Chapter 19
Blaise
“Sinclair, you got a minute to talk?”
I eye the cafeteria, where the staff is cleaning up the lunch service.
Since we’re not in mandatory training right now, there’s a lot of food left.
A lot of it is raw ingredients at the meal prep stations and will get packed back up for tomorrow or thrown into the dinner service, but there’s also a buffet table with fruits, veggies, nuts, and sandwich components for us to make ourselves if we’re on the run.
Since our grubby hands have been all over it by the end of service, it all gets tossed.
I had to let my personal chef go, which means I’ve been having to buy groceries myself.
And even though everything is Tilly’s fault, I’ve been covering the bill for both of us.
I don’t have a choice. The one time she did the shopping herself, she came home with seven kinds of dried pasta, most of them pre-packed with bags of straight sodium flavoring, white bread and hot dogs — no hot dog buns — a frozen pizza, and tubes of powdered sweet tea.
She’s feeding Donovan that. Not directly, but that’s what her milk is made of. I couldn’t allow that.
But groceries, real groceries, the groceries I need so I’m not gross and slow and distracted on the field, are fucking expensive.
The cafeteria is free. All you can eat. Half my old roommates get their full 6,000 calories per day here, and no one bats an eye.
I can’t do that. Coach would shit whole ass rottweilers if he knew I was going without a dietitian.
Alarm bells are already going off for my perfect attendance at practice, but they’re paying $5,000 a week.
That’s going to keep me afloat to Japan.
I’ve been coming in at weird times, squeezing in an extra round of either breakfast or lunch, banking on different guys being in the cafeteria if I pace it right, changing it up every day.
My personal trainer — who I technically pay for, but it’s taken directly from my salary by the Jugs, so I couldn’t let him go — has actually praised me for being proactive about my diet.
On the days I time everything right, I raid that sandwich station on my way out, throwing solid bricks of meat and cheese in a snack box, shoveling granola into a dry water bottle like a crazed squirrel.
Yesterday, I managed to get an entire loaf of a really nice sprouted-grain bread into my duffel bag without anyone seeing me.
I can see them wheeling their cart over to the table to start breaking down the station. Fuck. But I can’t blow off Maurice Bradley, the general manager for the Jugs, to raid the cafeteria. Especially if he’s about to read me the riot act for something.
I pull ahead of him and jog to his office, showing off how much energy I have by bouncing up and down.
Definitely not exhausted from the three hours of sleep I got last night after I caved and jerked off in the shower and caved even worse and curled up with Tilly, letting my brain go to that soft, sacred place of Trixie, the sweet, sad, desperate, brave fantasy.
Absolutely not hoping she’ll want to run some errands when I get home so I can snuggle up with Donovan for a daddy-baby nap.
Nope, Blaise Sinclair is 100%. Ready to do a whole second practice today. We. Are. Good.
Bradley has me take a seat before jumping right into it. “We want you rushing more.”
I barely catch my sigh of relief over it being a football conversation. Not about the barely contained train wreck going on off the field.
Only, this shouldn’t be a relief. My number one, top, only priority is football.
That’s the rule. That’s the dream. I’ve worked my ass off my entire life for the privilege of being owned by the National Football League.
So when the general manager — not the coach, the G fucking M — makes a critical comment about how I’m playing football, it should be devastating.
It’s not a criticism I haven’t heard before; I tell myself that’s why it doesn’t sting as bad as it should, why I’m not feeling like defending myself way too hard.
I’m not a dual-threat guy. My instincts aren’t to run when I get that ball.
There are five other guys on that field who are all there to run the ball.
My job is to get the ball to them. I’m a pocket passer all the way, just like plenty of the greats have been.
But it’s not lost on me that I ranked fourth in pass completions, sixth in passing yards, and twenty-third in rushing yards last season.
“My trainer might have mentioned it,” I grumble. “And the quarterback coach. Offensive coordinator. Head coach. They all mentioned it. I’m gonna work on it.”
“You’re missing two days of camp.”
It feels like a threat over my head, like he isn’t going to let me go to Japan, after all.
Andy’s already worked out the payment there, he brought in an accountant to figure out how to budget it to finally get some necessities to hold me over until my next big NFL check.
