Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Nate
Monday night I’m on my couch with Blake, Grant, and Holden, watching Buffalo deliver a master class in how football is supposed to be played.
My living room is finally being used for the purpose the designer allegedly intended, which brings the total number of rooms in this house currently justifying their existence to three. Progress.
“Man, I hate that we might have to go through them for the Bowl.” Blake groans at the screen from the far end of the couch, sprawled the way only a receiver can sprawl, six-two of long, rangy build arranged like furniture is a suggestion, boots crossed at the ankle on my ottoman.
The cowboy hat is parked on the armrest beside him, within arm’s reach, the way other men keep their phones.
He’s got the kind of open, sun-easy face that sells out jersey stock in an afternoon, and the boots and the hat are pure conviction: South Carolina raised him, but Texas is who he’s decided to be, and Blake MacArthur commits.
“They’re not that good.” Grant delivers this with his signature nothing-fazes-me calm, feet up on my coffee table.
“I mean, fine — Nash is a hell of a quarterback, and their defense is basically the Spartans at Thermopylae. But New England sucks this year. Anybody looks immortal against New England.”
I’m half watching and half absent, because internally I am hosting a private existential crisis, catered, black tie.
Here’s the thing. Sunday, I walked onto that field in New York fully braced to lose.
Not worried, resigned. I’d run the projections and the projections were grim: by the third quarter, Coach benches me, sends in Cash to mop up my mess, and Cash, let’s be honest, would have wept with joy at the opportunity.
I had accepted this future. I’d made peace.
Because Saturday I coached a Little League game instead of doing literally any of my pre-game protocol.
The protocol I’ve run without exception since college: film all day, visualization, silence, early bed.
Instead I spent the flight to New York cramming film like a student who partied through the semester, and that night I barely slept, partly running my reads, and partly, if we’re doing honesty, because I could not evict the sound of Callie Carter laughing from my head.
Fine, she was laughing at me, at Darius turning my coaching debut into content, but there were about ten seconds where I genuinely considered asking Darius to keep going, just to keep the laugh running.
On top of which, I was two weeks and change into Morrison’s party ban, which by my own long-standing theory meant my pressure valve was welded shut and the boiler was due to blow all over MetLife Stadium.
Every input predicted disaster.
I completed ninety percent of my passes. I ran for two touchdowns. I made New York look nearly as silly as Buffalo is currently making New England look.
Which means everything I believed about my own machinery is wrong.
The monk discipline, the sacred routine, the no-people rule, the entire operating system I built my life on, apparently wasn’t what was winning games.
I played the best football of my season distracted, under-prepared, sleep-deprived, and thinking about a woman’s laugh.
So what exactly has the routine been for?
What is any of it for? Coach’s voice, unhelpfully, on a loop: the emptiest man I have ever seen.
Turns out you don’t need to be empty to win. That’s somehow worse.
“Can we address the elephant in the room, please?” Grant says, and yanks me back into my own living room.
“You mean how Darius is about to get fined again for the crap he talks on that podcast?” Holden offers.
Ah yes. Darius did a special live episode after the New York game in which he discussed the actual game for roughly ninety seconds and then delivered a fifteen-minute keynote on how the younger brother of New York’s quarterback, a college kid, is the most useless player in the history of organized football.
Del Rio, the older one, took it personally, New York filed a formal complaint, unsportsmanlike conduct, league decision pending.
We’ve already run the betting pool on the fine: over or under ten grand.
I took the under. If it lands, I pocket five thousand dollars of the easiest money in Texas.
“See, what they don’t get is Darius just likes talking,” Blake says with a shrug. “It’s not even malice. It’s a hobby. Like you.” He points at Holden.
“The ref was blind.” Holden’s voice rises, a man freshly and personally re-offended by a memory.
During the New York game, Holden composed and began delivering an entire address on the subject of the side judge’s eyesight, including a generous offer to personally fund the man’s visit to an eye doctor.
