Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Nate
The locker room before a Houston game has its own weather. Louder, meaner, everybody’s chirp turned up a notch, because state rivalry does something to grown men’s blood chemistry.
“Rivers.” Darius, already in full pads, dark lines under his eyes, materializes at my locker holding his phone like a microphone. “For the good people out there. One word on Houston.”
“No.”
“He’s saving it for the field,” Blake tells the phone solemnly. “The man doesn’t need to speak, the score will show.”
“Didn’t ask you, South Carolina. I asked for his take.”
Down the row, Holden gears up the way he does everything: in silence, methodical, tape then pads then jersey, dark-eyed and unbothered, the only man in the building whose heart rate doesn’t know it’s Houston week.
Darius aims the phone at him hopefully. Holden looks at the phone. Darius aims it elsewhere.
Normal. Everything’s normal. My three songs are going on repeat, my gear goes on in its ancient order, and my head, which is the one piece of equipment that actually matters, will not stay where I put it.
Because the passes.
Three VIP passes, fifty-yard line, zipped into an eight-year-old’s equipment bag by a man who has since been correctly identified as a fraud and a bastard at a fence line.
Did she throw them away? She should throw them.
I would, in her position, with ceremony.
But the boys knew. Finn has probably been vibrating about this game for a week of practices I stopped showing up to, and Callie Carter has never once in her life made her sons pay a bill she considered hers, so either she found an excuse gentle enough not to break them, or she’s up there right now, sitting just a few rows above my head, hating me at close range.
I don’t know which is worse. I’ve run it both ways all morning, the way I should have been running Houston’s blitz packages, and that, right there, is the part that has me grinding my teeth into powder: it’s Houston, the biggest rivalry game on the schedule, and instead of coverage rotations I’m doing seat inventory for a woman and two kids I torched my own claim to.
“Hey.” Grant, at my shoulder, quiet, reading me the way he’s been reading me all week and mercifully not saying what he sees. “Where are you at?”
“Right here,” I lie, and pull my helmet on, and go out to prove it.
It’s a disaster again, but a different disaster than last week’s, so I suppose that’s progress.
Or degression. I genuinely can’t rank which performance is worse, and I’ve had time to think about it, because I’ve spent most of this game horizontal.
I also did my best not to look at the stands because looking and seeing Callie and the boys would gut me, looking and not seeing them would gut me as well, so I ignored the stands. I’m so fucked.
We’re playing Houston. Big state rivalry, the kind where the passion runs hot on the field and hotter off it, and the game is brutal from the first snap.
My sin this week isn’t creativity, last Sunday I played like a lunatic; today I’ve swung to the other pole: predictable and slow.
Telegraphing reads. Holding the ball a half-beat too long.
Two passes intercepted, and every time I hesitate, that prick of a defensive end Jackson Anthony sends me into the ground like I screwed his sister.
Now, I don’t usually hold grudges against men trying to take the ball from me.
It’s their job, same as it’s mine to get rid of it and my team’s to score.
Professional violence, professionally administered; I’ve shaken hands with men who’ve concussed me.
But Anthony’s sacks today have been a different genre.
Late, low, twisting, my whole body hurts, and I’m fairly sure at least two of those were auditions for ending my knees.
The final whistle goes and I’m standing in the middle of the field, helmet in hand, eyes on the scoreboard. 35–14. Somehow I dragged us to fourteen points. Real proud of myself.
That’s when Anthony walks past me.
“Hurting, old man? Rivers is getting old.”
“Fuck you. People pay to watch me play.” His chirp wasn’t even a good one, and mine is a terrible, arrogant answer, and some referee in my head notes that we are both playing badly at this too.
“Yeah? You should refund them, then, all they saw today was you on your ass.”
And that gets me.
For the record: I don’t fight. Not during games, not after them.
I’ll bump a shoulder to rattle a corner, chirp on rare occasions, always calculated, always change I can afford.
I’m not Holden, where the mouth is standard programming.
I’m not Darius, whose off-field volume buys him on-field enemies at scale.
I’m the guy who pulls teammates out of scrums. I have pulled opposing players out of scrums. Ever since high school I have had a career without throwing a punch that wasn’t play-action.
“Maybe if some dumbass bully defenseman who peaked in high school wasn’t hunting my knees all afternoon.” Shut up, Rivers. Do not escalate. Walk to the tunnel.
