Reconstruction - chapter 1 (with images) (Patreon)

The ground hits my hip first, then the shoulder, distributing the force exactly the way muscle memory dictates. The ball is trapped tight against my chest. I hold it there for a second. The grass smells like wet soil and chalk dust, nothing like the rubber crumb of the training turf we usually play on.

I push up to my knees and toss the ball out to the right back.

“Step up,” I yell. The sound is harsh in my own throat.

Doyle blows his whistle from the center circle. The scrimmage stops. It’s Tuesday morning. The air is already ninety degrees and holding water like a sponge. August in Oklahoma doesn’t breathe.

Danny is standing near the penalty spot with his hands on his hips. He looks miserable. The kid has the reflexes of a cat but he second-guesses his positioning, which means he’s always compensating with a dive he shouldn’t have had to make.

I pull off my right glove, tearing the velcro strap back with my teeth. I walk over to the cooler by the home bench and grab a water bottle. The plastic is sweating. I dump half of it over my head. The cold water runs down my neck and into the collar of my jersey.

“You’re dropping too early,” I tell him.

Danny squints at me in the harsh sun. “I thought he was going near post.”

“Doesn’t matter what you thought. Look at his plant foot. He opened his hips. He can’t go near post from that angle without breaking his own ankle.”

Danny nods. He wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his glove, leaving a smear of dirt above his left eyebrow. He idolizes me. He’s always watching, the wrist tape, the order I stretch in, what I put away before a session. It’s annoying mostly, but useful when I need the keeper union to fall in line during drills.

“Take the next rotation,” I say.

I stand by the post and watch the rest of the drill. My body feels heavy, a good kind of heavy. I know every inch of it. The slight tightness in the left hamstring is a three out of ten, nothing a foam roller won’t fix later. The twinge in the lower back is just miles on the odometer. I’m thirty-two. For a keeper, that’s prime. The game slows down up here. You stop reacting and start predicting. Your body just executes. My reach is seventy-nine inches, fingertip to fingertip. I know how much of the six-yard box I can cover in two strides.

Doyle blows the whistle again and calls us in. We jog toward the center circle. The cleats sound dull against the thick grass.

He goes over the set piece defense for Saturday. He talks about the opposition’s corners, pointing at Chad and holding up two fingers to indicate zonal marking. I listen with half an ear. I know their takers. I know the flight of the ball they prefer. I stand there with my hands resting on my hips, feeling the solid block of my abdomen, the sweat dripping down my spine.

Doyle wraps it up and the team scatters toward the tunnel. He catches my eye and tilts his head toward his office.

I follow him inside. The air conditioning in the stadium tunnel hits like a physical wall. Doyle sits behind his desk and kicks his feet up. He’s a pragmatist.

“Defense looked sloppy in transition today,” he says.

“Chad’s tired,” I tell him. “He played ninety on Saturday. We were running them ragged today.”

Doyle grunts. “I need you barking at them. If they switch off against Louisville, we go down early.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Good.” He picks up a pen and taps it against a clipboard. “You good? Head in the game?”

“Always.”

He nods and waves me out.

The locker room is cooled down to meat-locker temperatures. It smells of deep heat rub and damp towels. I sit on the bench in front of my locker and unlace my boots. The plastic studs are worn down on the left side, an asymmetrical wear pattern I’ve had since I was a teenager because I favor pushing off my right leg.

I peel the tape off my wrists. The skin underneath is pale and clammy. I toss the tape into a trash can by the door.

I check my phone. There’s a text from Lauren.

Got the last of the boxes. Left the keys on the counter.

I stare at the screen. I type Okay, then backspace it. I turn off the screen and toss the phone into my duffel bag.

“Everything good, skip?”

It’s Chad, toweling his hair a few lockers down. He’s looking at the bag.

“Fine.” I stand up, left knee popping loud. “She got her stuff out.”

Chad nods slowly. He doesn’t know what to say to that. Nobody really does. Three years is a long time to just undo on a random Tuesday, but that’s what happened. We stopped fitting together. She wanted things to move forward, a ring, a house out in Jenks or Bixby. I just wanted to play out my contract and see how the joints held up.

