Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Nate
I’m standing in the middle of the field somewhere between confusion and a full out-of-body experience.
My day started with the freak-out session that’s become standard issue lately: I spent Saturday doing Little League instead of the Nate Rivers Special, workout, film, workout, rest, and then I compounded the felony by asking Callie Carter to spend two days with me, which has been doing things to my heart rate that have no business happening before kickoff.
I don’t panic the way most people panic.
No pacing, no jitters, nothing a camera would catch.
It’s quiet. On the outside, Nate Rivers is functioning: pre-game ritual executed, cleats, pads, jersey, the three songs I always listen to on repeat, Coach’s motivational speech in its entirety — ‘go get ‘em’, all systems nominal.
I tape my wrists the way I have ten thousand times, flex my hands, done thinking about it.
Callie once watched me do this exact thing and walked into a door frame. I've been taping slower ever since.
Nobody in that locker room knows that internally I’ve concluded I have jinxed myself so thoroughly that the stadium will probably structurally fail and bury us all at the coin toss.
And then we won. And I’m still not entirely sure how, which is a problem, because I’m the quarterback; how is my whole department.
The first three quarters were a slow-motion disaster.
And here’s the maddening part, I wasn’t playing badly.
My reads were right. My throws were on point.
Every individual play made sense, and somehow the sum kept collapsing: a hold here, a drop there, a tipped ball, a stalled drive.
We could not buy our way into the end zone.
We kicked field goals like it was a hobby, and by the end of the third quarter we were down twenty.
I sat on that bench, head in my hands, running the ugliest math of my season. Watching kids win a Little League game is costing me this one. Callie Carter is a distraction, and the distraction is costing me this one. The old religion, chanting.
Except.
Except I’m happier than I’ve been in years.
Fuller than I’ve been in years. I’ve won a Super Bowl, I know exactly what the top of the professional world feels like, I’ve stood on it, confetti in my facemask.
I have never once felt its equivalent in my life as a person.
Saturday, watching a pack of eight-year-olds mob each other over a win I game-planned, I felt something in a part of me I didn’t know had wiring.
And the woman who was three bleacher rows away from me, the laugh, the sharp tongue, the absolute refusal to accept nonsense from me or anyone, makes me feel like a person who exists outside a depth chart.
So the problem wasn’t Saturday, and it wasn’t Callie. The problem was on that field, twenty points wide, and solving it is literally my job.
Fourth quarter, I was everywhere. They couldn’t touch me.
I ran when I had no business running, extended plays that were dead on arrival, threw one ball I have no memory of throwing that Blake caught with two men on his back.
I dragged the whole offense up the mountain by the collar and we won, by two, fine, a field goal margin, ugly as sin, but the scoreboard doesn’t grade on style.
So now I’m standing at midfield like a man who lost his keys, and Grant hits me at a dead sprint and jumps on me, and I nearly go down, because Grant is two-twenty before the gear and I just ran a quarter like a man being chased by debt collectors.
“You glorious bastard!” he’s screaming into my face.
“I can feel the love.” I’m laughing, wrecked and adrenaline-high, which for me is the best chemical state on the menu. See, I don’t need to do drugs. I get a high dose of adrenaline weekly and I live for that.
I shower and change in record time, then press. I sit next to Coach and endure, because I have somewhere to be, and every question is a fence between me and it.
“Nate, you’re currently the highest-rated quarterback in the league. Your numbers have exploded over the last four games. What’s different from last year?”
My greatest enemy, Callie Carter.
I do not say that.
“New workout regimen, new nutrition plan, better rest schedule.” I let a beat land. “And full offense taken, by the way, you’re making it sound like I was garbage last year. I was top three.” The room laughs on schedule.
“What clicked between the third quarter and the fourth?”
I stopped being a dumbass about my entire life.
“Refocus. Fixed some minor errors.”
The clown show wraps and I’m halfway to the parking lot when Deacon falls in beside me.
“Got a minute?”
“I don’t, actually. Meeting someone.” I keep walking.
“Fine. Then I’ll walk.” And he does, matching me stride for stride, twelve years of vet savvy in how casually he does it. “Grant says you’ve gotten friendly with Callie Carter.”
Grant needs to keep his enormous mouth shut.
