Page 31 of Forever Offsides

“I do. I wanted him in Denver, but I couldn’t make it happen.” I was only a tight ends coach then, and Denver had a top-five draft pick. He wanted to be it. And when Denver went in another direction, he resented me for it and didn’t talk to me for years. “What did Dallas’s GM want?”

“You don’t know?”

I can only shake my head. Always on the outside of the inside with my son.

“Evidently, Russel would like to be traded back here.”

Forget my hairline, my eyebrows just hit space. “For real?” I hate that this is news to me. I hate that I’m blindsided by the things Russel does, but I am. “I didn’t know. I mean, I had hoped I’d be able to lure him here either before the trade deadline or next year since he’s a free agent at the end of this one, but I wasn’t exactly going to bring that up on day one.”

“You didn’t start this?”

“No. It wasn’t me, and frankly, I’m surprised.” The words slip from my lips, and a familiar heartache hits my chest, which is likely why I never saw this conversation coming. “As I said, we’re not that close.”

He releases a sigh and turns back to his children, who are still engrossed in a conversation with their hands.

“He’s a bit of a problem child.”

I can’t deny that, so I say, “I’ve heard. He has an attitude problem and a public image issue.”

Asher chuckles. “He got into a fight on the sidelines, earned himself a hell of a fine, a two-game suspension, and lost three or so endorsements.”

“They call him the Bad Boy of Dallas. I know. He didn’t listen to me when I told him he needed to cool it.”

There’s a small pause before he retorts with, “Your son dated my daughter.”

I shoot back in my seat, and my gaze slingshots over to her. “What?” My throat is dry, and the word comes out as a squeak that would embarrass me if I were thirteen or could think past the panic. I should have known. That is, I should have guessed it was him, but she’d only mentioned him the first night we met, and truthfully, I didn’t give it much consideration. There are a lot of players who have played for this team and been traded later.

“You didn’t know?”

“No. I didn’t know.” Fuck. Fuck! The fucks keep coming.

My head meets my hands. He’s the ex she dated for years and broke up with her over text. The one I said was a jerk for what he did.

“He didn’t talk to me often and rarely gave me details about his personal life no matter how hard I tried to change that. But as I said, he didn’t speak to me after I couldn’t get him in the top five to Denver. You got him at eleven. Big price drop between the two. But his mother… she poisoned him against me for her own reasons.”

Reasons like I never married her and only supported Russel because I saw who she was and what she was after, when it was already too late, but not late enough to ruin my life. Even if I had married her, we would have had an iron-clad prenup. She broke my heart. I loved her. I truly did. I was going to college on a full football scholarship, and there was no way she was leaving Florida. She told me she was on the pill, and she was until I got my acceptance letter and scholarship. Then she suddenly stopped taking it regularly, and boom.

Baby daddy with a family worth billions and future prospects.

It served her quite well.

She’s still living in the home I bought for her and is on husband number three, I believe. She’d roll into custody meetings with a Prada purse or in designer heels, and I knew exactly where my child support money was going while she’d cry and play the part of the poor, cast-aside single-mother, damsel in distress.

Our son was a weapon in her war toward an easy life.

I don’t know why I feel the need to explain myself, other than I get extremely defensive about it. Whenever someone finds out that he’s my son, it makes me sound like I was a deadbeat dad who was never there for my son, when I was always there for him. As a player, I gave up opportunities and potential championships to stay on my team in Florida and be with him when he was a kid, then took on a shit college coaching job after I retired.

It wasn’t until he was in college that I was offered an NFL coaching job out of state.

I’ve worked my ass off and my way up, and now I’m here.

“Quinn is a twenty-eight-year-old fourth-year resident, which is young for where she is. She was an Olympic athlete and completed high school when she was sixteen. She won gold for halfpipe snowboarding, then retired to get a head start on college. She had… issues with a fellow competitor. Someone who lied and intentionally hurt her. It made Quinn closed off and less trusting, and then she met Russel. She’s goal-oriented and extremely focused. But he broke her heart. Badly. He did some things to her that weren’t the best, and one of them was getting himself traded and telling her about it after the fact.”

I swallow, unable to form words. I fucked my son’s ex-girlfriend.

I’ve been talking to her for months. Making plans. Having fantasies.

How does a father make sense of that? Like it wasn’t bad enough before when I thought it was only my boss’s daughter and my players’ sister. Then there’s the other piece about her being twenty-eight.