“You know,” I say. “I have to go back to the team tomorrow.”

“So soon?” she says.

We’re sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling our feet into the warm depths.

I nod my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I wish I could spend more time here with you. But maybe… Maybe you could come out and see me.”

“Oh,” she says, pausing. It looks like she’s thinking something over. It looks like she has something she wants to share with me, but isn’t sure if she should say it, or how to say it.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “It’s just that… Well, I’m sorry I never contacted you.”

“It’s OK,” I say. I shrug my shoulders. “I mean, I guess I would have liked things to have worked out differently, but who knows, maybe we both needed some time or something. But I just hope that things can be different this time. I mean, I’m only going to be a couple hours away.”

“But it’s a whole different life over there with the team, in the big city, isn’t it?” says Chloe.

“Not that different,” I say. “If you’re wondering, I’m not going to be seeing anyone else.”

She looks up at me and smiles. “You sure?” she says.

“I’m sure,” I say, grinning back at her. “You’re…” I don’t know what to say. There are so many things I want to tell her, so many things I want to say to her, about how much she means to me. But that would seem weird, wouldn’t it? After all, how much time have we spent together, all told? Just a few days, if you added all the hours together.

Chloe suddenly looks upset. “What time is it?” she says, sounding impossibly worried.

I look at my watch. “About one,” I say.

“In the morning?” she says.

I laugh. “Of course,” I say. I think she’s joking for a minute. This is just like when we lived with our parents and had to get back at a certain time…

Then I remember she has a daughter.

The news hits me like a brick in the stomach. So there’s someone else… I wonder if the dad’s still in the picture. Doesn’t sound like it at all.

In that case, I’d like to find the guy that was man enough to fuck her but not man enough to stick around for her daughter. What kind of man does that, especially with a woman like Chloe? Someone would have to be out of their damn mind to leave her, given what a woman she is, a spectacular woman.

“I really have to get going,” says Chloe, sounding frantic.

“Your daughter?” I say.

“Yeah,” says Chloe. “I have a sitter… well, it’s my aunt, but…”

“Your aunt?” I say, getting up and finding a towel in a pile and handing one to Chloe.

She starts drying off, and I can’t help but keep my eyes on her naked, glistening body. Her breasts have the most perfect curves to them and her hips are magnificent. I get an eyeful of every inch of her, from her toes up through her stomach, to her face, to the very top of her head, where her wet hair clings.

“That’s not the same aunt that… the really old one, what’s her name?”

“You know her?” says Chloe, sounding surprised.

“I think I did some yard work for her once,” I say. “Right before college. I’d forgotten about her. And, honestly…”

“You figured she’d be dead by now?” says Chloe, laughing a little.

“I guess,” I say, somewhat sheepishly.

“She says she’s too stubborn to die yet,” says Chloe, laughing.

“People like that are great,” I say. “Too bad there aren’t too many of them left these days. Like your dad… I mean…” I don’t know what to say.

I can see the mention of her father upsets Chloe. Her eyes start to tear up a little.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” I say. “I just…” Now I feel like an idiot.”

“I really need to be getting back to Scout,” says Chloe.

“Scout?” I say. “That’s a great name.”

And if things had turned out differently, maybe Scout could have been my daughter. But that’s the way the world is, isn’t it? We’re always saying, “If only… If only things had been this way or that way…” But you can’t just tweak the past to your liking. You’ve got to live with what’s here. The here and now—that’s the reality that we can’t shake, no matter how much we try to.

Chloe and I get dressed, chatting a little, but I can tell that Chloe is anxious to get home to her daughter, and I can’t blame her in the least bit.

I drive her back to the bar where her car is parked, and I lean in and give her a kiss, but there isn’t the same passion in the kiss that there was back in the pool. Something is missing there… I don’t know what could have happened in the short time since we made love in the pool.

I was hoping to fall asleep with her in my arms, but then life struck back with reality. Chloe has to get back to her daughter. Maybe she’s just nervous. Maybe that’s why she’s not kissing me like she could. I almost said as “she should.” But she doesn’t owe me anything. She either wants to be with me or she doesn’t.

“You want to talk soon?” I say.

“Yeah,” says Chloe. “Of course. Give me a call.”

But she sounds distracted, and it seems like something else is on her mind as she walks back to her car. I watch as she bends over. She starts the car and drives off without so much as a wave back towards me.

I hope I’m not back to where I started with her.

Whatever, man, I say to myself. Just don’t try to think about it. There’s nothing I can do.

But the chatter starts in my head: what if I did something wrong? What if I could have done something different…

But maybe Chloe just doesn’t feel the same way about me that I feel about her. She can’t help that, right?

But I know—I know that something’s there between us. I felt it and I know Chloe felt it too. And it wasn’t just simple lust. It was something much, much stronger, that I even have trouble explaining myself. It’s as if the universe has tied us together in some strange fate, like there’s this powerful link between us binding us together, but that we both don’t want to fully admit it, perhaps not even to ourselves. But I know it. I know I want her, like I’ve never wanted anyone else before.

