“How long were you out?”
“Eight months,” she says simply. “I went back too early the first time. That was my mistake. Thought I could push through it because I'd been pushing through everything else.” She finishes the apple and puts the core down. “Turns out knees don't care about your ambition.”
“No,” I agree, laughing lightly. “They really don't.”
With my plate of food, I pull out the chair beside her and sit down, reaching for the water bottle on the table.
She tilts her head slightly, quietly studying me. “First overall pick,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“How's that feel?”
I take a second before answering. The easy response would be the polished press-conference bullshit about being thankful and prepared for the challenge ahead, but I have a feeling Whit would see through that and demand the truth.
“Like you've been handed a test you didn't write, and either you ace it or everyone finds out you've been cheating the whole time.” I shrug. “There's no room for partial credit.”
She nods slowly. “I get it.”
“Must be hard being the LPGA’s golden girl.”
She nods. “It is. At least you have a team to fall back on if things don’t go your way. I’m the only person to blame if I don’t bring ladies’ golf into the spotlight.” She smiles despite the slightly bitter edge in her tone. “But I don’t hate it. It’s only going to last as long as I keep winning. You, on the other hand...” she trails off.
Have a lot more to prove.
I finish the sentence for her.
“Yup,” I say. “Gotta win a little more than two games to get put on that pedestal.”
“It’s brutal.”
“Welcome to the NFL.” I lean back in the chair. “But like you, I can’t complain. I knew it was going to be hard coming in. The team needs work, the management doesn’t care, the coaching is worse. None of it was really a surprise. It’s just–” I stop.
“Louder than excepted,” she says.
I look up into her green eyes.
“The noise,” she clarifies. “You can prepare for the work part of it, but what you can’t really prepare for is how loud everything gets the second things don’t go your way. The hardest part is keeping your cool when everyone else around you doesn’t believe in you.”
“Yeah.” I pause. “Yeah, that's exactly it.”
She picks up her water bottle and slowly twists it between her hands. “My coach told me something when I went pro,” she says. “He told me the scrutiny isn’t proof that you don’t belong. It’s proof people expect something from you. The athletes nobody believes in don’t get picked apart like that.”
She shrugs lightly. “It didn’t exactly make the noise quieter, but... it made it a little easier to manage.”
“That's good advice,” I say. Better than anything Coach Masters has said. He’s why our team is struggling. How can we win when the expectation is set higher than our experience allows?
“Don't sound so surprised.”
“I'm not surprised. It’s just that I don’t usually talk about things like this with someone I’ve just met.”
She smiles, which is the first fully unguarded expression I've seen from her. “I find small talk inefficient,” she says. “We've both been doing this long enough to skip the part where we pretend the pressure isn't real.”
I chuckle. “Fair enough.”
She stands, stretching her arms above her head. “Right. I'm going to get some more food before Ashley calls us back and makes us stand in the cold again.” She looks down at my hand. “Get the wrist seen to, Evans. It isn't worth it.”
She heads back toward the food table, and I look down at my wrist, flexing my fingers once before I stop myself.
