The longer I went feeling out of place in the city where I lived and worked, the more I felt the need to explode out of my skin, which came out in destructive ways on the field. Add to that, my coach had been kind of a dick who liked it when we got rough with the opposing team, no matter how many penalty flags we drew.
As I walked down the hallway, I didn’t stop to look at the framed pictures of Ivy and me. I turned into my bedroom, the walls covered in dark gray paint and posters of football players I’d idolized my entire life.
Including Faith Pierson’s father.
He won the championship in his last year in the league, one of the quietly strong leaders who never had to roar too loud to be heard. But every once in a while, I remembered him getting into trouble. At the time and the age I’d been, it had made him more likeable to me. He wasn’t perfect, but he had grit. He came from a normal family, and it wasn’t easy to remember that when I saw his wife and daughter and their empire that was worth billions by now.
I flopped on my bed and laid an arm over my eyes. An angry buzzing came from my pocket and I sighed. I’d ignored my phone the entire day.
When I pulled it out, it was a text from my agent making sure I hadn’t gotten fired yet. I rolled my eyes but didn’t respond.
Scrolling to the messaging app, I curled my mouth up in a tiny smile when I saw her messages waiting for me, asking about Ivy. It was another thing about this day that wasn’t surprising—her reaction, this online friend of mine, was exactly what I needed.
Without overthinking, I started typing a response.
NicktheBrickLayer: Don’t judge her for this, but Ivy’s favorite restaurant was Bob Evan’s. She loved the little kids’ menus, loved all the crap they sell up by the register and the breakfast food. If my parents had let her, she would’ve eaten a pound of their hash browns.
NicktheBrickLayer: Her favorite movie was A League of Their Own. She probably watched it two hundred times. To this day, I can’t hear the music without wanting to cry.
My eyes burned as I typed that out because it made me think about the last time she was in the hospital for treatment, and we’d turned it on in her room. Even hooked up to all the machines, all those fucking cords, she told me she was going to be an athlete someday. Even though that movie was her favorite, she was going to play women’s soccer for team USA. My parents could hardly afford the meals at Bob Evan’s at the time, let alone the thought of entering her into sports, even if she was healthy enough.
If she’d beaten the cancer, if she’d gotten her strength back, I would’ve worked ten jobs if it meant fulfilling that dream for her.
“You wait and see, Dom,” she told me. “I’m going to break all the records, and someday, they’ll put me in a museum, and it doesn’t matter if the boys make fun of me, I’ll do it.”
“I believe it, Ivy Lee,” I’d told her back.
I liked that I could tell Turbo these two new things. Because over the years, she’d learned a lot about Ivy, considering Ivy was the reason we started talking in the first place.
At the time, my paychecks at the construction company hardly covered my books and tuition, but I’d set enough aside to do something that year to commemorate Ivy’s life. The Seattle Zoo, Ivy’s favorite place, had this thing where you could digitally adopt an animal. Watch it on a camera, see it grow, and the zoo sent you a dinky little stuffed animal as a thank you.
She was the one who responded to my comment online when I asked if there was a koala available because it was my sister’s favorite animal. A week and countless messages later, she mailed me a special stuffed animal that she’d found. A larger koala holding a smaller one—me and Ivy, she told me.
Even though she didn’t seem to be online, I clicked on her profile and stared at the picture again, the tiny gold charm on her necklace … a delicate snail against smooth tan skin. TurboGirl was her username, and mine was NicktheBrickLayer. Mind-numbingly clever, I know. But for a walk-on college football player who wasn’t there on a scholarship and built houses for a living, it seemed appropriate. At the time, I figured I’d be laying bricks and nailing two-by-fours for the rest of my life.
The green circle appeared on her profile, and my heart sped up when I saw her typing.
TurboGirl: I LOVE THAT MOVIE. Ivy and I would’ve gotten along very well.
NicktheBrickLayer: No comment on Bob Evan’s, I see. You’re judging, aren’t you?
