Rose sighed. “Chris has always allowed his emotions to lead him. He tends to react without thinking situations through,” she said. “But he’s come a long way.”
“This is better?” I asked, my defenses on high alert. Because if him acting this way was considered “better,” then what did worst-case scenario look like?
Rose nodded. “He used to have a lot of anger inside of him. It started when his father and I got divorced. He and Henri don’t have a good relationship—or any relationship, really.”
Chris had told me as much that day at Casa Bonita, but he’d left out the anger part of the story. Whether that was intentional or an oversight I didn’t know, but still it made me question if I really knew him at all.
“What changed?” I asked, tucking my hair behind my ear and shifting in my seat to face her.
“Henri was absent for much of Chris’s childhood, and even when Henri was present, his behavior was unstable. Destructive. Chris and he argued a lot as a result.” Her eyes lit up with hurt and sadness, the kind that was lasting and deep. Then she shook her head, as if dislodging a painful memory, and said, “One night when Chris was in high school and Henri was drunk and acting out of control, which happened often, their fight turned physical. I cut off all contact with Henri after that and signed Chris up for anger management classes.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and swallowed, my throat dry. “Anger management classes?”
Rose’s expression softened as she squeezed my hand. “I recognize how that sounds, Hazel, but like I’ve always told Chris, that part of his past is nothing to be ashamed of. Some people bury their feelings, and other people—people like Chris—let their emotions spill like an open tap. The classes helped Chris work through his issues with his father, and he’s happier for it.”
The way she said it, with total sincerity, should have given me confidence, told me that I should believe her, and yet I couldn’t stop the whispers of doubt lingering in the back of my mind.
* * *
The Bengals game had ended a half hour ago, and already the stadium had morphed into a ghost town. It was amazing how fast Blizzards fans cleared out when their team lost. The offense had fallen apart after Chris’s ejection, resulting in three interceptions, two more fumbles, eighty-four overall passing yards, and an embarrassing 37–7 final score and a new 6–8 season record. The Blizzards hadn’t been eliminated from the playoffs—yet—but their chances weren’t looking promising.
Once the entirety of the Blizzards roster had sulked off the field to lick their wounds, I’d left Rose in the suite to strategize football with my uncle—over the course of the remaining quarters, I’d discovered that Rose knew more about the sport and rule book than half the coaching staff and players combined. All during the game my uncle had been on a rampage, and she seemed capable of calming him down.
Now I waited for Chris in the underground tunnels where the Blizzards players and staff parked their cars—I’d asked my uncle to drive me to the stadium earlier on the chance Chris would take me home after the game so we could finally talk, but based on how he still hadn’t emerged from the locker room, that possibility seemed unlikely.
Except I wasn’t ready to give up on him yet despite the way Rose’s earlier comments were reverberating in my head. The referee’s call had been unfair, and for that alone, Chris deserved the benefit of the doubt.
I leaned against the wall near his Aston Martin, the cold from the concrete seeping through the faded cotton of my sweatshirt, and tried to ignore the trepidation clutching my chest as I watched the televisions mounted along the tunnel ceiling all tuned to the press conference. Ben Fitzpatrick, Dustin Olson, and Austin Thompson had already received their whipping from the sports media, and now it was Tony’s turn at the microphone. His knuckles were white where he gripped the sides of the podium, and a controlled intensity had replaced his usually jolly demeanor as he provided canned answers to the generic questions from reporters—What went wrong out there today? What does Colorado have planned to better prepare for game fifteen against the Colts? Does tonight’s performance reflect a lack of preparation or a breakdown in team dynamics?
The large silver-painted door that leads to the locker room swung open, banging against the concrete, and I bolted away from the wall at the sudden jarring sound. Chris stepped into the tunnel. Relief flooded through me at the sight of him—he hadn’t snuck out before the game was over. A gym bag was slung over his shoulder, and his gaze was trained on the floor as he moved like a man on a mission toward his car.
“Chris,” I said, my voice coming out too loud and oddly foreign in the space.
He looked up and abruptly stopped walking. Something shifted in his expression—surprise? Annoyance? Reassurance?—but then his face transformed into an unreadable mask. We stared at each other in silence. The air separating us felt still, as if it was holding its breath. Blood whooshed in my ears and my insides twisted, my whole body vibrating, as I appraised his navy suit molded perfectly to his body, his damp hair raked back with fingers, not a comb, and the stubble covering his square jaw.
After a long moment, Chris cleared his throat and asked, “What are you doing here, Hazel?” His tone was flat and distant, a sharp contrast to the tension coiling his posture. I wanted to hug him, kiss him, but he was wound tighter than an overstressed string on a violin and I worried he might snap with the slightest touch.
Instead, I approached him slowly, noticing how dark crescents had formed beneath his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be here? I told you I’d come.” When he didn’t respond, I took another step closer to him and asked, “Was the outcome a suspension like your agent predicted?” I studied his features for clues—anything to indicate what had transpired at the hearing—but I gleaned nothing.
Chris laughed, a hollow, brittle sound that echoed through the tunnel. “Plus some.”