It was, honestly, beautifully structured, thesis, supporting evidence, charitable close, and it’s a miracle for all our wallets that the ref caught maybe a third of it before I physically relocated Holden to the other end of the sideline.
“No. No.” Grant is staring directly at me. “Not that elephant. The elephant I’m referring to is six-three, and on Saturday it stood at a fence having a friendly chat with Callie Carter like they’re old pals.”
I stare back at Grant. I am going to kill Grant. I’m going to walk him down to my home gym and introduce his smug, pretty face to a forty-five-pound plate, and at the funeral I will tell beautiful lies about him.
“I witnessed it,” Blake volunteers, raising a hand like we’re in class.
“The Callie Carter?” Holden’s eyebrows go up. “What was the play there, slip poison in her coffee?”
“Her kid plays on the team I coach.” Absolute truth. “And I talked to her about her kid. He was having trouble on the field. I handled it.” Also truth. I am a fortress of technically-truths.
“Right.” Grant hasn’t blinked. “What he’s leaving out is that the woman laughed at something, and this man looked at her like a puppy watching its owner come up the driveway.”
“One, I did not.” Strong defense, Rivers. Airtight. The jury is convinced. “Two, thanks to Morrison, I have not been in the same zip code as a woman in over two weeks. At this point a retiree with dentures could get a second look from me. It’s not her. It’s scarcity.”
“Why is Morrison riding you so hard, anyway?” Holden asks, and Grant opens his mouth to protest the subject change, and I could genuinely kiss Holden on his head.
“Because I’m bad for the franchise’s image, apparently.”
I’m getting good at this. The lying. That’s a sentence a man should worry about, and I do, in the designated worrying hours.
Because Grant doesn’t know about the photos either, not from me, and that guts me nearly as much as sitting on Danny’s couch and lying to his face did.
Grant is my best friend alongside Danny.
If I told him tonight, right here over Buffalo highlights, he’d understand all of it in thirty seconds.
I’m not ashamed of that night. I’d do it again tomorrow.
But every person who knows is one more place the story can leak from, and the story doesn’t end my career, it ends what’s left of Danny’s name.
So the circle stays at three: me, coach, and the man who messed up my life.
And I hope to God no one else has these images, especially the woman whose laugh is keeping me awake and whose hobby is making our lives miserable.
“Nate.” Grant leans forward, and the grin’s gone; this is the other Grant, the one guys go to when it’s real.
“As your best friend, I’m saying this once.
I get that coaching that team wasn’t your call, that has Morrison’s fingerprints all over it.
But be careful. That woman is a nuclear bomb with a keyboard.
She is not just a pretty face with a killer body and a sharp mouth. ”
Yeah. Except her face is pretty, and her body is a genuine problem, and the sharp mouth is attached to a brain that can meet mine at the line of scrimmage and make me forget why I was there. And her laugh has been keeping me up at night for days.
I say none of this, obviously. These men would waterboard me with Gatorade and livestream it.
“Noted,” I say, and steal the remote.
And the next afternoon, with Grant’s warning still sitting in my ear where he left it, I pack the equipment bag anyway.
Cleats, cones, the whistle, a sleeve of juice boxes I bought with my own money like a man with a secret.
Because here’s what I didn’t say to that room: I’ve read the scouting report on Callie Carter, cover to cover, twice.
I know exactly what she’s capable of. I’m going back to that field on Tuesday regardless, and the fact that I want to is a problem I’ve decided to have.
#
Callie
Tuesday practice, and Eli is more locked in than I have ever seen him, and my serious boy treats everything like a professional obligation, so the baseline was already high. But I don’t recognize the kid on that field. In the best way.
“Eli’s really good,” Finn observes from the chair next to mine, around his straw, connoisseur of both juice and football.
“He is, baby.”
I would love to tell you it has nothing to do with the conversation on that bench Saturday.
But since that conversation, he hasn’t asked once whether Travis is coming, and he’s attacked every drill like it owes him money.
