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“I didn’t know she was coming.” The words came out thick and slow. “I swear to God.”

“I know.”

In the glass, he dragged both hands down his face, then touched two fingers to the cut and pressed on it, like he was checking how bad it was.

Nicole turned around. “Why wouldn’t you press charges?”

“Nicole.”

“No. I want to know. She broke into your room and attacked you.”

“She’s a girl,” he said, as if that made it excusable.

With the overhead light on and nobody yelling, Nicole could finally see all of it, and it was worse than she’d thought. Red welts were coming up on the side of his neck and all down both forearms. He had long pink scratches across the back of one wrist and a mark on his collarbone where his shirt had been yanked crooked. And that cut, still seeping at the edges.

“She drew blood, Drew. She tried to force herself on you!”

He flinched at that, harder than he had when his mother went for the cut. He shook his head at the floor. “What am I supposed to tell them? Huh?” He laughed, and there was nothing funny in it. “That a girl did this to me? Cops come, and it’s in the papers. It’s in the fuckin’ papers, Nicole.”

That shut her up.

Because he was right, and nobody knew that better than she did. She knew exactly how fast a story like this got from a hotel room to a checkout line. Heisman finalist. Naked blonde in his bed. And if Drew pressed charges, Phallon would turn right around and press them on Nicole. Phallon had a split lip to show for it, and two guards who’d walked in on Nicole beating her ass. Then it wouldn’t just be his name in the papers. It’d be Melvin Wright’s daughter in a hotel brawl, right there in the headline next to Drew’s. Her family had just been through one tabloid cover this fall. Her mother would never leave the house again.

“I just wanted her gone,” Drew said.

“She should be in handcuffs,” Nicole said anyway.

“Yeah, well.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “She’s not.”

Nicole had plenty more to say, none of it fair, all of it stacked up behind her teeth. But he was sitting there bent in half with blood drying on his face, and if she said one more word, she was going to start yelling, and she’d done enough yelling tonight.

She turned back to the window and watched him through the glass.

“Wait,” Drew said behind her. “How are you here?”

“My doctor cleared me to fly Friday, so I booked a ticket. I wanted to surprise you. But my flight was delayed all day. I sat in that airport for hours. I was supposed to be here before the ceremony. I was supposed to . . .” Her throat closed up on her, and a cough came up behind it. She turned her face into her shoulder until it passed. “I didn’t make it. I was still on the plane when they called Tariq’s name.”

Drew lifted his head and looked at her for a long time. “Thank you. For coming.”

“Yeah.”

He opened his mouth to say something else. Then his face changed, and he went pale. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

He was off the bed before she could move, one hand over his mouth, stumbling for the bathroom. He caught the doorframe with his shoulder and didn’t even slow down. A second later his knees hit the tile, and then he was throwing up.

Nicole stayed where she was. She was still so mad she could feel it in her jaw and her shoulders, and in her hand, aching under that ice. At Phallon. At those guards. At Mrs. Kiernan and that glare. At the airline, and every single hour she’d lost in Birmingham. Not at him for getting drunk, though. He’d lost the Heisman on national TV, and she got it. She was mad she hadn’t been here for it.

He retched again, and then again, and groaned. She stood there one more second. Then she set the towel on the windowsill, crossed the room, and went into the bathroom.

The smell hit her before she was all the way through the door, sour and sharp, all that liquor coming back up. Drew was on his knees in front of the toilet with one arm across the seat and his forehead resting on it. His back heaved, and he gagged on nothing.

Nicole reached past him and flushed. He didn’t even lift his head.

“Sorry,” he mumbled into his arm.

“Hush.” She filled one of the little plastic cups by the sink and set it on the floor next to him. Then she took a washcloth off the rack, ran it under the cold tap, and knelt down on the tile beside him. She pushed his sweaty hair back off his forehead and wiped his mouth. Then she wiped the lipstick off his jaw until there wasn’t a trace of that girl left on him.

She rinsed the cloth, wrung it out again, and put one hand flat on his back.