TurboGirl: I’d never. I’m just hiding my face in shame as I’ve never eaten at one before.
I grinned, thumbs flying across the screen.
NicktheBrickLayer: It’s a life-changing experience. You should go sometime.
TurboGirl: How are you? What happened at work?
NicktheBrickLayer: It’s been a shitty day, T. No other way to put it. And I wish I could come here and talk to my parents about her. But I think it just hurts them too bad. I don’t want it to piss me off so bad, but God, it does. They’re the ones I SHOULD be able to talk to.
NicktheBrickLayer: It’s like we had this small window of years when our family was so fucking strong. We did everything together, and now I can’t even tell my mom that she sounded like Ivy without ruining her mood.
TurboGirl: I can’t even imagine losing a child like that.
NicktheBrickLayer: You lost your mom, though, right?
TurboGirl: Yeah, but I was a baby. I don’t remember her. I didn’t even know Ivy, and I think of her every time I see something with tie-dye on it.
Breathing out a laugh, I didn’t fight the single tear that slid down my temple this time.
“Tie-dye can’t be your favorite color, Ivy Lee,” I told her. The nurse asked her what her favorite color was, and they’d try to find her a hospital gown.
“Yes, it can,” she announced. “It’s all the colors, and that makes it even better. Nothing is prettier than tie-dye.”
The koala that T sent me had been fitted with a small tie-dye ribbon that she’d tied around its neck. It sat on the top of my dresser, and if anyone gave me shit about that fucking stuffed animal, I’d rip their ballsack off.
NicktheBrickLayer: What are you up to tonight?
TurboGirl: Hanging out with my roommate. Nothing too exciting. Maybe I’ll tell her we should watch A League of Their Own.
My fingers paused before responding because for the millionth time since I moved back, I thought about telling her that I lived in Seattle again. When we “met,” I’d been at school in Texas. There was no option for us to meet up for lunch. For drinks. For a walk. And now that I was here, in a place where she still lived, I found myself hesitating.
T didn’t know who I was or what I did for a living. And she was the only relationship in my entire life where I could be myself. Be Nick, the guy who built houses in order to afford college. Nick, who lost his sister and still knew how to help his dad frame a house, and who ordered breakfast for dinner at Bob Evan’s because his sister loved it.
There was no one else in the world where I could be those things as easily. And I knew I risked ruining it if I met her.
My mom called from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready, guys.”
NicktheBrickLayer: Gotta go eat the shitty cordon bleu. Talk tomorrow?
TurboGirl: Busy day at work, but I’ll check in after.
NicktheBrickLayer: Thanks for messaging, T.
TurboGirl: Anytime. I wish I could’ve met her, N.
NicktheBrickLayer: Me too.
I set my phone down and sighed. Thank God I had her.
Faith
“Don’t you have your own office?”
The baby kangaroo in my arms jammed his feet against my body, pulling harder on the bottle I was feeding him, and I laughed. My best friend Tori shook her head, adjusting the joey in her own embrace.
“Yeah, but my office doesn’t have them,” I pointed out.
“You should’ve changed your major freshman year when we met because if you’d done it then like you wanted to, you’d get to feed these g
reedy little jerks every single day like I do.”
One of the greedy little jerks looked up at her with massive brown eyes, and she smiled down at it like it was her own child.
She wasn’t wrong, though.
Non-profit administration didn’t sound nearly as cool as feeding baby animals for a living, but it was the path that unfolded in front of me with ease when my dad married Allie. My afternoons and weekends, through middle school, high school, and college, were spent helping out at the Team Sutton events, then at the office as the organization grew.
It was also when my grooming had started. Not in a creepy way. But anyone with eyeballs could tell I was meant for that type of work.
I had a knack for it, as we’d discovered. The kids liked me, the school administrators liked me, and as evidenced by the mountain of scholarship applications currently leasing space on the corner of my very big desk in my very big office, the scholarship applicants liked me too.
