The Wall of Winnipeg and Me Read online

  “Herro,” I said, slipping the phone between my ear and my shoulder.

  “Vanny, I don’t have time to talk. I have an appointment in a minute,” the bright voice on the other line explained quickly. “I just wanted to tell you Rodrigo saw Susie.”

  Silence hung between Diana and me on the phone. Two moments, three moments, four moments. Heavy and unnatural. Then again, that was what Susie did best—messed things up.

  I wanted to ask if she was sure it was Susie that her brother, Rodrigo, had seen, but I didn’t. If Rodrigo thought he saw her, then he had. She didn’t have the kind of face that was easy to mistake, even after so many years.

  I cleared my throat, telling myself I didn’t need to count to ten, or even five. “Where?” My voice came out in a slight croak.

  “In El Paso yesterday. He was visiting his in-laws this weekend with Louie and Josh, and said he saw her at the grocery store by the old neighborhood.”

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  Nope. That wasn’t enough.

  I had to start counting all over again, all the way to ten the second time. A thousand different thoughts went through my head at the mention of Susie’s name, and they were all pretty terrible. Each and every single one of them. It didn’t take a genius to know what she was doing in the old neighborhood. Only one person who we both knew still lived there. I could still remember our old stomping ground so clearly.

  It was where Diana and I had met. Back when I lived with my mom, Diana’s family had lived next door to us. They’d had the pretty house—the freshly painted blue one with white trim and a nice lawn—the dad who played with his kids outside, and the mom who kissed boo-boos. The Casillas were the family I had always wanted when I’d been a kid, when things had been at their worst, and the only thing I found consolation in was my notebook, not the mess within the walls of my house.

  Diana had been my best friend for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d eaten over at their house with my little brother until Mom had lost custody of us. Diana had always done what my own family didn’t, and that was watch out for me. She was the one who had found me—Stop it. Stop it. It wasn’t worth the energy it took to think about things in the past I was over. It really wasn’t.

  “Huh. I had no idea she was back.” My voice sounded just as robotic aloud as it sounded in my head. “I just talked to my mom a week ago and she didn’t say anything.” Diana knew I was referring to my real mom, the person who had actually given birth to me and my four other siblings, not my foster mom of four years who I still kept in touch with.

  At the mention of my birth mom, Diana made a small noise I almost missed. I knew she didn’t understand why I bothered trying to have a relationship with her. Honestly, half the time I regretted it, but that was one of those rare things I never told the person I was closest to in the world because I knew what she would say and I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I figured you would want to know in case you were planning on visiting,” she finally said in kind of a mutter.

  I didn’t visit El Paso often, but she was right. I definitely wouldn’t want to go now that I knew who was there.

  “I really have to go in a sec, Vanny,” my best friend quickly added before I could say anything. “But did you tell Miranda you’re leaving?”

  The ‘Miranda’ went in one ear and out the other. I’d been calling him that for so long, it sounded so natural it didn’t even register. “I just told him yesterday.”

  “And?”

  She couldn’t just let me sulk in my reality. “Nothing.” There was no point in lying or making something up that would make me seem more important to Aiden than I was. While I didn’t tell anyone a whole lot about him because of the non-disclosure agreement I signed when I first started working for him, Diana knew enough to get why his name was saved on my personal phone under Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada.

  “Oh,” was her disappointed response.

  Yeah. I thought so too.

  “He’ll miss you once you’re gone. Don’t worry about it.”

  I highly doubted that.

  “Okay, I gotta go, my client is here. Call me later, Van-Van. I get off work at nine.”

  “I will. Love you.”

  “Love you, too. Oh! And think about letting me dye your hair once you’re out of there,” she added before hanging up on me.

  Diana’s comment made me smile and kept me smiling as I headed into Aiden’s office to tackle his inbox. Talking to Di always put me in a good mood. The fact she was one of the most easygoing people I’d ever met, had also soothed my soul more often than not. She never gave me shit for how much I worked because she worked a lot too.

  But I told her the same thing my foster dad had told me when I was seventeen, and I told him I wanted to pursue my artwork: “Do what you need to do to be happy, Vané. Nobody else is going to watch out for you but you.”

  It was the same belief I held onto when I first told my foster parents I wanted to go to school a thousand miles away, and what I told myself when I didn’t get a scholarship and my financial aid was merely a drop in the bucket to go to said school. I was going to do what I needed to do, even if I had to leave my brother— with his blessing—in the process. I’d told him the same thing when he was offered a scholarship for a college right after I moved back to Texas to be closer to him.

  Sometimes it was easier to tell other people what they should do than to actually practice what you preached.

  That had been the real root of my problem. I was scared. Scared that my clients were going to disappear and my work would dry up. Scared that one day I’d wake up and have absolutely no inspiration any more when I had my photo-editing program open. I was worried that what I’d worked so hard for would crash and burn and everything would go to hell. Because I knew firsthand that life could be taking you in one direction, and the next moment, you’d be going in a completely different one.