I have to wonder at the timing of her change of demeanor. Everything seemed to change when she remembered that she had to get back to her daughter, but it seemed like she was more than just worried. After all, her demeanor simply changed too much.

Maybe she’s thinking about the daughter’s father? Maybe she’s feeling guilty in some way, or worried…

Damn, I hope he’s not still in the picture.

But that’s a selfish kind of thought to have. After all, shouldn’t I just be worried that things will work out for her well in the end, rather than wondering whether or not she can be mine? Well, maybe I’m not just that great of a guy after all.

I drive back slowly to my parents’ house. They’re both asleep when I get in, and I get into bed and try to fall asleep. It’s three o’clock before I finally realize that I’m not going to be able to sleep at all.

I get up, and write a note for my parents, telling them that I’m heading back, because of the traffic. True, the traffic is going to be nonexistent in the middle of the night, but obviously that’s not the real reason I’m leaving so early.

Along with the note, I leave the numbers of some helpers that I contacted. These are people who can help my mom, taking her back and forth from her physical therapy appointments with Chloe. They’re professional helpers who specialize in elderly people with some kind of disabling life event. The people I looked up all came with great references, and I’ve already made the initial contact with them, of course warning them that my mother can at times be a bit of a handful.

The drive back to the city is long and it’s completely dark out. I can’t get my thoughts away from tonight, away from Chloe. But I need to get my head back in the game. I know that I need to be concentrating fully, especially after taking this unprecedented break during the season. Coach is going to be riding my ass pretty hard, going to be pushing me to my absolute limits, which is OK. I like a challenge, and I like being pushed, so long as it’s fair, so long as it’s good for the team in the end.

The drive is uneventful. There’s hardly another soul on the road. I hit an easy 75 and keep going all the way into Philly. I don’t turn the radio on. On the side of the road, I can see the big old refineries looming up. They’re from a time when Philadelphia was a completely different type of city, when it was full of industry, and when the factories and foundries spewed thick clouds of pollution into the air every day.

The pollution is gone today, and the air is cleaner, but with the pollution the jobs vanished too. People are having a hard time economically. Sure, not everyone. There are still the people with cushy office jobs, but just walk around the city for a day and you can see that people are really hurting, that they’re struggling. They’re not living on much money at all, and for these people football is really one of their very few pleasures, one of their few escapes. People complain that the fans just live vicariously through us, the athletes, but I don’t. I understand it. If you don’t have anything else to look forward to in your week, then you really want your team to win. I understand why the fans are so crazy for us to win. In reality, I have an obligation to them.

I just wish I had an obligation to something else, to someone… to someone like Chloe.

If I had a daughter with her, instead of whoever she had the kid with, I’d always be there… I would have never left, not like that other guy, whoever he is, that asshole.

My mind wanders here and there on the drive, and I’ll admit it heads into some pretty dark places.

I don’t know what I’m going to do if Chloe doesn’t want me this time. I can’t go back to womanizing the way I was. I’m sick of it, sick to the depths of my stomach and my soul with it. There’s never any connection. The women only wanted me because I’m famous, I’m rich, and I’m a good football player. Oh, and because I’m on television, too.

There’s no traffic. No noise from other cars. Just the sound of my tires on the road, just the slight sound of the engine. The city is looming up ahead of me, the tall skyscrapers dominating the horizon.

I get back to my place early in the morning, when people are just starting to make their coffee, when they’re stumbling out in their bathrobes, shivering, to fetch the newspaper from out front.

I drive slowly through the suburbs and head to my house. Sure, I have an apartment in the city, too, but this is a little more relaxing out here. I throw my duffel bag down in the kitchen hallway and look out at the back yard for a moment. There’s really nothing here. Sure, the house has furniture, and it has a good view, but there’s nothing growing in the back yard, and the home doesn’t have that lived in feel that a real home would have. Really, I haven’t spent much time here. The place is like a shell of a house, an imitation of a real home. If I had someone like Chloe to share my life with, I’m sure it would be different. There’d be a small garden out back, and there’d be a little bit of a mess in the kitchen, not too much of course, but just enough to make it feel cozier. The place would feel used, lived in, rather than this cold, empty feeling that even the sun and the heating system can’t dissipate, no matter what.

There are a dozen messages from Coach on the home answering machine, and I check my cell phone’s voicemail and find another dozen.

I call him back.

“You’re finally back?” says Coach’s gruff voice. “Or you decided to abandon us for bumblefuck Pennsylvania?”

“It’s only a couple hours away,” I say. “And my mom needed my help. I had to take her to the physical therapist.”

“With what we’re paying you, you could have just paid someone to do that.”

“I’m doing that now,” I say. “But it needed the special touch, you know? It means a lot to her to have her son come home.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Coach, sounding even more annoyed than usual. “No more excuses, Dan. You’ve got to get your ass in here. We’ve got a game coming up, remember?”

