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Chapter 1: Brooks Chapter 1 Brooks
“I ever tell you how much I hate you?”
With a sinister-as-hell smile curling the corners of his mouth, Parker drops the five-pound plate he’d been in the process of adding to my squat.
He picks up a ten and feeds it onto the bar instead. Adds one more to the other end while I stand here like a chump, unable to do a thing about it because the bar’s already loaded with another too-many-fucking-pounds across my shoulders.
“Despise.” I grind my teeth as he assumes his position behind me, arms outstretched to spot me. “Have I ever told you how much I despise you?”
“Multiple times a day.” My best friend seems to pride himself on it. He smirks real hard at my reflection in the wall of mirrors in front of us. “Squat the damn bar, Brooks. We’ve got to be out on the field for drills in thirty.”
From an alternate universe somewhere out there, a very different Brooks Attwood shakes his head at my sweaty form in abject disgust.
Look at you. You call yourself a big-shot NFL starting wide receiver?
I do not, in fact, call myself that. Nor has anyone else since a miserable spring day, two years ago.
Alternate Brooks, who’s currently nine years into his pro football career, could squat this bar no problem. He’d scored three touchdowns in the second half of his last Super Bowl game to bring his team as close as they’d come to a championship in over two decades.
Unlike me, that Brooks didn’t leave that game limp and unconscious on a stretcher, six minutes and eleven seconds after his last touchdown. He didn’t spend months recovering from a crippling concussion, thinking he’d never make it out of a dark room again let alone survive another tackle from men twice his width. And he didn’t retire from the league while at the very top of his game.
The lucky bastard’s probably sitting pretty on some beach during his off season. Maybe with a wife and a kid on the way.
He’s certainly not here.
In the gym at the University of Oakwood Bay, deserted but for me and Parker as the school year winds down.
“Two more reps and then thirty seconds of rest.” In the mirror, I find Parker frowning at my form. He taps my left thigh as I lower into a squat, and I adjust the bend in my knee.
I lucked out, having two physical therapists-slash-trainers for best friends. Parker and our friend Summer have been whipping my body into athletic submission since January, when I quit my only season as wide receiver coach for the UOB Huskies football team to focus on an unlikely comeback to the NFL. They’ve been helping me build enough endurance to sprint the length of a football field as fast as I did when I played, without vomiting violently on the sideline. Reminding my feet what it’s like to twinkle-toe through a course of intricately laid orange cones without wiping out and breaking my neck. And building enough strength not to crumble under the weight of the godforsaken bar currently perched on my back.
It’s a long shot, no doubt about it. A player pushing thirty, attempting to come back to the league as a free agent, after a bad concussion and two-year retirement? It’s unheard of.
Laughable, depending on which sports pundit you ask. Since the day my agent leaked the news that I’ve been working on a comeback, you’d be hard-pressed to find a media outlet that hasn’t run at least one segment a day about it. Either talking up my audacity or mocking my delusion. And all of them chalking it up to my being yet another athlete who can’t bear to let the game go. To see the end of his glory days.
I’ll take those assumptions any day, if it means they never catch wind of the humiliating truth: that my obsession with this comeback is fueled by neither audacity nor delusion, but by the cold sweats waking me up in the middle of the night. The tossing and turning until I give up on sleep and drag my ass out of the house for a long, exhausting run, bringing along my poor German shepherd simply for the sake of his company.
I squat the final two reps, sweat absolutely pouring down my temples, and rack the bar. Parker hands me the towel I’d slung on the black workout bench in front of us.
“Your knee keeps turning inward on the descent. Does it feel tight?”
I run the towel over my face. “It’s been locking up on and off since yesterday’s drills.”
Parker swears under his breath. “You’re supposed to tell me these things. How do you expect me to help when you’re out here pretending everything’s fine?”
“Everything is fine. That knee just squatted my body weight on a bar.”
Parker’s eyes close. He sucks in a long breath as though willing away all his problems in life. Which, I suspect, mainly consist of me at the moment.
He points at the workout bench. “Sit down.”
“The knee’s fine. Let’s keep going.”
“Sit the fuck down, Brooks.”
I sigh like he’s my biggest problem and drop onto the bench, leg extended. Parker crouches and gets to work digging his thumbs into the muscles around the joint. I think making it hurt on purpose, just to prove a point.
The doors at the opposite end of the facility bounce open, smashing into the walls, and we look around to find Summer striding into the otherwise empty space. She’s been in the adjoining athletic rehabilitation center with a client all morning, and I wonder whether the session went to shit, considering the look of murder on her face.
“Look who I found trolling the rehab center.” She widens her eyes at us. And then I spot Josh, the agent who’s been in charge of my career since my rookie season, following several feet behind.
