A coach who threatened me within an inch of my life if I ever started another fight on the field again.
My job would’ve consumed my life if it wasn’t for Faith, who made me pay attention to some of the things I’d normally miss. The tiny purple flowers that were growing along the east side of our house that someone else had planted. The fairies planted them, according to her. She got what was left of me after meetings and weights and notes and game plans and hours of film, and it still didn’t feel like I was giving her enough.
How could I possibly set any more pieces aside for another person?
I had to grit my teeth as I stared at the pool. Where she’d waited for me. For the first time in my life, I’d experienced that strange dichotomy that I’d heard talked about.
Two sides of the same coin.
Peace and fire.
Heat and calm.
She’d given me both, which seemed impossible.
I rubbed at my forehead when I felt my thoughts drifting away from Faith. This was why I couldn’t even contemplate it. How could I possibly try to make a regular relationship work? Keeping her in a neat, small box of time hadn’t felt like it was working. Even after only a few weeks of that, she’d pushed the edges open until I felt powerless against what I wanted from her, what I wanted out of my time with her. Powerless against wanting more time with her.
My phone buzzed next to me, and I saw a text on my lock screen.
Dayvon: Open up. I’m at the front door with leftovers
I shook my head. “Faith, run around the front and grab Mr. Dayvon. He’s here with food.”
She squealed and took off, a flurry of pink ruffles and long brown hair. When he came around the side of the house, she was up on his back, chattering happily in his ear. Something made him let out a booming laugh, and I found myself smiling.
“What’d you bring me?”
With the hand not bracing my daughter’s slight form, he held up a large paper bag. “Tamales. Monique said you looked scrawny last week.”
When he was closer, he tossed the bag, and I caught it. Dayvon used his massive paws to heft Faith up on his cement beam shoulders, where she screamed happily and grabbed him around the face to hold on.
I opened the bag and inhaled gratefully. They’d be my dinner. Probably tomorrow night too. While I rolled the seams of the bag over into tight edges and set it on the lawn, I watched Dayvon make my daughter laugh. He had four boys of his own, the youngest only a couple of years older than Faith.
He and Monique got married right out of college, a ceremony I’d attended as one of his rookie year teammates since we’d entered the draft at the same time. He’d gone in the first round, and I was a couple of rounds later, needing to grow into my talent a bit more.
The ring on his finger glinted brightly in the sun, and I found myself staring at it.
“Does she get stressed during the season?” I heard myself ask him.
Without any further clarification of who I was asking about, Dayvon shook his head. “Nah. We dated all through college too, man. By the time I hit the pros, she knew what she was getting into.” With a roar, he dipped forward so he could deposit Faith safely on the grass. “Why don’t you go draw Miss Monique a pretty picture, baby girl? She’d love that.”
“Okay!” Faith ran off into the house.
Sitting heavily in the chair next to me, Dayvon tipped his head back and sighed contentedly. “Man, I need a place on the water like this.”
“Yeah,” I drawled, “just watch out for assholes on boats with cameras.”
He scratched the side of his face and chuckled. “No shit.” Then he cut me a sideways look. “Haven’t seen much of her lately.”
Quite stubbornly, I refused to look at her house. “Same here. I think she moved into Robert’s house for a bit.”
“Scare her off, did ya?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have time for a woman. You know that.”
Dayvon tipped his head back, hooting loudly. His whole chest shook from the force of his laughter. When I crossed my arms over my middle and said nothing, he laughed even harder. He used the edge of his thumb to wipe at the skin underneath his eyes.
“Oh, man,” he yelled. “That’s some funny shit.”
“I’m not trying to be funny.”
“No, I don’t think you are.” He stared at the lake, shaking his head. “You think she’s stupid, is that it?”
“What?” I sat up. “I never said that. No,” I insisted. “Of course, I don’t think she’s stupid.”
“So then don’t blame shit that has nothing to do with why you’re sitting here alone and why she’s off in that house when she probably wants to be here.” He clucked his tongue like a chicken.
So I told him that was exactly what he sounded like.
“You need a mother hen, son,” he said. “If Monique was here, she’d smack you so hard.”
I stayed stubbornly silent.
“Tell me this,” he said. “And I won’t ask details because God knows I like Allie too much to know that shit about her, but when you were with her, how’d you feel?” When I gave him a skeptical look, he held up his hands. “What? I’ve been married for twelve years. I know how to talk about feelings, man. Not my problem if you don’t. Just, don’t answer if you don’t want to. But without all the extra noise, just you and her, what was it like?”
Effortless.
Impossible to describe.
Instinctive.
Nothing we’d done made me second-guess myself, not until the moment everything went wrong at the press conference.
“Doesn’t your ma ask you about stuff like this?” he asked.
I shook my head. “We weren’t the family who shared our emotions. It was more like ...” I thought for a minute about my childhood, college, when Cassandra died, and my parents moved out here to help with Faith, so I wasn’t paying strangers to help raise her. “We showed our love by showing up. We didn’t need to put the words on it like pretty labels. You just be there.”
Dayvon nodded slowly. “I feel you.”
