Into His Keeping by Gail Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page B

you away from me.
     
    “The day after you disappeared, my dad received new orders. We were moving to a base in California. I wasn’t going to the college I’d thought I was. After some serious arguing, I accepted my parents couldn’t afford to send me to an out-of-state college. My father wouldn’t hear of my not going. So that meant a state college in California. I had no way of telling you where to find me. I needed you to be able to call me, which meant you had to know where I was. I couldn’t stand for you not to know.
     
    “I figured being in the public eye somehow would do it. I had to be famous so you could keep track of me. Football was the only thing I could come up with and still make it through school. I was a third-string backup that first year. I planned to be the starting quarterback by the time I was a junior. Do you have any idea how fucking ridiculous that plan was? No third-string quarterback gets to be a starter. I did it. I did it because I had to know you could find me. My junior year I was first string and we went to a bowl game. I waited for your call. You didn’t.
     
    “I made up reasons for you. You’d never been interested in football. You might not have realized mine was the name you read. It went on and on, I was damn good at thinking up reasons you couldn’t call me. So the next year I had to get my face plastered in every paper across the country. I predicted we’d be national champions at the beginning of the year just to get the press coverage. It worked. But then there was the rest of the team and the huge weight I’d put on them by needing to get my face in the paper for you.
     
    “The press called me Superman and a bunch of other smack for dragging that team to the top on my back. It was goddamned true. I needed us to be national champions and do it spectacularly so you’d see me. You had to know where I was so you could call me. You didn’t.
     
    “I figured perhaps college ball wasn’t big enough. You wouldn’t read the sports page and we were only front-page news a couple of times. You could have missed it. I had more reasons why you didn’t call but you couldn’t miss the Super Bowl. Everyone knows who wins the Super Bowl. At least they do the day after.” Holdin sucked in a breath and grimaced.
     
    “First-round draft pick meant nothing to me. It meant I was going to a shitty team and I needed to get to the Super Bowl. So I did it again. I hounded, I bribed, I bullied those men into practicing in the off-season, working harder, being better. I lived and breathed football. I drove them like a freaking obsessed fiend. My second year in the pros we made it to the Super Bowl but we lost. And you didn’t call. The third year we won it all. And you didn’t call.”
     
    Jill’s eyes barely blinked as she listened. Drifter had plopped down on the end of the other double bed.
     
    “I became the biggest thing in football, the best. Money, fame, a freaking household name and you didn’t call. I took on the biggest charities I could find, did commercials. Became spokesperson for household products. If you didn’t watch football, you had to have seen me in those commercials, I figured. I did every damn thing I could think of and you didn’t call.
     
    “Don’t try to make us, this, finding each other trivial. You struggled with no memories, no history. I lived with them every damn day. I built my life around them, on top of them. I became the man you see now so you could find me. I’ve loved you, hated you and died because you didn’t call over and over again. You drove me to the edge of endurance and then you pulled the impossible out of my soul. With each success and disappointment it drove me to imagine what I thought was every conceivable reason you didn’t find me. Every reason except this one. It never occurred to me that you didn’t know me.”
     
    Holdin pulled away from the door and took the two steps to her, sinking to his knees in front of her.