“What does that mean exactly?” I asked, my heart beating hard and fast like a drum against my rib cage. Why haven’t you returned my calls?
“It means the commissioner invalidated all my receiving statistics from last season.”
I frowned. “He— What? How can he do that?”
“Because Sunday is holy, and the NFL commissioner is God.”
I was hardly an expert when it came to football, but I’d learned enough from my uncle over the years to recognize that this was bad. Career-altering bad. Still, I kept my voice upbeat as I said, “Remember what I told you about it all working out? It’s going to be okay.”
A blank shutter fell over his eyes. Chris turned quiet again, his mouth pressed in a firm line, enough to tell me it wasn’t the contemplative kind of silence, but rather a slow simmer of anger ready to boil over. For a second, I worried he was about to lash out, but then Chris inhaled a deep breath, shook his head, and asked, “Want to go for a drive?”
I bit my lip, my instincts warring with my emotions. He was clearly upset, which set my nerves on edge, but Chris needed my support right now more than ever, so I pushed aside my reservations and said, “Yeah, okay. Let’s go for a drive.”
Nodding, Chris clicked the button on his key fob until the horn on his Aston Martin beeped twice. I buckled myself into the passenger seat while he flung his gym bag inside the trunk and settled himself behind the wheel. Then without a word or meeting my gaze, he locked the doors, revved the engine, and put the car in gear, racing through the tunnel and out onto the street beside the stadium.
We merged onto Interstate 25, zipping in and out of traffic, the speedometer rising—faster, faster, faster—as downtown Denver grew smaller in the rearview mirror. His gaze was focused straight ahead, though by the way his eyes darted back and forth, I wasn’t sure how much he was actually processing.
“Chris, could you slow down a little?” I asked, touching his arm. With each jerky movement as we traveled along the highway, my heart lodged itself in my throat and my stomach dropped to my feet.
“Just . . . goddamn it. Why does everyone associate
d with this league have it out for me?” he yelled, steamrolling right over my question and smacking the steering wheel three times in quick succession. “First Rory McMillan blindsiding me on Face to Face, then the commissioner and his asinine punishment, and now the damn refs are making bullshit calls just so I’ll react and give them an excuse to eject me from the game. When is it going to fucking end?”
Now the anger was radiating off him in waves, causing goose bumps to pop up on my skin and a wall to build around my heart again. “Just slow down and we’ll talk about it, okay?” I said, instantly regretting my decision to get in the car with him.
“I’m the best damn wide receiver on the Blizzards roster. Who in the hell do they think they are that they can treat me like that?” he shouted, more to himself than to me. He exited at 6th Avenue East. Immediately, he slammed on the brakes to avoid colliding with a car in front of him because he’d failed to slow down on the ramp before honking and swerving around the car and gunning it again.
“Chris, you’re making me uncomfortable. Slow down,” I repeated, firmer this time. But like before, he ignored me, swinging the car onto University Boulevard, the tail end swaying wildly on the asphalt. I pressed one palm against the dashboard and the other against the roof to prevent me from sliding around on the seat.
Why was he reverting to old habits? Or maybe this version of him was the real Chris and all this time he’d been acting for me. I shook my head, but even as I told myself not to dwell on dangerous thoughts like that, the possibility that I was right persisted.
We turned onto a quiet side street that led straight to his neighborhood and as he rolled through a stop sign, I unlatched my seat belt and said, “Let me out of the car.” My voice sounded harsh and gravelly, like concrete rolling in a mixer.
Those six words seemed to snap him out of his trance, because Chris abruptly hit the brakes and looked over at me. I tried the passenger side handle, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“Hazel, wait,” he said, reaching for me, but I brushed him off. “I’m—”
“I don’t care what you have to say!” I yelled over the pounding of my heartbeat, which echoed in my ears. “Just unlock the car. Now!” And mercifully when I flicked the handle again, the door swung open and I stumbled onto the sidewalk, gulping fresh air into my lungs.
Killing the engine, Chris hopped out and jogged around to where I was standing, stopping a few feet away from me. “Hazel, please get back inside the car. I’ll take you home.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, stepping away cautiously, like prey faced with a predator. My chest heaved, my breath forming faint white clouds in the cold. “What in the hell is wrong with you?”
“Me? I’m not the one who practically threw herself out of a moving vehicle!”
“You were driving like a maniac,” I said, studying the way his huge form appeared to tower over me under the yellow glow of the lamps lining the sidewalk.
Chris sighed. “You make it sound like I was engaging in a little Grand Theft Auto.”
“You were completely out of control!” Frustration and the fear that I’d made a mistake for allowing myself to get close to him rose from deep in my chest. “Why is everything zero to a hundred with you? Tonight on the road, earlier on the field?”
“That ref—”
“Was out of line. But so were you,” I finished for him. “You should have walked away, controlled your temper, and helped the Blizzards offense win that game. But did you?”
“Hazel, my career was recently flushed down the toilet. Can you seriously blame me for lashing out the way I did?”
I shook my head, sick of his flimsy, flawed excuses. “It’s always someone else’s fault. The referee. The commissioner. The nosy neighbor who discovered your pills. You never own your culpability in anything.”