“Heard that,” Josh tells her.
“Meant you to.” Summer runs a frustrated hand through her shoulder-length brown hair.
I don’t blame her. Josh is an ass on his best day.
But he’s an ass that got me nearly everything I’d dreamed of as a kid hoping to one day go pro. Drafted second overall by the Los Angeles Rebels, during my junior year here at UOB. A lucrative six-year contract extension that bought two homes for me and one for my parents. Multiple cars I really didn’t need, outrageous holidays my ex-girlfriend enthusiastically bragged about on social media.
He and his five-percent cut had jumped at the opportunity when I’d called about this comeback.
Josh rounds Summer to set a laptop on my workout bench, looking ridiculously out of place in his crisp pinstripe dress shirt and slacks. His hair is neatly pushed back in a way that would take my unruly waves a good forty-five minutes of styling to accomplish. Not that I’d ever waste a second attempting it.
He does a double take when he sees Parker working on my knee. “What happened?”
Summer, too, looks concerned by the sight. She assesses the movement of Parker’s fingers around the joint. Seems to sigh inwardly when she connects the dots.
“Nothing happened. Just resting before the next set.” I stand despite Parker’s obvious disapproval, and the now outward sigh from Summer. But these two are my ride-or-dies. They know how easy it is to set off Josh at the mere mention of a papercut on my multimillion-dollar hands, let alone a tight knee. So they keep their mouths shut as I line up at the squat rack. Simultaneously, they move to either side of the bar and remove fifty pounds off the ends.
“Cool-down set,” Parker explains when Josh raises an eyebrow.
Satisfied that my body is still in working order, Josh decides to ruin my day in a different way. “Bad news, Brooksy.”
I almost falter mid-squat. “Not something I want to hear, man. Is this about your call with the Rebels? How’d it go?”
Josh had arranged a call this morning with Jackson Ford, head coach for the Rebels, to discuss the prospect of my return. Because it’s not enough to rejoin the league. I’ve set my sights back on my old team. Two years later, they’re still among the top four teams. And the last time I wore their royal purple jersey also happens to be the last time I truly felt alive. Three feet in the air, catching a football a heartbeat before I was on the receiving end of what I’d then decided was a career-ending tackle.
The Rebels are where I need to be.
“You wanna know how it went?”
Squat.
Josh flips open the laptop he’d placed on the bench.
Squat.
The screen comes to life. It takes me a second to make sense of the picture in front of me. It’s dark and a little blurred...
And then my eyes adjust. It’s me. Me and...
“What the—” My knees buckle. Behind me, Parker darts to grab the bar, helping to get it back on the rack.
Who is that woman?
I’ve got her backed up against an alley wall I recognize as one next to Beehive, a Hollywood nightclub frequently attended by Rebels players. The photo’s close up, but grainy in a way that tells me whoever took it captured it from afar. I’ve got my mouth planted on this woman’s neck, and her fingers seem to be fumbling with my belt buckle.
“What the fuck is that?”
“That,” Josh jabs his finger at the screen, “is the reason you’re not getting signed to the Rebels. They gave me this. A file full of photos just like it.”
My body goes cold. “Since when is a consensual make-out in a back alley an unsignable offense?” I sound outraged. But I remember full well what else happened in that back alley.
And it was far more than a make-out.
Josh hits a button on his laptop. It’s another photo. The same alley outside of Beehive, but my clothes are different. My shirt’s all the way open this time and... that’s definitely a different woman.
Josh clicks again, and another photo floods the screen. Same alley. Different woman.
Humiliation trickles through every inch of my body. At my side, Summer whispers a very sad, “Oh, Brooks.”
I’ve done my best to forget the six months I spent aimlessly wandering LA after my retirement. Not just because I’d been broken-hearted over losing my dream career at twenty-seven. But because the day I’d announced my retirement—already the worst day of my life—was also the day I caught Naomi, my then-girlfriend of eight years, cheating with my own teammate.
She’d taken my barely beating heart and turned it into a lifeless husk. The months that followed were a blur of Hollywood nightclubs, nameless women I’d never see again. Too much liquor and brain-numbing hangovers. Living on instant gratification. Anything and everything I could do to forget that I’d just had the soul ripped out of me, losing my dream career and college sweetheart in a single day.
I was a walking disaster of a human. Treated my body like shit until my poor mom finally broke down in a fit of tears over the phone one night. It crushed me so bad, I got my ass into therapy the very next morning.
“It’s an unsignable offense,” Josh continues, “because the Rebels are a family-owned business. Passed down through generations of the Dupont family, who very much value their reputation as a squeaky-clean organization. And according to this slideshow, you seem to have fucked your way through the state of California the last time you lived there.”
