Page 149 of The Player

“Except you,” he said quietly.

She nodded against his chest.

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t tell her it was going to be okay, or that they were only trying to protect her, or that her dad was a piece of shit. He just pulled her in closer and pressed his mouth to the top of her head and kept it there, and she loved him so much for not saying anything that she almost started crying again.

When she finally sat up, the sun had moved all the way across the living room floor. She looked at him.

He was in an old Red Sox T-shirt, washed so many times the letters were cracking. His hair was getting long again. He’d just gotten back from flying out to Kansas City, and he had another visit next week, and in three weeks he’d be standing on a stage in New York shaking hands with whoever wanted him. His forearms were tan from Miami. His hands were big and scarred across the knuckles, and that right arm of his was the reason everybody in America knew his name.

She’d told her father he was different. He gets me. I trust him. She’d believed in Drew the way she’d believed in her father, without a single doubt, and right now she couldn’t tell the difference. Trusting Drew felt exactly the way trusting her father had felt this morning, before the phone rang. She’d thought her father was different too. He was the one man she’d never once had to worry about.

“Hey,” Drew said softly. “Where’d you go?”

She blinked. “Nowhere.”

He looked at her a second longer. He wanted that to be true, she could tell, so he let it go.

Her fingers had found the little gold heart at her throat without her even noticing, and she made herself let go of it.

“I think I need to be by myself tonight,” she said.

He went very still.

She’d never asked him to leave. Not once. Not after New York, or the night she’d shut her bedroom door on him over Bailey. He’d slept in her bed almost every night he’d been in this town since November, and she’d never wanted him anywhere else.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “You want me to go home.”

“I need to call my family back. My mother’s calling again tonight. And I just . . . I need to think. I need to be by myself with all of this for a little while.” She met his eyes. “It’s not you.”

“I know, baby.”

“It’s not, Drew.”

“Hey. I believe you.” He reached up and pushed her hair off her face, and his hand stayed there a second, on her cheek. “I’ll go. But you call me. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever. You call me.”

“I will.”

He got up and grabbed his keys off the coffee table and his jacket off the arm of the couch, and at the door he turned around, and she could see it all over his face. He felt it. He didn’t understand it, but he felt it.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

It was true. She’d never meant anything more. That hadn’t changed, and it wasn’t going to, and that was what made it so much worse. Something in her had broken anyway, and it wasn’t his fault, and she didn’t have the first idea how to fix it.

The door shut behind him.

She stood at the door and listened to his truck start in the driveway. Then she went down the hall to her bedroom, picked up the phone, and dialed her sister.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Drew knew before she said a word.

He’d known for days, if he was being honest with himself, and for the last week, he hadn’t been. He’d been telling himself she just needed time. That her whole family had blown up in her face, and anybody would go quiet after that, and she’d come back to him when she was ready.

The story had broken two days after her mother called. It was on Hard Copy by Monday night and on the cover of every supermarket rag in the country by the end of the week, and the sports shows couldn’t get enough of it. Melvin Wright’s love child. Melvin Wright’s lies. They’d dug up the picture from Fort Worth, too, him and Nicole with her hand in his, and run it right next to a picture of her dad, like it meant something. A reporter had called her house twice. A photographer had been waiting outside the art building on Wednesday, and Toni had walked her to her car with her own coat held up between Nicole and the camera.

Drew had flown out to Phoenix for a team visit that same week, and the first thing the general manager said to him, before they’d even shaken hands, was, “Hell of a thing with Melvin Wright. That’s your agent’s old man, right?” Like he was making small talk. Drew had smiled and said yes, sir, it was, and wanted to tell him to go fuck himself.