Looking around the room, I noted all three of their faces were frozen into variations of this is a horrible idea.
“You guys,” I stated, “I’ve totally got this. They probably aren’t even coming to film him. We have thirty-one other players to pick from. It’ll be fine.”
Oh, how very, very wrong I was.
NOAH
Almost nothing about my job intimidated me.
A three-hundred-pound offensive lineman could curse me out just before the snap of the ball, threaten my mother and spit through his helmet all the ways he was going to grind me into the turf, and I wouldn’t feel the slightest twinge of apprehension.
I didn’t become the best at my position by getting scared off easily. I did it by living, eating, breathing football.
Nothing came before it. Nothing ranked above it.
Practice always took precedence over anything I might find fun, which was why my former teammates in Miami used to call me The Machine. I was the first one in the weight room, the last one to leave the film room, the copious notetaker at meetings, and probably one of the only unapologetically celibate football players in the league.
Another thing that didn’t come before my job was women, or what anyone around me might think of me.
But when my agent called me two days earlier, and said, “We’re sending you to Washington,” I felt something foreign lodge behind my chest, somewhere low in my rib cage.
Apprehension.
Nerves.
And worst of all, the slightest, smallest twinge of fear.
Because forty-eight hours later, I found myself standing in front of the closed door of my new defensive coordinator, who was expecting me for a meeting, and I couldn’t bring myself to open it.
My hand wouldn’t lift to knock, and my feet stayed stubbornly parked in place. I’d clocked in at two hundred and eighty pounds at my last weigh-in, and not one of those pounds, the muscle I’d worked on my entire career, was feeling particularly motivated to move me forward into that office.
My jaw tightened as I stared at the nameplate next to the door, innocuous silver with black letters.
Logan Ward, Defensive Coordinator.
In the past ten years, I’d only seen him once since I started for Miami, when our teams had played against each other two years earlier. A nod after the game, which they’d won, and that was it.
Prior to that … I refused to think about. My eyes pinched shut because that one day set me onto a trajectory where nothing, and no one, would ever distract me from my goals again.
The door yanked open, and his face greeted me with a scowl.
“Are you coming in, Griffin, or should we yell at each other through the door?”
Whatever trace of fear had been lingering was instantly replaced with annoyance, and I gave him a look of consternation. “Nice to see you, too.”
“Let’s get this over with because I don’t need distractions, and there are already enough of them lining up for the season.”
“Are you this welcoming to every guy you coach?” I asked as I followed him into the no-frills office.
“Nope,” he answered easily. He sat heavily in his chair and watched me thoughtfully.
His was typical of every coordinator’s office I’d ever been in. A desk with two chairs across from it, a whiteboard along the back, and empty walls. Their work took place on the field, their strategies mapped out on clipboards and in the film rooms. And a defensive mind like Logan’s, that had been one of the best when he played, had only been honed further now that he coached from the sidelines.
His genius didn’t need a fancy office. He just needed players who listened and knew what to do, knew what to look for, and who had that same sense that he did in reading an offense.
“Haven’t talked to you in a long time, Griffin.”
Just over nine years since we exchanged a single word, but that stayed unsaid, considering my dad sold our house shortly after Logan all but threatened my career in his driveway if I ever looked at his sister again. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t ask to be sent here.”
He exhaled a quiet laugh. “Dispensing with niceties, I see.”
I swiped a hand over my mouth. This was the part I wasn’t very good at. “I guess. I just … I’m here to work, you know? Yes, you and I used to be neighbors, but it’s not like anyone knows that here. I didn’t want to leave my team, but here I am. It’s not my choice, but I’ll be damned if it derails me in any way.”
Logan’s attention never wavered from my face, and his expression never shifted. It was that razor-sharp focus that every good player had. Every good coach too.
“You’ve changed,” he said quietly.
“In ten years? I hope so.”
“Fair enough,” Logan conceded. He leaned forward, setting his folded hands on the surface of the desk. “Here’s the deal: you’ve got more natural talent in your pinky finger than most players on my entire defense. And if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it until my dying breath.”
My face stayed unchanged, even as my heart sped up at his compliment.
“But I will not go easy on you because we knew each other. If anything, I’d take great pleasure in seeing you get knocked on your ass a couple of times, simply because it’s within my power to make that happen,” he said with a grim smile.
I sat back. This was the meeting I’d expected. The warning I’d anticipated. All because his pain in the ass little sister climbed on the lap of a stupid college boy who used to let his dick rule his life.
My thoughts must have been clear on my face because he nodded like he could read every single one.
“I wasn’t allowed to knock you the hell out back then,” he said. “But I wanted to.”
My chin lifted a fraction of an inch. “I know you did, sir.”
“I won’t now. I’ve matured in my old age.”
If he wanted me to crack a smile and lighten the mood, I didn’t give him the satisfaction. Nobody saw me flinch. “You also know I’d hit you back, coach or not.”
Logan’s smile was slow, but it came nonetheless, because he thought I was joking. When my face still didn’t change, the smile disappeared. He shook his head.
“You are one grumpy son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“I’ve heard that, yes.” Then I shook my head. “I’m not grumpy. I just don’t take any of this lightly. Football is the most important thing in my life.”
“I can respect that.” He tapped the side of his thumb on the desk, looked away from me, then looked back, seeming to come to a decision about something. “She works here, by the way.”
I tilted my head. “Who does?”
A warning siren started low, somewhere in the back of my brain as he said it, and it occurred to me, just before he answered that maybe this was the reason I felt apprehensive about this change. This was the reason I should’ve been afraid to come to Washington.
“Molly.” He stared me down, daring me to have any sort of negative reaction about her. Any reaction at all.
Over the past nine years, I’d come to think about Molly with a strange sense of detachment, equal parts harbinger of destruction and the symbol of my shifting focus.
“A lot of people work here, sir. What does that have to do with me?”
His eyebrows popped up. “Not much, I suppose. I just wanted to give you a heads-up, in case—“
I held up a hand. “She a trainer?”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.