In my seat, I shifted slightly. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Emotional intelligence of a rock, man,” he muttered up at the sky. “I think it wouldn’t matter if you woke up with little hearts floating around your big ole head, you still wouldn’t admit what you feel.”
“That’s not true.” I scoffed. “It just feels ... impossible, I guess. Everyone would be watching us.”
“So what?”
Dayvon leaned forward. “Let’s play a game real quick. Don’t think too hard, just say the first thing that comes to your head. Was your life better with her in it?”
Yes.
My mouth stayed zipped shut.
“Do you miss her?”
Hell yes.
“How many times have you seen her in the past few weeks?”
Twelve.
A tease, just a taste, when I wanted to gorge endlessly. In the silence, I could feel my heart thudding uncomfortably, which was probably exactly what the asshole wanted.
He must have seen something on my face because he chuckled under his breath.
“Do you trust her? Did she put constraints on your time? Complain about what you do? My guess is that I know the answer to every single one of those questions.” He sighed when I finally looked over at him. “Man, doing what we do? Do you know how hard it is to find a woman who’s got the strength to put up with the work and the commitment? I don’t care what anyone says, what they have to do is harder. So much harder. Monique is the strongest person I’ve ever met in my entire life, but don’t you dare tell my ma that if you ever meet her.”
I laughed.
He wasn’t done, though. “You want to know why I’ve never once been tempted to cheat on my wife when most guys wouldn’t think twice? Because I don’t want to. There ain’t nothing out there that’s better than what I’ve got at home. No one who could ever compare. Maybe your family defines love as showing up, but
I think it’s that I know there’s nothing better. No one better than her for me. I could see a thousand women. I don’t care what they look like, or what they promise me, there’s nothing better out there for me than Monique. And I trust that like I trust nothing else in this world.”
I hung my head down, my arms dangling between my legs while I struggled to breathe.
“So I don’t know why you’re fighting against it so hard because the way I see it, you’ve been a grumpy pain in the ass the past few weeks for a reason. You’re working yourself too hard because you can’t get her out of your head, right?”
I pushed my tongue into the side of my cheek.
“It can’t be that easy, can it?” I asked, voice rough and rusty and coming from somewhere deep in my chest. A part of my body I didn’t normally speak from. It grew into something bigger, wider, too much to be contained within my skin.
Could I imagine someone better for me than Allie?
Hell no.
I’d never been tempted by anyone until her. I’d never come close to accepting the slightest risk of upsetting my life until her. And she hadn’t upset it at all.
She’d fit into it.
Into me.
“Holy shit,” I breathed uncomfortably. My ribs pinched until I had to suck in a deep, cleansing breath through my nose. Everything rearranged inside me to make room. But my brain, always logical, always reacting to what was presented in front of me, rattled and churned to life slowly as I realized the utterly, stupidly transparent truth of what I refused to admit. “It’s that easy, isn’t it?”
He leaned back, stretching his long legs in front of him, his hands folded over his stomach. The picture of smug satisfaction. “Yup.”
I glanced at him. “What do you get out of this little sermon?”
“My wife bet me I wouldn’t be able to get you to admit it. I get the satisfaction of being right, my friend.”
Faith came running out of the house and thrust a paper filled with pink and purple stickers and scribbles in every color of the rainbow. “Do you think she’ll like it?”
“Aww, yeah, I do. I bet she’ll put it right on the front of our fridge, baby.”
I patted my lap, and Faith hopped up, snuggling into my side. “That’s really pretty, turbo. Good job.”
“What are you gonna do about it?” Dayvon asked.
I breathed in the soft scent of Faith’s hair. “Not sure yet.”
He grinned. “Make it big. Women like that.”
“About what?” Faith asked, smacking a kiss on my cheek.
Over her head, Dayvon and I shared a look. “Well, I don’t have a plan yet, but do you think I should figure out a way that we could see Allie more? I know you miss her.”
“Yes,” she screeched into my ear, and I winced. “Can she come over again? Please, please, please?”
“We’ll see,” I told her, unwilling to promise anything more.
Because first, I had to see if she’d even hear me out.
That was what I knew I had to do and just pray she didn’t kill me for it.
28
Allie
“Explain to me why we’re here so early again?” I asked Paige, who hustled us into my suite well over an hour before kickoff.
I mean, yes, I understood the significance of playing on Monday night. Ratings were higher, games were usually more important, and it was our first one all year. Because of everything that had happened, and it being a division game in the latter half of the season, there was a lot riding on it.
“I, umm, just really wanted to get comfy.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye. Against one wall, there was a massive floor-to-ceiling entertainment center with large flat-screen TV mounted against the wall and surrounded by built-in bookcases. “If you were a remote, where would you be hiding?”
From the mahogany coffee table, I handed her the remote she needed. “Were you day drinking again?”
“It was touch and go there for a couple of hours,” she muttered. “But no.”
“What is going on?”
Outside the box and the relative privacy of the glass doors leading out to our two rows of cushioned seats, I could hear muffled music. The players were stretching, and I tried not to stare down at them, so small on the bright green grass. I tried not to pick out where Luke was tossing the ball to someone else in tight pants and a T-shirt.
