AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Fine. Still, nobody knows. You never confirm or deny your suspicions to her.”
I nod. “I swear.”
He stares at me for a few beats, and then, to my complete and utter shock, he tells me. “It was a bad injury. There was an infection. I had to have additional surgeries. There was talk that I might not make it back to the field at first, and that was the story that my publicity team released.” He shakes his head a little as he’s transported back to that time. “I made peace with that, and a small part of me had this strange sense of relief I wasn’t expecting when I was told I might not get back to the field. I thought maybe it was just the drugs helping me cope. The mere thought of a career-ending injury for an NFL player would be devastating, but instead my thoughts immediately turned to coaching. It turned to what came after playing. I didn’t want to keep beating the hell out of my body. I was tired of blocking defensive linemen and getting plowed down for it. I was just…tired of playing. I’d been doing it since I was old enough to join my first pee-wee league, and I didn’t want to do it anymore even though I still wanted to be connected to the game. I wanted to strategize. I wanted to be in charge. But there was literally nobody I could admit that to. Literally nobody.” He stops, and his eyes meet mine. “My father…I couldn’t disappoint him.”
“That must’ve been impossible,” I say, offering my sympathy.
He drains the whiskey in his glass. “I couldn’t just opt out of the game. So I asked the doctor not to speak to anyone about the injury, and since he had to follow confidentiality laws, I used the knee as my out and rewrote my own narrative.” He shrugs at the end and sits on the edge of the bed. “So go ahead and judge me however you want, but that’s my story, and you’re the only one who knows it aside from my doctor and myself, so if you publish it, I go to the press and let them know you’re just a bitter ex making up stories.”
I gasp a little at the end of his diatribe. It’s not the fact that he lied to the world about his injury—something I already suspected.
It’s the fact that he feels like he needs to threaten me to ensure I won’t tell anyone.
It hurts.
Far worse than I ever imagined it would.
“Lincoln, I won’t tell a soul. I swear. You can trust me.”
He glances over at me, and I finish my whiskey and slam the glass on the nightstand.
“But if you ever threaten me again, you will not like the results.”
He clenches his jaw, and he sets his empty glass on the dresser. “Understood.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me, but I have to ask. What made you confess?”
He shakes his head. “I have no fucking clue. Your magical pussy, maybe.”
Despite the gravity in this room, I can’t help when I break into a fit of giggles at that.
“Want more?” he asks, holding up the whiskey bottle.
“If I have anymore, I’ll be drunk.”
He grins and pours us each a little more before he perches back at the foot of the bed. “Then drink up, JoLo.”
JoLo. I haven’t been called that since…well, since the last time he called me that.
My first and middle name. Jolene Lorraine. He’s the only one who has ever called me that.
“What are you going to do with me once I’m drunk?” I ask.
He smirks. “I’ve never seen a drunk Jolene Bailey. Remember how adamantly you were against alcohol when you were fifteen?”
I laugh. “Yeah. Times have changed.”
“But you’re still as stubborn as you ever were.”
I take a sip. “I don’t know about that. I did just let you fuck me, after all.”
“I think you were the one fucking me there, Bailey.”
I laugh as I take another sip. “You sound like you’re ready for round two.”
“I can’t tell if that’s an invitation or a threat.”
“Maybe both.” I set my glass down and get up on my knees. I grab the nearly empty pizza box and set it on my nightstand, and then I crawl over to where he’s sitting. I press my lips to the back of his neck. He’s still not wearing a shirt, and it’s kind of not fair that he can just sit there eating pizza and drinking whiskey sans shirt and those six-pack abs just ripple in the moonlight.