I walk to the showers. The water is scalding. I let it beat down on the back of my neck until the skin turns red. I run soap over my chest, feeling the thick hair, the hard muscle underneath. My shoulders fill a goalmouth. They were put together to take a striker at full tilt and give nothing back. I scrub down my legs, calves corded and dense. Everything works. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be.

I dry off roughly, pulling on boxer briefs and a pair of jeans. The denim is stiff. I pull a gray t-shirt over my head. I grab my keys and walk out to the player lot.

The heat outside is oppressive. The pavement shimmers in the distance.

I climb into my truck. The steering wheel burns. I crank the AC and sit there for a minute, letting the cold air blast my face. There’s a tiny black rubber crumb from the training turf sitting in the cup holder. I flick it out the window.

Tulsa is a sprawling grid of highways and strip malls built on oil money and church attendance. You can’t hide much here. Especially not when your face is on a billboard overlooking the Broken Arrow Expressway, wearing the Arkana FC crest and advertising season tickets. It’s a conservative town.

I pull out of the lot and head toward midtown.

I need groceries. Chicken, eggs.

I park at the Reasor’s on 15th Street. The automatic doors slide open, hitting me with a blast of refrigerated air that smells vaguely of floral foam and old produce.

I grab a plastic basket and walk the aisles on autopilot: chicken breast, eggs, spinach. I don’t need a list.

I’m standing in the checkout line behind a woman buying diapers and soda. She’s struggling to get the card reader to accept her chip.

The guy behind me clears his throat.

“Hey. Cole, right?”

I turn. He’s maybe forty, wearing a polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts. He has a slight sunburn on his nose.

“Yeah,” I say. I keep my voice neutral.

“Thought so. Season ticket holder. Section 104.” He points a finger at me. “Big game this weekend. We need three points.”

“We’re working on it,” I say.

“Defense looked shaky last week against Indy. You gotta yell at those boys. Get 'em organized.”

He speaks with the unearned familiarity of a fan who thinks buying a ticket buys him a share in my performance. I don’t mind it, usually. It’s part of the job. But today the heat is miserable and I just want to go home.

“I’ll pass it along,” I say.

He nods, satisfied he’s done his part for the club. “You’re a wall out there, man. Best keeper this city’s had in a decade.”

I offer a tight smile and turn back to the register. The cashier scans my chicken. She doesn’t look up.

I carry the plastic bags out to the truck. The handles dig into the calluses on my palms. I like the minor pain.

The drive home takes ten minutes. The apartment complex is quiet. It’s a nice place, gated, brick facade. The kind of place you rent when you make good money in a second-division club but you know the career doesn’t last forever.

I unlock the door and walk in.

The living room looks bigger. Lauren took the rug, the good floor lamp, and a reading chair I never sat in. The floorboards are bare where the rug used to be. There’s a faint rectangular outline in the dust.

I drop the groceries on the kitchen island. Her keys are sitting right there on the granite counter — two brass keys on a plain metal ring.

I leave them where they are and put the chicken in the fridge. The plastic grocery bags go in the trash under the sink. I grab a bottle of water, kicking the cabinet door shut with my heel, and walk out to the living room, stripping off my shirt and jeans.

I sit on the sofa, a low slung leather thing, and stretch my legs out, crossing my ankles. The spread of my knees, the width of my shoulders against the leather. I take up most of the couch and all of the quiet. I drink half the water in one go.

I need to stretch.

I get down on the bare floorboards, legs in a V, reaching forward. My hamstrings pull tight. I breathe out and lean further, feeling the stretch deep in the muscle belly. I count to thirty. Then a butterfly stretch, feet pulled in close to my groin, knees pushed down with my elbows. Hip flexors tight. They always are after diving drills. My eyes close and I focus on the sensation.

Under the skin, the muscles. The ligaments, the bone structure. I know how they load, how they fire, how they recover. I’ve been tuning my body for twenty years, at the top of what it does.

There’s no mystery to it. Pain means tissue damage. Tightness means lactic acid or contracted fascia. Hunger means calorie deficit.