Except, no, I see the play as it develops.
Grant knows that if he brings it to me directly, I tell him where to file his concerns.
So he escalated. He sent Dad. That’s not gossip; that’s a structured intervention, and it’s almost touching, and I’m still going to kill him.
“I am. In fact, I’m spending my off day with her.” Deacon is good people, the vault of this locker room; things go into Leon Briggs and do not come out, so I hand him the truth straight.
“I see.” He absorbs it, recalibrates. “We’re just worried, Nate. The woman has a reputation.”
“A reputation for what?” I stop walking and face him.
“For doing her job? Tell me one sentence she wrote that was false. One. You can’t, and neither can I, and believe me, I’ve looked.
You and me hating what that article cost people we love doesn’t make her a bad person.
It makes her the only one in the whole city who did her job that year. ”
“Fair.” He puts his palms up and retreats a step, and I genuinely can’t tell whether I’ve persuaded him or just look sufficiently deranged that he’s declining the parking-lot debate. Probably both.
And here’s what I notice, driving off: I meant it.
Every word, no lawyer in my head drafting it.
I still wish she’d never written that piece, or written it quieter, aimed it better; that wish doesn’t expire.
But somewhere between a shed and a hallway, defending Callie Carter stopped being a position I argue and started being a reflex.
Thirty minutes later, she’s in my passenger seat, her weekend bag is in my trunk, and San Antonio is shrinking in the mirror.
“Stressful game,” she offers.
“You watched?” I’m grinning before I can stop it, because there is something embarrassingly good about knowing she watched me.
“I’m a sports journalist, Nate. I write about football professionally.” A beat, and I catch the smile she’s trying to keep out of it. “Yes. I watched.”
“You know what, next home game, you should come. Bring the boys.” I glance over. “No boxes, nothing conspicuous, unless you want the box, but I can get you the best seats in that stadium that no camera ever finds. Eli would lose his mind.”
“I think we could do that.” Soft, pleased, trying not to be. “They’d love it.”
The playlist rotates, three notes into the next song, and my hand is on the skip button before conscious thought.
“Nope. Not this one.”
“Hey, I love that song.” She reaches for the screen; I swat her hand away with the gravity of a bomb-squad lead.
“There are three songs I am not permitted to hear outside a locker room, and that’s one of them.”
“I’m sorry, permitted?”
“You know athletes are superstitious. Some guys have to step onto the field right foot first. Some pour out the first sip of every water bottle. Deacon’s worn the same undershirt, no, that’s Grant, Grant has the undershirt. Point is, everyone’s got the thing.”
“Okay…”
“Those are my three prep songs. Locker room only, on repeat, every game since college. Hearing them anywhere else burns the magic. That’s the rule.
I don’t make the rules; I just obey them completely.
” I deliver this with the solemnity of a man reading his own death sentence, because I am completely serious.
“This is extremely useful intelligence.” She’s laughing now. “If I ever need to get rid of you, I just play them on repeat until you flee the building.”
“You’re evil.” I say it like a compliment, because from me, right now, it is one.
My house at Lake Travis exists because someone once convinced me that real estate is a smart investment vehicle.
The flaw in the plan: I bought a property I love, and you can’t take profits on a thing you refuse to sell.
Twelve acres of woods rolling down to the water, a three-bedroom log cabin, a private dock.
It’s where my off-seasons live, which, being me, means it’s where I run trails, swim open water, and work out with a lake view instead of a mirror.
Occasionally the guys descend and there’s a boat, a jet ski, and beer.
It is, I realize as we come up the gravel drive, the one property I own that I chose.
“It’s not much,” I say, pulling our bags from the trunk. It’s full dark; the porch light throws a warm apron across the front steps and catches the first planks of the dock.
“Not much.” Callie turns a slow circle in the drive. “Nate. That is the size of my house. My only house.”
“Okay, fine, it’s something. I’m just —” I shrug, honest by accident.
“I’m not used to having people in my spaces.
I never know what you’re supposed to say.
” What I don’t add: a designer furnished this one too, another set of rooms staged for a magazine that never comes, and until about four seconds ago that never bothered me here either.
She’s standing in the porch light with her hair coming loose from the drive, laughing at something, at me, probably, and whatever I was going to say about the house dies of irrelevance.