Qualified: A Sports Romance (3 page)

“The bathroom’s down the hall?”

“Yeah.” Allie took a shaky breath. She turned her
chin to find her purse and her jacket where she’d laid them on his desk. In the
corner of her vision she could see his shirt peeling away from the upward
stretch of his elbows. She needed to get out of there. She snatched her things
up and retreated towards the door while he was still getting his shoes off. “If
you have any more questions, you can ask at your appointment tomorrow.” With
that said, she fled.

The next morning was crazy. One of
the resident gymnasts came in from their practice with a gushing nosebleed that
left a messy trail. Allie called building maintenance to have a steam cleaner brought
around for the hall. Time slipped past her while she was busy squatting over
the spots on the patterned indoor-outdoor carpet with a bottle of disinfectant
spray. She had left her phone by her computer so she didn’t realize she was
late until the receptionist peeked out of the clinic to look for her.

Her hurry to get back to her desk pulled up short
when Allie found it occupied. Marc had helped himself to her chair. He was
wearing his earbuds again, the cords trailing into the collar of his jacket as
he sat kicked-back and reading. She recognized the Study Goals information
sheet from the papers she had left in his room.

Allie awkwardly came to stand at the front edge of
the long counter beside him. “Hi.”

Those dark eyes lifted to fix upon her. “Hello.”

Allie’s hands floated over the surface of her desk.
It seemed impossibly messy. “I’m sorry I’m …” This was not how it was
supposed to go. This was not her. She was organized, she was professional, she
could do this. Marc Belmont wasn’t going to make her flounder.

She’d put the sheet right … there. There it
was. Tugging it out from beneath a stack of files, she fastened it to a handy
clipboard and plucked a pen up from the collection within the alumni mug on her
desk. “I’ll try to get you out of here quick.” Allie looked up with a small
smile from the entries she began to fill in.

She dropped her gaze back to her datasheet to keep
from staring as Marc rose from her chair. He seemed different this morning.
Scented of soap, or perhaps it was his aftershave she noticed. He was wearing a
v-neck shirt beneath his jacket and she could see the whirls of his tattoo
peeking out beyond the collar once he unzipped his warmup jacket.

“I’m going to get you set up in one of the
appointment rooms,” Allie indicated with a gesture of her pen’s tip towards the
hall. “I’ll, uhm, get your vitals and paperwork in order, and then Doctor
Kaitech will be in to speak with you afterwards.”

“All right.” Marc towered over her, waiting.

It took Allie a second to remember this was her cue
to lead. “This way, please.” There. That sounded better. She led the way to get
Marc tucked into an examination room so she could update the database with his
current measurements.

“Looks like you got your wristband figured out,”
Allie noted when she slid it out of the way to get at his pulse.

“I’m a clever ape.”

Something about the way he talked … Allie’s
gaze was drawn up to search his eyes for his meaning, but that liquid shadow
kept its own mysterious counsel.

She’d been the best in her phlebotomy certification
program and everything had gone well with the athletes she’d seen in her four
months at the training center’s clinic, but she was ridiculously nervous when
it was time for Marc’s blood draw. There wasn’t any reason for it. She had no
trouble locating a vein in that softer nook defined by the built muscle of his
forearm. She had never had problems before with her work, but for some reason
she was too aware of the man’s body which she now handled.

Maybe it was because she couldn’t forget how he’d tried
to handle her. How he thought he knew what she wanted.

He wasn’t letting her forget it. “This isn’t a bad
joke because I tried to stick my tongue down your throat?” Marc cocked an
eyebrow at her after she explained the salivary brush sampling that would be
used for the immunology study.

“I don’t joke about my work,” Allie answered with a
half smile. It didn’t really do much to cover her nerves. There was no helping
the awkwardness as she wielded the little wand, swabbing it into his obligingly
opened mouth. She deposited the single-use brush into its own vial of
preservatives. The packaging would protect the sample during its trip to the
analytical machine at Doctor Kaitech’s main laboratory.

“You haven’t done this much, have you?”

“I’ve …” Allie was mesmerized by the way Marc
steadily watched her. “I’ve been assisting Doctor Kaitech with the study but I
haven’t …” She dodged a look in the direction of the doctor’s door, still
locked up from last night. “There was Tracey before winter break, so you’re the
first guy I’ve … the first subject I’ve … escorted.”

Escorted? She couldn’t open her mouth without it
all going wrong. Allie thought about kicking herself.

“A virgin,” Marc summarized. He actually smiled.