“Just one thing, Coach,” I say. “I’ll be in to practice today, but could I ask you a favor?”

“A favor?” says Coach, his voice sounding bitter and mean, rough and tough, like an industrial machine that hasn’t been oiled in decades.

“Yeah,” I say, unfazed by his tone. The idea has just come to me, so I might as well try it out while I’ve got Coach’s attention. “You think you could wrangle me some special tickets to the next game?”

“I’m not the guy to talk to about that,” says Coach.

“But it’s easier,” I say. “This is a last minute thing.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” says Coach, before hanging up.

Sure, of course I can get tickets for friends to the game, but if I go through Coach I can get the really good ones, make the whole thing more special. I’m thinking that I could invite Chloe and her daughter out to the game this week. Maybe Chloe was upset that I didn’t ask much about her daughter, but maybe if I can show that I’m more of a family oriented guy than she thought, well, maybe that way she’ll give me a chance this time. Just maybe.

I’m tired, but I’ve got to get to practice. I make myself some instant coffee, because I’m a bachelor and don’t even have a coffee pot here. I throw some things into another duffel bag, and get back into my car. It’ll be good to get to the field earlier than everyone else for practice. I’ll take a shower and it’ll give me some time to think.

On the way over in my car, with the cool morning air and the morning sun, I think of what I’m going to write to Chloe.

When I park in the lot, right in my reserved parking space like always, I kill the engine, and write my message to Chloe.

“Hey,” I write, unable to think of anything better to say. “Had a great time with you last night. Was hoping you and your daughter could come to my game this week. Special seats and everything.”

I look it over and don’t think it sounds too idiotic, so I hit send and hold my breath, hoping for the best. This better not be like last time, six years ago.

But I know there was something… something powerful between us. I know that she can’t stay away from me. I just know it, deep in my bones, and in the very center of my heart.

Just thinking about her has got my cock hard again, so I have to hold my duffel bag in front of me at an awkward angle as I get out of the car and start walking towards the locker room, the cool air nipping my skin, since I’m not in the habit of wearing a jacket, no matter what the weather. I was thinking that the cold would kill my erection, but I’ve got no such luck. Thoughts of last night with Chloe swirl through my head, sending blood rushing to my ever-growing hard cock.

Damn, I should have thought to take care of this before I left the house. Even though my body is exhausted without any sleep, my cock still wants Chloe, and is still raging hard for her.

I head into the locker room and I’m the first one here, and probably will be by at least an hour.

I strip down and my cock is as hard as ever. Heading into the shower, I turn the water on hot, and let the steam tumble up around me, making my body feel relaxed.

Chloe’s naked breasts are rushing across my mind’s eye. My hand falls down towards my cock and I grip it without really thinking about it. I let my fingers wrap around my hard shaft and my head tilts back towards the ceiling and my eyes close, giving me a better look at my memory of Chloe’s body. I remember what she looked like naked in the pool, getting out, with her hands on the pool deck, pulling her naked body out of the pool, the water falling off her in cascades.

I imagine that Chloe’s here in the shower with me, with the steam all around us, making us warm and comfortable. There’s no one like her, no one that can compare to her beauty.

I picture her long, shining legs and where they meet in the middle. In my imagination, her soft tight pussy clamps down around my cock, sliding onto it, taking the whole thick length inside her. She moans softly and tilts her hips, gyrating them up and down at an angle. Her hands reach around my back and hold onto my muscular, cut shoulders. I grunt and she moans. I thrust my hips into her, pumping into her. There’s no condom, nothing to distract from the pleasure of naked flesh on naked flesh.

She feels so good. Of course, it’s just my imagination… but I can trick my body somewhat with my mind.

My fist is working along my cock in a fury now. I’m half in the water, the shower stream hitting my hard back and ricocheting off in a thousand little streams.

I thrust my cock forward, into my fist. My fist is a blur now. I open my eyes and watch my cock, my own fist, pretending now that it’s Chloe’s delicate little hand on my cock.

I’m about to come. The pressure is building up, like a rocket. I can feel my body tensing. I straighten my legs as I stand, clenching all my muscles at once.

I want her so badly… so badly.

I’ll do anything for her.

My cock explodes and I sigh as the orgasm bursts through me, waves of pleasure washing from my body.

It’s good, but not anything compared to Chloe, to the real thing. It’s nothing compared to last night, and the orgasm leaves me only briefly satisfied. My come washes away down the drain, the hot water still blasting from the showerhead.

Sighing, I grab my bottle of body wash and squirt some into my hand.

Got to get my head into the game.

I make suds from the wash in my hands, rubbing them together, and start lathering up my body.

“No fucking way!” comes a shout from someone. Sounds like some of my teammates have finally arrived. They burst into the locker room, making a ruckus, laughing and cursing at each other.

I’ve never felt more alone than right now, with my come washing down the drain, with the teammates arriving, and with Chloe so far away.