Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Callie
I wake at five, as per usual, my body doesn’t know it’s on vacation; my body has never once been on vacation, and when I open my eyes, Nate’s are already open, watching me in the gray pre-dawn like he’s been at it a while.
“I know why I’m awake.” He pulls me into him, my head finding the spot on his chest that apparently got assigned to me overnight, his calloused fingers drawing slow lines up and down my spine. Quarterback hands. Every ridge of them earned. “The question is why you’re awake.”
“I usually run in the morning.” I press a kiss to his chest, because it’s there.
“Careful.” His voice rumbles under my ear. “Don’t start anything you’re not prepared to finish. My lower body has a hair trigger, and I have apparently no discipline whatsoever around you. It’s a documented problem. There were multiple incidents last night.”
I laugh against his skin, and feel him smile into my hair, and for a moment neither of us moves, because this, the weight of an arm, the drum of a heartbeat, the lake doing its slow work outside, is a luxury neither of our lives has stocked in years.
“So what does a rest day actually look like?” I push up on one elbow to see his face. “For you.”
“Same as any other day, slightly slower.” The sarcasm arrives right on schedule.
“Run in the morning. Lift. Breakfast prepared by my nutritionist, the sacred post-game rest-day meal, distinguishable from the other meals by the label on the container. Film in the afternoon, light weights, call it conditioning for the brain. Then either Danny’s, or a game at my place with the guys. ”
Danny.
The name lands in my stomach like a dropped key.
Because I’ve decided, somewhere between the hallway kiss and last night, that I’m telling Nate everything.
The photos. What I’ve been sitting on for a month.
What I actually want to write, and why. Today or tomorrow, before we’re back in the world.
He’s earned it a hundred times over, and every day I don’t say it, the not-saying compounds like interest.
Not at five a.m., though. Not with his heartbeat under my ear. I’m allowed a few more hours of this first. That’s the deal I make with myself, and I pretend not to notice the terms.
“So you’re not exaggerating in interviews,” I say instead. “The regimen.”
“Exaggerating?” He actually lifts his head off the pillow to look at me.
“Callie, I tone it down in interviews so people don’t think I’m insane.
I run. I lift. I work with a private conditioning coach on injury prevention, that’s on top of team practices and team lifts.
My nutritionist preps a meal for every occasion in my life: pre-game, game day, post-game, heavy day, travel day.
My fridge is a filing cabinet of black plastic containers with labels, and at this point I don’t even ask what’s inside them. I just eat in alphabetical order.”
“So… tacos with me every morning are wrecking your diet.” I say it half-joking and half-genuinely concerned, because this matters to him, and while I’m fairly sure a taco can’t defeat these abs, I’m also not a licensed professional.
“Tacos with you,” he says, and his voice drops out of the joke entirely, “are the only meal I look forward to.”
And while I’m busy having a small cardiac event about that sentence, his hand slides down under the sheet, palms my ass, and flips me beneath him in one easy, outrageous motion, an entire adult woman, relocated like a football.
“Now. Here’s the day’s game plan.” He settles over me, forearms caging my head, morning-rough and grinning.
“As established, hair trigger, worse around you. I still owe the day some cardio. Two birds, one stone.” He lowers his mouth to my neck and starts working his way down, unhurried, thorough, a man with a plan and no meetings.
“Then we take it to the shower. Then we find a breakfast that has never seen the inside of a black container.”
“I know a place near Fredericksburg,” I gasp, because his hand is reaching between my legs and sentences get difficult.
He stops. Lifts his head. Looks at me with total sincerity.
“Callie, I will drive to Canada right now if that’s where you like to eat breakfast.” A beat. “But we’re finishing what I just started first.”
We finish what he started.
Or rather, I stage a coup first. He’s working his way down my sternum with clear intentions when I put a hand flat on his chest and push, and he goes over onto his back with a raised eyebrow and little resistance.
“My turn.” I inform him then I kiss my way down all that warm skin, slow, taking the scenic route past every ridge and scar, and by the time I take him in my mouth the eyebrow is long gone and one big hand is cradling the back of my head like something breakable while the other has a death grip on the headboard.
