But flipping Cole the bird would convey the exact breed of familiarity with these people that Jackson had been striving for the better part of a month to avoid.
That was unfair. It wasn’t that Jackson didn’t like them. They were good people. It was just…
Jackson’s hand lifted to his shirt collar, a finger slipping into the neck of the white dress shirt as he tugged at it.
He didn’t belong.
For three weeks—three long-ass, bullshit weeks—he’d been trying to pretend that he, Jackson Burke, former quarterback of the Texas Redhawks, could change. That he could now be Jackson Burke, fitness editor for Oxford magazine.
It wasn’t working. He hated New York. Hated the suits. Hated the change.
“I already ate,” he grumbled for the second time, avoiding the knowing look his coworkers were giving him.
“Huh,” Cole said. “Heads up.”
Before Jackson fully registered Cole’s intentions, the other man’s wrist flicked, tossing the baseball toward Jackson.
The ball came to Jackson’s right side, but it was his left hand that crossed his body to catch it.
He felt a flash of rage, wondering if Cole had done that on purpose to test him—wanting to see for himself if the rumors about Jackson’s injury were exaggerated.
Believe it, Sharpe. The right shoulder’s every bit as useless as everyone thinks.
But Cole wasn’t paying attention to whether or not Jackson had caught the damn baseball. He was too busy shooting the shit with Lincoln Mathis—another Oxford staffer, and one who didn’t feel the need to lie about already having had lunch. Lincoln had that sort of easy confidence that he belonged here. They all did.
But then they hadn’t had their entire life turned upside down the moment a multitasking businessman had thought he was the exception to all the don’t-text-and-drive statistics. They hadn’t gone from NFL superstar to international douchebag. Although the douchebag part he couldn’t blame on Mr. Text-and-Drive. Jackson’s reputation was a gift from his toxic ex-wife.
As he lifted his finger to his too-tight shirt collar once again, it occurred to Jackson that maybe it wasn’t the shirt that threatened to choke him. Maybe it was the anger.
Anger that not so long ago his biggest worry had been Tirone Alberts’s occasional butterfingers in the end zone. Now the closest he’d be getting to any end zone was through the seventy-five-inch flat-screen in his living room.
“Hey, Burke!” Lincoln Mathis said, seeming to realize for the first time that they were standing in the doorway of Jackson’s office. “You coming to lunch?”
Even Jackson Burke could admit that Lincoln was one good-looking dude. Black hair, blue eyes, shoulders that knew their way around a gym.
And just like Penelope and Cole, Lincoln had no respect for the fact that Jackson had zero interest in joining their little clique.
“No. Not coming to lunch.” Jackson cleared his throat when he realized how terse his response sounded. “I have a couple things to work on here, otherwise I would.”
Penelope tilted her head, her long brown ponytail swinging to the side. “I thought you said it was because you already ate.”
Jackson lifted a hand to his forehead, relieved not to feel any dampness. Good Christ, were these people out to kill him?
Jackson had jumped at the job offer from Oxford magazine’s editor in chief with an odd mixture of reluctance and desperation. Reluctance to relocate to New York, to cease being an athlete and start being a journalist. Desperation to escape Houston. Desperation to get to—
“So that’s a no, then?” Cole asked, interrupting Jackson’s dark thoughts.
He gave a curt shake of his head. “Maybe next time.”
Someone snorted at that. He wasn’t sure who.
“Yeah,” Penelope said quietly. “Maybe next time.”
One of them closed his office door with a quiet click, and Jackson shut his eyes in gratitude for the silence even as he felt a stab of regret.
How many times would he have to say no until they quit asking?
How many times until he wanted to say yes? Until he wanted to be one of them, going to the casual lunches, the after-work happy hours, and the weekend whatevers.
But something held him back. No, everything held him back. Accepting a job offer with Oxford magazine had been foolish. Worse than the time he’d thrown an interception at his first Super Bowl. Worse than the time he’d had an affair with his professor in college. Worse than the time he’d blown his entire first year’s salary on a Houston mansion he hadn’t yet been able to afford.
Worse, even, than marrying the woman who’d nearly destroyed him.
But none of that—not the interceptions or the affairs or the money mistakes or Madison—quite measured up to the acute stab of foolishness that had Jackson staring rather desperately around his barren office wondering what the fuck he was doing.