Just Rules Read online

  Just Rules

  Anna Casanovas

  Translation by Carlie Johnson

  Original Title: Las reglas del juego

  Copyright © 2013 by Anna Casanovas

  English translation: Copyright © 2013 by Carlie Johnson

  Cover image: Copyright © by Ryan Jorgensen - Jorgo / Shutterstock.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-84-616-5965-4

  About the author

  Anna Casanovas always dreamed about being a writer but she graduated in a prestigious law school and worked ten years in a bank before giving writing a chance. She published her first novel in Spain in 2008 and also started working as an English-Spanish literary translator. Since then she has published several novels and translated many more. She now dreams of finding a way to keep on dreaming. She is working on her new novel and fighting her two daughters who think that her mom shouldn’t take her computer everywhere they go.

  Just Rules is Anna’s first English novel and hopefully not the last.

  Please, feel free to get in touch with Anna. She loves to chat.

  website: annacasanovas.com

  twitter: @CasanovasAnna

  facebook: facebook.com/AnnaCasanovasAuthor

  Acknowledgment

  I own a big thank you to my amazing English translator Carlie Johnson. Just Rules would not be here without her talent and her patience.

  It has been a pleasure working with you, Carlie. Thank you.

  To Marc, Agata and Olivia.

  Chapter 1

  First rule of American football:

  The best defense is a good offense.

  The celebration dinner was going to take place in the most exclusive restaurant in Boston. The club’s administration had reserved the entire place in order to treat the players and their families, and the entire coaching staff of the Patriots, after having one of the best seasons in history. However, the staff at L’Escalier was smart enough to not decorate the place until finding out the results of the game. The dinner would take place even if the team didn’t win the famous Super Bowl, but the atmosphere would be different, as well as the banners and the rest of the surprises planned for that night. The menu would be the same.

  They lost.

  It was a great game.

  They fought for victory until the end, but they lost.

  The New England Patriots had lost the Super Bowl.

  In the locker room the players were furious with the results, but satisfied with the way they played and with the show they put on for their fans during the whole season. Despite the fact that the New York Giants had played a great game and deserved the victory, it was a shame, and it was unfair that they wouldn’t be able to hold the title.

  At least they had lost to an exceptional team, and now they had no choice but to suck it up and start getting ready for the next season.

  The dinner would be good for them to relax and to have a nice time without the pressure they had to deal with during the last few months. All the players seemed to be more or less calm while they showered and got dressed for the dinner. The only one who was still sitting on the bench holding his helmet between his hands was Kev MacMurray, Hurricane Mac, one of the main quarterbacks and captain of the Patriots.

  “I already know that women like your tough guy look, Mac, but I doubt they will let you in L’Escalier all sweaty and covered in mud. And your eyebrow is still bleeding,” said Tim, his best friend and fellow teammate who used to be the running back.

  Mac threw the helmet against his locker door. The sound of metal resonated in the locker room, but nobody paid any attention to it. Everyone was used to their captain’s temper.

  “We should have won,” he mumbled. “If in the last play…”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it now, Mac.” Tim interrupted him, throwing a towel at his face. “Go take a shower. Put your suit on and let’s go to the party. Afterwards, you can call one of your lady friends and I’m sure she would love to spend the rest of the night consoling you and telling you how wonderful you are. ”

  “We should have won,” he repeated, although he stood up furious and took off his shirt.

  “We will win next year. Go take a shower.”

  Mac took off his gear and realized that his shoulder hurt more than he thought it did.

  “I feel like getting drunk tonight. Should we go to that club, the one with the name I never remember, after the dinner?”

  “Sunset, and sorry, but no. I can’t.”

  “Oh no, don’t tell me that little Miss Prissy doesn’t let you go out after twelve.”

  “Don’t call her that, or in a few months you’ll have to call me Mr. Prissy.”

  “Don’t remind me that you’re getting married to that snob. Shit, Tim, you’re making a big mistake.”

  “That’s not true and you know it, that’s why you’re my best man. Let’s go, hurry up, I’m sure Susan is waiting for me outside.”

  “She doesn’t even let you breathe.” He sucked the air between his teeth in order to contain a shooting pain and grabbed the towel. He was getting older and his body insisted on reminding him of it. “OK, shit, I’ll go take a shower and I’ll get dressed for the damn dinner, but you and your control freak fiance can go without me. I’ll see you at the restaurant. ”

  Tim, who was already half dressed, stopped for a second while he put on his cuff links and looked Mac square in the eyes. They had been friends for so long that they knew when the other was lying.

  “You’re not going to leave us hanging are you, Captain?”

  “No, but get out of here before I change my mind,” he said, turning his back, heading for the shower with a towel around his waist. “And tell little Miss Snob not to come near me. After having lost to the Giants, I’m not up for dealing with sarcastic comments.”