It’s a month out, but we’re already dipping into it to make sure everyone left in my ecosystem is paid.
If that trip is taken away from me, I’m fucked.
“We’re going to have Morales running the show then, but I need you to make a deal with me. For the next two weeks, you’re with the practice team two hours a day, and you’re doing running plays with them.”
“Fuuuuuuck,” I groan.
“Don’t start with me.”
I hold my hands up in surrender, but seriously.
Fuck. I’m going to have my little red vest, they’re all going to be told do not hit me, do not hit me, do not hit me, but the point of these drills is to get as close as possible, and sometimes, they get too close.
I’ll be racking up bruises. Bradley and the coaches know as well as I do that this is inviting off-season injury, but they must all agree that it’s worth the risk.
“Okay.” There’s nothing else for me to say.
“So here’s the good news. We’re adding incentives.”
Ooh. But I can’t get too excited about that either.
“You run a touchdown in, you get 50k.”
A nice bump. Was 25k last year.
“You run a first down over ten yards, also 50k.”
“Ohh.” That’s definitely way more distance than I like to run with a ball, everyone else is moving a lot faster and hitting a lot harder, but I can probably get a few of those without breaking myself.
“You rush fifty yards in a game, you get an extra hundred. And if you rush a hundred yards, you get an extra two hundred. On top of everything else. You get a hundred yards, you’re easily walking home with 400k in your pocket off a single game.”
“Well, shit,” I whisper. One hundred rushing yards from a QB is practically unheard of. But fifty yards? Not so bad for the guys who like to run. Everyone likes to get a touchdown; that certainly includes me. And if I’m trying for fifty yards, those first downs are going to happen.
If I pocket 200k on a Sunday, I’m putting a down payment on a house on Monday. Donovan can have his own bedroom. I’ll have my own gym again. I can make sure there’s a space suitable for a studio for Tilly.
My brain glitches, the way it always does when I remember I shouldn’t be thinking of Tilly as a partner when I’m only co-parenting with her until I can figure out how to secure Donovan.
Andy was right that I needed her for these early days, but that plan included a future exit.
I keep telling Andy I’m still planning that, but the longer she goes without emailing me, the longer she just doesn’t fucking blackmail me, the easier it is to just forget the past. For Donovan.
And for me.
Fuck, Tilly feels every bit as nice in my arms these nights as she did that night last July.
Better, actually, now that she has meat on her.
She owes me. Big time. But I know who she is.
I remember how enthusiastic she was to be the best little whore for me.
She can pay me back the millions she owes me on her knees.
No one’s home, so I make myself a giant sandwich from yesterday’s haul and pass out for an hour, telling myself it’s great I’ve got the place all to myself. But nothing about this is home if Donovan and Tilly aren’t here.
They’re still not home when I wake up, which has me concerned, but then I peek out the window and see Tilly getting out of a rental car.
I passively wonder if Cora’s been in an accident since her other friends are Jugs WAGs, and it’s easy enough for teammates to carpool if there’s a car in the shop.
Cora’s single — ish; I don’t trust Merrick’s claims about being over her more than I can throw him, and he’s so much heavier than a football — but she travels enough that if her car needs to go to the shop, it makes the most sense she’d have the work done while she’s out of town, so an accident is the only explanation I can come up with for a rental.
Only, it’s not Cora who gets out of the driver’s seat. It’s a tall, dark, broody-looking white guy with plastic-perfect hair, an expensive summer jacket, and a telltale drool spot on his designer tee-shirt. He looks vaguely familiar, although I’m not sure where I know him from.
Tilly tries to get the stroller out of the trunk, but he jumps in front of her. He does the same with bag after bag of shit we don’t have space for, and then he grabs Donovan from the back seat.
He’s an asshole. I don’t know who the fuck he is, but he’s an asshole, and I don’t think he should be holding my son.
Even if Donovan is in his car seat, that guy doesn’t look like he should be trusted with babies.
And the way he pushed Tilly out of the way?
Total dick move. She’s not some wilting princess.
Now that I’ve got her seeing real doctors, she’s doing great.
And the way they’re loading everything up in the stroller, I bet he’s not even offered to carry everything upstairs for her.
Fucking douche.
