From the moment I woke up, I knew it would be a shit day. I’d forgotten to close my bedroom curtains, and as my room faced east, I opened my eyes to a painfully bright sun shining directly into my eyes. Like the day dawned with the intent to make my journey into wakefulness as harsh and jarring as possible.
I made my smoothie without a single glance toward her house. While I was actively not looking that direction, my blender broke. Four dollars made their way into Faith’s swear jar. Faith’s eggs ended up on the kitchen floor when she knocked her plate over on accident, and then she put her own dollar into the jar.
My mood was already so foul by that point, in anticipation of the team meeting, I couldn’t even bring myself to punish her for her creative use of curse words.
I almost ran out of gas driving Faith to Monique and Dayvon’s house.
During my workout, my elbow was sore and tight.
In the shower afterward, my shampoo bottle was empty.
Each successive thing reduced any remaining good humor I had into a snarling, snapping tangle of energy.
The team meeting was only about ten minutes from starting, and by the time I found a padded seat in the main room, I felt very much like a leashed lion. If anyone dared get too close, I’d swipe with a heavy paw and pray to inflict damage.
What had Coach Klein said the day before? I didn’t always react well when genuinely surprised.
While that was true, this was something different. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t the guy who remained steadily, purposely mute around my laughing, chatting teammates. Whatever they saw in the set of my mouth, my eyes, and my body language was enough for them to give me a wide berth. In front of me on the table was my binder for team meetings.
Scribbled notes in the margins, readable only to me. Diagrams with Xs and Os and lines and arrows, plays that unfolded in my head when I would sit and listen to Coach talk or our offensive coordinator discuss the defense we would be facing next. All the small things that I did on a daily basis that added up to wins during the regular season.
It was discipline—in every meeting, every workout, and every morning that I made my smoothie and chugged it down.
Sitting in that chair with my eyes shuttered and my jaw locked tight, I didn’t feel very disciplined. I felt like screaming. The jumble in my head was messy, a tangle of past and present. My conversation with Robert about her business failures, her absence in his life, and how she was posting pictures as she worked her way through Europe while her father sat home by himself for every holiday. Her face at my door, cupcakes in hand. Her smile at the meeting yesterday.
It was a cacophonous, discordant mess in my brain; nothing I could make sense of even if I wanted to.
Of course, I wanted to. It was what I did every day on the field. To anyone else, a line of players shifting in motion looked like chaos. But I knew what it meant when someone went left, and another went right. When their eyes darted back to the edge of the field.
My fingers tingled with the need to scoop into my thoughts and find the one thread that I could pull to make all this make sense. Any kind of sense. But I had the feeling that if I pulled the wrong thread, it would only tangle the knots further.
So I’d sit. And wait. And keep my mouth shut. Say a prayer to the football gods above that she didn’t come in and fire everyone in the front office and replace them with Victoria’s Secret models even if that would make Jack sublimely happy.
I let out a slow breath as the volume in the room increased with each new teammate appearing through the door. No Alexandra yet.
Just the thought of how they would react, how they’d see her, had me leaning forward and pinching the bridge of my nose. This was a disaster. It was everything I didn’t want for us. Someone sat heavily in the empty seat to my right and nudged at my elbow.
Gomez, my center, laughed at the dark expression on my face.
“Who pissed in your Wheaties, Piers?”
All I did was sigh and lean back in my chair. “I just want this over with.”
We’d played together for six years since New England traded him for two of our draft picks. He balanced me well, all smiles and jokes, amping up the O-line with his positive energy. His forehead wrinkled at my tone, but he knew me well enough not to push.
Then he leaned in. “I heard about her.”
Of course, he did. I pinched my eyes shut and tilted my chin up.
“Heard she’s hot. Like really hot.”
Someone sat down to my left. “Dude, you’ve never seen her before?” It was Jack. Like I wasn’t sitting between them, he leaned closer so that Gomez could hear him above the steadily rising noise in the room.
“No. I mean, I know she must have been at the funeral, but I wasn’t exactly lookin’, you know what I mean?”
Jack nodded. “Same. I looked at her Instagram last night.”
“No shit?” Gomez asked.
I pushed my tongue against the inside of my cheek and glared at Jack, who was completely oblivious.
