Page 33 of Hard Count
“Y’all need hobbies.”
“Bro, winning is our hobby,” a defensive line end yelled.
That got another round of laughter.
Noah leaned back, letting the noise wash over him.
“You assholes would not have said no to the amount of money they threw at us to get naked in front of a bunch of fucking taxidermy!”
For now, Noah could control the jokes.
His phone buzzed, it was his older brother, Danny, Bro, the family is not happy with these photos and the attention. This is NOT how we were raised.
A pit in Noah’s stomach started to grow. He had told the family what he was doing but maybe left out the finer details around it being homoerotic for engagement sake.
He started typing,Well the Reyes vultures have always been fucking happy with the money.His finger was hovering over the send button, but he stopped before he sent. He did not want to start more beef with his brother and would never win. The house he just bought Danny in cash was apparently not enough to make him leave Noah alone for once.
He put the phone face down. He had been paying them off since his rookie deal. The house for Danny, the cars, the winery. As if he paid enough, the love would come with it, but it neverdid. The money was the only part of him they ever wanted, and he had started to believe it was the only part worth wanting. Piper already had everything Noah could think to give him. That should have been reassuring. It wasn’t. Only time would tell.
He deleted the message and typed,noted,he hit send and his brain shifted focus to the moment a day before with Piper. The chemistry, the explosive sex, Piper’s laugh. The whole event felt like a fever dream he never wanted to wake up from.
Chapter Fourteen: Los Angeles to Chicago
On the flight to Chicago, Piper sat alone in the last row of the charter with his seatbelt loose across his lap. Most of the team had scattered quickly after boarding, players too tired to talk much, coaches already buried in tablets and game cut ups.
He stared out the window in a sort of daze. He felt off in a way he couldn’t quite figure out. There were two things sitting in him that wouldn’t reconcile: Jayson’s text, and underneath it the Four Seasons, Noah’s voice in the dark. His ability to truly be in the moment with someone and not want it to end.
He couldn’t hold both at once, but he kept trying anyway. Every now and then one surfaced whole and sharp enough to make his teeth clench, and he’d push it back down and stare out the window and start again.
He reached for his phone, stared at the screen. No messages.
By the time the plane touched down, he had convinced himself he was exhausted, not rattled. He was still doing that math when he walked into the training facility before sunrise the next morning.
Piper moved through the quiet room with his Gucci duffle bag over one shoulder and his head down.
The locker room was almost empty.
He sat at his locker and began taping his wrists.
He thought about Jayson and the contract that ran how he lived his life.
Vivienne had warned him once.Are you willing to be destroyed for ten mil a year?Piper remembered that he had only been thinking about what Jayson had done for him when he was at his lowest point in life.
***
Seven Years Earlier
He had gotten the call at two in the morning when he was twenty-three. He had been in a facility not unlike this one, taping a wrist he had been icing for a week.
Piper got a call about an accident on Pacific Coast Highway. A car had gone off a cliff and exploded against the rocks where the surf pounded the shoreline. It was assumed the driver had been drinking since the driver was Piper’s father.
He had spent the next six hours in a waiting room in Santa Monica, wondering if maybe it might make it easier with a splash from his father’s flask. Jayson had arrived by four a.m. That was the thing Piper had never examined. He had assumed someone on staff had called him. He had just been grateful that someone was there.
His parents had been at one of Jayson’s parties that night. They had both been drinking. It was not unusual since they always drank a lot at parties and everywhere else for that matter. They drank at nearly every event, a habit Piper had spent his whole life accepting as weather, something true about the people who raised him.
It happened on a curve they’d driven a hundred times. The fifth drink had been one too many for Dan.
Donna Ashton was nowhere to be found that evening. Piper later found out she had blacked out at the home of a very prominent movie star she had run into at the party after she and Dan got into a screaming match and Dan stormed out taking the car.