  Because that was the way surprises worked—they didn’t tend to pencil themselves in to your schedule and let you know they were visiting ahead of time.

  Chapter Three

  This place smells like armpits, I thought as I made my way past the cardio equipment at the facility where Aiden had been training at since we’d gotten back from Colorado.

  Located in the business warehouse district on the outskirts of Dallas, the facility had the equipment necessary for all levels of weightlifting, plyometric exercises, calisthenics, strongman, and powerlifting. The building itself was new, nondescript, and easy to miss unless you knew what you were looking for. It had only been open about three years, and the owner had spared no expense on any square inch of the gym. The facility boasted that it trained some of the most elite athletes in the world in a wide range of sports, but I only paid attention to one of them.

  Aiden’s schedule had been as consistent as it could be in the two years I’d been with him, considering everything that had happened in the last ten months. After football season ended, and after he’d been cleared to train this year, Aiden headed to a small town in Colorado where he rented a house from some ex-football star for two months. There, he trained with his high school football coach. I’d never outright asked him why he chose there of all places to spend his time, but from everything I knew about him, I figured he enjoyed the time away from the spotlight. As one of the best players in the NFO, there was always someone around him, asking for something, telling him something, and Aiden wasn’t exactly the outgoing, friendly type.

  He was a loner who happened to be so good at his sport there wasn’t a way around the spotlight he’d been thrust upon from the moment he’d been drafted. At least, that was what I’d learned from the countless articles I’d read before sharing on his social pages and the hundreds of interviews I’d sat through with him. It was just something he put up with on his road to being the best—because that’s what fans, and even people who weren’t fans, referred to him as.

&nb
sp; With a work ethic like his, it wasn’t a surprise.

  After his seclusion in the middle of nowhere—I’d gone with him twice because apparently he couldn’t live without a chef and housekeeper—he, we, flew back to Dallas, and his high school coach went back to Winnipeg. Aiden then worked on other aspects of his role with another trainer until the Three Hundreds called him in for team camp in July.

  In a couple of weeks, official practices would begin and the insanity that surrounded an NFO season with one of the highest caliber players in the organization would start all over again. But this time, I wouldn’t be part of it. I wouldn’t have to wake up at four o’clock in the morning, or have to drive around like a crazy person doing the hundreds of things that seemed to pop up when he was busy.

  This August, instead of dealing with planning meals around two-a-day practices and preseason games, I’d be in my apartment, waking up whenever the hell I wanted, and not having to cater to anyone else’s needs but mine.

  But that was a party I could throw in the near future, when I wasn’t busy looking for Aiden while my hands were full.

  Past the cardio machines and through two swinging double doors was the main part of the training ground. At a cavernous, ten-thousand-square-foot size, red-and-black décor swam in front of my eyes. Half of the floor looked like turf and the other half had lightly cushioned black flooring for a weight training section. Scattered around the building at six o’clock in the morning, were only about ten other people. Half of them looked like football players and the other half looked like some other sort of athlete.

  I just had to look for the largest one of them all, and it only took a second to spot the big head on the turf section by one of the eleven-hundred-pound tires. Yeah, 1100-pound tires.

  And I thought I was badass when I managed to carry all of my grocery bags to my apartment in one trip.

  A few feet away, a familiar-looking man stood by watching The Wall of Winnipeg. Finding a spot out of the way but still close enough to take a decent picture, I sat cross-legged at the edge of the mats perpendicular to Aiden and his current trainer, pulling out the DSLR camera I’d suggested he should buy specifically for this purpose a year ago. One of my duties was to update his social media pages and engage his fans; his sponsors and fans enjoyed seeing live shots of him working out.

  No one paid me any attention as I settled in; they were all too busy to look around. With the equipment out of the bag, I waited for the perfect shot.

  Through the lens, Aiden’s features were smaller; his muscles seemed not as detailed as they were when you saw them in person. He’d been cutting his calories for the last two weeks, aiming to drop ten pounds before the start of the season. The striations on his shoulders popped as he maneuvered around the massive tractor tire, squatting in front of it, making the full muscles of his hamstrings look even more impressive than they usually did. I could even see the cleft that formed along the back of his thigh from how developed his hammies were.

  Then there were those biceps and triceps that some people seemed to think had gotten the size they were due to steroids, when I knew firsthand that Aiden’s body was fueled by massive amounts of a plant-based diet. He didn’t even like taking over-the-counter medications. The last time he’d gotten sick, the stubborn-ass had even refused to take the antibiotics the doctor had prescribed. I hadn’t even bothered to fill the painkiller prescription he’d been given after his surgery, which might have been why he’d been so grumpy for so long. I wouldn’t even get started on his aversion to sodium laurel sulfates, preservatives, or parabens.

  Steroids? Give me a break.

  I snapped a few pictures, trying to get a really good one. His female fans always went nuts over the shots that showcased the power contained within that great body. And when he had tight compression shorts on while he was bent over? “BAM. I’M PREGNANT,” one of his fans had written last week when I posted a picture of Aiden doing squats. I’d almost spat water out of my mouth.

