Someone squeezed my hand, then released. “We’ll take it from here, Mr. Bryant.”
Slowly, I opened my eyes, only to be blinded by a pen light shining into my retinas. I grimaced and closed them again.
“Wren, they’re going to roll you onto the spine board and take you to the quiet room and go through concussion protocol,” Catherine said. “Do you have family here today?”
“No,” I croaked out, grimacing as the trainers loaded me up onto the board and fastened the straps across my torso.
“I’ll come see you when the game is over,” she said. “You’re in good hands.”
Those hands carried me off the sidelines and into the belly of the stadium. The crew of four—two athletic trainers, an EMT, and a doctor, carried me into an exam room where a neurotrauma specialist ran through the SCAT5 test to determine if I had a concussion.
The answer was, very clearly, yes. Apparently, that’s what happens when a two-hundred-pound football player in full pads tackles a woman who weighs half of that.
Tatum’s helmet left a gash on my forehead that, with the help of a few butterfly bandages, had been cleaned and closed.
Holy hell. Tatum. I must have been hallucinating. It was probably a side effect of the concussion and the abject humiliation of being steamrolled in front of eighty thousand fans.
There was no way it had been him. There was no way Tatum was a professional freaking football player! There was just no way!
But he had called me Little Bird.
Maybe I hallucinated that, too.
The quiet room—called that because of the low lights and lack of anyone except medical professionals who were unaffiliated with the team—helped calm the pounding in my head. After having completed her assessment, the doctor ran through her diagnosis. I had a concussion—a mild one. I would not be allowed to participate in rehearsals for the beginning of the week, though I was allowed to attend and observe. I’d need someone to drive me home and someone to stay with me in case I felt nauseous, had speech or vision impairment, and needed to go to the ER.
There was a knock on the door. The physician peered over her shoulder. The explicit rules of the quiet room were that no one was allowed to come in until the medical provider invited them in to discuss the player’s—or in my case, cheerleader’s—involvement in the rest of the game.
The person on the other side knocked again.
“Come in,” the doctor said with an air of annoyance.
Slowly, the door creaked open. Tatum Bryant in all of his muscled, sexy glory stood braced in the doorframe.
His helmet was in his left hand, and there was a football in his right. His Red Cocks jersey was stained and dirty from an afternoon of play.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. He must have been pissed.
A grocery list of consequences scrolled through my mind. This couldn’t happen. We couldn’t happen. I’d get kicked off the team. He would probably just get fined, but the ramifications for me…
Cheering with the Ladies in Red was everything to me.
Rules were rules. Love be damned.
The physician raised her pearl-chained glasses from her chest and slid them up the bridge of her nose. “I’m with a patient, Mr. Bryant.”
Tatum was staring at me like I was Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy all wrapped in one. But even the shock couldn’t hide the intensity of the fury blazing behind his brown eyes. His jaw was locked. Knuckles tight. Feet braced.
“Uh, yes, ma’am. I know. I, uh…” Tatum tucked the football under his arm and rubbed the back of his neck. “I just wanted to come apologize to—”
“Miss Porter,” the doctor filled in for him. Thank freaking God. If Tatum just so happened to already know my name, I’d be shit up a creek without a paddle.
He must have caught on to my sigh of relief. “Yeah, uh ... Miss Porter.”
The doctor had been, unsuccessfully, trying to print off a sheet of information about concussion protocol. She had already replaced the black ink, added new paper, realigned the ink cartridges, and unloaded the paper when the test sheet got jammed but had yet to print off a single sheet of usable paper. The printer beeped with a message that she needed to replace the colored ink as well. “Damn thing ain’t right,” she hissed. “It’s a black and white document! It doesn’t need colored ink!
Tatum looked absolutely terrified of the five-foot-nothing physician. When hitting the damn thing with the palm of her hand didn’t magically fix it, she huffed, declared that she was going to print it off in her office, and stormed out in a blaze of ink jet printer-fueled frustration.
I waited until she had cleared the doorway before opening my mouth. “You can’t be here.”