Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Nate
Walking into Coach’s office has always felt like walking into the principal’s office. Nobody gets called in here because he’s about to hand you an award. You get called in here because something is wrong, and the walk down the hallway is for thinking about what you did.
The thing is, I can’t come up with anything. We won Sunday by three scores. We haven’t even had practice yet today, so my window for screwing something up has been, generously, four hours, and I spent three of them throwing routes to a ball machine. My conscience is as clean as it gets.
Which is exactly why my gut doesn’t like this.
Coach Hardin is what you’d get if West Texas decided to build a man out of leftover ranch materials.
Gravel voice, mirrored sunglasses even indoors half the time, the emotional range of a fence post, and the ability to make a grown man want to apologize for things he hasn’t done yet.
Me included. I’ve stared down six-man blitzes with more composure than I walk into this office.
He’s behind his desk when I come in, arms crossed, giving me nothing. But it’s not Coach who catches my attention.
“Did someone die,” I ask, “and you’re here to feast on the corpse?”
David Morrison, the team’s PR director, doesn’t even blink.
The man could be a very well-dressed debt collector or sleek Mafia enforcer with that look.
He thinks in headlines and quarter-hours and I’ve never once seen him sweat.
There is nothing in the media world that happens concerning this team that he doesn’t know about.
“Yours, from the look of it.” He holds out his phone.
I take it, and my stomach drops through the floor and keeps going, somewhere down past the equipment room.
I know the place immediately. Saturday night.
The club on the east side where Danny asked me to come, where Danny’s texts had gotten weird enough that I went.
The pictures are dark, shot from across the room, but not dark enough.
There I am, leaning in to hear some woman over the music.
There’s the table. The bottles. And there, in the middle of the frame like it was staged for a jury, lines of white powder on a mirrored tray.
The woman isn’t a problem. The bottles aren’t a problem. The powder is a nuclear warhead with my face next to it.
“I have a life outside this building, Morrison.” I hand the phone back like it’s nothing, because the first rule of a pass rush is you never let them see you flinch. “I’m not a monk. I’m allowed to talk to women. I’m allowed to have a drink.”
“And the white powder is, what, powdered sugar? For your sweet tooth?” He raises one eyebrow, patient as a vulture on a fence line.
“It’s not mine.” The words come out flat and hard, because they’re true, and the truth is the only card I’m holding. “Test me. Blood, urine, hair, whatever your lab wants. Tonight, right now. I like to party, but I don’t touch drugs. Not recreational, not otherwise. Never have.”
Like to party is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence, and I know it.
I party because I need somewhere to put it all down, the five a.m. alarms, the film, the season, the whole gladiator machine of my life, and for a few loud hours in a place where nobody needs anything from my arm, it works.
I’m not explaining that to anyone, and definitely not to David Morrison, who would find a way to put it in a press release.
“Oh, we’ll test.” Morrison pockets the phone.
“Because when a media outlet gets hold of these, and one will, there will be questions, and I intend to answer them with a paper trail. So. Weekly screenings, starting today. Documented by an external lab, not our medical staff, so no one can accuse this organization of doctoring records.” A beat. “Again.”
The again hangs in the room like smoke. Three years since the article, since the purge, since guys I came up with got boxed out of the league, and this franchise still flinches at the word medical.
“And effective immediately,” Morrison continues, “you will not set foot in a bar, a club, or a private party. If you are ever again photographed near a bar, it had better be at your retirement party.”
“The fuck? You don’t get to tell me how to live my life.
” It comes out louder than I planned. I’m livid, and it’s got layers.
One, because he does not get to tell me how to live my life.
Two, and this is the part I keep behind my teeth, because I need my damned outlet the way other people need sleep.
“I’m up at five every morning. I run, I lift, I’m the first one in this building and the last one out.
I have a diet that consists mostly of chicken and broccoli.
I’m the hardest worker on that field and in that gym, I win games, I’ve got one of the best stat lines of any quarterback this season.
Partying and women are how I come down. It doesn’t hurt anyone.
I’m allowed to be a human being for a few hours a week. ”
“It hurts you.”