“Whatever, man. You’re all hot air. You’re full of shit, Rivers.”
And here’s the problem. On the scale of insults professionally deployed to provoke me, full of shit doesn’t even chart.
Men have said worse about my mother’s cooking.
The problem is that it’s true. That’s exactly what I am and exactly how I feel, full of it, hollow behind it, and Jackson Anthony has no idea what he just hit.
He doesn’t know I’ve spent two weeks pushing away every person I love because I convinced myself that being alone in my empty house is what performance requires.
He doesn’t know I spent this entire game ignoring the fifty-yard line, wondering whether the woman I love, yes, present tense; I’ve stopped litigating it, came, because I gave her sons tickets, and hoping she came even if it’s only for the boys.
And hoping, in the same breath, that she didn’t. Because then she’d be here for this.
I launch at Anthony.
He doesn’t expect it, nobody expects it, that’s the entire scouting report on me, so I get him clean in the gut, and then he’s a professional athlete with fifty pounds on me and full gear still on, and he headbutts me with the helmet.
Side of my skull. My ear starts ringing on a frequency I can taste, and after that it’s noise and grass and fists and the two of us screaming things national television will have to bleep into oblivion.
It takes Blake, Grant, two assistant coaches, two refs, and three guys from his own team to pull us apart. That’s an eight-man job. I’d be impressed with myself if I weren’t so busy being a disgrace.
“You’re bleeding,” Grant informs me, dragging me into the tunnel with an arm like a tow cable.
I touch the side of my head by the ear and my fingers come back warm and sticky.
There’s copper in my mouth and a molar with a suspicious new range of motion.
My right hand, my throwing hand, is announcing itself through the adrenaline, which is the first genuinely frightening data point of the day.
Grant hands me my helmet. I take it, walk three steps toward the medical rooms, and send it screaming into a concrete wall, because apparently today I’m a man who does things like that now.
The trainer who comes to check me over is the new intern — Quinn Abbott, a tiny blond thing with big hazel eyes, and I’ll give the rookie this: she doesn’t blink.
Not at the blood, not at the dented helmet in the corner, not at the franchise quarterback radiating shame on her table.
Welcome to the team, darling. The quarterback is a mess.
“Follow the light for me?” She runs the concussion protocol first, penlight steady, voice pitched at that calm, unhurried register medical people train into themselves. “Any ringing? Nausea?”
“Ear was ringing after the headbutt. It’s gone now.”
“Okay. Good.” She checks my pupils twice more anyway, thorough, and pronounces me clean.
The side of my head turns out to be broken skin, not broken skull; she cleans it with small, sure hands and steri-strips it shut.
“This’ll ache tomorrow. Scalp wounds bleed dramatic, they heal fast.” The lip gets the same treatment, efficient, no commentary.
Not one question about the fight. Not who started it, not what he said, not the thing every person in this building is going to ask me for a week.
Just the work, and the quiet, and I’m so grateful for the quiet I could put her on my Christmas list.
“Anything else hurting that I should know about?”
And here’s where I have to say it out loud.
“The hand.” My voice comes out wrong. “My right hand.”
She takes it in both of hers, palpating gently along the knuckles, and I watch her face instead of the hand, reading her like a coverage, because this is the moment.
Not the fine that is certainly incoming, not the benching, not the headlines.
This. A career of five a.m. mornings lives in this hand, and I shook it into a bigger man’s ribs over a chirp that wasn’t even good, at the end of a couple of weeks where I torched everything else I care about, and if the price of all that stupidity is the one thing I have left —
“Breathe, Mr. Rivers.” She doesn’t look up from the hand. She’s clocked it anyway, the held breath, the pulse she can definitely feel going like a jackrabbit under her fingers. “Can you make a fist for me? Slow.”
I make a fist. It hurts. It closes.
“Squeeze my fingers. Good. Now spread.” She works through the whole battery, calm, then wheels over the portable X-ray, and the ninety seconds it takes are the longest of my season.
“No fracture,” she says finally, turning the screen so I can see it, because she somehow knows I need to see it and not just hear it.
“Bruised, second and third metacarpal. Ice tonight, twenty on, twenty off. Rest it two days minimum and you’ll feel it less by Friday. ”