Page 143 of The Player

“You’re nasty, Wright.”

“You like it.”

“I fucking love it.”

The game itself didn’t count for anything, which Nicole had to explain to Bailey three times. It was all seniors, half of them from teams that hated each other, playing on the same side for one afternoon. Drew didn’t start. He came in for the second quarter and the third, and the first pass he threw was a long, high spiral down the sideline that dropped right into a receiver’s hands at the twenty, and Nicole was on her feet screaming before it ever came down.

“Was that good?” Bailey yelled.

“That was so, so good!”

After the game, Nicole and Bailey waited by the fence with a crowd of wives and girlfriends and somebody’s grandmother in a church hat. When Drew came out of the tunnel with his hair still wet, he picked her out of the crowd. Then he saw who was standing next to her, and he looked at Nicole and lifted his eyebrows, and she nodded.

She hadn’t told him Bailey was coming, because she’d wanted to see his face. He’d been on her since Christmas to just call Bailey already. “Best friends don’t fall outta the sky, Wright,” he’d told her more than once. “You two need each other. Call the girl.”

He hugged Nicole first and lifted her right off the ground, then put her down and hugged Bailey too.

“About time,” he said in Bailey’s ear, and Bailey laughed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

Drew’s six weeks in Miami were MJ’s idea.

The second the Senior Bowl was over, Nicole’s brother had him on a plane to work with a trainer who’d gotten half the first-round quarterbacks of the last few years ready for the Combine. He trained twice a day in a gym off a strip mall in South Miami that smelled like rubber mats and sweat and somebody’s Cuban coffee. Mornings were speed work and afternoons were throwing, with lifting and film crammed in around both. And some little guy with a stopwatch hung around off to the side and never said one damn good thing about anything.

Drew loved it. He also hated every second of it, because Nicole was seven hundred miles away.

They talked every night. Some nights for ten minutes, because he could barely keep his eyes open, and some nights for two hours, with him lying on the bed in the furnished apartment MJ had found him, and her back in Alabama up in her studio with the cordless on the worktable and a brush in her hand the whole time. She told him about her drawing teacher, who’d stood over her shoulder for a whole class and made her draw the same hand nine times until she wanted to stab him with her charcoal.

“Did you?”

“No. The tenth one was good.”

“’Course it was.”

She told him about Bailey coming over for dinner on Sundays now, and Lauren too sometimes, and how the three of them cooked dinner together. He told her the guy with the stopwatch had finally said “not bad” one morning, and Drew had almost hugged him. And he told her he missed her, which he said a lot. He’d never said it to anybody before her, and now it came out of him every night like he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t even try to stop it.

One night, out of nowhere, she asked him why he’d quit drinking.

He’d figured she’d get around to it sooner or later. She hadn’t asked in New York, and she hadn’t asked since, and he’d been glad about that at the time. He lay there staring at the ceiling.

“I kept waking up next to girls I didn’t remember,” he said. “Half the time I didn’t know their names, or how the hell I got there, and I didn’t fucking like that guy. So I quit.”

She was quiet for a second. “I like this guy,” she said.

The Davey O’Brien Award went to the best quarterback in the country. They’d told him he’d won it back in December, but the dinner wasn’t until February, in Fort Worth, and Drew flew in from Miami and Nicole flew in from Birmingham, and they met at the hotel two hours before it started. Twenty minutes after he got there, she’d kicked him out of the room so she could get ready.

He’d seen her dressed up before. He’d never seen her like this.

She came down the hotel stairs in a long black dress with no back to it, and her hair was up off her neck, and the little gold heart was sitting right at her throat. Drew was standing at the bottom of the stairs in a rented tuxedo that was tight in the shoulders, and he forgot how to talk.

“You look,” he started. “Wow.”

“We aim to please,” she said with a wink, and kissed him.

The ballroom was full of money and old men in cowboy boots, and every one of them wanted to shake his hand. Drew shook them all. He had Nicole’s hand in his other one the whole time, and he wasn’t letting go of it for anybody.

They hadn’t made it to their table yet when a woman in a navy suit stopped in front of them with a notepad in one hand and a press badge clipped to her lapel. She was a Black woman, maybe mid-thirties, with gold earrings and short, honey-blond hair over a pair of dark brown eyebrows, and she was pretty enough that more than a few of those old cowboys had already noticed her. She broke into a big smile the second she saw Nicole.

“Nicole Wright,” she said. “I know that’s not you.”