Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Tina had a fat ass and enough confidence to know exactly what that navy skirt was doing for her.
I noticed.
Would’ve had to be dead not to.
She introduced herself before we took off from Teterboro, smiled like she knew who I was before I gave her my name, then spent most of the flight finding reasons to come back through the cabin.
Nothing obvious enough to complain about.
A little extra eye contact. A few questions with room underneath them.
Under different circumstances, I might’ve appreciated the effort more.
Today, I wanted the cranberry tonic she was carrying and an hour where nobody needed Andre Jones to make a decision.
“Still good with lime?” she asked.
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Her fingers brushed mine when she handed over the glass.
Definitely flirting.
I took a drink and looked toward the window.
Apex Sports had sent the Gulfstream to New York Monday afternoon, put me in a hotel I could’ve bought a floor in, then had a car waiting Wednesday morning to take me to their Manhattan offices.
Three executives, two producers, lunch I barely touched, and almost four hours of people explaining why Sunday Prime needed me.
They wanted a permanent chair.
Pregame, halftime, postgame, playoffs, film breakdown, player interviews, special segments once they figured out how much Andre Jones they could fit into a football season.
One of the executives called it the obvious next chapter of my career.
I smiled instead of saying the last chapter had ended without asking whether I was done with it.
The contract Apex emailed before I left their building sat unopened on my phone. I should’ve been reading it, but opening another document that needed something from me made me tired in a way sleep wasn’t going to fix.
Jones Motor Group needed me tomorrow morning. Omar wanted me at North & Vine tonight for a tasting I had already missed once. Pops had called twice about the commercial contract Jones Outdoor was bidding on, and Crown Weekend started tomorrow.
AWU had found a dozen reasons for me to shake hands, sit on panels, take photographs, and smile beside people with enough money to have their names engraved on buildings.
Friday night was the big one. Crown Legacy Award.
Gala. Parents in attendance. Pops pretending he wasn’t more excited about the damn thing than I was.
Now Apex wanted my Sundays.
Somewhere in the last year, everybody had gotten real comfortable treating my calendar like it belonged to the group.
“You sure I can’t get you anything else?”
I looked up.
Tina was still standing there.
Pretty woman. Warm brown skin, glossy lips, ponytail down her back, and that body I had already noticed twice.
My dick worked fine.
Interest was another matter.
“Nah, I’m good.”
She held my eyes for another second, read what was there and what wasn’t, then smiled.
“Let me know if that changes.”
“I will.”
It wouldn’t.
She headed toward the galley while I stretched my left leg farther beneath the table and flexed my knee. The tightness eased some, but not enough for me to forget it had made the trip too.
That morning had started at five twelve in the hotel gym. I knew the exact time because the clock across from the mats was the first thing I saw after my knee locked halfway through a set of step-downs.
I caught the rail before my balance went with it.
“Fuck.”
Pain moved beneath my kneecap, bright enough to tighten my stomach. Manhattan was still dark beyond the windows, the gym empty except for me standing on a low platform while my left leg decided whether it felt like listening.
I waited until the knee released, reset my foot, and finished the set.
Ten each side. Three rounds. Resistance work. Stretching. Stationary bike.
I hadn’t skipped the routine since my surgeon stopped calling it rehabilitation.
Rehab sounded like there was still somewhere to get back to.
Maintenance was more honest. Keeping enough strength around the joint to walk dealership lots for hours, stand through dinner service at North & Vine, inspect a site with Pops, travel, work, and live without negotiating every move with my body.
My leg could still do almost everything I asked.
The exception was the thing it had made me famous doing.
The last time I trusted it completely, I was twenty-four carries and one hundred thirty-one yards into the final game of the regular season.
Three minutes and twelve seconds left against Cleveland. Tie game. Division title still sitting inside the next few possessions.
I took the handoff on outside zone, pressed toward the edge, and watched the linebacker overrun it. The safety committed. The lane opened inside.
I planted my left foot.
My cleat stayed in the turf.
The rest of me kept moving.
The pop beneath my kneecap came before the pain.
No hit. No defender rolling into me. Nothing dramatic enough to explain why my knee folded beneath me and refused the next thing I told it to do.