I release the stretch and lie flat on my back on the hard floor. The ceiling fan spins slowly overhead, clicking faintly on every rotation.

I place my hands on my stomach. The ridges of the abs are hard under my palms. I trace the line of hair down toward the waistband of my briefs.

The apartment feels different with Lauren gone, a weight taken off one side of a balanced scale. I just have to recalibrate.

Tomorrow is Wednesday. Midweek fixture against Kansas City under the lights. Heavy lifting in the morning, tactical in the afternoon. I need to eat thirty-five hundred calories to maintain mass. I need to get eight hours of sleep.

I roll over onto my side and push myself up.

The floorboards creak under my weight. I walk back into the kitchen, pick up her keys, and drop them in the junk drawer. They land with a dull clatter against loose AA batteries and a stack of old mail. I slide the drawer shut.

I pull a chicken breast out of the fridge, grab a knife from the block, and start trimming the fat. The knife’s sharp and goes clean through the pink flesh. I trim one, drop it, trim the next.

I turn on the stove. The burner clicks and flares blue. I set a cast iron pan on the grate.

I stand there waiting for the iron to get hot. I brace my hands on the edge of the counter, leaning my weight into my arms, feeling the triceps engage, the pectorals tense. The engine is idling. It’s ready for Saturday.

Wednesday night, a couple hours after the Kansas City whistle. The deadbolt sticks. You have to pull the knob toward you while you turn the key. I pull it, twist, and the door gives way into the dark apartment. The air inside is stale and over-conditioned.

Gina walks in past me. She drops her purse on the kitchen island. It hits the granite with a heavy thud that echoes off the bare walls. The streetlamp outside throws a long yellow rectangle across the living room floor. She steps into the light and turns around to look at me.

I push the door shut and lock it. I don’t turn on the overheads. My ears are still ringing slightly from the stadium speakers and the post-match crowd at the pub. Three points. A clean sheet. The adrenaline hasn’t fully drained out of my bloodstream yet. It sits in my joints, a low-frequency hum that makes my shoulders feel wide and loose.

I walk over to her. I don’t rush. I step into her space and the distance between us closes to nothing. She looks up. I’m six foot two, four inches taller than her even with the boots she’s wearing. I place my hands on her waist. Her hips feel narrow under my palms. My thumbs rest against the sharp points of her hip bones, my fingers wrapping around to the small of her back. I know how to hold my own weight, how to apply pressure without forcing.

She reaches up and grabs the collar of my polo shirt. Her fingers brush the coarse hair at the base of my throat. She pulls me down.

Her mouth tastes like gin and lime. I kiss her back, stepping forward so my chest presses against hers. She yields against me. I let my hands slide down her lower back, gripping the denim of her jeans, and lift her just slightly. It takes no effort.

We move toward the hallway. I guide her backward. My strides are longer, driving the pace. Her shoulder bumps against the doorframe of the bedroom. She laughs into my mouth, a quiet sound that gets swallowed by the dark.

I leave the bedroom light off too. I pull back just enough to grab the hem of my shirt and yank it over my head. I drop it on the floor. The cold air from the ceiling fan hits my damp skin. I run a hand through my hair, feeling the sweat drying at the roots.

Gina is watching me. The faint light from the window catches the outline of my chest, the heavy swell of the pectorals, the thick ridges of my abdomen. The hair on my stomach tapers down to the waistband of my jeans. I unbuckle my belt. The leather is worn soft. The metal clasp clicks loud in the quiet room.

She steps close again and pushes my hands away, taking over the zipper. The metal teeth part. She pushes the denim and the boxer briefs down over my hips.

I kick my shoes off and step out of the clothes. I stand there bare. The air is cool but I don’t feel it. Blood is already rushing south, pooling, hardening. The weight of it shifts my center of gravity forward by a fraction of an inch. I’m hard, the skin pulled taut, pointing up and away from the coarse hair at the base. It demands attention.

I put my hands under her arms and lift her onto the edge of the mattress. The springs groan under the sudden weight. I step between her knees. The position is rooted. My feet are planted flat on the floorboards. My thighs bracket her hips.

