Chapter 3
CAMDEN
“Hey, man.” Erik, my best friend and teammate, smiles when I clap hands with him after opening the door to my penthouse in Center City. “How’s it going?”
“Terrible.” I shake my head and allow him to come in, brushing my fingertips over Kai’s head. He’s strapped to his dad’s chest and seems to be conked out.
“Still?”
Erik spent a few days with me after the funeral, sitting in on meetings with my manager and agent, Malcolm and the PR company.
Everyone wanted to decide what the hell I was doing with my life as it crashed around me, but it was my best friend who spoke for me when I didn’t feel like I could anymore.
For as much as I know how the world sees me, Erik has been there with me from the beginning.
We were drafted the same year to Philadelphia with the purpose of rebuilding a dying team, tasked with bringing it back to life. Which we did.
He’s the golden boy.
I’m the arrogant asshole. Because I like to have fun on and off the field. What is the point of making millions of dollars a year, doing the thing we dreamed of as kids, if we can’t have fun?
But now, I don’t know who I am. Or what all of this is for anymore.
Only that the last conversation I had with my parents before they died was how they were disappointed in me, and I’m now in charge of raising my kid sister.
“She barely comes out of her room,” I explain to Erik, motioning down the hall. “She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” he assures me, but she won’t talk to me, and she’s pretty much cried every single day. Not that I can blame her.
She’s lost her parents, home, and friends in one fell swoop.
“I’m not cut out for this. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.” I grab two bottles of water from the fridge and toss one to him, which he catches with one hand, the other holding Kai’s tiny bum.
“You’ve just started. You can’t throw in the towel already.”
I heave a sigh. I love the dude. After seven seasons playing together, I know him almost as well as myself.
I know what his favorite meals are, how he falls asleep to some English guy on an app telling him to relax his muscles and mind, and that he always has to put his left sock on before his right or his whole game will fall apart.
But if he doesn’t know by now that I’m not cut out for raising a fourteen-year-old girl, I don’t know how else to convince him.
“Everything I do and say is wrong. She won’t leave the house, but also, I’m kinda glad because I don’t want those vultures outside to say anything to or about her.”
The internet had a field day when the news broke. My name and face were plastered everywhere. More than usual. Someone paid for their kids’ college with the pictures sold to the tabloids of me in my black suit, bent over two coffins, my hands resting on each, eyes closed.
I can’t even fucking bury my parents without the world trying to tear me down.
But I won’t let them tear my sister down simply to get a piece of me.
Erik nudges me out of the way to assess the inside of my refrigerator. “You might want to start with buying some groceries.”
I don’t cook, and I certainly don’t grocery shop. I have people for that.
The only items I have in my fridge are water, sports drinks, Greek yogurt, and eggs. I’ve been ordering in every day since we returned from Iowa, though I have my chef scheduled to drop off some meals tomorrow.
Leaning my elbows on the kitchen island, I focus my attention on the pattern of striations in the white marble.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I can’t be…
a dad. I don’t know how to take care of another human.
Especially one who’s fifteen years younger than I am who cries literally every time she looks at me. ”
Erik takes a swig of his water and sets it down, eyes scanning my place, pristine from the cleaning service, before pinning me with his dark stare. “Then why don’t you try to be her brother instead?”
I huff an aggravated sound. “I don’t know how to do that either.”
He strokes the back of Kai’s little head. “Maybe that’s part of the reason she’s so upset. You went home, what? Once or twice a year?” I don’t need to answer because he knows. “Maybe work on getting to know each other again.”
Yeah, sure, that sounds good, but it’s easier said than done.
After I was born, my parents had trouble becoming pregnant again, so they figured it would just be me. But then in my sophomore year of high school, after my mom turned forty-one, surprise!
She got pregnant with my sister, but it wasn’t easy, and Paisley arrived really early.
She was a sickly baby with an infection that caused her to lose most of her hearing.
She spent months in the hospital before she could come home, but I recall being attached to my baby sister from day one.
As soon as she started walking, she’d come to my high school games, and I doted on her, spending as much time as I could with her.
But college came fast—and the draft even faster.
She grew up in Cedar Falls, while I spent years away from her in Alabama and then in Pennsylvania. Now, I barely know her.
