“I presorted them for you using the applicant’s previous middle school and current GPA. They’re on your desk.”
Coop looks up from his phone.
“Thanks, Owens. Have I told you lately how awesome you are?”
“Uh, no. I’m not sure that you have ever told me how awesome I am.”
“Stop playing. I’m sure I have at some point.”
He continues working on his phone.
Uh, no you never have.
“So … listen … I wanted to talk to you about something.”
I rub my palms nervously against my thighs.
“Yep,” he answers curtly. Still obviously distracted by his phone. “What is it?”
“Have you ever considered getting a new assistant?”
Coop sits his phone down, pivots his entire body, and stares at me straight-on.
“What.”
“A new assistant.”
“What would I need a new assistant for? I have you.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing.”
I look down at my hands and start twisting my emerald ring around. It was my mother’s and has always been my good luck charm.
“Look at me, Owens.”
I clench my hands and look my employer in the eyes. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I was so sure about my decision. I’ve been sure about it for months now. I’m an actress not an assistant, and I need to finally go and actually be an actress.
“I’m quitting, Coop.”
“You’re quitting?”
“Yes.”
“You are quitting.”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do if you don’t work for me?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know? What the hell kind of answer is that?”
“An honest one.”
“Who’s trying to poach you? Stevenson? Johnson? One of the agencies?”
“No, Coop. No one is trying to hire me from under you. This is all my decision.”
He stares at me with what I think is a look of pure confusion. I think he’s about to say something to me, but then he stops himself.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while now but don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you high and dry. I’m going to help hire my replacement.”
“You’re making a mistake, Owens.”
“This doesn’t mean that I’m ungrateful. I realize what an opportunity this has been, and I thank you for it, but it’s time for me to move on.”
“If that’s what you want to do—”
He bends his head back down and begins typing furiously on his phone.
I find his reaction a bit surprising, but I won’t let it unnerve me.
The hard part is over.
“Thank you for everything.”
“You said that already.”
We arrive to our destination in total silence. Coop gets out of the car and starts walking with large strides inside of the building. It’s not that he doesn’t normally walk in front of me, he can’t help to with his colossal frame and long legs, but this time I can tell it’s purposeful.
He can’t get away from me fast enough.
Chapter Ten
I tried to drink it away—I’ve reached my limit.
Sex it away—Not in the mood. Not even to masturbate.
And now I’ve tried sleeping it away—But that shit’s not working either.
I’ve been in bed lying in a supine position, with my hands behind my head, for exactly thirty-five minutes and have come to the conclusion that I will never sleep again. Not until I understand why Owens would want to resign.
It makes zero sense.
She’s got to be fucking with my head.
I’m the perfect boss to work for. We get along. I pay her well. She’s a natural as my second in command. What else could her ungrateful ass want?
Dammit! I’m out of vodka and Tylenol PM. I need sleep. I need some clarity. I’m going to call her. It’s the only thing left to do. She answers on the third ring.
“Coop?”
“Were you sleeping?”
It’s obvious she was in a deep sleep. Damn deserter. Probably dreaming about whatever the hell girls like Owens dream about. Puppies, rappers, Louis Vuitton bags. Hell, if I know. I’m just glad I woke her ass up. How dare she sleep like a baby after the bomb she just dropped on me.
“Everyone living in the Eastern Standard time zone is sleeping. It’s almost three a.m.”
“I just want to be clear.”
“About?”
“Your announcement comes at a very inconvenient time for me.”
“When would have been a better time to announce that I’m moving on.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Owens. It doesn’t become you.”
Actually, she’s always been a smart-ass. It’s one of the things I find most endearing about her.
“Say what you called to say, Mr. Barnes.”
“Oh, it’s Mr. Barnes now?”
“It probably should have always been Mr. Barnes. We’ve totally been way too casual with each other.”
Is that why she’s leaving? She wants me to be a dickhead boss? What a masochist.
“Then I’ll keep things not so casual with you. You can’t just leave. I’ve given you way too much responsibility. So, you’ve got thirty days to hire and train a suitable replacement. I have too many good things going on in my life right now for a change in assistants to mess it up. I want a smooth transition. It’s the least that you owe me for giving you such an amazing opportunity.”
**Soft snoring.**
“OWENS!”
“I heard you,” she says sleepily. “Thirty days. Replacement. I’m on it.”
I end the call abruptly.
Pissed more than ever.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I make another call.
“Hello?”
My friend and teammate Saint answers the phone with a gravelly voice. I realize it’s three in the morning, but if I can’t get a decent night’s sleep then neither should my quarterback.
“Hey.”
“Coop?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Are you in jail?”
“No.”
“The hospital?”
“Nope.”