She pulls her own shirt over her head, then unhooks her bra. Her skin is soft, the curves sloping and unfamiliar. I run my hand down her side, feeling the dip of her waist and the flare of her hip. My palm is rough with calluses from the gloves and the turf. It catches slightly on her skin. I like the friction. I like the difference between my hand and what it touches.

I unbutton her jeans and pull them down. She lifts her hips to help. I toss the clothes aside.

She lies back on the mattress. I follow her down. The bed dips under my weight. I catch my weight on my forearms to keep from crushing her. My knees sink into the mattress between her hips. I don’t have to think about where my limbs go. My center of gravity is high, in my chest and shoulders, allowing me to pivot and press down where I want.

I kiss her neck. My stubble scrapes against her collarbone. She hitches her breath and arches into me. Her thigh brushes against my groin. The contact sends a jolt up my spine. The friction of her smooth leg against the coarse hair of my thighs, the pressure against my erection, it all feeds the momentum.

I reach down and guide myself to her.

She’s tight and slick. I push forward and my hips lock into the movement. The muscles in my lower back and glutes engage. I sink into her.

She gasps and her hands grab my shoulders. Her nails dig into the dense muscle of my traps. I barely register the sting.

I pull back and thrust again, slower. Finding the rhythm. The friction is intense, radiating outward from the groin with each push. The wet sound of skin on skin filling the room. I set the pace, the depth. Every drive forward, abdominal muscles contract, core rigid, force transferring straight through the hips.

She climbs on top, her calves pressing against my thighs. It changes the angle, opens her up more.

The heat of the room is thick enough to taste. Our sweat mixes, mine sharp, hers something sweeter underneath it. Her breathing goes erratic over the steady drag of mine. I watch her face in the shadows. Her eyes are closed, her head thrown back. I’m doing this to her. The knowing is as good as the friction.

I flip her around and speed up. The bedframe knocks rhythmically against the baseboard.

I start to sweat. A drop runs down my nose and falls onto her collarbone. My breath rasps in my throat. The tension in my groin winds tighter with every thrust.

I drive my hips forward hard and hold myself there, buried as deep as I can go. The muscles in my thighs lock. My toes curl against the mattress. The release hits, a violent contraction that empties me. It starts at the base of my spine and rips upward. I grit my teeth and groan, the sound guttural.

The contractions pulse through me.

I stay frozen for a long moment, my weight pressing her into the mattress, my chest heaving against hers. The adrenaline peaks and shatters.

Slowly, the muscles unknot. The tension drains out of my legs. My hips go slack.

I pull back and separate from her. The cool air hits wet skin. I roll over onto my back and stare up at the dark ceiling. The mattress shifts as she moves beside me, pulling the sheet up over her waist.

My chest rises and falls. My heart is hammering against my ribs, slowing down beat by beat. The sweat cools on my forehead. I spread my arms out, taking up space. My body feels heavy, drained of urgency but whole. I run a hand over my stomach. The rigid muscles are relaxed now, but it’s the same as it was an hour ago. Bone and tendon. The weight of it.

Gina rolls onto her side and drapes an arm across my chest. Her hand rests over my heart. The weight of her arm is nothing. I could lift her with one hand if I wanted to.

“You have water?” she asks. Her voice is raspy.

“In the fridge.”

She doesn’t move immediately. Neither do I. I close my eyes. The low hum in my joints is gone, replaced by a satisfied lethargy. I listen to the click of the ceiling fan in the living room. I feel the coarse hair on my legs scratching against the cotton sheet.

Eventually, Gina pushes herself up and walks out of the room. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood floor. The fridge door opens, the glass bottles clink.

I shift my hips, finding a cooler spot on the mattress. The dull ache in my right shoulder reminds me of the diving drill from Tuesday. The slight tightness in my groin reminds me of what just happened. I pull the sheet up over my waist and wait for her to come back.

The room is quiet. I lie there in the dark, occupying my side of the bed, rooted to the mattress by my own heavy mass.

Saturday. The stadium clock is a red smear through the sweat in my eyes. 89:12. We are up one-nil and the air is dead, thick with August humidity that makes every breath feel like pulling water into the lungs.

