Free Fair Game: A Football Romance by Emerson Rose

lives gladly step back to let me deal with him.
    One, a young pretty girl, seems to be more determined to wake him until he backhands her, catching her in the eye with his knuckles. She gasps, and her hand flies to her eye. Covering one side of her face, she retreats to the door. The other two stay but at a much farther distance.
    “Adam? Hey Silver, what’s wrong?” I say softly, not getting too close myself. His arms stop waving, suspended in the air, but still now.
    He kicked his covers off with his good leg, and I’m concerned about his bad one. I hope he hasn’t done something to set back his recovery. He’s panting when he drops his arms to the mattress, still yelling at invisible intruders, who are touching someone he’s trying to protect.
    The words that come out of my mouth next shock me. I don’t realize I’ve said them until he stops yelling and mumbles something about “his Ame.”
    “Baby shush, everything’s okay. I’m right here.”
    Where the holy hell did that come from? I called him baby when we dated in high school, but this man, the man he’s become, is a person I can’t stand.
    “Ame?” he says, opening his eyes and reaching for my hand.
    The nurses seem nearly as shocked as I am. Both of them are staring at me, bug-eyed and slack-mouthed. I look at Adam and then at each nurse individually, scrambling to come up with some sort of excuse for calling my boss “baby.”
    God, I hope neither of these women thinks to leak this to the press. That’s all I need. I’ll be flushed down the toilet right along with my career so fast I won’t have time to hold my breath.
    Everybody at MBS knows it’s the biggest no-no to get involved with our patients. Even if I weren’t a NP taking care of Adam, I know it’s stupid to associate with him.
    My parents would die if they knew I was hooking up with the biggest player in the NFA. They disowned him when he walked out on me. No one in our house has spoken his name in all these years, and football is a forbidden topic.
    My dad was less than thrilled that I wanted to go into sports medicine. He worried for the first two years of my career about this exact scenario happening. Well, not this exact scenario . I’m sure he never thought I’d call Adam “baby” again. 
    Dr. Moto enters the room, effectively popping the bubble of tension in the air.
    “I’ve got a nurse out there with a black eye, Adam. What’s going on in here?”
    Dr. Moto is readily available in the middle of the night since he’s only visiting. He must have a doctor sleep room nearby. Most surgeons go home on call in the evenings. But I guess when you’re as rich as Adam, people are at your beck and call at any time of the day or night.
    “I think he was having a night terror. I’m not even sure he’s totally awake yet,” I say. I don’t like defending him, but it’s the truth. He didn’t know he was hurting that nurse.
    “I’m awake.”
    I switch my gaze back to Adam from the doctor who is approaching and the nurses who are retreating.
    “Do you know what happened?” I ask.
    “Bad dream, it’s nothing. I have them all the time,” he says, but it’s obvious it’s not nothing. He’s covered in sweat. His heart rate is 120 BPM, and he’s still panting.
    “Seems like something to me. You’ve got the whole floor awake, asking what the hell’s going on. Well, not everybody, I guess there is that guy in room ten who’s in a coma.”
    I like Dr. Moto. Anybody who can make a joke in the midst of all this has a pretty awesome bedside manner. That’s rare these days. Most of the doctors I know are only in it for the money.
    Adam notices he’s holding my hand and lifts them up together.
    “Must have been bad. My nurse is holding my hand,” he says with a shit-eating grin on his face. Any sympathy that was growing inside of me goes up in a puff of smoke, like dry tinder in a campfire. I shake free and roll my eyes.
    “You punched a nurse,” I say.
    “Gave her a