Page 142 of The Player

He looked at her for a long second. Then his arms tightened around her, and she leaned back into him and let herself relax. He didn’t argue.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Nicole picked up the phone and put it back down three times before she finally dialed.

It had been almost six weeks since Bailey sat on the end of her couch and told her it was her own mother who’d leaked the story about Nicole’s dad. Six weeks since Nicole asked for space and watched her best friend put her soup pot in the fridge and let herself out. She’d needed that space. She’d needed to be mad at somebody, and Bailey’s mother was a long way off in San Francisco, and Bailey was right there.

But she wasn’t mad anymore. She hadn’t been mad since Christmas, if she was honest. She just missed her. She’d gotten good news all week, from the lawyers and from Drew and from her professors, and every single time, Bailey was the first person she’d wanted to call. So why hadn’t she? Because she was the one who’d asked for space, which made the next move hers, and the longer she put it off, the harder it got to just pick up the phone and say hey like nothing had happened. And some scared part of her kept wondering if Bailey had gotten used to life without her.

Her mother’s attorney had called Tuesday to say it was over. Phallon’s lawyers had dropped the whole thing, the letter and the money and the threat to sue, because taking it to court would’ve meant explaining how Phallon got a key to Drew’s hotel room in the first place, and somebody on her side had finally done the math. Nicole had hung up and done a little dance in her kitchen by herself.

Drew had left for Mobile on Sunday, and Lauren couldn’t go. She had RA duty all weekend and somebody had already traded with her once this month. And Nicole had been all set to drive down by herself, four hours with the radio up and nobody to talk to, when she’d realized she didn’t want to go alone. She wanted to go with Bailey.

So she dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hey, B.”

For a second there was nothing on the line. Then Bailey said, “Nikki?” like she wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

“Are you busy Saturday?”

“I . . . no. Why?”

“Drew’s playing in the Senior Bowl. In Mobile.” Nicole pulled her knees up to her chest. “I don’t want to go by myself. And I miss you. Like, a lot. Will you come with me?”

Bailey started crying. Then Nicole started crying. Then Bailey said, “Yes. Oh my God, yes. What do I wear? Is it cold in Mobile? I don’t even know where Mobile is.”

Nicole grabbed a tissue off her nightstand. “Well, I hope you can read a map,” she said, “because I sure can’t.”

Bailey laughed, still half crying. “Nikki, you are such a mess.”

They left before seven Saturday morning with the heat blasting and a bag of drive-through biscuits between them.

For the first hour they were careful with each other. Bailey talked about her classes and her shifts at the hospital and how Ryan had tried to make meatloaf and set off the smoke detector in their new apartment. Nicole told her about Christmas. About Mama Gussie sending Drew to the guest wing, and the matching pajamas, and the Doug Flutie football. Bailey made her tell the part about the free throw twice.

Somewhere past Montgomery, Bailey stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked out her window.

“I still haven’t talked to her,” she said. “My mom.”

Nicole kept her eyes on the road. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t know. Some days.” Bailey picked at a flake of biscuit on her jeans. “She calls. I let the machine get it. Ryan thinks I should just yell at her and get it over with.”

“Ryan’s not wrong.”

“Don’t tell him that.”

“What she did to my family, that’s not on you.” Nicole reached over and squeezed her hand. “It never was. But she’s still your mom. Yell at her if that’s what it takes. Just don’t let this be the thing that ends y’all.”

Bailey squeezed back and didn’t let go for a few miles, and that was the last either of them said about it.

Ladd-Peebles Stadium was older and smaller than the stadium at Drayton, but it was loud, and the stands right behind the benches were packed with men in team jackets from all over the NFL, holding clipboards and stopwatches and not cheering for anybody. Drew had told her about them on the phone that first night, after the weigh-in. He’d stood on a stage in his shorts in front of every team in the league while they measured his hands and wrote down his weight, and then he’d spent his nights that week in hotel rooms answering questions from coaches who wanted to know everything from his favorite play to whether he’d ever been arrested.

“It’s like the world’s longest job interview,” he’d said. “With no shirt on.”

“Sounds like my kind of interview.”