Page 83 of Power Play

His phone vibrated again, and Briggs stabbed the mozzarella stick into his ranch hard enough to crack the breading.

Cade leaned back in the booth and watched him. “You planning to answer that?”

“I’m planning to let it annoy everyone until they give up.”

The phone buzzed against the wooden table again.

Easton glanced down at it. “They’re persistent.”

“People discover perseverance when television tells them they should give a shit.”

Nobody laughed, and Briggs noticed. His mouth tightened before he picked up the phone and looked at the screen.

“My mother.”

He set it back down without answering.

Rider lowered his burger while Cade’s expression changed. “She saw the segment?”

“Apparently everybody with basic cable did.”

“What’d she say?”

Briggs let out a humorless laugh and unlocked the phone. “Which message? We’ve got options now.” He scrolled through the screen. “My favorite so far is, ‘Your father and I watched you last night. We’re so proud of the man you’ve become.’”

His jaw flexed as Easton leaned farther back in the booth.

“Then Dad sends me the clip this morning like maybe I missed the part where my own face took up half the television.” Briggs laughed again, quieter this time. “His text says, ‘That’s our boy.’”

The words sat wrong in the middle of the table.

Briggs locked his phone and looked at all the food he’d ordered without touching any of it. “I was never their guy when I needed them.”

The comedy disappeared from his face, leaving behind the version of Briggs most people never saw. Everybody knew the loud goalie who climbed onto furniture sober, argued with strangers for entertainment, and turned almost any uncomfortable conversation into something stupid enough that nobody had to sit inside it for long.

We knew what lived underneath too.

Cade reached for his drink but didn’t lift it. “You don’t owe them anything.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t sound like you know.”

Briggs rubbed one hand over his jaw. “I know intellectually. Is that helpful?”

“Not even a little.”

“Then I’m fucked.”

Rider shifted beside me. “You’re pissed.”

“I’m fucking furious.”

His answer came fast enough that several people at the next table looked over. Briggs lowered his voice without lowering the anger.

“I wanted that shit when I was ten. Twelve. Fourteen. I wanted my dad at games where there were forty people in the stands and half of them were parents who came because somebody had to drive their kid home. I wanted my mother to remember my birthday without Grandma calling her three days before to make sure she had the date right.”

His phone vibrated again, but this time he didn’t touch it.