He leaned in, a gleam in his eye. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Lily. I wasn’t so great at this football stuff either, not at first. Sure, some of it’s talent, and everyone talks a big game like it’s some innate ability or something that’s handed down from on high by a mysterious being.”
He leaned in even further, conspiratorially, and I found myself doing the same. “The truth is that that’s all bullshit. It’s about 20-30% talent and genetic ability, but the rest of it is plain hard fucking work.”
He sat back. “And that’s football. Writing is totally different. Sure, the smarter you are, the more you’re able to express in your words, but that’s only 20-30% of the game. If you keep testing out what works and doesn’t work you’ll find the right stuff.”
“You still make it sound so easy.”
“It’s not fucking easy at all, don’t get me wrong. Nothing worth doing on a professional level is. If it were, everyone and their sister would do it, and no one could do it professionally.”
“That’s quite the pep talk.”
“All I’m saying is, you’ve gotten this far, that means you’re good enough to play in the big leagues. What happens next is up to you.”
Damn, Drake Rollins was even sexier when he was giving me a pep talk.
How was that even possible?!
It seemed like as good a time as any to ask an important question.
“So what’s the deal with you being a complete ass to me this last week?”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
CHAPTER 18 - DRAKE
“So what’s the deal with you being a complete ass to me this last week?”
That was out of the blue. “What do you mean?”
“I meant after we slept together last week, you changed.”
“I didn’t change at all, I treated you exactly the same as before.”
It was only when the words came out of my mouth that I realized my mistake. Of course, I had treated Lily exactly the same before we had fucked as after. I thought that was keeping things the same, but clearly in her world it was a huge change.
Because things were supposed to change after two people have sex, duh. I didn’t get that through my football-thickened skull, because in my world, there was very little difference in my relationship to a girl before and after sex.
Clearly Lily Pearson was not the kind of girl I regularly connected with, socially.
She was looking at me like I had grown a second head, and for all intents and purposes, I might as well have, right then and there. “I didn’t realize…”
“Never mind.” She shut me down, hard.
“Let me explai-“
“Save it, Drake, I should have never asked the question. Leave it to me to ruin a good night.”
This was a good night? All we had done was argue and tell the other person they were better than they thought they were. “If this is a good night, I don’t even want to get close to one of your bad nights.”
“No,” she smiled, “you don’t.”
We finished up eating and I paid the bill. We got up and walked out of the restaurant, and I made no attempt to hide how much I was ogling Lily in her sexy dress. I didn’t even ask her to dress up this time, she just automatically did.
That was hot as fuck.
We walked down the street along the sidewalk, away from the car, just two people taking a stroll. Of course I had just played in a preseason football game a couple hours earlier and Lily had covered the game for the Globe, but if you saw us in that moment, you wouldn’t be able to tell anything was out of the ordinary.
Lily slipped her arm into mine and we walked on, neither of us saying a word. This was weird, we were doing date-like stuff but it seemed pretty clear, at least to me, that what we were doing couldn’t continue too much longer. We came from different worlds and we were going in different directions.
All these thoughts ran through my head and I tried to get them to go away, because what was becoming abundantly clear to me was that I was falling for the girl assigned to cover me for the Boston Globe, the girl whose hand was making its way toward mine.
I really shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself - I was falling for Lily Pearson. Sure we fought all the time and when we weren’t having sex we were probably at each other’s throats, but at the same time she was the only person who believed in me. She wanted me to succeed, and even though she had a stake in it too, it felt so genuine that I didn’t care that she might have an ulterior motive.
She lifted me up when I was down, and that was so rare. Besides being deliriously sexy, that one fact was huge. Plus, the whole brilliant and talented writer thing.
“You know, Drake,” Lily piped up, “what you said earlier about believing in yourself, I think you could do a little bit more of that too.”
“What do you mean? I believe in myself enough for two guys. Enough for three!”
She giggled, then got serious. “We both know that’s just on the surface, though. You talk a big game, but you want to belong just as much as the rest of us do. You want to be a part of the team.”