Chapter 6 #3
I’ve assigned blame and it is distributed as follows.
Cash Turner: because ever since the gala story, every time I see the woman in her mom jeans my brain runs an unauthorized render in a cocktail dress and heels, legs recalculated to endless.
Morrison: because his party ban means it’s been two weeks, and two weeks is apparently where my brain starts fixating on the best-looking woman in proximity, and the best-looking woman in proximity, twice a week, on a schedule, is Callie Carter.
These are just circumstances; they mean nothing.
Deprivation plus proximity. I could get a sports scientist to diagram it.
I walk through the house to the kitchen, open the fridge, and close it again.
My house is a sad place. I know this the way you know a stat: verified, sourced, undisputed.
It’s expensive and modern and fully furnished and an interior designer chose every object in it; I have never picked out so much as a lamp.
In five bedrooms there are exactly two rooms with me in them.
The closet, the clothes, the belts, the watches, that’s all mine, and the office, where my jerseys are framed and there are pictures of Mom and me and a shelf of game balls.
That’s the complete inventory of Nate Rivers in the Nate Rivers residence.
If Coach ever walked through here, he wouldn’t say a word.
He’d just take the sunglasses off and look at me the same way he did when he called me empty.
My house and I are practically kindred souls.
I open the fridge again out of spite. Inside: a neat stack of my nutritionist’s meal-prep containers, labeled by macro.
Milk, for the protein shakes. Nothing else.
A thirty-two-year-old man lives here on prepped chicken and shakes, in a house he didn’t decorate, between workouts he didn’t schedule.
I should call Callie Carter myself and pitch her the headline: The Sad and Empty Life of QB1. Exclusive photos of a fridge.
Callie again. Why does every third thought route through —
I pull out my phone and almost call Grant.
Pocket it. What am I going to say? Hey man, you know Callie Carter?
I’m having thoughts about her and they’re not rational.
Grant would have it on a group chat by midnight with a poll attached.
I pull the phone out and almost call Danny.
Physically wince. Pocket it. That’s not a worse idea; that’s a war crime.
Out again. Scrolling. And then I land on the name that should have been first.
Deacon.
Leon ‘Deacon’ Briggs. Twelve-year veteran, center, protector of my blind side and my privacy in equal measure.
Took me under his wing my rookie year and has been bedrock ever since.
The man has a wife who outranks him, kids who dogpile him, and the only functioning moral compass in our locker room.
I dial before I can talk myself out of it, and only once it’s ringing do I realize I have no idea what I’m going to say. Too late. No retreat.
“Hey, Nate.”
“Hey, man. You… got a minute?”
“Sure. Give me a second, the kids are staging something in the living room and there will be casualties.” A pause; a door closes; the shrieking goes distant. “What’s up?”
“Have you ever…” I stall out. Have you ever had thoughts about the woman who wrecked your best friend’s life and could end yours?
No. Reroute. “Have you ever doubted your own read on someone? Like, you were dead certain this person was the enemy. Book closed. And then time passes, you get more film on them, and you start to… see their side of it. You still disagree. But now you understand it, and the understanding won’t go away. ”
A long pause.
“Nate. You don’t sound drunk. But are you?”
“Stone-cold sober.” Unfortunately.
“Hm. Okay. Then to answer your question, and this stays off the locker-room floor, I mean it, you remember when Holden got drafted? Year after you, I think. Could not stand the guy. Every game, some fresh nonsense, somebody looks at him sideways, he’s telling them where to go.
Told a ref, to his face, that he was a dumbass.
Cost us yardage, cost us fines. And it didn’t help that the man comes from money and wears it like cologne, we all make more than people should, but Holden showed up already rich and acted like consequences were for other tax brackets. ”
“I remember the ref thing. There’s a compilation.”
“There’s several. So one night I take him out, couple of beers, and I ask him straight: why do you do this?
Some of us want to stay on the field. And he looks at me and says he does not care what people think of him.
Never has. Calls a ref a loser, sucks to suck.
That’s the whole philosophy.” Deacon exhales, and I can hear the shrug in it.
“Now, I don’t agree with that. Not then, not today.
But I understand it now. Holden’s not performing for the crowd, and there’s something almost clean about it.
Point is: you can disagree with somebody’s whole operating system and still respect them, even like them, once you understand why they run it. ” A beat. “Ask my wife.”
He laughs at his own joke, warm and easy, a man in a house full of noise he chose on purpose.
“Thanks, man.” And I mean it more than the two words carry. “I needed that.”
I hang up, stand in my catalog kitchen for one more minute, and then go take a very cold shower, on the theory that thermodynamics give and thermodynamics can take Callie Carter out of my head.
The theory fails.