Chapter Fourteen Los Angeles to Chicago
On the flight to Chicago, Piper sat alone in the last row of the charter with his seatbelt loose across his lap. Most of the team had scattered quickly after boarding, players too tired to talk much, coaches already buried in tablets and game cut ups.
He stared out the window in a sort of daze.
He felt off in a way he couldn’t quite figure out.
There were two things sitting in him that wouldn’t reconcile: Jayson’s text, and underneath it the Four Seasons, Noah’s voice in the dark.
His ability to truly be in the moment with someone and not want it to end.
He couldn’t hold both at once, but he kept trying anyway. Every now and then one surfaced whole and sharp enough to make his teeth clench, and he’d push it back down and stare out the window and start again.
He reached for his phone, stared at the screen. No messages.
By the time the plane touched down, he had convinced himself he was exhausted, not rattled. He was still doing that math when he walked into the training facility before sunrise the next morning.
Piper moved through the quiet room with his Gucci duffle bag over one shoulder and his head down.
The locker room was almost empty.
He sat at his locker and began taping his wrists.
He thought about Jayson and the contract that ran how he lived his life.
Vivienne had warned him once. Are you willing to be destroyed for ten mil a year? Piper remembered that he had only been thinking about what Jayson had done for him when he was at his lowest point in life.
***
Seven Years Earlier
He had gotten the call at two in the morning when he was twenty-three. He had been in a facility not unlike this one, taping a wrist he had been icing for a week.
Piper got a call about an accident on Pacific Coast Highway. A car had gone off a cliff and exploded against the rocks where the surf pounded the shoreline. It was assumed the driver had been drinking since the driver was Piper’s father.
He had spent the next six hours in a waiting room in Santa Monica, wondering if maybe it might make it easier with a splash from his father’s flask.
Jayson had arrived by four a.m. That was the thing Piper had never examined.
He had assumed someone on staff had called him.
He had just been grateful that someone was there.
His parents had been at one of Jayson’s parties that night.
They had both been drinking. It was not unusual since they always drank a lot at parties and everywhere else for that matter.
They drank at nearly every event, a habit Piper had spent his whole life accepting as weather, something true about the people who raised him.
It happened on a curve they’d driven a hundred times. The fifth drink had been one too many for Dan.
Donna Ashton was nowhere to be found that evening. Piper later found out she had blacked out at the home of a very prominent movie star she had run into at the party after she and Dan got into a screaming match and Dan stormed out taking the car.
She had been having an affair with the actor for months. She had many affairs. Donna Ashton lived her life by one rule. If it felt good, she would keep doing the thing until the whole thing burned.
Jayson had sat beside him in the waiting room without speaking.
Later, when the house passed into Piper’s name, Jayson had managed everything.
The lawyers. The estate. The phone calls Piper couldn’t make.
The way grief had administrative requirements that nobody told you about until you were inside them.
He had thought it was love. Or the closest thing to it he had gotten.
***
Present Day
Tank walked into the locker room with Starbucks. He brought Piper his usual, a quad mocha.
He took one look at Piper and stopped.
“You look like shit.”
Piper kept taping. “Good morning to you, too, asshole. Thanks for the coffee.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
Tank set the coffee down on the bench and dropped onto the bench beside him.“You sleep at all?”
“A little.”
Tank looked at him. “What’s up with you lately?”
Piper grabbed the coffee. “What’s with the investigative reporting on me?”
“You got that look.”
Piper glanced over. “What look?”
Tank thought about it. “The one where you’re deep in conversation with Joan.”
Piper gave a half smile. He had told him about Joan years ago, and Tank continued to give him shit about her, or whatever the hell it was.
“It’s nothing, don’t worry about me, worry about catching my fucking throws today.”
“Deal,” Tank said as he picked up his coffee and took a drink. He didn’t ask anything else. That was part of why Piper trusted him. Tank got it that sometimes the best thing to do was just be there without prying too much. Piper would let him know in time.
After a minute he said, “Coach wants quarterbacks on the field in twenty.”
Tank stood, stretching his neck from side to side. “Try not to kill anybody.”
“No promises.”
Piper opened his phone. Still nothing from Noah.
***
By the time Piper stepped onto the field in Chicago, the air was frigid and it almost hurt to breathe.
“You’re two minutes fucking late Ashton,” Coach Ramirez said.
“Then I’m early by the rest of the world’s standards, coach.”
Ramirez grunted. “Cute, go warm up.”
The ball felt good in Piper's hand, and was the only thing that helped him forget why he was anxious in the first place.
He dropped back and fired the first throw into the chest of a receiver. It was a tight, clean spiral with real speed. The next rep got the same result.
“Piper, you’re driving too hard,” his coach said as he monitored the situation.
Piper took another snap from the assistant coach and hit the out route, and answered. “Shit, the arm’s doing too much.”
Piper reset and threw again. This one was deeper, the receiver having to stretch for it.
They moved through progression drills, then pressure simulations.
Piper liked the pressure work, because it kept him inside his body as his mind took a break.
He stepped through the collapsing pocket, felt the rush flash at the edge of his vision, and delivered one throw after another.
The ball was coming out hot enough now that even the receivers noticed the intensity.
One of them held onto a slant and flexed his hands afterward, “Fuck, bro.”
Piper gave him a look. “Catch it softer, bro.”
The receiver laughed and jogged back to the line.
By the time the rest of the offense joined them, Tank was already watching him with narrowed eyes. They ran the opening scripted series. Then Ramirez waved them into position.
Tank jogged past him on the reset. “You trying to make a point or start a fucking war?”
Piper wiped his palm on his towel. “Maybe both.”
“Well that’s fucking healthy.”
Piper almost told him to shut the fuck up, but didn’t. Tank would only take that as confirmation.
They reset. Another play and completion.
For maybe fifteen minutes, he forgot completely about anything else.
***
The game itself was the kind of win Piper preferred, clean.
Boring for the highlight reel and perfect for his body.
He threw for two hundred and seventy-four yards, two touchdowns, no turnovers.
Tank caught nine for a hundred and twelve yards.
The defense got three sacks. Final score: L.A. 27, Chicago 13.
On the flight back to L.A., he sat in the first row of the charter with his phone on the armrest. He continued to check every minute, just in case Noah texted him.
Joan, was it something I said?