Page 39 of Base Block

“Oh, wow,” Anara said. She stared at her phone. “The clip is already showing up on the Woodsmen fan accounts.”

“Let me see,” I ordered and held out my hand.

Shoot. There I was, crying, red, and with liquid cheese on my face as I silently screamed toward the field. The comments were pouring in, since everyone had time to reflect during the halftime break. There were lots of emojis of crying laughing and a lot of people had tagged my channel with Callum. The clip started again, and I watched myself losing it for a second time.

“I’ll get you some water,” Heidi suggested. She also had to pee, and I went with her to the bathroom to remove the rest of the dip from my cheek and nose.

But I forgot about it because Callum was still filling in for the second half, which flew by. I tried not to go crazy in the same way but I definitely did, because Anara wiped my face again.

“This napkin is clean,” she announced loudly. “I told you guys that something was going to happen.”

By the end of the fourth quarter, I felt like I had also played a game of football—I was exhausted. Heidi was tired too, and we were slow as we went down to the player’s lounge. “Callum is going to be even later than usual, because I bet he gets interviewed,” she told me. There were TVs in here with live feeds of the press room, and I watched carefully but didn’t see him. Then George walked through the door and he and Heidi left together, and Demitrious emerged and Anara broke off in the middle of the word to run to hug him. More guys came out and I was left with a much smaller group, waiting as I absently wiped my cheek where the cheese had been.

Finally, Callum stepped into the lounge and I stopped myself from screaming, running, and jumping on him. He was smiling so hugely that I started to cry again, though, and he hugged me instead.

“That was pretty damn good,” he said quietly.

“It was so damn good. Do you have that ball?”

“They print the date on it for us. It’s a perk of being in the big time.” He put his palm under my chin to tilt up my face. “I liked you with the nacho stuff.”

“You already saw that?”

“One of the reporters showed me the video when she was interviewing me in the locker room. You were also pretty damn good,” he said.

“I was? Did I embarrass you?”

“What? Hell, no,” he told me. “You screaming like that, crying? I never had anybody care much about what I did. Aw, come here.” He hugged me again. “The reporter said that it’s going viral, so she told me to get ready. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to get ready for that.”

I showed him one idea after we got into the car, after he’d signed a ton of autographs and talked to a lot of the fans waiting outside the stadium. “I’m going to film you,” I said. “Pretend to dab at the air with this napkin.”

He did, saying, “All better, now?” The next angle was me, nodding, except I started crying again by mistake as I kissed his cheek. We needed to get a response out there, like when Millie had quickly thrown together a video after Damian’s lack of criminal history had been exposed. She’d said it was the same as when someone got a DUI, you had to show that you didn’t care and things like that didn’t matter for a celebrity. In his case, we had made a post with Sage mostly naked to prove that women still wanted him even though he wasn’t actually felonious, and his sex life wasn’t suffering because he was a liar and faker.

I honestly didn’t care if people were laughing at me because of the cheese on my face tonight, but I didn’t want it to hurt Callum. This was the perfect time for him to harness attention and start signing deals that would give him financial security, maybe for the rest of his life! I was here to help, not hurt that. But I was also here to be so proud that I couldn’t stop smiling, in between bouts of crying.

“I think it’s a good thing that I wasn’t around when you were in high school. I don’t know if we would have gotten along,” I mentioned. We were almost home, which was good. He was shifting so much in his seat, as if he was in pain, and he needed to lie down and relax.

“You wouldn’t have liked me?”

“No, I’m sure that I would have.” Whether those feelings would have been returned was something that I doubted, but that wasn’t the issue. “I would have seen your talent and been so upset that you were just…what’s the word? I’m trying to say that you were wasting it.”

“Squander. That was what my high school coach used to tell me. ‘Damn it, Frazier! Nobody gets chances like this!’” he said, pitching his voice slightly higher and a lot angrier. “‘How many kids have I coached? Thousands? How many get offers as a damn sophomore? You’re throwing it away! You’re squandering it! You don’t deserve it.’” He sighed. “I should call that guy.”

“Yes, to tell him that he was mean! And an asshole!”

“No, to tell him that he was right,” Callum corrected. “One hundred percent right. I was squandering it but I was such an asshole myself that I couldn’t stop. I got unlucky with a lot of stuff in my life, but I was very lucky that I could play football. I just couldn’t see it because I was so pissed off at the entire goddamn world. Every single person.” He glanced over at me. “I guess it is lucky that we didn’t know each other, because I would have been pissed off at you, too.”

“Why me? What did I do?”

“Nothing. That’s the point,” he told me. “I had no reason to act that way.”

“It seems like you did have a reason to be mad,” I corrected. “Your mother was an addict and your grandparents weren’t helping you. You had to move all the time. Not a lot was going right except for football.”

“I should have hung onto it, rather than shoving it in the dumpster. That’s what dumb kids do, right? They make dumb mistakes and my coach was knocking his head against a wall when he was trying to tell me so. Poor guy. I did have it rough but I wish I had been smarter.”

I may have had a few adults like that, ones who had cared enough to try to point me in the right direction, but I had also ignored them. “It’s funny what people consider rough,” I mused. “Millie, Damian’s assistant, used to talk about growing up in a suburb in New Jersey that sounded really nice. But her parents didn’t get her the car she wanted, and she only had a share of a horse.”

“What the hell does that mean?”