“You know you’re speaking out loud, right?” Belle’s nose wrinkles as she asks, “Why exactly are you telling your grandchildren about how you lost your virginity?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s just an expression. Although, I envisage myself as being that really cool, hip nan who shares all my wild party days with my own little faction of whippersnappers.”
Giggling, she says, “Okay, couple of things wrong with what you just said. Faction? We’re not post-apocalyptic, so stop being so dramatic.”
I adjust my glasses and shoot her a glare, but it doesn’t slow her down. “Also, nobody uses envisage in general conversation. Your prodigy-ness is showing.”
“Ha, ha,” I grumble.
“Okay, back on topic.” Belle walks back over to her bed and slips her feet into her trainers. Her eyes are slanted deep in thought. “I think we can fix this virginity thing. What if you try just the tip?”
“The tip of what?” I ask, distracted by my own internal thoughts about finding the right kind of player to do this with.
“The tip of Stanley’s cock.” Her face is deathly serious. Her eyes pierce me with encouragement.
“You are such a bloke sometimes,” I groan, disgusted. “That sounds exactly like what a man would say if he were trying to get in a woman’s knickers.”
“Indie,” a proud smile spreads across her face. “A tip can be quite nice if wielded properly. You just have to have him stroke—”
“Enough!” I cover my ears. I’m over virginity talk with Belle. I am maxed out on Belle’s advice on how to get this done.
She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I may still be a virgin, but I’m not immature anymore. My time hasn’t come and gone. I refuse to turn into a thirty-year-old virgin unicorn. That’s certainly not the type of majestic creature I want to be, even if it does entitle me to a forehead horn.
A tip from Stanley won’t be the way I lose this ridiculous cross I bear. I refuse. I’m not the under-developed, late bloomer I was in school. I will find the perfect Penis Number One. And I will do whatever it takes to complete this task.
Suddenly, my pager blasts from my scrub pocket. I glance down. “Yikes. It’s Prichard. 999. Gotta go.”
Without looking back, I turn and run out of the on-call room, bursting through the doors and skirting past a crowd of interns in the middle of rounds. Dr. Prichard is the attending ortho surgeon whom I’ve been working with for the past few months. His encouragement is the real reason I’ve developed such a focus on orthopaedics. If he pages 999, it means something big is happening.
My heart pounds as I fly into Patch Alley. Sirens blare through the automatic doors, and my face heats from the rush. This is why I love medicine. The exhilaration. The demand to think on your feet so you can save a life in the blink of an eye. The mature, capable confidence required to be a doctor.
My eyes squint at the flashing cameras outside the hospital doors, brightly popping off through the dark, pouring rain. I refocus to the foreground and see a pair of muddy boots hanging off the end of an evidently too-short stretcher. My gaze drifts up the muscular, socked legs beneath mud-soaked shin pads. Before I can clap my curious eyes on the patient, a pack of sweaty, shouting, and properly pushy men in kits comes ramrodding in behind him.
Rather than God answering my virginal prayer with a player, the devil answered it with four.
“WE NEED THE BEST FUCKING doctor here, right the hell now. I don’t care if he’s on holiday, get him here!” Tanner’s voice booms as a man attempts to introduce himself as my doctor.
I wipe my face as small flicks of spit come raining down on me. It’s shocking to see him this worked up. Granted, I’ve seen him get mighty upset over football before. But he’s not the one being wheeled into Accident and Emergency right now. I am. Shouldn’t I be the one screaming? Aren’t I the one horizontal on a stretcher?
My stomach rolls as I recall what happened only minutes ago.
The slip.
One fucking slip.
And my career is probably over.
I cover my face with my hands, willing a time machine to materialise and take me back to the second when everything went horribly wrong so I can stop it from happening. Reverse the damage. Undo what has been done. Anything.
It was a wet and wild game as London’s sky decided to open up and rain holy hell down onto the pitch, turning our match into a virtual mud bath. There is no such thing as rain delays in football, so the ball and every square inch of our bodies were covered in mud.
We were up two-nil—both goals scored by me. I was driving my way to a hat trick and potentially securing myself an offer from Arsenal. Suddenly, a back tackle came sliding across the mud right toward me. I attempted to cut left to dodge the harsh contact. My feet couldn’t find any grip, though, and they slipped out from under me just in time for him to come crashing into me. It was that second that I felt it…The slip. That’s the only way to describe it. Something in my knee slipped and I knew I was fucked.
I went down awkwardly and froze while the defender recovered with the ball and took off with my teammates down the field. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. My whole career had just flashed before my eyes like it was over.
Wet.
Muddy.
Bleak.
And over.
I rolled onto my belly and punched the mud-soaked grass over and over and over with all my might. I roared in anger and glanced up, immediately connecting eyes with Tanner across the field. He dropped down to the ground, reacting to the horror that overwhelmed me. He quickly leapt up and charged toward me, sliding on his knees to my side. This was bad. Just looking at his face I could tell it was bad.
Don’t get me wrong. You can’t play football for most of your life and not experience the odd injury here and there. But this was different. This was a game changer.
“Fuck, Cam!” Tanner cried, his expression marred with a knowing doom beneath his dripping beard.
“I tore something, Tanner. I know it,” I exclaimed. Right on cue, I felt a sharp slice of pain shoot up my quad. “Fuuuuuck!”
“Maybe it’s just a cramp. Can you get up?” Tanner asked hopefully.
I shook my head but attempted to stand anyway, hoping fate was playing a mean trick on me. My stomach flipped again when it felt like both the top and bottom parts of my leg were moving in two different directions. When I stumbled, Tanner slipped under one of my arms to hold me up. My ego crumbled with that one gesture. I held my lame leg completely off the ground, unwilling to tempt fate by putting more pressure on it.
In a flash, our baby brother, Booker, was under my other arm. Panic spread across his entire face—a face that always looked so young to me, even though he was only two years below us.
“Fucking hell, Cam. Tell me you didn’t!” he croaked the knowing question.
I clenched my jaw as I felt the distinct sensation of bone rubbing on bone under the skin of my kneecap.
Suddenly, the crowd erupted around us in celebration. I looked up at the board to see the opposing team had just scored a goal.
“Booker,” I groaned, realising he must have left his box when he saw me go down. “You should be in your box.”
“Sod football. You’re my fucking brother,” he growled back angrily. “That wanker was completely out of control. Utter horseshit and no card from the ref…It’s bullshit.”