“She’s got this one shot on a beach or some shit. Let me pull it up.” He whistled under his breath. “No top. I’m tellin’ you, dude.”
Under my breath, I made a strange noise that almost sounded like a growl.
He ignored me as Gomez laughed. His thumbs flew across his phone screen, and I fisted my hands under the table to keep myself from choking him. Just as he whistled softly and turned to hand his phone to Gomez, someone stood in front of us and blocked the light.
Logan snatched Jack’s phone out of his hand and tossed it back at his chest. Not gently either. “Knock it off, Coleman.”
My eyebrows lifted slightly as Gomez sat back in his seat. Jack mumbled something that didn’t sound very kind and shoved his phone back into his pocket.
“What’s your problem?” Jack muttered.
“You have a sister?” Logan asked.
Jack looked away. That was a no.
“I have four. All younger.”
My eyebrows went even higher.
Logan gave me a long look.
“Were you in that meeting yesterday or not?” he asked.
The undercurrent of his quiet voice was pure steel, and the implications, the fact another captain was chastising me, flanked by two members of my offense, made my face hot. “You know I was,” I replied evenly.
Logan leaned in close enough so that no one outside the two of us would be able to hear him. “Then act like it,” he bit out.
He sat in the row in front of us, oblivious to the fact that I was glaring daggers and knives and swords and all manner of weaponry at the back of his head. Later, when I didn’t feel like I was one fraying thread away from punching someone, I’d have a talk with him about verbally reprimanding me.
Of course, when you’re wading through the thick mud of a bad mood, you can’t possibly entertain the notion that they’re right in what they did. I shoved that train of thought down when Coach Klein and William entered the room. The volume around me flared quickly, briefly, until she walked in.
Then there was a hush, a vacuum of sound so intense, it was as if they all pulled in a breath at the same time. Inexplicably, it made me want to break something apart with my hands.
Her hair was pulled back this time, no waves or curls in that sunny, bright hair. No red lips. Skinny black pants, a loose white top, and a red tailored jacket covered her body. She looked sleek and bright and polished.
Rich. Powerful. Confident.
And I hated her at that moment because she was so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. Like waking up in the morning to find the sun aimed straight at me when I wasn’t prepared for it.
The guys all shifted in their seats while William introduced her and gave them a similar brief overview of where we currently found ourselves as an organization. Tension rippled through the room in the sets of shoulders faced in her direction and in the eyes glued on her, unable to believe what they were seeing.
William gestured toward Alexandra, and she smiled at him gratefully. Jack actually had his hand covering his mouth, and I elbowed him until he dropped it. His eyes were wide and disbelieving, but he was smiling as if he’d just won the lottery.
She cleared her throat and folded her hands tightly in front of her, a tiny display of nerves that made me look away from her briefly. I didn’t want to see her nerves. I didn’t want to see her at all.
My eyes pinched shut tightly, and I saw Robert’s small embarrassed smile as he told me he was eating Thanksgiving at Joy’s house. Again.
Her voice knifed through my thoughts, and I pried my eyes open.
“Thank you all for being here. As William said, I’m Alexandra Sutton. Over the next few days, it’s my goal to meet every one of you, and when I get that chance, I’d love for you to call me Allie. I know preseason starts in a couple of weeks, so while I can’t promise you that I’ll have the entire play card memorized, I do know what first and ten means, so I’d like to think I’m not completely hopeless.” There was a small ripple of laughter through the room, and I vaguely heard one of my molars crack down the middle underneath the pressure of my jaw. Her body relaxed slightly, and I found myself winding even tighter.
Her smile straightened as the room quieted again. “I’ve spent the past few days immersed in facts and figures and charts and budgets. But those papers don’t adequately convey the amount of love and respect my father had for the Wolves organization. It’s humbling to know that he trusted me to try to fill his shoes.” She glanced down at her spiked black heels and exhaled a laugh. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
This was my nightmare. Staring at her, all I could see in my head was her on my front porch with that plate of pink cupcakes. Her sitting at her patio table and holding her speaker up in my direction. Her holding my gaze fearlessly the day before in our meeting while she laid out her terms of how this would go. And now we were joking about her shoes in the team meeting.