Louisville is throwing everything forward. They aren’t even bothering to build through the midfield anymore. It’s just long diagonal balls pumped into our penalty area, hoping for a mistake, hoping the heat and the ninety minutes have slowed our reaction times down enough to leave a gap.

My jersey is soaked. It clings heavy to my chest and shoulders, plastered against my skin. My right hip throbs from a scrambling save I had to make ten minutes ago, the tissue already hardening into a deep bruise. I spit a wad of saliva and water onto the torn grass of the goalmouth. The turf here is chewed to pieces.

Chad is standing at the edge of the eighteen-yard box with his hands on his knees, chest heaving.

“Step up,” I yell at him. My voice is wrecked, a raspy bark that scrapes the back of my throat. “Don’t let them drop it in. Push the line.”

He doesn’t look back but he forces himself to stand straight, waving his arm to drag the back four higher up the pitch.

My calves are tight. A dull twitch starts in my right soleus, the warning sign of a cramp. I reach down and punch my thigh, hard, deadening the nerve a little to kill the spasm. The legs are tired but they’re holding. They know how to do this.

Gina texted me around noon. Something about leaving her sunglasses on the kitchen counter. I didn’t answer it. The thought surfaces and sinks immediately, displaced by the sight of Louisville’s center mid collecting a loose ball near the touchline.

He takes one touch to settle it. He looks up.

He’s going to cross it. I read the shape of his body, the angle of his plant foot, the way his shoulders lean back. It’s going to be a high, hanging ball to the back post.

“Mine,” I shout.

I don’t need to look at the goalposts to know where I am. Two steps to the left, one step out.

The cross comes in. It floats up into the glare of the stadium lights, a white blur.

I take three long strides, gathering momentum. I plant my left foot hard into the dirt to launch myself. The cleats bite in. I drive my right knee up to protect my ribs, extending my arms, reaching my hands up into the space I own. Two hundred pounds going straight up, every bit of it where I put it.

My fingers close around the leather. I catch it clean at the highest point of its arc.

Then something hits me from the blindside.

A full-speed torpedo. Their striker, a kid who subbed on ten minutes ago, didn’t bother tracking the ball. He just ran through the space. He undercuts me.

My center of gravity shifts violently in mid-air. I am suddenly horizontal, rotating backward, the ball knocked loose from my grip.

I try to twist, trying to get my shoulder down to absorb the landing, but his weight is tangled up in my legs. My right leg extends toward the ground instinctively to brace the fall.

The foot hits the grass first. The cleats dig into the thick sod and lock.

The rest of my body, carrying my own momentum plus the falling weight of the striker, keeps twisting forward and down. The leg is planted. The torso is rotating. The force has nowhere to go but through the joints.

There’s a sound. A wet crack, like a tree branch shearing off the trunk, loud enough that I hear it over the noise of the crowd.

It reads as something structural giving way, the whole leg dropping off the map. Pain hasn’t registered yet. The shockwave travels straight up my femur and rattles my teeth in my skull. I feel the moment the knee joint ceases to exist. The fibrous ropes snap. The kneecap dislocates. The tibia splinters under the torque, the energy driving upward until the femur shears diagonally halfway up my thigh.

I hit the ground on my back. The impact knocks the wind out of me.

The striker rolls off me and scrambles to his feet, holding his head.

I lie there, looking straight up at the night sky. The stadium lights are blinding, ringed by hazy halos of humidity.

My brain tries to send a signal to my right leg. I tell the knee to bend so I can sit up. The signal travels down the spine, hits the hip, and scatters into white noise. There’s no connection. The map of my body ends halfway down my thigh. Below that, nothing but a cold absence.

The referee’s whistle goes crazy.

I push myself up on my elbows. The air rushes back into my lungs in a ragged gasp.

I look down.

My right leg is bent at an impossible angle halfway between the hip and the knee. The thigh looks partially collapsed, the muscle deformed and bulging unnaturally where the broken femur is pressing up against the skin from the inside. Below the knee, the lower leg is twisted outward at a ninety-degree angle. The shin guard is turned sideways.

Blood is already spreading across the gray fabric of my uniform shorts, a dark stain spreading around the sharp tenting of the fabric where the bone is trying to push through.