She certainly doesn’t know me, and she doesn’t seem like she wants to know me either.
“You talked to the counselor?” Erik asks, drawing my attention up to him, and when I shrug, it’s his turn to heave a tired sigh. “You have to. You need to wrap your head around all of this.”
Erik is into all that hippie-dippie horseshit of yoga and therapy, but that’s not me.
That’s not what I do. The team is required to have small-and large-group meetings with the psychologist to maintain our mental game on the field and good relationships with teammates off the field, but the Founders also have a counselor on staff for individual sessions. For more personal matters, I guess.
But I don’t talk about my feelings, and I especially won’t expose any of my weaknesses.
“I’m not gonna give the front office more of a reason to trash my contract.”
“They’re not going to break your contract.” Although his voice isn’t as sure as when he calls plays in the huddle. When he knows we’re gonna score.
I scrub my hands over my face, thinking about how Coach Roberts wouldn’t even acknowledge me after the Bowl game. The phone call from my agent informing me I’d been dropped from all my endorsement deals. And, of course, there was Malcolm.
He’d given me a reprieve for the last few days to “adjust” to my new life, but he’s been texting daily to make sure I’m not doing anything stupid.
He doesn’t need to. Ever since that phone call weeks ago, I haven’t done much of anything besides stare out of windows, remembering my parents’ parting words to me.
“We didn’t raise you to be this way,” my mom said two nights before the accident. “We didn’t raise you to throw away everything you’ve worked so hard for.”
“We’ll always love you, son,” my dad added. “We just wish you’d remember we love you for being you, not someone else you think you need to be.”
I haven’t been sleeping well, haunted by those words.
By the person my parents thought I was, by the persona the world believed was true, by the future I couldn’t seem to see.
I can’t find a way out of any of it.
“Training camp starts next month…” I meet Erik’s eyes. “What am I supposed to do with Paisley?”
He considers this for a while, splitting his attention between the hall that leads to Paisley’s room and his three-month-old son. “What does she want to do?”
“Fuck if I know. Go back in time to ask my parents not to go out that night?”
He winces, and I plow my fingers through my hair. “I’m not cut out for this. I can’t do it. My aunt offered to take Paisley, and I think—”
“Are you kidding me?” Erik’s voice rises enough that it sets me back on my heels.
He has a wicked temper, though it very rarely shows.
“I know you are having a hard time with this new reality, but she is your sister. She needs you. She needs to feel loved and supported and not to be shipped off to yet another place she doesn’t know.
At least here she has her brother. So don’t you dare fucking finish that sentence. ”
As much as I need my best friend in my corner, I’m not about to be lectured by somebody who has two living parents and a bunch of siblings.
I cut my hand through the air. “Fuck you and your high horse, assuming it’s so easy.
I don’t have anyone. I’m not like you. I don’t have a huge family to rely on.
I have no one.” I slam my fist on the island, hoping to rid the stinging in my eyes and nose, the sudden pain in my chest. “I don’t have anyone to help me.
I don’t have anyone I can call at the drop of a hat. Fuck, I don’t even have…”
My voice wavers, and I lower my gaze to the floor, clearing my throat at the sudden realization that I don’t have anywhere to go for holidays anymore.
I won’t have anyone in the stands cheering me on.
Even if they were disappointed in me, my parents still picked up the phone when I called, but I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have anyone to call.
Erik rounds the island and tows me into a hug, careful of the baby between us.
He holds the back of my head, like he does on the field, slapping my helmet.
“You have me. You have the team, the coaches, and the front office. We will get you the help you need. You just can’t give up.
Not on yourself, and not on your sister. She needs you most of all.”
I nod, blinking away my blurry vision.
Erik pats the back of my head. “I love you, all right?”
I nod again, my throat three times its normal size.
“And I got your back. Always.”
I sniff and clear the boulder in my windpipe with a cough. “Yeah, thanks.”
“You don’t have to say it, but I know you love me too.”
That pulls a rough laugh out of me. “Yeah, you fucker.”
Really, if I hadn’t had Erik with me during that weekend of the funeral, I don’t know what I would have done. He stayed when no one else did. Not even Valerie. She came for the service and left almost immediately after. Something about a shoot.