  Mac walked around the locker room ignoring the different conversations around him that his teammates were having. The majority of them still had a lot of games left to play, but he didn’t. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do or what he was going to have to do, and not knowing was killing him. It was either that or it was an ulcer.

  He got in the shower and let the hot water rinse off the blood and mud that was still stuck to his face and neck. He put his hands on the wall in front of him and pointed the water towards the back of his neck. He was getting old. A few months ago he had turned thirty-five, and his bones were starting to complain. Thirty-five years old. Shit. He shook his head under the water like a dog getting out of the sea. God. Lately, he couldn’t stop thinking about this, about his age, about what he had achieved in life.

  Everything.

  Nothing.

  He shook his head again and with one hand turned on the cold water to the max. The sudden change in temperature made him curse, but he stayed under the water without moving. He used to never waste time thinking about these sorts of things, and it worried him to see that he was doing it now. It was nonsense. He threw his shoulders back a few times. The only problem was that he had not been able to relax in a few months. The season had been very tough and although the team had four captains, everyone always came to him. Because you’re the oldest out of everyone, shit, Mac. He grabbed the soap and started going through the motions of showering. The only thing he needed was to sleep, rest a little, and have a
fuck or two. If Tim wasn’t about to get married to Miss Frigid, that same night they could go out and get drunk until the sun came up. Mac could go out alone, or with any other teammate, the youngest ones were always game, but nobody understood him like Tim. Not surprising considering they had known each other since they were ten, when they both went to that stupid, exclusive summer camp.

  Now Tim was going to marry that stuck up, prissy journalist that would surely turn him into a wimp in less than a year.

  He lathered up his hair and forced himself to quit thinking about Steel Pants, which was what Mac had named Susan in his mind, aside from all of the other names he used for her every time he happened to be around her, something that, unfortunately, occurred quite often. For better or for worse, the feeling was completely mutual. Susana Lobato Paterson couldn’t stand him either, and didn’t try to hide it, although she was probably more discrete than Mac.

  Everything about her bothered Mac, starting with the fact that she was so stuck up she took the “a” off the end of her name. Susana’s father was a Spanish doctor who had transferred to the United States with his only daughter after he lost his wife. Tim once told him that the father and daughter were supposedly only going to stay for a while, but Dr. Lobato started a new life and they stayed. At that time Susan was only ten, which was one of the few details Mac knew; that and the fact that her father had gotten remarried to a nurse from Boston.

  What he didn’t know, was why Susana had decided to go by Susan.

  It bothered her that he called her that name, and he only did to make her mad. He saved it for special occasions because he knew that by saying that last “a” she would look at him with cold and empty eyes, and although making her angry gave him a certain sense of satisfaction, he was always left with a strange feeling in his stomach. It was probably because Tim would elbow him every time he would do it.

  Maybe the dinner wasn’t going to be so bad after all, he said to himself, tying the towel around his waist again as he got out of the shower, forgetting entirely about his best friend’s horrible fiance. It was absurd for him to worry about her because he would probably stop seeing her once married to Tim. And Tim, despite Mac’s jokes, would be the same as always. Having lost the Super Bowl was affecting him more than he thought. The best thing for him to do would be to get dressed and leave the stadium as soon as possible.

  The restaurant where they were going to have the (pity) party was exquisite, and surely one of the cheerleaders, waitresses, or journalists would end up going home with him. Yes, he sighed, satisfied while he rubbed a little cologne on himself. He would eat, drink, and spend the rest of the night in bed with some attractive woman. This, however, was also beginning to bore him. There were even times when having to seduce a woman wasn’t worth it because in the end, he felt as though they just wanted to sleep with Hurricane Mac, and not the man behind the name.

  Since when had he cared if they use him or not? There was a time when he would have taken that as a compliment.

  Because you were young and stupid then.

  “Snap out of it, Mac,” he muttered to himself.

  He didn’t want any love declarations, and he wasn’t willing to offer them either. But for once he would like that the woman in his bed care, at least a little, who he was and not only wanted to fulfill the fantasy of sleeping with one of the captains of the Patriots. It was as if they treated him like he was the trading card they needed in order to complete their imaginable collection of professional football league studs.

  The best thing to do would be to stop thinking about it. Whenever he lost a game he became very pensive, and if the game happened to be the most important game of the season, he was capable of spending hours analyzing each play. He buttoned his shirt and put a black tie around his neck. His vacation time began the following day, and when they started practicing again he would be in tip-top shape. He wasn’t going to let the Super Bowl slip through his fingers again.

  For the dinner party, Susan had chosen a black dress down to her ankles with an entirely open back. The dress had a scoop neck from shoulder to shoulder with the fabric falling to the sides of her body, leaving her back exposed.

