Page 151 of The Player

He was yelling. He could hear himself, and he couldn’t stop. He was so scared he could hardly breathe, and he didn’t know what the fuck else to do with it. She was sitting right there on that couch, three feet away, and she was already gone. He could see it. He could see her going, and he couldn’t get his hands on her to stop it.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“I know you didn’t!” She was on her feet too now. “You didn’t do anything, and it doesn’t matter! Do you understand that? Do you know how many Phallons there are going to be?”

He stopped.

“Every city,” she said. Tears were dripping off her chin, and she didn’t even bother wiping them. “Every hotel. Every road trip. Every girl who’s got a cousin at the front desk. Do you know how many? Because I do. I grew up with them. And every single time, you’re going to call me and tell me nothing happened, and you’ll mean it, and I’m going to believe you. Just like I believed him.”

And there it was.

She didn’t trust him. She was never going to, not all the way, not ever. And it wasn’t even about him. She didn’t trust herself to know the difference anymore.

There wasn’t a single thing he could say to fix that. There was no play for it. He’d run every one in his head, standing there in her living room with his heart pounding, and there was nothing.

His eyes burned and his throat closed up, and he could feel it coming. He locked his jaw and stared at the wall over her shoulder. He didn’t cry, not over a girl and not after a loss, and he hadn’t since his dog died when he was twelve years old. Hell, he couldn’t even stand Boyz II Men, with all that crying and begging they did on every damn song. He wasn’t about to start now, not in front of her, because if he did, he didn’t think he’d stop.

Nicole came to him.

She put her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his chest and held on as tight as she could, and she sobbed. He could feel it all the way through him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said into his shirt. “I’m so sorry, Drew. I love you so much. Please don’t hate me.”

He put his arms around her. He didn’t know what else to do with them.

“I could never hate you,” he said.

It was the truth. It was the worst part.

He stood there and held her and let her cry, and he felt like somebody had gone into his chest and scooped out everything that used to be in there. Nothing had ever done this to him. Not after the Heisman, not after any game, not ever.

He never wanted to feel it again.

After a long time, he pulled her hands away from his back. He held them a second. Then he let go.

He walked out her front door and down her porch steps, the same ones he’d carried her up the first night he ever stayed, with her arms around his neck. He made it to the bottom before he heard her through the door.

She was crying. Out loud, alone, the way people only cried when they thought nobody could hear.

He stood at the bottom of her steps with his keys in his hand and listened to it. Then he got in his truck, because if he went back up those stairs, he’d beg her again, and he couldn’t. He’d already begged her once tonight, and she’d told him she loved him and let him walk out anyway.

Nicole had told him she would drive him to the airport.

She’d said it weeks ago, back in March, when they’d planned all of it. She’d drive him to Birmingham on Thursday, and she’d fly up Friday, and she’d be in the Paramount Theatre on Saturday when they called his name. She’d already picked out what she was going to wear.

She’d canceled her ticket Monday morning. She hadn’t canceled the drive. When she’d called him Wednesday night to ask if he still wanted her to take him, there’d been such a long silence on the line that she’d thought he’d hung up.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Okay.”

She picked him up at seven. He came out of his house in jeans and a sport coat with his duffel over his shoulder and a pair of sunglasses on, and she had hers on too, and neither of them took them off. He got in and put the duffel down between his feet.

He didn’t reach for her hand.

It was almost two hours to the airport. Once they were on the interstate, Nicole turned on the radio, mostly so she wouldn’t have to hear how quiet it was, and for a few miles it was commercials and a traffic report and some song she didn’t even hear. Then the next one started, and she knew it from the first few notes. Shai, “Come with Me.”

She’d had that album on repeat since it came out in September, and she knew every word of this one, a man packing up for some job across the country and asking the woman he loved to come with him. Drew had never asked her that. He’d asked her to stay with him, wherever the draft sent him, and she’d said yes in a bathtub in January and meant every word. She turned it off so fast she hit the wrong knob first, and nobody touched the radio after that.

Drew sat with his elbow on the window and looked out at the trees going by, and the billboards, and the cows standing in somebody’s field, and he didn’t say a word. Neither did she. Every few miles she’d think of something to say, and every time, she couldn’t think of a single reason to say it. She wanted to reach over so badly. But she kept her hands on the wheel.