Raging Fires by Candace Camp
Chapter Fourteen
“Okay. So now we’re getting down to the real issue.” Jake stood up and walked away. It really burned him that she was blaming him. Again. His headache had sort of gone away while he and Kelli were talking, but now it was back full force. “What do you think, that I have designs on your virtue or something? You’ve watched Pride and Prejudice too any times. I’m not trying to lure you back. I don’t want you back.”
“Same here.” She glared. So that had zinged her a little.
“Good. Then we’re agreed.” But he was too pissed to stop there. “I didn’t seduce you last night, you know. You were hot and ready to go.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was feeling some nostalgia.”
“Nostalgia? That’s what you call it?”
Kelli’s face tightened. “Look,” she said carefully, as if she was being patient with a deranged person. “We were both drunk.”
“You had two beers.”
“Okay. We’d been drinking. It had been a very stressful day, and we were really relieved it was over, and then there was an old song, and you were being nice, and...” She swallowed. “We just made a mistake. And that’s what I am trying to avoid in the future. We can’t allow sex to get into this situation. It might be easy—close quarters and all—but the result would be disastrous. We’d be at each other’s throats and rehashing all the same arguments. Surely you don’t want that either.”
“You’re right about that.”
“So we need to be careful. That’s all I’m saying. Keep to ourselves as much as we can. I’ll spend a lot of time at the Blue, and we won’t have to be around each other all that much. It’s not as if we’re really married. We can pursue our own interests. Even date someone if we want.”
“Date someone?” Somehow this issue had never cropped up in his mind before. Kelli getting dressed in some short dress, one of those that swished around her legs, and high heels, perfume on, and walking out the door with some other guy? “Sure. Fine. We’re free to date other people. You might go out with your friend Tyler.”
“I don’t want to go out with Tyler.” She rolled her eyes. Sometimes he found that cute, but right now it was really irritating.
“Why not? He’s a nice guy, you said. Not an insensitive jock. Hell, he’s so nice he wants to save all the snakes. Probably the scorpions and rats too.”
She planted her hands on her hips. “Well, maybe I’ll just do that.”
“Go ahead. I’m sure I will. I met a hot redhead the other day.” Okay, so she was fifty-five and not hot and she’d rented him a car, but still…
Kelli’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared a little. “Good. I’d be glad. Maybe it would improve your temper.”
“My temper doesn’t need improving.” Yes, now his argument had really devolved into idiocy. What was he even talking about? He would really like to slam his fist into the wall, but that would just make her get that smug look on her face, like she’d always been right about him. Like she knew he’d become whatever it was that she found so unbearable. “What is it, Kelli? What is it about me you hate so much?” Jesus Christ, where had that come from? But his mouth kept on moving. “What did I do that you couldn’t stand to be around me anymore?”
She gaped at him, apparently as stunned as he was by his words. “I don’t hate you.” Her eyes filled with tears. How did she get to cry when she was the one who’d cut his heart out? “I never hated you, Jake.”
“You made a pretty good show of it.”
“I told you why. I told you a million times.”
“You nagged at me a million times, yeah. That’s what did it, the stuff you bitched about? I didn’t pay enough attention to my job? I had friends you didn’t like?”
“You didn’t have friends!” Her words slammed into him, and for a second he couldn’t even breathe. Why in the hell had he been so stupid as to ask her this?
She went steamrolling right on, “You had guys who hung around you so they could get something from you. A favor. Expensive drinks. Hanging out with celebrities. They weren’t friends, they were go-fers and users. Why did I leave you? Because you weren’t you anymore, Jake. You weren’t the boy I fell in love with. All of a sudden, you became this famous, arrogant, wealthy prick who didn’t love anybody but himself. Not me. Not your old friends, the ones who really loved you.
“When Michael Borelli came to visit us, you paid no attention to him. You treated him like he was one of your hangers-on. He’d been your friend since you were in second grade. Even when you became a big football player, you didn’t drop him because he wasn’t a jock—you still stayed best friends with him all through high school and college. And then when he visited us in Miami and you were going out with your ‘entourage’ instead of going with me to take Mike to the airport, you said, ‘Hey, Mike, it’s been great to see you’ and handed him money and walked out the door. And I knew then that you weren’t there anymore. I didn’t know who you were, but you sure weren’t the Jake Riley I’d loved.”
He couldn’t say anything. Tears were spilling down her cheeks. And his feet were cemented to the floor, his mouth closed, his brain disabled. Kelli whirled and ran out the door. And he just stood there, like she’d frozen him to the spot.
Jake felt strangely disconnected. Except for that acid churning in his stomach. He started toward the door. He didn’t know where he was going; he just knew he had to get out of here. He slammed the door behind him and started across the lot. By the time he reached his SUV, he was almost running.
He whipped out of the parking lot and took off. He had no destination, just drove aimlessly until he recognized where his subconscious was taking him. The place he felt most comfortable, the place he really knew. The stadium.
He did a few sprints and then he hit the stadium steps. He ran them until he was drenched in sweat and felt like he was about to puke. Then he went to the weight room. There were a few other guys there, but he went to the opposite end and began to lift, losing himself in the rhythm and strain. By the time he finished his upper body exercises, his arms were as wobbly as his legs.
Jake stood up and wiped off his head and face with a towel and headed for the hydrotherapy rooms. He’d worn himself out, but he hadn’t rid himself of that knot of guilt in his stomach. Michael Borelli.
He thought of the seven-year-old he’d first met. Skinny, glasses. He’d ditched the glasses for contacts as he got older, but he never moved past the skinny. Jake knew people thought he hung around with Mike because Mike did his homework for him, but that had never been the way it was. For one thing, Jake could do his own homework, thank you; he wasn’t an idiot.
He’d hung around with Mike because he was funny and cool and didn’t give a damn about football or how talented Jake was or how he had to beat this team or that. To Mike, Jake was just Jake, the kid he met in First Communion class, the one who had made jokes and built Star Wars Legos with him.
They hadn’t seen each other as much in college, only in the summers, because Mike went off to Stanford, no surprise, but still, they’d been friends. Hanging out at the pool, watching the tube. Then Jake went to the NFL.
He’d known he had made a mistake as soon as he handed the money to Mike. He and Mike hadn’t had much to talk about when he visited, and Mike wasn’t interested in going clubbing or standing around while Jake shot commercials or talked to the media or signed autographs. So the visit had been kind of uncomfortable. Jake felt weird not taking him to the airport, guilty for not spending more time with him, and so he’d shoved a wad of bills, whatever he had in his wallet, at him, thinking Michael could use it since he was still in graduate school. Thinking it would make up for the way the visit had gone.
Then he’d seen Michael’s face as he stood there, gaping, holding the bills in his hand, and Jake knew he had made a really douche move. (He hadn’t needed Kelli to hammer at him about it that evening.) Mike hadn’t said anything, just dropped the cash on the floor and walked off.
And that was the last time he saw Michael. Jake had felt too embarrassed, too guilty, and finally too resentful that Mike had made him feel that way, to call him and apologize. Jake knew he should have called anyway, but he’d realized he’d done something beyond repair. And screwing up his friendship was pretty minor, really, compared to the anvil Kelli had then dropped on him with the divorce.
That had been a bad time, one he tried his best not to ever think about. He’d done pretty well at that until he came back to Arizona. Until Kelli, with her sexy ass, irritating nagging, and tell-it-like-it-is honesty was suddenly in his life again.