Chapter 20 #2
“Okay. I’ll call you later tonight. This is important, Max. We need to talk about it.”
I nodded, not saying the words I thought. Did anyone ever tell you that you were too serious, Liz? I promised myself to ask her that question later.
I stood with the girls in my arms, a testament to my quad strength, and followed Liz to the door. She opened it and I put the girls down. She took their hands. Before she left, she whispered, “I hope we can still be friends.”
“Of course. Always, Liz.” She paused, suddenly seeming reluctant to let me go. I didn’t say a word. I had to get to the field. Pre-season camp started today and coach was counting on me to help with the younger players and especially the rookies.
“I’ll talk to you later,” she said again and left, the girls tugging on her hands as they rushed toward the car in the driveway.
By the time I got to the stadium, I was fifteen minutes late and I knew I was going to catch shit.
From Wyatt, from the QB coach parker and from Coach Marini.
I crashed through the doors of the locker room and went for my locker, ignoring the noise of the men at the buffet in the next room.
I changed into practice gear minus the helmet and grabbed a coffee to go.
“Step it up, men. Be in the main meeting room in two minutes,” Marini shouted over the din, effectively shutting everyone down.
I went ahead and found a seat at the front of the room with some of the other offensive players.
Wyatt stood front and center with a few of the coaches.
Men filed in the room and it filed with low murmurs with in the allotted two minutes.
We all knew Marini wasn’t kidding about his imperative.
I watched the second-hand tick down and the door to the room slam shut exactly as the two minutes were up.
Coach walked to the front of the room and didn’t bother with the microphone or podium placed there.
The room was fairly large and angled from rear to front in a slight decline.
We had almost a hundred people for spring camp, many of whom would be gone before the season started when the roster was set.
I’d be there. I was on year three of my three-year contract.
But I had no idea what my role would be, whether I’d be warming the bench all year or in for twenty-five percent of the snaps for trick plays and decoys like I was last year.
That would be partly up to me. Partly up to Coach Marini—who I’d no doubt pissed off by leaving the wedding with Natalie Singer, a close friend of his daughter and apparently, someone he’d decided he needed to look out for.
Not that I blamed him. He was right to be protective of Natalie.
I wanted to do the same. She was too vulnerable, too willing to give herself.
And I was the wrong man for her to be considering.
No kids of her own with me. I shook my head and barely listened to the orientation speeches by the coaching staff.
Thank god they were short. I filed out with Wyatt and we went outside.
The defense was taking the weight room first for measurements and assessment.
The QBs and kickers took the field and did our own drills, more for warming up than assessment at this point.
The day was cool and I was quiet, my mind refusing to concentrate on the task at hand in spite of the whistles and the yelling. My aim was off in spite of that being what I was famous for. Tell that to my head that seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of scenes with Natalie.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Wyatt said after I drifted six out of ten balls?”
I shrugged. What else could I do. I didn’t do much better with route running drills though we were still in the basic part of the playbook and I knew it all cold. Sitting at my locker, I was pulling off my cleats when Coach Marini came by.
“See me in my office. Now,” he said. Those were never words a player wanted to hear, but I wasn’t paranoid.
It could be about anything. Wyatt, being more real than most superstars, gave me a half-grin as if he knew what it was about.
Maybe he did. So before I’d had a chance to shower the sweat and dirt off me, I went to coach’s office.
I didn’t want to start guessing as I walked through the corridor with my mind blank—or as blank as I could get it aside from visions of Natalie naked in my bed. That should have been first my clue.
Standing in the spacious office that overlooked the practice field where more ambitious young men still worked out, Coach looked away from his computer and took off his glasses to study me. He didn’t ask me to sit before he started talking.
“I’m calling you out, Devon. You’re on notice.
Don’t think I don’t know you have something going on with my Natalie Singer.
Because I do.” He sat back in his chair, keeping me under the microscope of his stare.
I knew he wasn’t through, so I didn’t say a word.
But I’d eventually reassure him that there wasn’t—or no longer would be anything going on between us.
That was my intention, right? Maybe not so much was the honest knee jerk reaction in my gut. And that was my problem.
“Natalie is a special young woman,” Marini said.
“I don’t want to see her hurt. And for some Godforsaken reason she has her heart set on you.
And she has a big heart. Which you better not break.
” He stopped and stared a beat before waving a hand at me in dismissal, muttering about how it was bad enough he had to have these talks with the younger guys and that I should know better at my age.
I said, “You’re right, coach. I do know better.” He looked at me, but before he could speak, I got out of there.
If one of the young guys came to me for advice under the same circumstances, as they had in the past, I know what I would have told them.
Some horseshit about responsibility and caution.
But now that I was in the shoes of a man at a crossroads, too quickly put in a position to make a decision, it wasn’t so easy.
There was trepidation and a million what-ifs, spinning through my head as I headed for the showers.
But all the spinning and over-thinking the possibilities didn’t erase a few very important facts.
I felt a strong connection with Natalie, the kind I was experienced enough and old enough to know that didn’t come along every day.
I was also smart enough to know it wasn’t all about sexual chemistry—though there was a fuckload of that.
Another fact was that I couldn’t have any more kids.
Fucking shame. But should I be considering that fact, or making a decision about a deal breaker after only one weekend—mind-blowing sex aside? Reason, and my cock told me no.
The last fact was something I hadn’t imagined, hadn’t considered. The fact that Natalie might not care.
Before I hit the shower, I had a call to make.