And really, I loved all of them. As I’d grown older, it was obvious that I had a heart for volunteering. It was never work and never punishment. I loved helping out at Team Sutton, or the local animal shelter, or—in my college years when I needed some official volunteering hours not at Team Sutton—the zoo.
It’s where I met Tori, the jerk who lived with me and got to feed baby kangaroos all day long.
“Ouch,” I muttered when I got kicked in the boob again. I gave the joey a stern look.
“I told you to put him back in his bag,” she said, then tossed me the canvas tote that mimicked a mama’s pouch. She wasn’t getting kicked in the boob, so I listened to the smart zookeeper.
I scratched the side of his face while I maneuvered the rest of his body back into the bag and settled him on my lap. “You be careful, buddy. That’s the most action I’ve gotten in a while.”
Tori snorted. “There really is a shocking lack of men knocking down our door right now.”
“Right?” I shifted the bottle, my treacherous mind pulling up an image of Dominic Walker and the words he’d flung at me like darts. Every single one of them had landed with unerring precision. “All we get is handsy kangaroos and jackass football players.”
Tori gave me a sympathetic smile because I’d verbal vomited the entire story the night before.
“I bet once he gets to know you, he won’t think you’re a stuck-up rich girl who’s never worked a day in your life,” she said, oh-so helpfully.
I gave her a look. “It wouldn’t matter if he did. Rule number one.”
“I know, I know, I remember the douchebag. But honestly, it’s a tragic rule to adopt, considering the bevy of available men at your disposal. Honestly, each and every year, there’s a whole list of them drafted just for your perusal.”
I laughed. “Is that why they’re drafted?”
“They should be.” She shifted on her seat. “You watch. He’ll be following you around with heart eyes in no time.”
“I highly doubt that. You didn’t see him. This guy doesn’t just have a chip on his shoulder. He’s carrying around an entire freaking mountain.”
My roommate was undeterred. “Listen, it’s part of the Faith Pierson charm. We all go through this cycle when we come into your life. Like the stages of grief.”
“Oh my word, Tori,” I muttered.
“First is denial,” she continued. “I mean, look at you. You are smoking hot in that girl next door that could break the internet if she posted a nudie kind of way.”
“Which is totally my style.”
“You know what I mean. If you did. And it’s just a sad fact in this society, Miss Pierson … looking the way you look, with all those bajillions of dollars your parents have, the knee-jerk reaction of people whose parents don’t have a bajillion dollars is to deny the possibility that you are a kind person with a big heart and a recovered foul mouth who works really hard at whatever you do.”
I pointed a bottle at her. “I am around kids a lot at work, or I used to be, and I cannot be the one who’s teaching them creative ways to curse, okay? I like my swearing alternatives.”
Tori ignored me. “Then we all inevitably move to anger,” she said with a meaningful raise of her eyebrows.
“Why is your face doing that?”
“Mr. Walker is a perfect example of stage two in the Faith Pierson discovery cycle.”
I groaned. “Stop. I beg you.”
“He took one look at you, dipped his toe into denial, and went straight to anger.” She kissed the joey’s head and took the empty bottle away, hooking her tote bag around her neck so she could carry him around. “Which makes sense, if you know his background. He’s a scrapper, walk-on player in college, undrafted into the pros because no one thought he would do much—”
“I don’t want to know his story,” I interrupted. “Because I know exactly what kind of guy he is. I have no choice but to put his grumpy-tattooed-look at me I’m a bad boy ass into a situation where he’s trying to inspire and encourage the youth of Seattle.” I held her gaze. “Does that feel like a fun time to you?”
She sighed. “No.”
“No.” The bottle in my hand was empty too, so I set it on the floor and settled the joey—safely in his pouch—into a comfy chair next to me. “It was just … the way he looked at me, Tori. I’ve met a lot of football players in my twenty-six years, and I’m never surprised by the giant egos that can hardly fit through the door, the players, or the partiers. That comes with the territory. But the ones who come to help out at Team Sutton are good guys who work hard and love to give back.”
