Chapter 6
The Thunder were one of the few teams in the NFL that didn’t require players to stay in a hotel the night before a game. They offered the option—for players who craved that feeling of routine every single week, whether they were home or away—but Dawson liked his own bed. His own pillows.
The mattress on his king-size bed was the one thing he’d really given a shit about after he and Brynn had divorced. He’d ended up buying a new one, but the same brand. The one that felt like he was sleeping on a cloud.
Money was tight, but not that tight.
He could still have a great bed where he could, theoretically, get a fabulous night’s sleep.
It was not the bed’s fault that sleep was elusive these days.
Normally, he’d sleep like a baby. But Dawson was tired this afternoon, so tired he actually considered attempting to take a nap.
But before he could get closer than rising from the couch, his phone rang.
His phone only rang these days for a very select handful: his parents, his agent, and his lawyer. He’d considered adding Aidan to that list, but Dawson was beginning to suspect he’d abuse that privilege, with the number of times he’d called, “just to check in.”
Dawson sighed and answered. It was, as he suspected, not his parents or his agent, who all knew better than to call him the afternoon before a game.
“Hey,” Simon Burns, his lawyer, said. “Glad I managed to catch you.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said. Whenever Simon called, it was not usually good news. For a victim, he’d imagined that hearing from his lawyer would make him feel better every once in a while, but that never seemed to happen.
“There’s a new plea on the table from Ackerman and the defense,” Simon said. “The prosecutor wanted me to discuss it with you.”
“Is it going to piss me off?” Dawson asked archly.
Simon chuckled under his breath, which probably meant, yes.
“We’ve talked about this, Dawson,” Simon said. “He’s going to probably plea out. It’s a white-collar crime.”
“Does it matter what kind of crime it is? It’s still a fucking crime. Richard Ackerman stole from me. From a whole bunch of people.”
“I know.” Simon at least sounded understanding. He’d been invaluable during this whole process. Been the one to call up an old friend in the district attorney’s office and get more eyes on the case. Get it bumped up in the case load.
Dawson didn’t need to be reminded that there were far worse crimes out there. Criminals who’d killed and raped and stolen.
Stolen shit that couldn’t be given back.
“So what’s the plea this time?” This was not the first time Ackerman and his defense team had come up with a way for him to wiggle out of this.
Sometimes Dawson felt guilty for using all his football player privilege to make sure Ackerman got adequately punished, but then he remembered that it wasn’t only his money that his father-in-law had stolen.
He’d siphoned funds out of lots of people’s accounts, including a bunch of middle-class households that couldn’t necessarily ever replace what had been lost.
“Still trying to avoid jail time,” Simon said. “His defense team is pushing hard for house arrest, because of how high profile this case has gotten.”
“And? What does the prosecutor think?” Dawson demanded.
He wanted Ackerman to go to fucking jail.
He wanted him to sit in a tiny little box and think about how Dawson had been his son-in-law, with a front seat to how goddamn hard Dawson worked to earn every cent, but he’d stolen everything from him anyway.
But Simon just sighed.
Yep, Dawson had fucking called it. Nobody had any balls. They wanted Ackerman to get by on a technicality. To only be restricted to his cushy-ass house.
As far as Dawson was concerned, that wasn’t even a punishment. Not enough of one. Not even remotely.
“Shit,” Dawson muttered.
“And I talked to Alex,” Simon said, referring to Dawson’s agent, “and he thinks it would be better for everyone if Ackerman settled with a plea bargain. Less distracting press, less media focus on how that affected you last year.”
Dawson took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He doesn’t want me to testify.” He couldn’t blame Alex for being wary. When he’d been in the middle of all this shit, last season, there was no question it had negatively impacted his game.
And like all bad cyclical shit, the worse it had gotten, the more impossible it had been to pull himself out of it.
“You doing the deposition was tough enough.”
It hadn’t been easy, that was for sure. But the truth was while Dawson was a victim, he wasn’t the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. That was the forensic accountant he’d hired when Brynn had filed for divorce and suddenly nothing was what it seemed with his accounts.
“You said they wouldn’t even ask me to testify if it went to trial,” Dawson reminded his lawyer.
“If the prosecution keeps rejecting the pleas? If I was Ackerman’s defense team, I’d make it a media circus, and you’d be the key to that, Dawson.”