“Then, dude, I’m going to kick your ass at training tomorrow. It’s three fucking a.m. What the hell do you want?”
“Sleep alludes me.”
“What?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“And that’s my problem because?”
“Owens asked to resign or rather she told me she was resigning.”
Saint’s phone starts to make rustling sounds. I think I hear his wife Sabrina cursing me out in the background. He tells her that it’s me on the phone and that she should go back to sleep. I should feel guilty that I’ve woken her up too, but I don’t. I’ve decided it’s all Owens’ fault. She’s to blame.
“You called me at this time of night to discuss employee problems?”
“Yes.”
“You’re upset that she quit?”
“Fuck yeah. I’m pissed.”
“Did you think she was going to stay with you indefinitely? You probably suck to work for.”
“It’s only been three years not thirty! I’m in the middle of some of the most important work in my life right now. I’m at the prime of my career. I’m opening the school. I’m thinking of buying some other properties. She can’t leave. She picked the worst time to decide to leave.”
“So you hire someone else, Coop. Ursula is not the only capable assistant out there.”
“She’s the only assistant!”
Saint is quiet for a moment.
“Dude, you’re losing it.”
“I’m tired as fuck. Sorry.”
“Are you sure this isn’t about something else?”
“Such as?”
I get up and put on a baseball cap. Then I slide my cell phon
e inside of it next to my ear so I won’t have to hold it. I start scouring the kitchen for something half decent to eat and end up slamming the refrigerator closed. All I have is healthy shit in here. No white sugar, no white flour my ass. I want Oreos.
“Do you have feelings for her?”
“Have you been hit in the head too many times?”
“Have you? You’re the one calling me in the middle of the night over some girl.”
“You call her some girl again and—”
Saints starts laughing hysterically.
“You’ll what, Coop? You gonna kick my ass over some girl?”
I’m going to throttle him tomorrow.
“I should have known better than to call you about this.”
“And why is that?”
He’s practically snorting laughter through the phone at this point.
“Sabrina keeps your life in order. You’ve never needed an assistant like I do.”
“I keep my own life in order.”
“The hell you do.”
“Hire someone else, Coop. That’s all I can tell you.”
That’s not going to help me get to sleep tonight.
“Forget I called. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand what you need all right.” He continues with his incessant laughing.
“I’m going to tell coach to give you the concussion protocol tomorrow. I think you have one.”
“What’s ironic about this is that you’re filthy rich, marginally attractive—”
“Hey!”
“And so thick headed that you don’t realize what’s going on. You want Owens to sit on your face. End of story. That shit is funny.”
“Saint, I swear to fucking God!”
I want to reach through the phone and strangle him. My supposed friend. The only person besides Tito I tell anything to and look what it gets me. The jackass is laughing so hard that the phone drops, and Sabrina ends up picking it up.
“Coop,” she says sternly.
“Hi, Sabrina, I—”
“Stop talking.”
“But—”
“Whatever you’re saying has triggered my husband into a fit of laughter and literally ten seconds away from peeing in our bed.”
“But I needed to talk and—”
“Stop.”
I shut my mouth.
“Peeing in my bed is not an option. So, I highly recommend that you talk about whatever this is tomorrow, because if I don’t get back to sleep in the next ten minutes, I could easily miscalculate someone’s payroll tomorrow.”
I contract Sabrina’s business management firm to manage employee payroll and taxes for all of my businesses. It’s probably not a good idea to get on her bad side. I didn’t think this through.
“I’ll talk to him later. Sorry, Sabrina.”
“Wise decision.”
“Think about it, Coop!” I hear Saint yell and then a rustling sound in the background. Are the two of them actually wrestling for the phone? “Think about why you can’t sleep. She’s not just your employee, dummy. She’s a whole lot more.”
Sabrina lets out what sounds like a yelp laced with pleasure and then the phone goes dead.
I guess payroll is going to be late anyway.
Chapter Eleven
I pop my earbuds in and sift through my small cooler of goodies, pulling out an ice-cold Fiji Water and laying it on the back of my neck. It’s hot as hades outside, and I’m sitting on a scorching university bleacher at Nighthawks training camp, watching half-clothed men run plays, while I listen to the soundtrack of Mamma Mia.
There are sixteen training camp practices open to the public during the season. Fifteen are during the day and one is at night. Until my last day working for Coop, part of my job still includes attending them, because press is always here, and Coop doesn’t talk to the press. He says it’s a distraction, but it’s probably more like a phobia. A normal, arrogant, alpha ball player loves to talk about themselves to anyone who will listen. They love an audience. Not Coop.
“Hi, gorgeous.”
I pull my left earbud out.
“Hey, Jim.”