I tried to stand anyway.
Of course I did.
Nate Cole, one of our tight ends, got to me first.
“Stay down.”
“I’m good.”
“You ain’t.”
He was right.
By the time the trainers reached me, eighty thousand people had gone quiet and cameras were closing in.
That part stayed with me.
One red light in my face.
Millions of people watching Andre Jones figure out something inside his body had gone wrong.
So I fixed my expression. Loosened my jaw. Breathed through my nose. Gave them nothing they could turn into a tragedy reel before anybody even told me what happened.
Inside, it was a mess.
Why couldn’t I straighten my leg? How bad was it? Could they fix it? How many weeks? How many months?
Training camp was a long way off.
That had to be enough time.
Then my mind went where I didn’t want it to.
My career.
My future.
The contract I had signed before the season started. Four years, eighty-eight million dollars, fifty-two guaranteed because the Forge had decided I was worth building an offense around.
What happened to all of that if my leg didn’t come back?
What happened to me?
The crowd started chanting when the cart came out. I raised one hand and let them cheer because that was what number twenty-two was supposed to do. Keep his head up. Let everybody know he was good when he had no fucking idea if he was.
My teammates were already gathering for the next play when the cart started toward the tunnel.
Football kept going.
I didn’t know yet if I could.
The MRI showed a complete rupture of the patellar tendon. Surgery came two days later, and when the surgeon said some athletes had returned from the injury, everybody grabbed onto that sentence like the rest of what he said didn’t count.
So did I.
For months, the public got resistance bands, pool sessions, the anti-gravity treadmill, and the first video of me jogging again. That clip got close to five million views before somebody sent me the link.
22 COMING BACK DIFFERENT.
They weren’t wrong.
They just didn’t know what kind of different.
Nobody filmed Pops helping me into the shower the first week because I couldn’t lift my own fucking leg over the side of the tub.
Nobody saw the nights medication stopped doing enough, or the morning I dropped my phone beside the bed and stared at it on the floor because bending far enough to pick it up hurt more than I wanted anything on that screen.
Aubrey saw more of the ugly than most people.
I met Aubrey Carter through Nate’s wife, Sydnee, about six months before the injury. She came late to Sydnee’s birthday dinner in a little green dress, blaming Pittsburgh traffic while two deep dimples made everybody forgive her for something we all knew was probably her own fault.
She worked in fashion, though that covered a lot.
Instagram, TikTok, styling videos, brand partnerships, travel content, the occasional campaign.
She knew clothes for real too. Could explain for twenty minutes why two handbags that looked exactly the fucking same were different enough to justify another thousand dollars.
I used to tell her she made a living convincing women they needed shit they already owned.
She said football was grown men fighting over a ball, so neither of us had room to judge.
I liked her.
Eventually, I loved her.
And when my life got hard, Aubrey showed up. She came after surgery with food and clean clothes, learned my medication schedule when I was too angry to care, sat through appointments, and helped my mother change the sheets one afternoon after I sweated through them.
I wasn’t going to turn her into somebody she hadn’t been just because we ended.
Still, there were nights when Aubrey slept beside me and somebody else showed up in my head.
Imani.
That shit used to make me mad enough to ruin my own mood.
The night after surgery, I woke around three with my leg burning and pictured Mani in the chair beside my hospital bed.
During physical therapy, I heard her telling me I was being stubborn.
When Pops helped me into the shower and I was as humiliated as I had ever been in my grown life, some messed-up part of me wondered what she would’ve done if she’d been there.
I already knew.
She would’ve stepped closer. Probably cussed me out for trying to do too much while she did it.
She just hadn’t been there.
She left me.
At twenty-two, that was the part I understood. Imani could’ve used all the words in the world about ambition, New York, Tiffany & Co., and needing a future that belonged to her. What young Dre heard was that the woman he loved had been given a choice and didn’t choose him.
I was too arrogant to understand why she should’ve had to.
I wanted her with me. Wherever the league sent me, whatever came next, I assumed we would figure the rest out because that was what loving me was supposed to mean.
When she didn’t, I took it personally.
Then I spent a long time pretending I hadn’t.