“Fuck,” Dawson muttered.
“Think about it. I’ll send the particulars over by email. Review it. I know you have a game tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“We have some time to offer an opinion. And I’ll remind you again, it’s just an opinion. Ultimately it’s the prosecutor’s decision on whether they want to take it or not.”
“Right.” Dawson tried not to sound pissed off about it, but he could tell he hadn’t quite pulled it off.
“It’s going to end and be over, and you’ll be able to get back to your normally scheduled life soon,” Simon soothed.
But even as he thanked Simon for the call and promised to review the plea that came through in his email, he knew that was untrue.
He couldn’t turn back the clock.
When Brynn had declared she wanted a divorce, everything had changed.
He’d been forced to pull the blackout curtain back on his unhappy marriage and take a hard look on how long he’d been skating by with just “fine.” Then, the shit about the money had come out, and everything had gotten worse, capped off by suddenly sucking at his job.
He’d never be able to put all those genies back in their bottles. Dawson knew he was forever changed by what had gone down last year.
He knew who he’d been; he just didn’t know who he was going to become.
It was difficult not to imagine his dad giving him a blunt look and saying, “and who you are has got nothing to do with you? You make your own self, Daws. You always have.”
He could sit here and mull over all the shit, marinate in every way he’d gotten fucked, or he could do something else.
Dawson stood and grabbed his keys, not even letting himself think.
A minute later he was riding the elevator down to Cam’s floor.
He didn’t text, because he was afraid if he did, he’d chicken out.
But right now, all he was thinking about was how he felt better when Cam’s sunshine was soaking into him. At the dinner, he’d been jealous because he’d wanted it on him, and the only one keeping him from having those rays was himself.
Dawson knocked on the door once, then again.
He was just about to do it a third time when suddenly there was no more wood under his fist, the door swinging open.
Dawson nearly swallowed his tongue.
Cam was wearing only a pair of low-slung sweatpants.
It wasn’t like they didn’t all strip down in the locker room on a frequent basis.
They did. There was no real room for privacy in professional sports.
But Dawson had tried not to look—not at Cam, not at anyone.
And before that, what felt like an eternity ago, but was actually only like a few weeks, he’d not even been interested in looking at anyone.
He’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself.
Well, he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself now.
He was fucking looking and didn’t know how to stop.
Cameron wasn’t the hottest guy in the world or the most ripped, but there was something about the graceful slide of one muscle into the next—traps to pecs to abs—that made Dawson’s throat dry and his tongue too big for his mouth.
“Hey,” Cam said happily, eyes lighting up at Dawson’s presence in his doorway. “What’s up?”
“I . . .uh . . .” At some point, and at a point that couldn’t have been that long ago, Dawson had considered himself fairly charming. He’d gotten around Baltimore’s single scene, guys and girls alike, before he’d met and married Brynn.
But Cam short-circuited his brain.
He wanted to touch him, and not just with his hands, either.
Cam raised an eyebrow. “You okay?”
“I’m not gonna be if Aidan figures out I’m looking at you like this,” Dawson confessed. And okay, he hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but apparently the brain molecules that hadn’t just been fried within an inch of their lives had lost their connectivity to his mouth.
Cam had the nerve to actually look shocked. “What are you talking about?”
They didn’t need to have this conversation right here—frankly, they shouldn’t be having it at all, but having it in the hallway of their building was worse—and Dawson pushed into his space, until they were nearly pressed together in the tiny entryway of Cam’s even smaller apartment.
Dawson opened his mouth and snapped it shut. “Nothing.”
Cameron was still smiling, but the corners of his lips turned up farther, into a sly little look that shouldn’t have turned Dawson on, but did. “You can’t do that. Come on. What does Aidan have to do with this? And how are you looking at me?”
He had two options: tell the truth or run away.
Dawson told the truth. “You’re . . .well, you’re attractive, okay? And Aidan would probably be pissed if he knew about it.”
“What, and what?” Cam demanded. He pressed a palm into Dawson’s chest.
“Aidan—”
Cam laughed like it had been startled out of him, and it sounded like bottled sunshine. Dawson wanted to roll over like a dog and just bask in it. “I don’t want to hear about Aidan,” he interrupted. “I want to hear about you.”