“My culpability in things? Are you kidding me right now?” Chris threw his hands up, his expression exasperated and indignant in equal measure. “None of those things are my fault.”
“Yes, your culpability, Chris. You took the drugs. You shoved the referee. You went tearing down the highway with me in the passenger seat. Everything with you is flash and flare, passion and reaction—sometimes to the absence of all reason!”
“At least I’m willing to take the risk when it might bite me in the ass. That’s more than I can say for you,” he said, dipping his chin and staring at me as though I was equally as guilty.
“That’s where you’re wrong. I stepped out of my comfort zone, put myself out there. For you. Because I convinced myself I could trust you,” I said. “Which was my mistake. One I won’t make again.”
“That’s crap, Hazel. You’ve never really trusted me—not deep down. Hell, you told me as much that day Meatball was returned,” he said, tugging at the knot in his tie, as if loosening a noose. “Why are you always so quick to cast me as the bad guy?”
I squinted at him, wondering if he was being difficult on purpose. “Maybe because you make it so easy?”
“That’s not fair and you know it.” Chris sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I’m not perfect, and yes, I screw up sometimes. But I have tried and put in substantial effort to show you that I’ve changed. You just refuse to acknowledge it.”
His voice was almost pained, which only fueled my fury. Chris didn’t get to act upset. Not when he was the one who had lured me in, gained my confidence. Led me to believe he was a different man, a better man, than the person I had once thought he was.
“Acknowledge what? That you’ve tried ?” I said, the anger exploding out of me. “Do you know how many times my father said similar words to my mother? ‘I’m trying to change.’ ‘I’m trying to be better for you.’ But the man I witnessed at the charity gala and in that car a few minutes ago and on that field earlier”—I waved in the direction of the stadium—“he’s aggressive and brash and reckless. A leopard can’t change his spots, Chris. I let myself forget that, but I remember now. And I refuse to let someone with those qualities into my life again.”
How could I have been so stupid to fall in love with him? To presume that I could trust him with something so precious and fragile as my heart?
He shook his head, disregarding my words as easily as he’d disregarded my earlier concern. “I might be a lot of things—arrogant, impulsive, too damn proud for my own good—but I am nothing like your father, Hazel, nor am I the man you’ve accused me of being. So I hope you hear me, believe me, when I tell you I love you—I’m in love with you—and I’ve only ever wanted to be a man worthy of you.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, his words floating in the air between us like a frail soap bubble on the brink of popping.
We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity, a stubborn standoff. I broke eye contact first, looking over at a stray cat slinking along the sidewalk gutter before pulling out my phone and finding the Uber app. I wanted to take his words at face value, but I couldn’t. Not after everything.
After a long moment, Chris cleared his throat, the sound scratchy like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together, and interrupted the silence. “What happened to benefit of the doubt? Having faith in someone? Recognizing that people are more than just the sum of their parts?”
“All I did tonight was give you the benefit of the doubt, and where did that get me?” I asked, noticing how his fingers twitched, as though he was desperate to touch me and was struggling under the strain of keeping his hands at his sides. “All of your questions, they’re a fairy tale, and not things I believe in anymore. I should’ve listened to my instincts about you from the onset.”
“So what are you saying?” He locked his jaw, as if steeling himself for what he already knew was coming.
“I can’t do this anymore. Me and you.” I swallowed. My mouth felt dry, my cheeks hot. “I’m done.”
This time it was my words that hung in the silence between us. The emotion in his expression—a deep, quiet agony, like something vital had just b
een ripped from his bones and was now strewn across the sidewalk in front of us—should have made my heart clench, but I was too numb to feel anything.
“So after everything that’s happened between us, one bad judgment call, and I’m just another one-strike casualty?”
“Yeah.” The damage had been done. We’d tumbled over the jagged, rocky cliff with nothing left to salvage. So I ended with the only thing I could say. “Good-bye, Chris.”
Then without glancing over my shoulder, I walked back toward University Boulevard to wait for my Uber ride.
He didn’t follow.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chris
“Are all you refs blind? No way was that pass interference. Get your heads out of your asses!” I flung a several-day-old pizza crust at the television and watched as it bounced off the flat screen and landed on the rug. Olive popped her face up from where she’d spent the last few hours snoring against my thigh, licked my fingers, then settled back to resume her nap while I rewatched yesterday’s matchup—again—as though the third time around might magically change the final score.
But nope. As if in some messed-up football version of Groundhog Day, yesterday’s game against the Jaguars had finished about as well as last Sunday’s game against the Colts, which was to say it was a complete disaster. This game totaled ten losses for the season, thus knocking the Blizzards out of playoff contention, and all because the commissioner had gone on a vindictive power trip and chosen to turn me into the league’s whipping boy.
My career and my reputation, like my life, were effectively over. I hadn’t even been able to distract myself with team travel under the guise of “offering support,” because Kent had decided that between the NFL’s ruling and the subsequent media coverage surrounding it, he’d rather not be subjected to my presence for the foreseeable future. Not that I could blame him. I’d given up shaving, showering had become optional, and my entire house smelled like MSG-laden takeout.
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