I asked him what Rivers said. He gave me nothing, state secrets, just told me, with great dignity, that Coach shared his secret for staying focused on the field.
Eloquent, for eight. And it’s killing me that I don’t know what was said.
That’s the journalist. The mom doesn’t care about the transcript; the mom is just watching her kid walk around with his head up and trying not to cry into a juice box about it.
When practice wraps, Finn sprints to Eli and begs him to throw for a bit, and Eli, benevolent older-brother mode engaged, obliges.
I check my phone, a message from Priya about a vintage wedding dress she must acquire for the collection, complete with auction countdown, when the corner of my eye registers a crime in progress.
Finn throws the ball. Finn, God love him, throws the ball so catastrophically off-target that despite Eli’s genuine lunge for it, the ball sails past everything and hits Nate Rivers directly in the face.
“Fuck.” The man doubles over, hands to his nose.
I’m on my feet instantly, because my five-year-old has just executed the equivalent of a Toyota rear-ending a Lamborghini. My son being the Toyota. My uninsured son.
“Language,” Finn chimes, reflexive, to the bleeding quarterback.
I am not laughing. I am running the actuarial tables. What if it’s broken? The Carter family: taking down the Outlaws one man at a time, a dynasty of destruction. Can he play Sunday with a broken nose? He can, right? They make masks. Please, God, let there be masks.
“Let me see.” I reach him and pull his hands away from his face, and he lets me. His eyes are watering in the involuntary way noses insist on, the great equalizer; it gets Pro Bowlers and preschoolers alike.
“Please tell me it’s not broken,” he groans.
“It’s not broken. You’re bleeding, though.” I run my thumbs as gently as I can down the length of his nose, straight, no give, no grind, my hands cupped along his jaw to hold him still. His face is very warm. This is a clinical observation.
“I forgot the medical kit today, of all days —” Johnson arrives at a sprint, stricken.
“Eli. Med kit, back of my car. Go.” He’s off like the fastest eight-year-old anyone’s ever seen, and I keep Rivers’s head tilted forward with both hands, which requires him, significantly taller than me, a fact I’m newly and unhelpfully aware of, to hunch toward me like a question mark.
Eli returns at a dead run; Johnson cracks the kit; I take gauze and press it, soaking up the worst of it, watching the flow slow, then quit.
“You’re fine,” I announce. “It’s stopped. You broke a blood vessel, not a nose.”
“I’m sorry.” Finn’s voice arrives tiny, and I glance over: bottom lip going, eyes enormous, a boy watching his hero bleed by his own hand.
“Hey, it’s okay, buddy. I’ve had way worse.
” Rivers’s voice gentles completely, blood-dotted gauze and all.
“I just wasn’t expecting to catch one with my face today.
That’s usually Eli’s move.” A wet giggle from Finn; crisis passing.
Then Rivers’s eyes come back to me. “Stop looking at me like that, sugar.”
“Like what?” I genuinely don’t know how I’m looking at him.
“Like my nose is about to fall off my face. You ruled it not broken. Bleeding’s stopped. I’m cleared to return.” He offers half a smile under the gauze.
My hands are still on his face.
“Rivers, I’m already the most hated woman in this city for what I wrote.” I keep my voice light, almost cheerful, because light is the only safe altitude right now. “Breaking your nose would’ve made the title permanent. They’d have retired it with me.”
“Yeah?” His eyes are fixed on mine, green on green, and there is no reason, none, for that observation to be occurring — “well, then I’d have told everyone I slipped in the bathroom, sugar.”
And something goes wrong in my face. Heat, climbing, uninvited, absurd, I am twenty-nine years old, I am a mother of two, I do not blush at quarterbacks, and I pull my hands off his face like the man is a stove.
“I’m fine,” he says, clearing his throat, straightening to his full and unnecessary height.
“Yes. You’re fine,” I agree.
We are all fine. Everyone here is completely fine.