“And they’re usually very respectful of you because of who you are,” she pointed out gently.
“It’s not even that,” I hedged. “I mean, you’re not wrong. Sure, I’ve been judged for who my parents are. I’ve even been used for it,” I said lightly. “But I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who so quickly hated me for who I was.”
“Heavy is the burden of greatness,” Tori said lightly. We’d been friends long enough that she didn’t tiptoe around me, which I appreciated. Tori’s childhood was normal, and mine just wasn’t. My dad and Allie worked very hard to keep my sister and me grounded, but you could only instill so much normalcy when he was a championship-winning quarterback and my stepmom owned a professional football team. “Your life has been pretty sheltered, cupcake, and if his wasn’t, I can kind of understand why he acted like that.” She gave me a gentle smile. “Kind of.”
Suddenly, I wished I had the fuzzy little kangaroo shield in my arms again because her assessment made me feel kinda naked. “He looked at me like I was…” I paused, shaking my head. “Something to be pitied.”
Tori’s eyes took on a fierce gleam. “Then he has no idea how wrong he is, but you will show him tomorrow.”
“What stage of grief will he be in then?” I asked dryly. “I don’t think I want to know what Dominic Walker acts like when he’s trying to bargain with me over anything.”
“I’m teasing.”
“I know.”
She shifted the joey pouch. “You going to the office soon?”
With a groan, I stood from the floor of her office and wiped off the front of my jeans. “Yeah. I need to plan my day with the giant man-baby who can’t regulate his emotions.”
Tori laughed. “Good luck with that. I have a school tour in a little bit anyway.” She gave me a sly look. “You gonna go visit your boy’s koala?”
My face went hot, just like it always did when she teased me about Nick. “He’s not my boy, and for your information, no, I wasn’t planning on it.”
Her eye roll was proof of just how badly I’d lied. I always stopped and visited Ivy’s koala when I was at the zoo. For three years, he’d paid the digital adoption fee, and for some reason, it struck me as sad that he’d never been able to visit. So I always did it for him even though he’d never asked me to.
“Someone should,” I continued primly.
“Mm-hmm.”
“He lives in Texas, okay?
It’s not like he’s going to hop on a plane to come see it.”
“He used to live in Texas,” she pointed out. “You’re too chickenshit to ask him if he moved after college, and don’t you even deny it, Faith Pierson.”
I pulled my purse strap over my head. “You know what I like about my friendship with Nick?”
She pursed her lips. “The complete and total anonymity it affords you because it feels like he’s one of the only people who knows the true essence of who you are without all the weirdness of your day-to-day life?”
My face froze in a pained smile. “Yes?”
“And in other language … chickenshit. Because if you met him, you guys would probably fall in love and get married and have babies and save the world with all your do-gooding tendencies.”
The conversation I had with Nick the night before, a balm to my shitty, shitty day which started at the Wolves’ offices, was proof positive of what my friend was saying. Even without admitting it to her, I knew she knew she was right. And she knew that I knew it. One of those annoying unspoken true friend things.
In my head, I’d built him up to be tall and handsome, a good, decent man with a big heart and strong hands. In my head, he had a wide smile and sparkling eyes, and he spent his days creating homes for people to start their lives in. It felt impossibly wonderful that the reality of him matched the version I’d created. His profile picture was nothing more than the brim of a hat, white with the edge of an orange T-shirt showing, and a glimpse of his cheekbone, dark hair, and golden tan skin.
He talked about things that no guys my age usually talked about. How could he possibly measure up in every way?
Maybe it made me a chickenshit, like Tori said, but I would never sacrifice my friendship with him simply to see if the face-to-face version of us caused sparkage. Or flames. Or anything heat-inducing.
If I tried to explain who I was to Nick, explain my parents, our life, any of it … he’d get weird. And the last thing I wanted was to kick-start the Faith Pierson stages of grief, or whatever BS I’d never be able to get out of my head now that she said it.
The Lie : a bad boy sports romance Page 4
