“I know,” I heard him say just barely. “But you love it.”
“I do not!”
“You kinda do, though.” Even though I couldn’t see his face from this angle, I knew he was smiling.
And I knew he knew I was smiling too.
That bastard.
CHAPTER 11 - LANCE
What started out as a fake nap to help me avoid answering Charlotte’s very relevant question ended up very quickly becoming a real nap when I realized just how tired I was and just how comfortable this new groove in the bed I had settled into was.
I woke up an hour later and found Charlotte gone, and noticed that she had turned the TV off and cleared up my snack foods from earlier. I didn’t have much to do at the moment, so I turned the news back on and settled back in. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about not having anything to do, but I was bored of watching game film and studying the playbook.
I’d had nothing but downtime on my hands for the last few weeks, and I had reviewed all our upcoming opponents and attended the meetings just like normal. The only things I couldn’t do were workout, practice, and play. It just so happened that those were the most fun things I had to do each week, sooooo, yeah, it had been a rough few weeks.
Charlotte, of course, had been the only bright spot of this entire ordeal, though I’d rather pretend to take the world’s longest nap before I ever admitted that to her. I barely could admit it to myself that this woman, despite coming into my life at the worst possible time, was already becoming a huge part of it, and I looked forward to seeing her each and every time I did.
I didn’t even want to flirt with her as much as I did. Of course, if we’re being totally honest, I totally wanted to flirt with her even more than I already did. Every time I saw her, the thought of her body against mine made me even weaker with lust and desire.
But I couldn’t live like that, I couldn’t do that to her or to myself, and by extension, my teammates and the fans. I couldn’t break my promise to myself and open up to her, because I couldn’t risk that kind of vulnerability. The only person I could trust was myself and my teammates. That was how it had always worked.
So yeah, I loved flirting with Charlotte. I wanted to take her and press her against a wall every time I saw her. But I also knew that it couldn’t work out between us, not now. Not when so much was on the line.
There was a single knock on the door and then it opened. Oliver Lee, my backup quarterback came in, looking around with wide eyes that suggested he hadn’t spent much time around medical things. “Hey Lance, how’s it going?”
“Not too bad, Lee, not too bad. Catching the afternoon sports shows. How are you?”
“I’m alright, man, doin’ alright.”
The silence after that hung in the air for a few seconds. It got awkward. I didn’t mind, I actually enjoyed watching Lee squirm a bit. It was nothing personal; I’m sure if I got to know the guy we could be friends, but that was unlikely simply because it was Oliver Lee’s biggest and most important goal to take my job and never give it back.
The first part he had already succeeded at, and the second part he was working on.
“So, uh, Coach Armstrong asked me to come see you…”
“Yeah, he told me about it.”
Lee reached his hand up and brushed his blond hair back behind his ear. “Yeah, so do you have anything for me? Advice, I mean?”
Ugh, here was the hard part. Coach Armstrong had put me in a serious bind. He knew that I was the kind of player who would do whatever it took to help the team out, even if it wasn’t necessarily in my own best interest.
That was exactly what was happening. In the interest of the team and the season, Coach Armstrong was asking me to help Oliver Lee play well enough that it would be easier for Armstrong to give Lee my job permanently even once I got better.
Fuck. This fucking sucked. But I couldn’t see any way around it. I had Lee sit down and we went over his mechanics and how he needed to mentally approach the game, how to make sure he didn’t get overwhelmed by the action, how to tune out the crowds, and get past the media.
I told him things I wish someone had taught me a year ago when the Patriots had thrown me into the lion’s den after the previous quarterback got injured and I was forced to start way ahead of schedule. They had never even expected me to start; I was drafted to be a pure backup. Of course, that wasn’t my intention - far from it, but that was how things had looked.
Then that injury last year, and I was the starter. And now my injury this year, and Lee was the starter. It was my job to make sure that was only temporary.
But still, I had to help him, because even if I was able to come back and take the job from him, if we didn’t win any games in the meantime, this season was lost anyway.