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Bailey squealed and hugged her again, hard enough to knock the air out of her.

Nicole was going to miss having her right down the hall. Then again, a little privacy might not be the worst thing in the world.

“Babe!” Ryan yelled from the living room.

“Coming!” Bailey backed toward the door, pointing at her. “We’re finishing the Cedric story when I get back.”

Nicole wished them luck, and a few minutes later, the front door closed behind them.

Once the house was quiet, she stripped the bed, yanked the fitted sheet off the two corners that had somehow hung on all night, and pulled off the pillowcases. Everything went into her rolling hamper, and she wheeled it to the stairs and hauled it up to the laundry room.

She loaded the washer and got it going. Drew had said he would call, and until he did, she had shit to do.

Chapter Twenty-Two

By four Monday morning, Drew was awake and already pissed off, mostly at himself. The weight room opened at five, and his first class started at eight, which was enough time to lift, shower, and make it across campus.

At that hour, the drive took six minutes, with nobody else on the road except a paper-delivery truck making its rounds. Alabama got cold in November, but it wasn’t Boston cold. Even so, there was frost all over the practice field, and he could see his breath when he climbed out of his truck.

He was first through the weight-room doors, same as always. That came with being the quarterback and team captain, especially when they put your face on the entire program.

Drew lifted five days a week, but on Mondays he went hard enough to soak through his clothes and wreck every muscle he had. Today, he wanted it to hurt. He had plenty to take out on the weights, between the Heisman, Saturday’s loss and what it did to their shot at a national title, and the three regular-season games he had left in his college career. And Nicole.

When he left her house, he’d told her he would call, and he’d meant it too. That was the fucked-up part. But Sunday had gotten away from him. Every time he thought about picking up the phone, there was some reason to wait another hour, and by the time he ran out of reasons, it was too late to call without explaining the silence. Drew didn’t have an explanation, not a good one.

He started with squats and worked his way up to four plates a side. By the final set, sweat rolled off his jaw and his quads burned every time he drove up from the bottom. Then he moved on to power cleans, ripping the bar off the floor and bringing it down hard enough to make the plates rattle. Bench presses, pull-ups, sled pushes—he ground through all of it until his arms were shaking.

For the first hour, he had the weight room to himself. Most mornings, his Walkman was clipped to his waistband, the headphones turned up loud enough to shut out everything around him. Today, he’d left it in his bag. Five in the morning was the only part of his day when not a single person in the state of Alabama needed anything from him, and he wanted the quiet.

By six, the room had filled around him. Usually, Monday mornings came with music, shit talk, and somebody bitching about whatever still hurt from Saturday. This morning, nobody said a word.

At the corner rack, Kirby finished a set and slammed the bar into the hooks, then stood there with both hands locked around it, catching his breath. Two of the linemen traded sets in silence, which, if you knew linemen, did not happen. Somebody’s radio came on across the room, and a second later, somebody else walked over and shut it off. Neither of them said shit.

Between sets, Drew peeled off his shirt, wet and cold against his skin, and dropped it onto the end of a bench. In the mirror, he could see the six scratches Nicole had left down his back—four on the left side and two on the right, all of them already scabbed over. Just like that, he was back in her bed, with Nicole under him and her nails digging into his back, then on all fours while he fucked her from behind. She’d tried to keep quiet, but the harder he fucked her, the louder she got.

Cash passed behind him on his way to the water fountain, saw the scratches in the mirror, and grinned. “Damn, Drew. Leave some for the rest of us.”

Without turning around, Drew gave him the finger, grabbed his shirt off the bench, and pulled it back on. Another minute standing there thinking about Nicole, and he was going to end up with a hard-on in front of half the team.

Back to work. He kept going until seven, pushing himself past tired and into stupid. His legs felt like dead weight, his shoulders burned, and his shirt was soaked through all over again. Good.

After a quick shower at the field house, he drove home and crashed face-first across his bed. His eight-o’clock class could go fuck itself. He was too tired to sit in a classroom and pretend to listen, and one missed class wasn’t going to change where he was headed come spring.

A little over two hours later, his alarm dragged him awake. He threw on clean clothes and headed back to campus for a ten-thirty photo shoot. A photographer from Birmingham and his crew were already set up in the indoor facility. Somebody had rolled a navy paper backdrop down over the turf and taped the bottom flat. Tall lights stood on either side with white umbrellas turned toward the middle, and extension cords ran across the field under long strips of gray tape.

A student manager met Drew at the door with his game jersey on a hanger. Without pads under it, the jersey hung loose over his T-shirt, so a woman from the crew stepped behind him, bunched up the extra between his shoulder blades, and taped it. Then she went to work on his hair, misting it with a spray bottle, combing it back off his forehead, and running her fingers through it. She never once took her eyes off his face. Drew looked past her at the photographer setting up his camera and waited for her to finish.

The student manager handed him a football, and he planted his feet on the two strips of tape marking his spot. The photographer shot a Polaroid first, pulled the film out, and timed it on his watch. A minute later, he peeled the print apart and studied it before showing it to a guy from Jed’s sports information staff. The two talked quietly about the angle of Drew’s face and the way the jersey was sitting.

Drew waited. He’d been doing photo shoots and press long enough to know how this worked. Once the photographer raised his camera, Drew gave him what he wanted. Chin down. A little higher. Shoulders turned. Eyes straight ahead. Ball up, then lower, then right there. Hold it. Don’t move. There was no need to make the guy repeat himself.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the photographer asked him to look pissed off. Drew lowered his chin and narrowed his eyes at the lens.

“Perfect. Hold that. The camera loves you.”

The camera rattled through another twenty shots before the photographer said he wanted a few more with Drew’s shirt off.

Nobody had mentioned shirtless pictures, and Drew wasn’t in the mood for surprises. “What are they for?”