And this, I discover, is its own kind of gorgeous: Nate Rivers with his head thrown back, throat working, coming apart syllable by syllable under my mouth, all that trained control dismantling itself while morning light climbs the wall.
“Fuck your mouth is going to be the end of me,” he groans as I take him deeper. The headboard creaks. I’ve heard this man command seventy thousand people with his cadence, and I like him better like that, breaking apart because of my lips.
“Okay. Okay.” He hauls me up before it ends, breathing like the fourth quarter, eyes gone dark. “C’mere.”
What happens next involves being flipped with an ease I should probably find alarming and instead find outrageous — one moment I’m above him, the next I’m face-down in warm sheets and he’s sliding a pillow under my hips, dragging it lower with a deliberateness that makes my breath go ragged before he’s touched anything at all.
“This okay?” Low, at my ear, the whole length of him warm along my back.
“Don’t stop now.” My own words half-muffled by the mattress because I find out I can’t wait, and I feel him grin against my shoulder.
He doesn’t. He thrusts into me slow, deep strokes that drain the air from my lungs.
The pillow tips me perfectly, each inch of his cock filling me, every pull stretching me open.
One arm snakes under my waist, hand splayed on my belly to pin me exactly where he wants.
His mouth at the nape of my neck nips and sucks, leaving trail I will feel for days.
My walls clamp around him, hot and tight, and a wave of pleasure rips through me so hard I cry out into the sheets.
He drives on for two more brutal strokes, then stifles a groan against my hair as he empties himself deep inside.
We stay collapsed like that for a while, his heart slamming between my shoulder blades, both of us breathing like we ran somewhere. He is heavy and I don’t care because I discover I’m addicted to feeling his weight on top of me.
“So that’s the sacred rest day,” I finally manage, into the pillow.
“That’s the warm-up,” he says, and means it, and proves it in the shower, which takes three times longer than showers take.
His cardio is extremely thorough.
#
I’m getting dressed, hair still wet, when my phone buzzes on the bed.
An email.
A new hate email, I know before I open it; after three years you learn the shape of them from the subject line alone. A smart person ignores it. A smart person deletes unread and goes to breakfast with the handsome man in the next room.
I have never once been that smart person.
So I’m standing in Nate Rivers’s lake-house bedroom in my bra and jeans, wet hair dripping on the screen, reading.
It’s nothing new, as these go. Another entry in the classic genre: This team could have won two more Super Bowls if it wasn’t for you.
Honestly, I prefer this variety. The armchair ones.
The ones I can’t file under ‘preferable’ are the ones that come from the wives.
The husbands. Once, unforgettably, the teenage kid of a trainer who lost everything.
“Hey.” Nate comes out of the bathroom in jeans and nothing else, toweling his hair, a walking anatomy reference, and stops dead. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I toss the phone on the bed like it’s casual. Like my face didn’t already file the report.
“How about we don’t do that to each other.”
He crosses the room and picks up my phone, and here’s the thing that undoes me a little: he doesn’t look at the screen.
Doesn’t try the lock. Just holds it, face-down against his palm, and looks at me.
“I’ve seen you angry, that one I got a lot of, early.
I’ve seen you worried. I’ve seen you laugh, which I’d like to believe means I’ve seen you happy, I also saw you undone last night and this morning.
” His jaw sets. “But the look you had just now, I’ve never seen.
And it looked like pain. So I’m asking again. What’s wrong?”
I can’t explain it. That’s the humiliating part, I’m a journalist, words are the one tool I’ve kept sharp through everything, and I cannot assemble a sentence that explains deliberate self-punishment to a person who loves you.
The need to keep pressing the bruise so you never forget you earned it. There’s no clean copy for that.
So I do the other thing. I take the phone from his hand, unlock it, and give it back with the email on screen.
He reads. I watch his face do something I’ve only ever seen on television, in the two seconds after an interception, the polished surface gone, pure clean anger underneath.
“Who the fuck,” he says, with tremendous control, “is anonymousbadger765?”
I don’t answer. Instead I reach over and scroll him backward, out of the email, into the folder.
The whole folder. Three years of it, hundreds deep, subject lines stacked like a wall of small knives.
I haven’t even had the chance to file anonymous badger yet; he’s still sitting in the general population.
