Page 116 of The Player

Whitney didn’t laugh.

So Phallon let her eyes fill up with tears. It wasn’t hard. All she had to do was think about the front page of that school paper.

“Do you know what it’s been like?” she said. “Walking across campus and seeing them together? Everybody looking at me? My own sorority sisters feeling sorry for me?” She pressed her fingertips under her eyes, careful of her mascara. “I just want to see him, Whit. That’s all. You’re the one who called me, remember?”

“I know.”

“So please don’t make me beg.”

Whitney looked at the bar again, then back at Phallon. “Some girl’s called up to his room twice tonight. He didn’t pick up either time.”

Phallon didn’t have to ask who. Calling from her couch back in Alabama, probably. Couldn’t even get on a plane for him.

“Then he’s not answering for anybody,” she said. “Make the key, Whit.”

Whitney’s shoulders dropped. She turned to the little machine behind the counter, ran a blank card through it, and slid it across in a paper sleeve with the room number written on the front.

“Please don’t make me regret this,” she whispered.

“You won’t.” Phallon squeezed her hand. “Can you grab my things?”

Whitney pulled the garment bag and the overnight bag out from behind the desk. Phallon hooked them over her shoulder, tucked the key into her coat pocket, and walked to the elevators without looking toward the bar. She didn’t need to. He wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

The light on the lock flashed green on the first try.

The lamp by the bed was still on. Phallon set her bags down by the door and stood there taking it in. The comforter was rumpled across the middle, where he’d been lying on top of it. His tie was on the carpet. On the nightstand, the phone sat crooked, like it had been slammed down. Interesting.

She picked his tie up off the floor and held it to her nose. His cologne. She’d know it anywhere. She’d smelled it on her pillowcases for weeks after the last time he was in her bed, until her roommate told her it was disgusting not to wash them.

She draped the tie over the chair and started looking. His suitcase was open on the luggage rack. She went through it slowly, one thing at a time. Jeans folded in half. T-shirts. That navy Drayton sweatshirt he loved. She lifted out a pair of his boxer briefs and rubbed the cotton between her fingers, and then she put them back exactly where she’d found them. In the bathroom, his toiletry bag sat unzipped on the counter: his razor, his toothbrush, his deodorant, the bottle of cologne. She uncapped it and breathed it in, then capped it again.

There was a zippered pocket in the lid of the suitcase. She opened it, expecting socks.

It was a piece of newspaper, folded into a square, soft at the creases from being opened and closed so many times.

She knew what it was before she unfolded it.

The picture from the front page of the Drayton campus paper. He’d cut it out close, with no headline and no caption, just Drew leaning over the railing at the Auburn game in his uniform, his hand on Nicole’s face, his mouth on hers.

Phallon had seen this picture. Everybody had. The paper had been stacked outside every dining hall on campus the Monday after Thanksgiving, and somebody, Trisha probably, had taped one to the bathroom mirror at the house as a joke. Phallon had walked in to brush her teeth and found it staring back at her. The girls in the bathroom had gone quiet. One of them had touched her arm.

Phallon had wanted to slap her hand off.

She looked at it now, at his hand spread open on Nicole’s cheek, and her stomach turned over.

He’d been pissed when she kissed him in that bookstore. Sober Drew didn’t do PDA, and that had been his excuse every time he wouldn’t hold her hand or put his arm around her at a party. And here he was, hanging out of a football stadium in front of all those people and every camera in the state, kissing her.

Phallon held the paper closer.

Fine. Nicole was pretty. Phallon would give her that much. Pretty for a Black girl, she guessed. She had a nice face. Nice hair. And sure, she probably looked good in a bikini, but that ass of hers was a little too big. What was it with men and big asses, anyway? Gross.

But pretty wasn’t the point. Phallon was pretty. Phallon was what pretty was supposed to look like. She was natural blond, not out of a box. She had good bones, her mother always said, and a flat stomach she’d starved and sweated for since the ninth grade. She’d been first runner-up for Miss Mountain Brook at sixteen, and she’d only lost because the girl who won had a daddy on the pageant board. When she walked into a room, men looked, and they’d been looking her whole life.

And Drew wanted that?

She’d made herself understand it at first. Men got curious. They saw something different and wanted a taste, and then they got it out of their systems and came home. Her mother had a word for white girls who ran around with Black guys, and it wasn’t a nice one. White guys didn’t do that, not out in the open. Some of them messed around on the side, but they didn’t hold hands with those girls on the quad or take them home to meet their mamas. Not guys like Drew. Not guys who were going to stand up at the NFL draft with their whole lives ahead of them.

It was supposed to be a fling. Something to brag to his roommates about. Instead it was the front page, and his hand on her face in front of God and everybody.