Page 64 of Never Say Never
“I’m trying to wrap my head around the interest in us. It’s intense. I don’t really care, usually. I’ve never let any press stuff mess with my head, or anything like that.”
“Me neither, until my off-field life was all anyone talked about.”
I hate hearing the hurt that leaks into his voice. “You’ve had it much rougher than me, for sure.”
“The worst part…” He looks at me for a second. “I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but none of it is true.”
“You mean that picture was a fake?”
“No, it was real, just taken at a bad moment. All I did in college was drink, and not an obscene amount. I partied, sure, like a normal college student, staying up way too late, drinking beers. But no weed, speed, nothing like that—which, by the way, a ton of my friends did do cannabis, not that it’s bad. And now it’s off the NCAA banned drug list.”
“Yeah, I won’t name names, but same on the men’s team at my school.”
“I steered clear. Landon was all over me not to go there once I started at UT.”
A thought hits me. “Wait, why didn’t you deny using drugs outright?”
His eyes dart my way and he lets out a breath. “Can you keep a secret? Likefor real, this has to stay a secret.”
“Yes, I promise.” I wonder what this could be. “Consider it part of the NDA we all signed. I’m not a gossip, anyway.”
“When I was fifteen, a couple of my teammates and I got caught with—well, we called it something else—but ecstasy. To party with. The cop called our coach, and somehow he and my mom made it all go away. She’s a lawyer who knows everyone.”Huh.“Smalltown Alabama, you know?”
“You were just fifteen?” He nods. “That doesn’t sound bad, honestly.”
“The tale is not over,” Rawley adds with a half-hearted laugh. “For the next year, I smoked upa lot, to the point where it was impacting my football and I was constantly bailing on school.Landon and Grace had left for college, and I made a lot of shitty choices with them gone.”
“Oh, so what happened to turn things around?”
“Connor, who was fourteen at the time, called Landon and told him what was going on. Landon came home from the University of Alabama and kicked my ass. Verbally, I mean,” he rushes to say. “He spent weeks going back and forth between Tuscaloosa and our hometown, making sure I got my act together.”
Now I have a better sense of what he meant when he said his relationship with Landon is “complicated.”
“So that’s it. That’s how I became the family screwup.”
I don’t respond right away, but I flinch internally at how he described himself. I mean, he was just a teenager doing dumb teenager things.
“Aiden and Jim know about it all, and we’re careful to skip outright denials of ever doing anything.”
“That makes sense.” I dig deep trying to think of something comforting to say. “Hopefully this buzz around us will shift all those stories.”
His eyes, those beautiful blue eyes that are usually so light and full of life, hold a piercing sadness, augmented by a film of exhaustion.
Is that emotion always there? Does he just hide it?
In a blink, the window to that hurt is closed, and his expression evens out. “That’s what we’re banking on.”
He turns a corner and I recognize my street. Connor’s beat us here, and I see Rawley’s car as we approach my place.
“Date one done,” he says as he turns off the car.
He starts to reach for his door handle, and a foreign feeling washes over me.
I…I want one more moment. Of him. Of us.
My hand slides over the one he still has resting on the gear shift, and his head tilts back in my direction.
“I’m really glad it’s you,” I say, my voice low. My throat swallows involuntarily before I speak again. “I’m glad it’s you who’s playing this part. And that we’re getting to be friends.”