Nate scrolls. Slowly. I watch that perfect muscle in his jaw work through the archive, tick, tick, tick, and the silence stretches long enough that I have to fold my arms to keep from taking the phone back.
“Callie.” His voice has gone quiet, which is worse than the anger. “What is this?”
“Every piece of hate mail I’ve gotten since I wrote the article.
” We both know which article; in my life there is only ever the article.
“I keep them because… they remind me what I did to those people. What it cost them.” The tears arrive without clearance, fast, and I fight them and lose ground. “Danny included —”
And here it is. The opening. The exact door I promised myself I’d walk through today or tomorrow — Danny, the photos, the article, all of it, one sentence away, and I open my mouth to walk through it, and what comes out instead is nothing.
Just the crying, arriving all at once, three years of it, while the confession stands in my throat with its hand on the door and doesn’t move.
“Hey. Come here.”
He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me down into his lap like I weigh nothing, wet hair and all, and wraps me up.
“Callie. Listen to me.” His voice above my head, low and even.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you the article didn’t cost people.
It did. Well, not anonymous badger; his Super Bowl math is garbage and he should feel bad.
” A wet, involuntary laugh breaks out of me against his collarbone; he presses on.
“You know I had to defend you to a teammate? Yesterday, in the parking lot. Told him I was spending my off day with you, relax, he’s good people, it goes nowhere.
And he gave me the look. The are you insane look.
” He tips my chin up and clears my face with his thumb, one side, then the other.
“I’m insane about plenty, Callie. My workout schedule.
The way I dissect film. Three songs I’m not allowed to hear in a moving vehicle. Defending you is not on the list.”
“Nate —”
“No, you’re going to hear the whole thing, because you’ve had three years of anonymous badgers and zero minutes of this.
” He holds my eyes. “I was angry at you for a long time. I watched people lose jobs, watched guys I played with get traded and forced out, watched Danny —” his voice catches its footing — “and I aimed all of it at the easiest target, which was the name on the byline. But it wasn’t your fault.
It was mine. It was Grant’s. It was Danny’s.
The trainers, the coaches, the front office, ownership, every one of us had a part.
Hiding injuries. Not asking the questions we didn’t want answered.
Turning the blind eye and calling it being a good teammate.
You want to know Callie Carter’s part? Callie Carter never hid an injury.
Callie Carter never medicated a player off the books.
Callie Carter saw a problem, checked every fact, and said something out loud, which is exactly one more thing than every man in that building did, including me.
A kid died, and you’re the only one who told the truth about it, and you’re the one keeping a punishment folder.
” His thumb moves across my cheek again.
“You were braver than all of us combined. The self-punishment ends now.”
I’m sobbing. Fully, unglamorously sobbing, in the arms of one of the most attractive men in America, mascara-less by pure dumb luck, and he just holds on and lets it run its course like weather.
When the worst of it passes, he shifts.
“Okay. Here’s what we’re doing.”
He takes my hand, my index finger, specifically, folded gently in his, and holds my phone up with the other. Thumbs to the inbox. The folder. The settings. And there it is: Delete folder, in its little red font, cursor waiting.
“Off with the weird self-punishment,” he says.
He doesn’t press it. He doesn’t push my finger down. He just holds my hand steady, aimed, and waits, the same way he waited on that bench for Eli, leaving the silence open, letting the person walk through it themselves.
Three years. Hundreds of small knives. The folder I built as a monument to everything I broke, visited daily, dusted, maintained.
I press it myself.
Delete folder? the phone asks, giving me an out.
Delete.
It’s gone between one breath and the next, no ceremony, no sound effect, three years of penance dissolving into whatever heaven deleted emails go to, and the thing that floods in behind it isn’t emptiness at all. It’s room.
“There she is,” Nate says quietly, watching my face. Then he kisses my forehead, stands me up, and swats me toward my shirt. “Now. Fredericksburg. You’re navigating, I’m buying, and if this place has breakfast tacos, I need you to prepare yourself for what you’re about to witness.”
I laugh, wet, cracked, real, and go find my shoes.
Tonight, I tell myself, watching him hunt for his keys, whistling, ridiculous, mine. Tonight I tell him everything.