Jim McKinney is a local sports reporter in the city. He can’t be too much older than me, but he has made himself well-known among the seasoned press pit reporters already. He’s extremely ambitious and persistent. I can always depend on him to ask me two things whenever I see him: for an opportunity at an exclusive interview with Coop and for a date.
“I see your guy is looking pretty good this year. Did he drop a couple of pounds?”
“I wouldn’t know. He looks the same to me.”
I crack open and chug down half of my bottled water while I watch Coop and Saint Stevenson run a few plays together. They both look a little tired today.
“How’s his hearing this season?”
“Same as it’s always been.”
Coop has partial hearing loss in his left ear. It’s the result of some sort of non-football related injury that happened when he was young. A time in his life that he prefers not to talk about. Unfortunately, journalists have reported lots of wild theories about how the hearing loss happened which is another reason why Coop won’t talk to them. One time a reporter wrote that the injury was due to an altercation between Coop and his dad when he was a kid. A total lie, which Coop’s dad had to deny for years—he’s a college football coach—and for which Coop has never forgiven the reporters.
“What does he think about the new guys on the team? They gave up a lot to acquire Parinzino. Is he meshing well with the other players?”
“Aren’t these questions for the coaching staff?”
“I think you would know better than any of the coaches.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Nah, I think you’re holding out on me, Ursula, in more ways than one.”
He licks the corner of his lips, and I almost throw up a little in my mouth.
“I’ll give you one thing, Jim, you’re definitely persistent.”
“What?” He feigns innocence.
“You know I’m not going to reveal anything that Coop tells me, and to be honest with you, we don’t talk about what’s said in the locker room. It’s like Vegas in there. Whatever goes on in there stays in there.”
“I guess that makes sense, because football isn’t really his major priority anyway, right? You think he’ll retire soon?”
This is another running storyline that the press has continually tried to shove down fans’ throats as if it’s a fact when it isn’t. The media assumes that because football isn’t Coop’s primary source of income that it must not be as important to him as it is to other players. How soon they forget that football was first.
Coop comes from hard working people in Georgia that live, eat, poop, and breathe football. Nothing was handed to him. All the success he has built has come as a direct result of hard work and the wealth he first accumulated as a football player.
It’s ashamed how if he makes one mistake on the field they blame it on the “distractions” in his life aka his empire: Dunkin’ Donut franchises, pizza shops, tattoo shops, movie theaters, and soon his new high school for boys.
While I know that their assumptions about Coop are unfair and untrue, I guess it doesn’t help that he acts so standoffish with reporters. Maybe they would find something else to write about if he would talk to them about something. Of course that’s going to be the new assistant’s problem to manage now. Not mine.
“Now you know that isn’t true, Jim.”
“How would I know what’s true or what isn’t when he doesn’t ever talk to us?”
I shrug my shoulders like I have a million times before.
“I can’t control who Coop talks to.”
“He’s contractually obligated to talk to the press. He knows that, right?”
“Take it up with the NFL then.”
“Oh, come on, Ursula, it would be great publicity for him. I’ll even let him cherry p
ick his questions.”
“The answer is the same … I can’t help.”
A few of the reporters sitting in front of us start laughing. They’re old-timers who have been working the Nighthawk beat for over twenty years.
“You two sound like last season,” one of them says.
“Same song different summer,” the other chimes in.
I stick my earbuds back in and hum along to ABBA while I check on some of the applications the head-hunting agency sent over. Now that I’ve finally told Coop that I’m leaving I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. I notice one application that shines a little more than the rest. I’m going to call her for an initial interview and get this ball rolling. If I like her, I’ll bring her in to meet Coop.
“So, what about dinner then?”
I try to act like I don’t hear Jim’s question, but he taps me on the knee to make sure that he gets my attention. Like I said, the guy is persistent.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was listening to music. Did you say something?”
“I asked if you wanted to grab dinner tonight.”
I’ve never been comfortable turning a man down, probably because I don’t have a whole lot of experience at it. I haven’t dated much at all really. It’s not that I didn’t want to, but I either didn’t have the time or didn’t like who was doing the asking. This time my reasoning leans towards the latter. Jim is probably a good guy, but he’s just not my type.
“Ooh sorry, I can’t. I have to work.”
“She only has time to deal with one big personality at a time, McKinney. Barnes is all she can handle,” says one of the old cronies up front. The two of them get on my nerves sometimes. They’re like those two old guys from the Muppets. They think they can say anything they want and that no one is going to check them because they’re old. The most annoying thing about it is that for the most part they’re right.
“Speaking of big personalities, here comes Coop now.”
Wolf: A Sports Romance: The Nighthawk Series #2 Page 5