Made me not feel so bad about the Key West girls.
Which only proved my parents’ point.
Who the hell had I become?
I blow out a stuttered breath and shuffle toward the living room, with Erik following behind, murmuring a few quiet words to his son.
When we sit, he takes the baby out of the carrier and hands him over to me.
I wouldn’t say I’m comfortable holding him—this being only the third or fourth time—but in my very limited experience with babies, I think this one’s pretty easy.
He snuggles up in the crook of my arm as Erik digs through a bag I didn’t notice he brought, retrieving a bottle, which he also hands to me.
“What do I do?” I ask, not sure if I’m holding Kai right.
“Keep his head up a little higher. Yeah, like that. You got it.”
Kai starts in on the bottle like he’s never eaten before, formula dribbling out of his mouth, and Erik finds a soft cloth that he tucks around my forearm, so I can clean him up, and my best friend chuckles.
“You’re a total natural. Who says you can’t be a dad?”
That’s when Kai lets loose a monstrous sound, bubbly and warm against my side, and I nearly throw him back to Erik. “Me. I say I can’t be a dad because I am not dealing with that.”
Erik lays his kid out on my sofa, and when I realize what he’s doing, I toss my hands up. “Not on the leather sofa!”
“It’s fine.” He pays me no mind as he strips Kai’s onesie off to get to his diaper. It takes five wet wipes to clean that baby of his mess, and I shake my head.
“Are we sure he’s human and not part animal?”
“Nah. Just got those Rivera genes.” Erik holds him up, noisily kissing Kai’s cheek until he grins, drool making its way down his chin.
“He is cute, though,” I admit, and Erik nods.
“Takes after his mother, thank god.”
“How’s Molly doing?”
“Good. Out with Nadine now. That’s why I thought we’d stop by.”
“Nadine?” I scratch at my jaw, prickly with a few weeks’ worth of a beard.
“She’s staying with us for the summer,” Erik explains, and I fold my arms over my chest.
“Why?” Not that I care. Only making conversation.
“She’s kinda down lately. Her job is…wearing on her.”
“Still teaching?”
“Yeah. I thought she could stay with us for the summer to get her out of her funk.”
I barely hold back my dubious snort. That girl has always been in a funk. So uptight she could shit diamonds. No sense of humor whatsoever.
“You know,” he starts, head tipped to the side like he’s studying a new play, “she might be able to help you.”
I tug at my ear. “Run that by me again.”
“Nadine might be able to help you out.” He tucks Kai against his chest. “It’s kind of perfect, actually. She’s experienced with kids Paisley’s age and knows ASL.”
Though I can infer what he’s implying, I need him to spell it out for me because… No.
Not Nadine Rivera. The first time we met, she called me an asshole. The second time, she told me it was a good thing my head was so big, to make up for the size of my dick.
“What do you think your sister can help me with?”
“You could hire her to help with Paisley. Like a nanny.”
“No, that’s not… You think… Would she?”
Erik shrugs. “Maybe. You know how she is…”
I stare blankly at him. Because, no, I don’t.
“She’s always down to help, if needed. When I told her about what happened with your parents, I think she was ready to hop on the plane. Especially when I told her about Paisley.”
I sink back against the cushions, cracking my knuckles, thinking of the sharp-tongued woman. For being only a few inches over five feet, she sure carries herself like she’s ten feet tall. Looks sweet, but she’s poison underneath those blue eyes and soft lips.
“I could talk to her, if you want,” Erik goes on. “She understands the demands of your life, and you know you can trust her.”
Good points. But still…
After that time I suggested she’d be more relaxed if she got laid, I highly doubt she’d be excited to help me.
But then Paisley skulks around the corner, her long hair down around her face, her T-shirt and shorts way too big for her.
She looks miserable and barely spares a glance in the direction of the living room before she opens a few cabinets, searching for food and clearly not finding anything to her liking since I don’t keep anything fourteen-year-olds enjoy.
Mostly just protein bars and single servings of habanero BBQ almonds.
She screeches her annoyance, grabs a Gatorade, and then stomps back to her room.
Erik raises his brows in my direction, and I acquiesce with a dip of my chin. “All right. Talk to your sister.”