leave, and then the anesthesiologist came in, and Colton’s world went foggy again until everything tilted sideways and he tipped over into the darkness.