Allie was almost too mortified to notice. Was she
really so transparent?

Allie groaned once she’d left Marc
inside the patient room. Falling heavily into her chair at her desk, she folded
forward to thud her forehead against the wood. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It took her a moment to notice her phone was
sitting face-up beside her keyboard. When she tapped it awake, the pings of her
calendar reminders were crowded out by Violet’s nosy messages.

How’s it going
with your special assignment?

Did you have
to take his shirt off?

Does this mean you’ve found a room?

Allie scrambled to unlock her screen and tapped up
her mobile messenger. She scanned back with her pulse sticky in her throat to
check the timestamps. Did they come in when Marc was at her desk? She tried to
put the thought out of her mind.

I think I told him I’m
a virgin

Sounds - promising?

I might die

Allie’s face was hot with embarrassment. She closed
out the app and tapped over to her calendar. Another of the water polo players
was arriving that morning who would involve a little more work than the
standard intake procedure. Extra notes from the team’s physical trainer were
tagged to his file because he was at the tail end of an injury recovery. Allie
would need to make sure they scheduled additional appointments for monitoring
his status using the clinic’s facilities.

Resetting her braid over her shoulder, Allie mostly
succeeded in focusing on her emails while she waited for Marc to emerge. If she
had any hope of pretending she wasn’t hyperaware of him, it was ruined by the
speed with which she jumped up to her feet to intercept him on his way out.
Despite the time it took him to amble over to her desk, she still had nothing
to say to him. Allie offered a smile in place of words.

There was noise in the hallway. It sounded like the
jocular scuffling of young men, their deep voices laughing over some joke she
couldn’t quite hear. From glancing in the direction of the door, her gaze tore
back to take in Marc’s expression. His tight jaw was so similar to how it
looked in his picture.

“I’ll see you later, Allie.”

Allie’s breath caught in her throat, but she still
found nothing clever to say. “… See you.” Her voice sounded weak, but the
thought was reassuring. She would see him again. Allie reasoned that next time,
she could prove that she wasn’t some tongue-tied fool. Her gaze lingered too
long on the retreat of his back.

Luckily the energy bounding through the door was a
sufficient distraction. “Doctor.” A blond young man planted his feet inside in
the door and starfish-spread his arms. “I’m ready for my examination.”

Allie suppressed her smile as she dragged a quick
study over the guy. “Don’t tell me—you must be Adam.” Thankfully she seemed
able to recover her friendly professionalism once away from her special
patient. She swept up her clipboard neatly and rounded out from behind the desk
to sign him in.

“See,” Adam said to the teammates who had
accompanied him into the clinic for their own basic check-ins, swatting the one
on the left in the chest. “My reputation precedes me.”

Biting her lip, Allie didn’t bother correcting him.
She neatened her hair behind her ear and collected Adam with a gesture,
directing him into the patient area first. “I have notes from your physician in
Northern California, as well as from the team’s physical trainer Lindsey. She should
be arriving shortly, but let’s get started so we can have you out before
lunch?”

“Sounds good to me.” Adam looked her over. “Maybe
you and me, we can walk over together.”

“Such a gentleman.” Allie smiled back. “I
appreciate the offer, but I make it a policy not to accept lunch dates with
athletes.”

“Well if you just have a problem with
lunch
dates …”

Allie laughed at the overdone waggle of his
eyebrows. “Not any dates.” Waving for him to follow, she led the way farther
into the clinic.

Adam proved more playfully endearing
than her last patient. While it wasn’t enough to convince her to break her rule
and go to lunch, Allie was enjoying his company enough to at least walk him out
to the hallway.

“Hey,” he turned to ask before he left. “Was that
Marc Belmont I saw in here earlier?”

“Yes.” Allie scuffed to an abrupt stop as the
question caught her off guard. “Don’t you know him? I thought you and he played
at the same university.”

“Well yeah.” Adam’s smile had gone lopsided. “But
he graduated almost a decade before I started. Or, well, he
left
.” He
scratched uncertain fingers through his hair. “He’s cleared to play and all,
right?”

That set Allie swaying. A faint frown touched her
brow as she searched the younger player’s guileless eyes. There were all sorts
of reasons she felt uncomfortable answering further, not the least of which was
because it seemed strange that she would know more about Marc than one of his
own teammates. “Why shouldn’t he be?”

“Oh I don’t know.” Adam shrugged it off, but he was
only making her worry more as he went on. “You just hear things. I don’t think
the older guys are that excited to have him back on the team. Our captain
isn’t, anyway. I don’t think they got along very well in the past. Plus Belmont
was kicked off the team last time around, before that first qualifying
tournament in two thousand eleven.”