The pain hits.

It comes up as a white wall and erases the stadium, the lights, the scoreline. It’s a physical object crushing the air out of my chest. I drop back onto the grass. A guttural sound tears out of my throat, a sound I didn’t decide to make.

Chad is suddenly hovering over me. His face is pale, his eyes wide and panicked.

“Hold still.” His voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater. “Don’t move, skip. Just stay down.” He looks at my leg and turns his head away quickly, spitting onto the grass.

Ben, the head physio, slides to his knees next to me. He smells heavily of peppermint oil and latex. He grabs my shoulders, pinning me flat.

“Cole. Cole, look at me.” Ben’s face is inches from mine. His hands are trembling slightly. “Don’t look down. Look at my face.”

I can’t control my breathing. I’m taking shallow gasps, my chest heaving rapidly. A cold sweat breaks out across my forehead. The temperature drops out of my hands and feet, everything pulling to the core. The shivering starts. I clench my jaw until the teeth grind and tell the shaking to stop and the muscles don’t answer.

Ben is talking into a radio strapped to his chest. “I need the cart. I need the board. We have a compound fracture of the femur, massive structural damage to the knee. Get the medics on the pitch right fucking now.”

I turn my head to the side. The grass blades are very close to my eye. I can see a brown ant climbing a blade of grass. I can smell the chalk from the six-yard line.

The stadium is dead silent. Ten thousand people and nobody is making a sound.

Doyle is standing near the edge of the penalty box. He isn’t allowed on the pitch but he walked on anyway. He’s staring at my leg with his hands on his head. He looks old.

I close my eyes.

You don’t rehab a shattered femur and a destroyed knee at thirty-two.

The career is over.

The paramedics arrive. The cart bounces across the uneven turf. I hear the tires crunching on the dirt. Four people are suddenly crowded around me. They’re cutting my shorts open with heavy shears. The cold metal slides against my skin.

“We have to stabilize the joint before we move him,” someone says.

Ben leans over me again. “Cole, this is going to be the worst thing you’ve ever felt. I am so sorry, man. We have to traction the leg to get it on the board.”

I nod. I just want them to do it. I want the white wall of pain to swallow me so I can pass out.

Someone places a plastic mask over my nose and mouth. The smell of medical-grade oxygen and dry plastic fills my sinuses.

“Breathe deep. We’re going on three.”

A heavy pair of hands grips my ankle. Another pair presses down hard on my hip.

“One. Two.”

They pull.

The feeling of the shattered bone ends grinding against each other deep inside the meat of my thigh is something I will never forget. It’s a scraping vibration that echoes up my spine. The white wall rushes forward, blinding me, ringing in my ears until it drowns out the sound of my screaming.

When my vision clears slightly, I’m on the back of the cart, strapped to a yellow backboard. My right leg is encased in a blue splint. They have an IV line in my left arm.

The cart starts moving. It bumps over the turf, every small jolt sending a fresh spike of nausea through my stomach. I swallow hard, fighting the urge to vomit.

I turn my head and look toward the bench as we drive past.

Danny is standing there. He has his warm-up bib clutched in his hands. He looks terrified. He’s twenty-two years old, his knees are intact, his bones are whole. He’s going to have to put his gloves on and play the last three minutes of stoppage time. He’s going to take my job.

He catches my eye as the cart rolls by and just watches me go.

We hit the smooth concrete of the tunnel and the bouncing stops. The air conditioning hits my wet skin, freezing the sweat. The fluorescent lights overhead pass by in a rhythmic blur. Flashing white, then shadow, then white again. The cart has a squeaky wheel on the front right side. It squeaks rhythmically, echoing off the cinderblock walls of the tunnel.

Ben is walking next to the cart, holding the IV bag up. He’s looking straight ahead, his jaw tight.

I look down at my own body. The thick chest, the sweat-soaked jersey. The ruined leg. I built my body for twenty years, fed it, trained it, commanded it, and it broke in two seconds.

The squeaking wheel gets louder as we reach the ambulance bay. The concrete walls give way to the humid night air again. The back doors of the ambulance are open, waiting.