ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(19)
I nodded. “Yes, loyal to no one,” I said, but then added, “What about you?”
Smoke laughed and scratched at his beard. “No one, kid.” His dark eyes were shining, practically glowing when he added, “Especially not me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nolan
For the first time in all my twenty-one years, I was early for something. I’d never been a morning person. The only sunrises I’d ever seen were the product of late nights turned early mornings, or because the coach called for an early practice.
Consumed by thoughts of the girl in the white bikini, I tossed and turned all night. By four a.m. I’d given up trying to sleep altogether. By the time the sun rose, I was already out the door, the first person in the waiting room that morning. In even before the doctor.
I f*cking hated doctors and their offices and their waiting rooms. After my injury doctors had become nothing more than white coat wearing, bad news dispensers.
The doc poked around my leg for a while asking me if this or that hurt before he removed my cast. When he said my leg was healing nicely my hopes perked up like a dog being offered bacon. He gave me a pair of crutches to practice using to get me up and moving again. I knew I shouldn’t have asked him if hockey was ever going to be a possibility for me, considering I’d already been told it wasn’t, but I was still holding out hope for some sort of miracle. I got my answer in the form of a small smile that was more like an upside down frown.
The doc looked down at me like the pitiful motherf*cker I felt like. With one hand on my shoulder, he simply shook his head and handed me a prescription for Percocet, which I promptly tossed in the trash the second I wheeled my ass out of there. If I couldn’t feel the pain, how would I prevent myself from injuring it again? How would I know it was healing?
Fuck the doctors. Fuck what they said. Fuck my f*cking leg. In that moment I found a new determination that hadn’t been there the day before. Regardless of what it took I was going to get back on the ice again.
Not only was I going to skate again.
I was going to play again.
A little pain wasn’t going to stop me. No one was going to stop me.
The day before, I’d been ready to give up on everything and now, after being so close to the end, I could only see my way forward. I’d been looking through the tunnel of death and now I had tunnel vision toward the same future that was mine just a few short months earlier. I was going to use every second of my summer proving all the naysayers wrong.
For the first time since my injury, I felt lighter. Fuck ’em if they tell you that you can’t. Then show them that you can, was what my gramps always said. If he were still around, he’d be just as disappointed in my injury as I was, but leaving the doctor’s office that day I think he’d be proud.
At the crosswalk in the middle of our town, I stopped my wheel chair and waited for the flashing red hand on the sign to turn green. Murray, already tired from the quarter mile walk from the cottage to the doctor’s office, was snoring in my lap. I removed my t-shirt, leaving on the wife-beater I’d had on underneath, without disturbing his lazy ass and flung it over the back of my chair, where I’d tied up my new crutches with a bungee cord.
It wasn’t even eleven a.m. yet, but already the temperature was well over ninety degrees. I’d always liked Harper’s Ridge. The heat. The beach. The girls in bikinis 365 days a year didn’t hurt either. The town was as unique as the tourists who visited. I always loved watching them with their cameras around their necks. You could spot a tourist from a mile away because they were always the ones wearing sneakers instead of flip-flops. Their red faces a mixture of sunburn and having just come from a blizzard in whatever northern town they’d temporarily abandoned to claim their piece of paradise. On the rare occasion the temperature dropped below seventy, they were the ones still walking around in their bathing suits, while us locals covered our shorts with our winter gear, which were hoodies, and shivered the entire three steps from the car to the house.
Georgia had been great, too. The weather. The hockey. Lakes instead of the Gulf. Pontoons instead of fishing boats. Fresh water fishing for bass instead of salt water fishing for reds. So different, yet the same. The last two years had been a dream, but I’d forgotten how much I missed this place.
Just yesterday I felt nothing but disdain for the town I used to wait all school year to be able to visit during the summers before I moved here permanently.
A lanky old man with a deep dark tan carried a fishing pole and a bucket, crossing the hot pavement, barefooted and unaffected. He flashed me a toothless smile on his way to the pier.
I felt…better that morning. Still unsettled, but better nonetheless.
I knew the reason for my new outlook on life. The reason I had a life.
HER.
The girl in the white bikini.
Overnight, my imagination had gotten the best of me and I replayed the drowning and then her diving in and saving me, but as it played out like a movie, my subconscious had taken some artistic liberties. Replacing her scowl with a smile. Instead of running away and flipping the bird again, my dream ended with her on her knees, lips wrapped around my cock.
Fuck.
I was getting hard again, just like I’d been all f*cking night and every time I thought about her. Not wanting to sport massive wood in public, I adjusted myself the best I could. “Sorry, Murray,” I said, apologized for waking him up and rolling him over to the side so I could adjust my dick some more.