And this was the guy that Allie was supposed be
running a trial on all week, counting on him for the data which would help her
get into Doctor Kaitech’s good graces? “What does someone get kicked off for?”
It was kind of a stupid question when she worked in a sports facility’s testing
lab. Her mouth twisted unhappily.

“I don’t know,” Adam repeated with an apologetic
spread of his hands.

“It’s okay,” Allie waved off their worries. “I’m
sure, whatever it was … I’m sure that the coaches wouldn’t have put him
onto the team if they didn’t believe he belonged.” Except a small voice in her
head repeated something she remembered Marc saying when she complimented him on
doing the trial.
Tell that to my coach
. Like he needed to be vouched
for.

“I guess.” Adam frowned. “I just hope nothing weird
happens to ruin our chances. We need magic after we failed to pull it out in
the continental tourney. Our last chance for the summer games is the world
qualifying tournament at the beginning of April. Belmont is supposed to be one
of the best. And he’s a hole.”

Allie blinked. “Wait, what does being an asshole
have to do with it?”

“No,” Adam laughed. “The hole is one of the
positions. The center. We need our biggest and toughest guy there, because it’s
where a lot of the fighting happens.”

“There’s fighting?”

Adam stepped back and gave her a funny look. “Have
you ever seen a water polo game?”

Allie stared blankly at him.

“I’ll take that as a no.” Leaving the past behind,
Adam relaxed enough to jostle a friendly shove at her shoulder. “You should
come to our practice. I’ll be benched for scrimmage, so I can point out the
rules. It will be fun.”

“Is there even anything to see?” Allie couldn’t
help but be shaken into a smile. It softened the dubiousness that she tilted up
at Adam. “Isn’t it all in the water?”

“There’s plenty to watch. Passes and goals and all
the swimming back and forth. You’ll probably not be able to see most of the
wrestling,” Adam admitted. “The worst of that does happen under the surface.”

“Wrestling.” Allie shook her head. She was having a
hard time matching the image that the word conjured with anything that could be
done in a swimming pool.

“We basically try to drown each other where the ref
can’t see,” Adam said with a too-eager grin. “Some people claim it’s the
roughest sport, between the sprint-swimming and the contact play. And the ball
game, on top of that, of course. Though it’s really the girls’ teams that are
the worst. They’ve got nails.”

“Is that so? I can’t say I’ve ever progressed
beyond the doggy paddle.” Allie flapped her hands at the air in sheepish
example. “Well, all right then. If you think it’d be fun. I’d like that.” It
wasn’t like she was going just to stalk Marc, she reasoned with herself. “I’m
on schedule to assist your physical trainer later this week, so it’ll be good
to know ahead of time what you boys are actually getting up to.”

“Sweet. We’ll probably do the first scrimmage the
day after tomorrow. Do you think you’ll be able to get away around three?”

“I’ll have to check my schedule, but I can maybe
shift my break. And yeah, I’m supposed to be there at four to do Marc’s sample
anyway, so.” Allie shrugged her clipboard up into a hug against her chest.

“It will be very scientific,” Adam promised her
with a wink as he turned to head off to the dining hall. “Observing the wild
animal in its natural habitat.”

“Yeah,” Allie grinned.
Wild animal
—perhaps
it was a little too close to the truth when it came to the one specimen to
which she’d gotten closest.

Allie ate at her desk so she could
finish all the scheduling she was responsible for. She had to fit in nutrition
and psychology appointments for dozens of athletes around their multiple
practice times, gym workouts, and strategy meetings with their coaches. It was
quite a puzzle, but after all of this experience, if anyone could figure out
how to fit an impossible number of things into one day it was Allie.

She hadn’t been down to the aquatic wing of the
center since part of the Halloween festivities had happened there. The smell of
chlorine hit her as soon as she walked into the glass-windowed entry hall.
Whistles were ubiquitous. There was a particular way that they and the coaches’
hollering voices echoed off the rocking surface of the pool.

Wet. Spandex. Balls. Allie was greeted by all of
these things even before she ducked inside the opened doors of the large space
that enclosed the big pool. Trails of dampness over the cement deck told of
exercises that must have brought the guys up onto land. Near the pool’s edge,
discarded vests slumped in puddles beside a strange assortment of what looked
like metal construction materials.