I’d keep my end of the bargain. When I shook her hand, slim and cool in my own, I meant it. I wouldn’t do or say anything to disrespect her in front of anyone. But I also couldn’t force myself to sit here and laugh and joke and think it was funny that the person who owned our team promised us that she knew what first and ten meant.
It wasn’t funny to me. She posted topless pictures that my star receiver had already drooled over, and God knows what else was out there. I wanted to win another Lombardi trophy before I retired while she had bounced around Europe on her daddy’s dime. I wanted to prove that I could make it to the top more than once in my career, that it wasn’t a fluke.
Crafting a perfectly constructed social media presence was how she lived her life, and I would do anything to avoid that kind of bullshit veneer.
I wanted to play football. I wanted to win. And I wanted to do it without distractions and games and circuses surrounding the team. Let our performance do the speaking.
Allie’s bright gaze briefly tangled with mine, and I refused to blink or look away. Her smile grew strained for just a moment, but then she visibly brightened. As if she refused to let me ruin this for her.
“When I was looking through some of my father’s files, I found a scrap of paper with his handwriting on it.” She held up her hand, and even from my spot a few rows back, I could see the frayed, torn edges. Allie stared at it for a second, and there wasn’t a single sound in the room while we waited to hear what it said.
“In times of difficulty, those brave enough to stay the course will be victors in the end,” she read in a firm, clear voice. She glanced up. “Does anyone know who said that?”
I knew. Of course, I knew. Jack looked at me, clearly surprised I wasn’t answering.
“Bo Schembechler,” someone said from the front row, referencing the famous Michigan coach. A veritable institution for anyone like me who played at The Big House, who understood the weight of his name among the hallowed ranks of college football coaches.
Allie smiled at him. “That’s right.” Again, she looked down at the paper before carefully folding it up and curling it into the palm of her hand. “Before I found this paper, I wasn’t sure whether I would accept this position, whether I would keep the team. And I’m not telling you this so you’ll doubt my commitment; I’m telling you this so you can trust that I’ll be honest with you when it’s important.” Her voice got louder, and her chin lifted as the energy in the room made a palpable shift. Something that rose in a sharp crescendo and split through the room like a charge. I could see it take shape in how they were nodding, listening intently to what she was saying.
She smiled, clearly seeing what I was. “I’m choosing to be brave enough to trust my father’s decisions, to trust that all of us can work together to stay the course and be victors in the end. If you’re brave enough to trust someone who has a lot to learn, who won’t be afraid to ask for help, then I believe we can do incredible things.”
“Hell yeah, we can,” Dayvon said from behind me. Allie laughed along with everyone else. Except me. An irritating swell of something pushed through me. It wasn’t admiration, not exactly. But in less than fifteen minutes, she had this entire room eating out of her hand. When I glanced around, my teammates were nodding their head, smiling, some even clapping.
No, admiration wasn’t the right word. A grudging admission that I’d underestimated her was certainly part of it. A muted shock that I seemed to be the only one who felt uncomfortable in how this was playing out.
Maybe none of them had spoken to Robert about her. Maybe none of them would view that conversation with the same stomach-sinking gravity that I had as a single father myself. I wouldn’t be the one to tell them, but I’d sure as hell keep my eye on her, for whatever good it might do.
While Allie exchanged a few smiles and a laugh with some of the linebackers in the front row, one of the women from the PR department went up to the front of the room.
“Okay, guys, just a few things and then we’ll let Coach take over. We’re going to wait another day or so before issuing a press release about the transfer in ownership because we’d like Allie to feel a bit more comfortable before the media gets hold of this story.” She smiled, and it reminded me of a shark baring its jagged, knife-like teeth. “And believe me, this is a story that will be everywhere. We’re working with Allie and Cameron to make sure this gets us as much positive attention as possible, so if any reporters reach out to you, catch you after practice, whatever, we’re incredibly excited for the new direction that Allie brings to the Wolves while maintaining the strong working relationships that Robert forged over the past twenty years.” She looked around. “Any questions?”
Oh, I had questions. But since most of them involved some variation of are we done now, I kept my mouth shut and waited for Allie, William, and the PR chick to leave. As soon as Allie cleared the door, I finally felt like I could pull a full breath into my lungs.
It should have been a warning that I couldn’t breathe properly when she was around. But I ignored it. Focused on football. That was the only thing I needed to worry about. Everything else would blow over eventually.
