Page 66 of Play For Me

Sybil looks the same as the last time I saw her. What was it—a year ago? Maybe eighteen months. She’s wearing one of the dozen nearly identical black suits I’ve seen her in a thousand times, her hair up in a bun so tight it just has to be painful. Even though it’s after nine p.m., she’s clutching a briefcase, like she’s on her way to yet another meeting.

Her attention is on her phone, so it takes her a brief moment before she looks up. When she does, her eyes lock on me, the slight raise of her eyebrows the only signal that she recognizes me.

“Solomon.” I fight off a shudder at the sound of her voice, then immediately feel angry with myself for still being so affected by her, even after all these years. “What on earth are you doing here?”

Nohello. Nonice to see you. It doesn’t even surprise me. This is always who she’s been.

“I’m here for school.” My voice doesn’t quite sound right. Or rather, it sounds how it used to. Tight and flat, like I’m trying hard to keep any emotion from getting through. I guess I am.“I’m doing my clinical rotation with the women’s soccer team. They have an away match.”

The elevator doors start to close again, but not before I see the frown form on her face. I press the call button and the doors slide right open again. This time, she steps out, and I take a huge step backward. I probably don’t need to give her quite so much space, but it’s habit at this point. Or maybe instinct.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” she says in a low tone. “Traveling with strangers?”

A cold feeling starts to creep into my fingers—a bad sign. “It’s part of my program.” I suck in a breath, desperate to keep from gasping. “And they aren’t strangers. I’ve been working with the team since August.”

Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t look at all convinced. Her frown deepens. “Have you been able to behave yourself?”

The disdain on that word—behave—has the cold, clammy feeling spreading from my fingers into my arms, then down my legs, into my chest. Soon I’ll feel cold all over and then it will start to get hard to breathe. I need to get out of here.

Next to me, Cecelia makes a small noise. Shocked or maybe offended. Either way, it reminds me that she’s standing right here next to me. Funny, I’d basically forgotten all about her the second I laid eyes on Sybil.

“I’ve been doing well,” I say, my voice even more clipped. “We actually have a team meeting to get to. If you’ll excuse me.”

She doesn’t move away from the elevator doors. Now she’s looking at Cecelia, measuring the distance between us—has Cecelia moved closer to me since this conversation started?

“Solomon, perhaps we should talk,” Sybil says, and it takes all of my control not to burst into bitter laughter.

“You have my number,” I snap, then move around her to press the call button again. Thank God no one on one of the higher floors called the elevator because the doors slide rightopen. I step through, feeling Cecelia following close beside me, the warmth of her body soothing some of the chill in mine.

I can tell Sybil is pissed. She doesn’t like to be dismissed. But she also doesn’t like to cause a scene of any kind so she merely nods her head and says, “very well,” before striding away from the elevator. I get a final glimpse of her straight spine, the rigid set of her shoulders, then the doors close and I slump in relief.

There’s a moment of tense silence in the elevator. I know that soon—probably the second I get into my room—I’m going to regret the fact that Cecelia is with me, that she just witnessed that interaction. But right now, it’s all I can do to keep my breath steady.

Then I feel warmth against my tingling, numb fingers and I look down to see Cecelia’s hand sliding into mine. I take a deep breath, letting the air fill my lungs, trying to relax enough that I don’t have a meltdown right here and now. The pressure of her hand helps, and I squeeze it tighter, trying to focus on only the feel of her fingers.

“Sol,” she finally asks, her voice hushed and so very tense. “Who on earth was that terrible woman?”

I do laugh now, and the sound is every much as bitter as I expected it to be.

“That,” I say, “was my mother.”

EIGHTEEN

CECELIA

Solomon is not okay.

No one else seems to notice but then again, I doubt anyone else spends as much time looking at him as I typically do. At breakfast he sits with the training staff, but I can tell he’s barely talking to anyone. He goes through the right motions at our morning stretching session, moving around the ballroom we’re using and helping players to adjust their form.

But he avoids me entirely.

Last night, after that horrible interaction by the elevators, he declined my invite to play cards, claiming he wanted to rest. When I offered to keep him company in his room, instead, he gave a clippedno thanksbefore striding off down the hallway alone.

I hadn’t wanted to leave him, not when I could tell he was so upset, but what was I supposed to do? Chase him down the hallway? The way he was acting was so similar to his behavior the night of the frat party and the punch debacle. Such a vast difference from the warm, jokey guy who had just massaged my knee and teased me about getting kicked out of Girl Scouts. This version of Solomon is completely cold and shut down in a way that scares me.

It’s more of the same during our mandatory study hall on Friday morning. The athletes have three hours where we’re required to do coursework before our team lunch, and I guess the student staff is included in that because he sits huddled up at a back table with the other student trainer and the team’s student managers. He doesn’t look at me once, even though I try to catch his eye several times. I don’t think he looks up from his text book at all.

I have a leaden feeling in my stomach every time I think about that awful woman from last night. She’s the reason he’s acting like this, obviously. I almost didn’t believe him when he told me she was his mother. I didn’t even know hehada mother. When he told me he moved to the ranch to live with his grandfather as a teenager, I’d assumed something had happened to his parents. There’d been a note in his voice, something tense, guarded. It gave me the impression that his reason for moving there was something he didn’t want to discuss.