She tried to keep from staring at the boys wearing
nothing but tiny speedos clustered around their coach. It took her a moment to
spot the blue bleachers in the far corner as the obvious place to sit. While
Allie made her way over, the group broke up and a damp-haired Adam sat himself
on the first bench while the rest of the team plunged back into the water. He
spotted her walking around the pool’s edge and waved her over.

“I haven’t missed it, have I?” Allie asked quietly
as she slid herself into the seat beside him.

Adam shook his head, leaning in to better speak
over the strange acoustics of the room. “Perfect timing. We’re just about to
run some plays. It won’t really be a game, but it should give you an idea.”

It was a little difficult to match all that naked
flesh to the guys she’d met yesterday, particularly with the funny hats that
they either wore or were putting on. There were three colors—two red and the
rest evenly split between blue and yellow.

Some of the younger guys were horsing around. “Get
in the pool,” the coach yelled, unamused. The last of them were already falling
with ungainly shove-propelled steps into the field that had been defined by the
floating dividers in the water.

Black hair … Allie didn’t see it, but then her
gaze latched to familiar eyes looking out from across the water while Marc
secured his cap’s bow beneath his stubbled jaw. She didn’t quite stop herself
from licking at her lips as her attention dropped down the lightly fuzzed
ridges of his torso, the pop of his lats as his fingers worked, and the
shockingly small stretch of red-white-and-blue that banded the clean-cut v
below his hips.

His feet-first jump into the pool was as neat as a
diver’s.

“See Belmont?” Adam asked with a bump into Allie’s
shoulder. “Wearing yellow cap seven?”

Feeling caught red handed, Allie darted a look to
Adam while she nodded her head.

He was focused on the guys setting up within the
pool, pointing out the arrangements at either end where nets like miniature
soccer goals floated. “See how he’s in the middle? That’s hole position. You’ll
see Marc stay there, while the others switch up and down on their sides looking
for an opening. Except for the goalie—the red cap stays in the cage like hockey
or soccer. Our goalie on the left is Austin, he’s one of the veterans of the
team too.”

“Blake, I want to see you take the ball from Chad,”
the coach was yelling as he leaned out over the center of the pool with one of
the yellow balls extended in his hand. The sharp tweet of his whistle sent
everyone but the goalies into a whitewater sprint towards the field’s midline.

“Chad’s our team captain, that guy out front in the
blue cap.” Adam leaned in again to narrate. “And I’ve played against Blake.” He
pointed to the yellow cap narrowly winning the race to corral the bobbing ball.
“He’s in his final year down in Southern California. They were both on the team
for the summer games in London.”

Allie nodded her head vaguely, but she was too busy
watching.

Blake scooped up the ball in one smooth motion,
drawing it up with a back-cast hand to cock for the throw. It was an impressive
show of strength, the force that rippled through muscle as he reared himself so
high out of the water that his waistband showed.

As the field coalesced, all those wetslick bodies
started to collide in thrashing, roiling whitewater. “Oh my,” Allie flinched
towards Adam. “Is it always like that?”

“Pretty much.”

There were obviously some rules about contact going
on, especially around the ball. The defensive player in blue who was guarding
the teammate Blake had passed to seemed to be careful about keeping the flat of
his hands out of the water even while he loomed over the other player’s
shoulder. But away from the ball, instead of less contact there seemed to be
more
.

In the center of the pool, the smaller-built
defender guarding Marc seemed to have him in a headlock. Violet had teased
Allie about the file containing pictures of wrestlers in Jello, but maybe her
friend hadn’t been so far off. And to be fair, it wasn’t that the guy was
small. It was just that Marc was a titan. With a sweep of his arm and a pitch
of those broad shoulders, the other guy disappeared under the water and Allie’s
study subject threw a hand up into the air to neatly palm the ball that his
teammate snapped to him.

Marc didn’t hold onto it long. He twisted and
whipped his arm into a throw around his surfacing opponent, giving the younger
guy a faceful of tattooed shoulder to look at while the ball arrowed towards
the goal. The goalie came impressively far out of the water with a great
winging of arms, but it wasn’t enough to stop the hard smack of the ball into
the wetted net.

“Yeah.” Adam clapped his hands from beside her, his
attention on the game. “That’s what we fucking need.”

Allie hadn’t taken her eyes off of Marc. If she
had, she would have missed that moment where he flicked a look up towards her
before stretching into a distance-eating crawl stroke for the center of the
pool. She felt heat rising to her cheeks. Was he going to be even more of a
dick, if he suspected she were a fan?