Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(35)

I’d like to send him a text that says, I’m playing rugby with Quinn, but instead I turn around and jog toward her so I can ask her to give me a better idea of what on earth it is I’m supposed to be doing.

Shit is about to get real.

Half an hour later, Quinn is muddy and smiling, and she yells, “Isn’t this great?” from across the field. We are getting our asses kicked by the Carson team. I have no idea what I’m doing at least 80 percent of the time.

“It’s awesome!” I yell back.

Because it is. It is awesome. I’m high on how awesome it is—how good it feels to run, how solid the ball is when I catch it, how firm beneath my arm.

It is awesome until the instant I get hit by a truck.

Okay, fine, the truck is a person. But she feels like a truck, and she knocks all the air out of my lungs. I lie on my back, blinking at the sky, trying to breathe with these air bags that completely refuse to work. I bend my knees and lift my hips up for reasons that are unclear to me. Probably I look like I’m trying to mate with the sky, but it doesn’t matter, because down at the other end of the field something exciting happens, and no one’s paying attention to my death.

A dark shape blocks my view of the sky. A male voice says, “You got the wind knocked out of you.”

I’m not dying. This is excellent news.

I’m so grateful, I could kiss him.

I still can’t breathe, though.

“Turn over on your side,” he tells me, and his hands urge my hip toward him. I turn, because he has a soothing voice, and I like his whistle. I stare at his hairy calves and his black socks and his shoes that look like they might actually be specifically for rugby, with cleats on them and everything.

I experiment with breathing again. Nothing happens. My eyes are starting to feel like they might pop.

“Don’t panic. Your diaphragm is having a spasm, but it’ll relax soon. Just take it easy. Close your eyes.”

I do as I’m told. After a few seconds, the constriction in my chest eases and I’m able to inhale.

“Good.”

I breathe. I open my eyes. The grass is blurry. I blink at it, but it doesn’t come into focus.

“I can’t see.”

He hunkers down and squints at my face. “Do you wear contacts?”

Oh. “Yes.”

I blink again, and now I recognize this. This is what the world looks like with one contact in.

The guy is kind of blurry, too, but in a nice way. He has really short brown hair in tight curls and a dimple in his chin.

“You think one got knocked out?”

“I do. Was that woman made of bricks?”

He smiles. Dimples there, too. Dimples all over the place. “She probably outweighs you by a hundred pounds. That was pretty hard-core. You want a hand getting up?”

I take his hand, thinking, I got hit so hard I lost a contact.

“I’m Scott,” he says.

I’m so distracted, I barely hear him. I’m too busy thinking, Oh my God, I got tackled and I’m not dead. I’m totally hard-core.

“Caroline,” I say, but I guess I must have mumbled, because he spends the next five minutes calling me Carrie while he fetches me some water from the Carson Athletic Department cooler and insists I use his folding chair.

I watch the game and try to figure out more of the rules. I ask Scott to explain the tricky bits. He does, and when he dimples at me, I go ahead and smile back at him.

What can it hurt? He doesn’t know my name.

The whistle goes off a few minutes later. Quinn looks at me with that eyebrow up. I nod my head and jog back onto the field.

Afterward, I learn that all rugby games end at a bar. This is, it seems, nonnegotiable. The Carson team’s coach shakes Quinn’s hand and drives away, and the rest of us form one huge mass of muddy, bruised womanhood—plus Scott—and walk along the railroad tracks that bisect Putnam’s campus. We pass the science center and the phallic sculpture that reminds me of West’s rubber chicken. One of the Carson girls tries to climb it.

By the time we burst through the door of the bar, most of the players are singing a song so filthy it makes me blush. Scott is beside me, somehow, at this exact most inopportune moment. “Not going to sing?” he asks.

“I don’t know the words.”

He smiles. “You really are new at this, aren’t you?”

“I never touched a rugby ball before today.”

My vision’s a little blurry with just one contact in, but I can still see all his dimples deepen. There are two in his left cheek, one in his right, plus the one in his chin. Quadruple dimples. When he steps up to the bar with one of the women on his team to order the first pitchers in an endless stream of beer, I close one eye so I can appreciate how broad his shoulders are, the chiseled shape of his calf muscles.

The Putnam players start shoving tables together in the main part of the bar. It’s only two o’clock, so we rugby women have the place to ourselves. I grab a seat and am gratified, a few minutes later, when Scott sits by me and not by any of the Carson College players.

When he throws an arm over the back of my chair, I’m threaded through with excitement and wariness in a combination I’m not sure what to do with.

He’s flirting with you. He likes you.

He looks nice, but how nice is anybody, really? What does he look at when he jerks off?