  His e-mail inbox got flooded after those kinds of posts went up. What the fans wanted, they got, and Aiden was all for it. Luckily for him, between semesters, I’d taken a photography class at the local community college in hopes of snagging a few gigs during the summer doing wedding photography.

  The tire started its path to getting flipped. Aiden’s face contorted as sweat poured down his temples and over the thick, two-inch scar that slashed white vertically along his hairline before melting into the beard that had grown in overnight. I’d overheard people talk about his scar when they didn’t know I was listening. They thought he’d gotten it during a drunken night in college.

  I knew better.

  Through the lens, Aiden grimaced and his trainer urged him on from his spot right beside him. I snapped more pictures, suppressing a sleepy yawn.

  “Hey, you,” a voice whispered a little too closely into my ear from behind.

  I froze up. I didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. There was only one person in the group of people that circled Aiden’s life that made my creeper-radar go off.

  And this will hopefully be one of the last few times you see him, I told myself when I had the urge to flinch.

  There was also the fact my gut said that making my dislike of him known would just make this situation worse, and it wasn’t like I would tell Aiden his teammate gave me the heebie-jeebies. If I hadn’t told Zac who was my friend that Christian made me feel uncomfortable, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell the person who wasn’t. But it was the truth. I minded my own business when I showed up to anything Three Hundreds related and tried to be nice or at least polite to the people who were kind to me. Trevor had drilled it into my head when he’d interviewed me that I wasn’t to be seen or heard. The attention always had to be on the big guy and not some crazy-ass assistant, and I was totally fine with that.

  Plastering a tight, forced smile on my mouth, even though I wasn’t facing him, I kept the camera where it was, ready for action. “Hi, Christian. How are you?” I asked in a friendly voice that I really had to dig in there for, easily ignoring the good-looking features that disguised a man who had gotten suspended a few games last season for getting into a fight at a club. I thought that said a lot about him to begin with, because who did something that stupid anyway? He made millions a year. Only a total idiot would jeopardize a good thing.

  “Great now that you’re here,” Creeper Christian said.

  I almost groaned. It wasn’t like I’d known he was training at the same place Aiden was. I doubted Aiden even knew or cared.

  “Taking pictures of Graves?” he asked, taking a seat on the floor next to me.

  I brought the viewfinder eyepiece to my eye, hoping he’d realize I was too busy to talk. “Yep.” Who else would I be taking pictures of? I snapped a couple other shots as Aiden managed to flip the tire again and resuming that wide-legged, squatted position after each time.

  “How you been? How long has it been since I’ve seen you?”

  “Good.” Was it bitchy to be so vague? Yes, but I couldn’t find it in me to be more than cordial to him after what he’d done. Plus, he knew damn well how long Aiden had been out of the season. He was the team’s star player. Someone from the team had been constantly in contact with him since his injury. There was no way Christian wouldn’t have kept up with Aiden’s progress. It seemed like every time I flipped through The Sports Channel, some anchor or another was making a prediction about Aiden’s future.

  The heat of his side seared into my shoulder. “Graves sure got back on his feet real quick.”

  Through the lens though, I found Aiden glowering over in my direction, his trainer a few feet away jotting down something on the clipboard he’d been holding.

  I was torn between waving and getting up, but Aiden beat me to decision making by saying loudly, “You can leave now.”

  You can—?

  Lowering the camera to my lap, I stared over at him, pressing my glasses a little closer to my face with my index finger. I�
��d heard wrong, hadn’t I? “What did you say?” I called out the question slowly so he could hear me.

  He didn’t even blink as he repeated himself. “You can leave now.”

  You can leave now.

  I gawked. My heart gave a vicious thump. My inhale was sharp.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

  “Kill them with kindness,” Diana’s mom would say when I’d tell her about my sisters picking on me. I hadn’t necessarily taken her words into account when dealing with my family, but they had made sense to me once I was old enough to have to put up with other people’s bullshit.

  Being the kind of person who smiled at someone who was being a jackass usually pissed off the assholes a lot more than being rude in return did.

  In some cases though, people might also think you had brain damage when you did it, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

  But in this case, in that moment, forcing myself not to obviously flip Aiden off was a lot harder than normal.

  It was one thing for him to ignore me when I tried to be playful with him, or when I said “good-bye” or “good morning,” but for him to act that way with me in front of other people? I mean, he wasn’t exactly a teddy bear on the best of days, but he usually wasn’t a model for Asswipe & Fitch. At least, not when we were around other people, which was rare.

  One, two, three, four, five. I had this.

  I raised my eyebrows and beamed over at him like nothing was wrong, even though I was pretty much seething on the inside, and wondering how to give him diarrhea.

  “What the fuck is his deal?” Christian muttered under his breath as I settled the camera back into its case, and then into my bag. I couldn’t decide whether to leave as quickly as possible or stay where I was because he was out of his damn mind if he thought I was going to do his bidding when he talked like that to me.