His arm goes around Tilly as she tucks Donovan in. Is he putting a move on her? I see the way she tenses. She doesn’t want that. Who the fuck is this guy?
When he whispers something in her ear, I hit my breaking point. This guy’s about to learn he doesn’t mess with other guys’ girls.
I sift through the kicking tees in my duffel bag, adding them to the collection on the coffee table, finally finding the football in there.
Once the asshole backs off and Tilly leans over the stroller, blocking Donovan, I launch the football at the dickhead.
It hits him square in the chest, knocking him off his feet and folding him back into the car.
Shame it’s not the driver’s seat; he could drive right the hell off.
Tilly looks back, startled, and then her eyes go right to me. She has the audacity to glare at me like I didn’t just save her from that fucking perv. And I’m going to own up to it, proudly. The guy was assaulting the mother of my child, and I’m a good man; I protect my woman. I did the right thing.
But I’ve got that whole behavior clause thing happening in my contract, so I can’t publicly announce that I hit the guy because technically that’s assault, too. Instead, I yell, “Oops! I was aiming for the . . . tree.”
This is the rundown area of the city. There are all of two trees I can see from here. They’re the ones planted by the city along the sidewalk, and they’re barely hanging on to life. Probably if I hit one, I’d get in trouble for damaging public property, so the dickhead saved me, in a way.
“What the bug was that about?”
“Who the bell is this guy?”
“Stop being an ice hole.”
“Excuse me, ditch? I’m the ice hole? This guy’s a bugging . . . a bugging . . . a bugging aardvark!’
“How dare you call me a—what?”
That’s my chance to snatch the stroller out of Tilly’s hand.
I don’t want to fight in front of this pervert, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t know if pervert is even a word that needs to be censored.
We’ve been trying not to swear in front of Donovan, not even because we’re concerned about him picking up words so much as because everyone else seems to think that’s the best thing to do, and Tilly doesn’t want to be kicked out of the WAGs babysitting phone tree because she can’t control her mouth.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she whisper-shouts at me. If we play our cards right, Donovan will be out for the next two hours. If he wakes up because she’s yelling like a crazy person, it’s gonna be a hell night.
“I’m putting my son to bed!” I hiss back.
She doesn’t even flinch at that, even though I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve let slip that I know exactly who she is.
I guess I’ve taken ownership of Donovan in enough other ways — although I managed to intercept both his birth certificate and social security card, so she hasn’t seen Donovan Orin Washington Sinclair on paper yet — that it’s no weirder than my handsomest little man or my all-star or my stinky jelly belly.
My son just sounds better right now.
She actually jumps in front of the stroller to stop me and points back at the jerk, who’s retrieving the football from the hedge it rolled up to. “You need to apologize to Emerson.”
“That’s a stupid fucking name.”
“Bugging!” she screeches. “And stop acting like you don’t know who that is.”
I take a closer look at him as he jogs up to us but stops five yards away.
Probably because he’s a pussy ass little bitch man with glamor muscles and stupid hair and moisturized skin like a total lame-o.
“Is he your childhood best friend who always thought you’d end up married, only for you to friend zone him or something? ”
I don’t even know where that came from.
The guy has the audacity to look abashed at that. “Oh no, you saw 30 or Bust. I’m so sorry.”
I take one last hard look at him and realize he’s the guy from that movie. That was a fucking banger, I watched it probably half a dozen times because it was on rotation for flight movie options for a while, but in my opinion? The dude has not aged well.
I attempt to push the stroller again, but Tilly still blocks me. “Blaise. Apologize.”
“I said it was an accident!” I whisper, but now there’s a wheezing sound in it. This guy’s all old and decrepit and creeping on my . . . fucking whatever she is, but mine, but if he’s famous, I’m gonna get so much in trouble for pegging him in the gut with a football.
He looks willing to drop it, actually, but Tilly pushes. “Literally no, you didn’t. Stop being an ice hole and apologize for . . . why did you even do that? Oh my Bob.”
But then the dude, Emerson, just says, “It’s cool. But I’m gonna keep the ball. And can you sign it? It’ll be a great story.” He chuckles to himself. “Randomly getting hit by a ball thrown by Blaise Sinclair. No one will believe me.”
What a fucktwat.