“I haven’t done that in a long time.” My voice comes out paper-thin. I’m fixated on the photo on screen, the way I look... barely there. Barely alive.
“Since you moved to Oakwood to coach,” Josh specifies. “I know. You cleaned up your act, did something with your day that didn’t involve drinking and fucking. But as far as they’re concerned, you got your act together after leaving the Hollywood scene. They’re convinced that bringing you back will set you off. That you’ll humiliate the organization with more of this very public indecency the moment you set foot in that town again.”
I shake my head, rejecting the thought that the Rebels might not want me back because of the stupid things I’d done in a drunk and depressed fog. “This is bullshit. You see that, right? I haven’t been that guy in years. I’ve... I’ve been productive and responsible—”
Josh hits that damn key on his laptop and the next photo puts me way back on my heels. It’s set at Oakley’s, the only bar here in Oakwood. It’s a grainy photo again, taken from across the room, but it’s clearly me. Sitting in a chair with a petite blonde in my lap.
Josh raises his eyebrows. “You had an affair with your best friend’s girlfriend just a few months ago—”
I cough out a breath. Beside me, Parker mutters “Oh, Jesus” and runs his fingers through his hair. Summer chokes on a startled laugh. Probably because the woman on screen is our friend Melody, who also happens to be Parker’s twin sister and our friend Zac’s now-fiancée.
“That wasn’t real.” The satisfaction of finally being able to explain something forces a laugh out of me. “I was her fake boyfriend. We pretended to date each other so Parker wouldn’t know she was really hooking up with his childhood best friend. If anything, she was the one having an affair, seeing as she had two boyfriends on the go. One real, one fake.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Josh demands.
“It wasn’t real. That one-time lap-sitting was as far as it ever got with us, and Zac—her real boyfriend—was in on it. It was fake. I was her fake boyfriend.”
“Fake boyfriend?” Josh blinks. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Thank you.” Parker shakes his head at the photo of me and his sister sitting together. Summer huffs a laugh. “Absolutely stupid.”
“Point is, all you have to do is explain that to the Rebels, and this’ll be squared away.”
“And the other women?” Josh flies through the back-alley photos again. “Were you fake-dating them, too?”
“That’s... No. It’s exactly what it looks like. But I wasn’t in my right mind then.” I white-knuckle the racked squat bar, willing away the nausea that rumbles through me with every picture that flashes on his screen.
“That’s enough.” Parker moves to my side. His body is tense like he expects to have to jump into a brawl at any moment. “He gets the point, Josh. Knock that shit off.”
Summer snaps shut Josh’s laptop, removing the photos from my sight. The tension in my chest eases almost instantly. They’ve spent the past few months tirelessly working to get me into playing shape, but I’ve never been more grateful for the both of them.
“All right.” Josh sighs. It’s as close to an apology as I’ve ever heard from him. “Look, Brooksy, you know there’s no one more invested in your comeback than me.”
Summer snorts. Parker rolls his eyes.
“Fine. Tweedledee and Tweedledum over here aside.” Josh waves a dismissive hand at them.
“Don’t.” Summer flings an arm out in front of Parker without even looking his way—probably sensing, by virtue of their twenty-six years of friendship, that he was about a moment away from throttling my agent. He’s always been an act first, think later kind of guy.
Parker’s body immediately deflates.
Josh watches it unfold with amusement, and I think I might throttle him myself. “Is that what you’ve come here to tell me, Josh? That the only team I want to play for won’t have me? That there’s no chance of my signing with them?”
Josh turns his attention back to me. “That is what I’m saying. Before our call today, I would’ve given you a ninety percent chance of receiving an invite to their training camp in a couple months’ time.”
“And now? What chance do I have?”
“Unless you find a way to convince the Rebels owners that you’re no longer the kind of person who meets with random women in back alleys—yes, I know it was consensual, Brooks.” He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his slacks, shakes his head at the beginnings of my protest. “It doesn’t matter to them how ready and willing these people were. Unless you can somehow prove you’ve settled down, that you’ve turned over a new leaf? You can kiss your chances of signing with them goodbye.”
I sag against the cool metal squat bar. “And how do you expect me to do that?”
“Any chance you’ve got a wife or long-term girlfriend you’ve been hiding from me?” Josh shrugs when I shake my head, in a move I’d almost call helpless. “Then I’m sorry, Brooks. It’s time to consider other teams. And do yourself a favor and keep it in your pants.”
He collects his laptop and spares Summer and Parker a glance before turning on his heel and making for the gym doors.
“And if I don’t want to consider other teams?” I call after him.
He doesn’t answer. Josh shoots me a genuinely sad smile over his shoulder.
And that’s how I know how serious he is. How absolutely shit out of luck I am.