  She had never had such a sensual and suggestive dress, and if Pamela hadn’t been with her that afternoon in the shop, she wouldn’t have gotten it. It was too tight, too short, too provocative, and too expensive. In other words: over the top. But Pamela didn’t give up until Susan gave her credit card to the salesperson and said she would take it. Pamela, her friend and camerawoman for the same program where Susan worked, knew exactly what she had to do to convince her: tell her that she didn’t dare to wear it, a sure-fire tactic.

  Susan took the bait.

  Pamela was right, at least about one thing. She would never wear that dress like the salesperson told her to, but with a jacket covering her back and the long pearl necklace she inherited from her maternal grandmother, it turned into simple black dress, part of a basic wardrobe. And she could easily wear it.

  Susan spent more than half an hour doing her hair and makeup. When she finished, she stood in front of the mirror in the room and looked carefully at her reflection. It was as if she was looking at another person. She looked very beautiful. She couldn’t help but admit that she was attractive in that dress. But she felt strange. A tingle ran down her spine and her hands were sweating.

  A premonition.

  Something important was going to happen that night. She sighed and shook her head. Whenever she had a premonition, she remembered her mother telling her that goose bumps meant that something good was going to happen. It was absurd, and she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t true, but there was no denying the fact that that night seemed different.

  She looked at her reflection again and tried to be objective. Part of her would have liked to have been able to go to a football game like that, surely Tim would like it. And so would the rest of the guys who see you walk by, said a voice inside her head. But it was that same voice that also reminded her that she would lose the respect it took her so long to earn. The world was full of women who had used their physical appearance to get to where they wanted to go, and she didn’t judge them because of it. People do whatever they want in order to reach their objective. But if she wanted to be taken seriously in her profession, it was the last thing she needed to do.

  Susan had a Ph.D. in economics and her dissertation was about the flow of finances in the globalization of markets. Yes, as a child they called her nerd, four-eyes, gullible, and an infinite number of variations of those same names. However, when she became a teenager, boys would agree with whatever she said, even without listening to her, just because of her looks, and girls started either to ignore or to criticize her. Neither her father nor her siblings understood why she had decided to go into the world of television if it bothered her so much when people looked at her. But she was convinced that she could deliver the economic news in a more interesting, convincing, and useful way.

  That was her biggest dream, although she had never told anyone except for her boss, Joseph Gilmor, probably one of the only real journalists left in the country. One year earlier, Joe had given her five permanent minutes on the nightly news, the most sought after time-slot in television, and if everything went according to plan, in a few years she would have her own economic program. It certainly wouldn’t be anything scandalous, and she wouldn’t have much of an audience, but it was a start.

  Little by little, people started to take her seriously, and Susan knew that if she showed up at the Patriot’s dinner on her fiance’s arm as if she were just another trophy girlfriend, she would lose the respect that had been so difficult for her to earn in the first place. She already had to put up with enough comments due to the fact that her boyfriend was a professional football player, and at that, Timothy Delany, Tim, came from one of the most influential families in the United States. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been congressmen, and everyone assumed that when Tim was finished
messing around with football he would follow suit.

  She put on the earrings that Tim gave her when he asked her to marry him three months ago. They matched the spectacular diamond she wore on her left hand, and she turned her back slightly towards the mirror to check out her dress. Looking again at the reflection of her bare skin, she thought about the face MacMurray would make when he saw her.

  “Surely he won’t dare call me Steel Pants to my face today,” she said out loud, touching up her lipstick. She smiled, grabbed a tissue, and puckered up to blot the excess lipstick, and then she put on her jacket.

  She walked out of her apartment with a smile on her face, and she got in a taxi that was waiting to take her to the stadium. Susan lived very close to the city center, and if it hadn’t been for the high heels she was wearing that night, she probably would have taken the subway.

  What she really needed now was to sit down on the subway and get lost in the faces of the passengers. Observing peoples’ faces was one of her favorite things to do. Sometimes a facial expression, a movement of the brow, or the corners of one’s mouth were worth more than a thousand words. She observed the taxi driver for a second. He was man in his forties, balding, and looked like an Italian actor or some member of the mafia. The stop light ahead of them changed to yellow, and the car in front decided to follow the law and stop.

  In the rear-view mirror Susan saw the taxi driver glaring at the other driver, and biting his bottom lip to hold himself back.

  Yes, a face could reflect a lot. Tim’s gave off tenderness, and sometimes sadness. And Mac’s…was indecipherable most of the time. Although given that he didn’t have any qualms about saying what he thought of her, she didn’t really have any need to read his facial expressions.

  She wasn’t really sure why she had thought of MacMurray at that precise moment, but the truth was that she had never liked Tim’s best friend. She still couldn’t understand how such a conceited, stupid, and superficial man could have practically grown up alongside her fiance.