Paige didn’t answer, fumbling with the remotes and squinting at the TV when the guide appeared. “Finally, good grief.”
“Paige,” I huffed, crossing my arms over my black long-sleeve t-shirt. Joy had picked out the fitted V-neck style from the pro shop, something new we’d gotten in last week because she said it looked good on me. Written down one sleeve was Washington and along the other was Wolves. Over my heart was the red, black, and white logo of the howling beast. Briefly, I laid my hand over it, the silly little drawing that had become so ridiculously dear to me in such a short time.
“There,” she breathed when she found the Monday Night Football countdown that was currently being filmed on the very field we looked down on.
“Seriously?” I asked her. “We’re at the game, so why do we need to watch this?”
For the first time since we got in the car, she cut me an apprehensive look. “I just ... really want to watch Jon Gruden’s interview. I love his Monday night interviews.”
“Since when?”
“Since now.”
I shook my head and picked up the catering menu but tossed it down again because nothing sounded good. For the first time all season, we’d be the only ones in the box. Usually, I invited different family members of the players or gave passes to employees to use for friends and family, but Paige really wanted us to relax tonight and not feel like we had to entertain.
I sank onto the couch and propped my sneaker-clad feet on the coffee table while the announcers gave updates from around the league.
“It’s important for the Wolves to win tonight,” one said, giving a nod back to the field behind them. “They’ve got a two-game lead in their division, but they end out the season with one of the toughest stretches all year. Two back-to-back away games against two of the best scoring defenses in the league. They’ve stayed healthy, which is huge, but they’ve also been plagued with distraction on and off the field.”
Paige looked at me, and I crossed my arms over my stomach, determined not to show how uncomfortable this made me. This was the stuff that Luke hated. The rhetoric. The narrative that you couldn’t control. People who didn’t know you dissecting your life, your livelihood, colored with their own bias.
Gruden nodded. “Indeed, they have. One thing we know about Luke Pierson, besides his huge arm and ability to manage the game, is that he’s not prone to those kinds of distractions. He normally avoids guys like me, so when he called and asked if he could sit down with me, I was more than a bit surprised.”
I sat up slowly, my lips falling open.
The other two at the curved table laughed. “Us too,” the third announcer said. “We thought you were kidding.”
Gruden held up his hands, an affable smile wide on his face. “I’d never lie about the elusive Luke Pierson asking for a one on one.” He looked straight at the camera. “So here you go. My most surprising and revealing interview of the season.”
My heart catapulted up into my throat as I sat forward fully, my knees bouncing in place. The camera cut to a dark room, only two chairs facing each other with lights behind each.
Gruden sat in one. Luke in the other.
I had to cover my mouth with a shaky hand at how good he looked. His hair had been recently cut close to the scalp. It would be soft against my hand. He was wearing a simple white dress shirt with a light blue plaid pattern that made his skin look golden and healthy. His shoulders stretched the seams when he shifted in his seat.
“Thanks for having me,” he told Jon.
“I was a bit surprised, man. You don’t usually call me to have a chat.”
Luke gave a look that was half grimace, half smile. “Yeah, sorry about that. I haven’t always had the best of luck with the media.”
“How so?”
He took a deep breath, visibly prepping himself before he spoke. In the set of his jaw, I could see how uncomfortable he was. My hands wanted to crash through the glass to get to him even though I was just seeing an image of him, a replay of something that had probably been shot the day before. Maybe even earlier.
“I’ve always struggled with the feeling that when I spoke to the media, I was defending myself. Defending how we played, how we didn’t play, defending the things that happened off the field that might have affected our game.” He swallowed and looked down. “When my daughter’s mother died, it only magnified that feeling because I had no desire to explain any of that. It was private to me, and it was difficult to see my silence taken as tacit agreement to a made-up story about what my life had been like with her.”
“And by that, you mean that your relationship was more serious than it was in reality.”
“Yeah.” Luke stared past Gruden’s shoulder for a minute. “Cassandra, Faith’s mother, wasn’t someone who I knew all that well. Not really. And I regret that, especially for my daughter. I wish I could tell her more about what her mother was like, but I can’t. And when I was suddenly stuck in the trenches of being a single father, I wasn’t ready to open myself up to that conversation, and it really affected how I started dealing with the media.”
Gruden leaned back, folding his arms and shaking his head. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “Man, and here I thought we’d talk pass rush and how you read a blitz so well.”
Luke laughed, and my heart somersaulted, sluggish and lovesick. “We can do that, too.”
“But that’s not why you wanted to sit down with me?”
Another heavy exhale that I felt in the tip of my fingers, a rush of blood with hot anticipation. “No. It’s not.”
“You want to talk about Alexandra Sutton.” Not a question. No surprise in his eyes.
“I think I’m having a panic attack,” I whispered. Paige rubbed my back. Beyond the glass, I realized I heard an echo of Gruden’s words. My eyes darted out, and with a dawning sense of horror, I realized that they were projecting the interview up on the main screens of the field. During warm-ups. For everyone to see. “Holy shiiiiiiiiit,” I breathed. Both hands covered my mouth now, and I fought the urge to go lock myself in the bathroom.
The Bombshell Effect Page 23