Coach’s voice. First thing he’s said since I walked in, and it lands like a knife between my shoulder blades.
Not because he’s right. He’s wrong. It’s how I stay sane, it’s maintenance, it’s the pressure valve, it’s the one part of my life that doesn’t have stats and seven competitors discussing my throw angle attached to it.
“You’re good, son. You’re right about all of it, the work, the numbers.
” Hardin leans forward, and his gravel drops half an octave, which for him is practically shouting.
“So here’s my question. What if you’re not as good as you could be?
What if the late nights and the liquor and the noise are the only thing standing between you and whatever your ceiling actually is?
You ever let yourself think about that?”
“Coach, I have never once gone out before a game. I never have more than a single drink during the season. I study film like a monk. I know my protections better than the coordinators do.”
But the seed’s already in the dirt, and he knows it, the old bastard. What if the partying isn’t recharge? What if it’s just noise, not the thing keeping me sane but the thing keeping me from finding out how good I could actually be? I’ve won a Super Bowl. What if it should have been two? Three?
“Son.” Hardin takes off the sunglasses, which he does maybe twice a season, and looks at me with forty years of Texas football behind his eyes. “You’re the best quarterback I have ever coached. And you are the emptiest man I have ever seen.”
The disappointment in his voice does something no defensive line has ever managed.
I could argue. I could invoke my contract, my agent, my leverage, remind them both what a franchise tag actually means and watch them get off my back.
I don’t. Because Coach thinks Morrison is right, and there’s exactly one man in this building whose opinion I can’t shrug off, and he’s currently cleaning his sunglasses like he didn’t just gut me with them.
“So.” Morrison clears his throat, smooth as a man reading a quarterly report over my body.
“Here is your redemption arc. The partying is over as of this conversation. And you’re going to buy back some goodwill.
There’s a youth league on the east side, their junior team needs a volunteer coach. Twice a week.”
“No.” I say it before he’s finished the sentence. “I’m not teaching eight-year-olds how to grip a ball while a fence line of parents backseat-coaches me. I have games. I have film. I have a season. I have other things to do.”
Other things, in my world, means working my body until it stops asking questions and partying until my brain goes quiet, but that’s not the point.
“Do hospital visits. Kids’ wards, signed jerseys, whatever photographs well.
I’ll smile till my face cramps. But not babysitting with a whistle.
” I look at Coach for backup, because surely. “It’ll wreck my practice schedule —”
“No, it won’t.” Morrison is too smug for his own good, which for him is a real achievement. “I already checked. Tuesdays and Thursdays you’re out of the building by three. Their practice starts at six. Their games are Saturdays —”
“Which I can’t attend, because in a fun coincidence, I also play football on weekends.” I look at Coach again. Come on.
“Which you will attend when your game schedule allows,” Morrison finishes, unbothered.
“And on top of it I’ll book the hospital visits, the school reading program, the animal shelter, whatever other wholesome content I can find, and we will wallpaper your image with it.
If that’s what it takes, I will find an entire orphanage and make you adopt it before I let this organization take another national scandal. Are we clear?”
I don’t answer, because there’s no version of the next hour where arguing gets me out of this room any freer than I walked in.
Fine. I’ll show up, I’ll be spectacularly bad at it, some league administrator will quietly ask Morrison to send a mascot instead, and I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled life inside a month. Everybody wins.
I’m almost to the door when Morrison decides to keep talking.
“And Rivers, stay away from Danny Alvarez. That’s not optional either. The man is rotten goods.”
I stop in my tracks.
“What did you just say?”
I’m not a fighter. Twelve years in this league and I’ve never thrown a punch that wasn’t play-action.
But right now I am one wrong syllable away from finding out what it costs to knock the PR director through his own crisis plan, and it must be visible from space, because Coach is on his feet before I’ve finished turning around.
“Nate.” Calm. Level. Reading the situation the way he reads a safety creeping into the box. “Locker room. Get ready for practice.”
I hold Morrison’s gaze one more beat. He looks back at me with the mild interest of a man watching an asset fluctuate.
“Keep Danny’s name out of your mouth,” I tell him, and I walk.