I turn around in time to see him tumbling into the back seat of his car as a football rolls away from us.
Chapter 19
Blaise
“Sinclair, you got a minute to talk?”
I eye the cafeteria, where the staff is cleaning up the lunch service. Since we’re not in mandatory training right now, there’s a lot of food left. A lot of it is raw ingredients at the meal prep stations and will get packed back up for tomorrow or thrown into the dinner service, but there’s also a buffet table with fruits, veggies, nuts, and sandwich components for us to make ourselves if we’re on the run. Since our grubby hands have been all over it by the end of service, it all gets tossed.
I had to let my personal chef go, which means I’ve been having to buy groceries myself. And even though everything is Tilly’s fault, I’ve been covering the bill for both of us. I don’t have a choice. The one time she did the shopping herself, she came home with seven kinds of dried pasta, most of them pre-packed with bags of straight sodium flavoring, white bread and hot dogs — no hot dog buns — a frozen pizza, and tubes of powdered sweet tea. She’s feeding Donovan that. Not directly, but that’s what her milk is made of. I couldn’t allow that.
But groceries, real groceries, the groceries I need so I’m not gross and slow and distracted on the field, are fucking expensive.
The cafeteria is free. All you can eat. Half my old roommates get their full 6,000 calories per day here, and no one bats an eye. I can’t do that. Coach would shit whole ass rottweilers if he knew I was going without a dietitian. Alarm bells are already going off for my perfect attendance at practice, but they’re paying $5,000 a week. That’s going to keep me afloat to Japan. I’ve been coming in at weird times, squeezing in an extra round of either breakfast or lunch, banking on different guys being in the cafeteria if I pace it right, changing it up every day. My personal trainer — who I technically pay for, but it’s taken directly from my salary by the Jugs, so I couldn’t let him go — has actually praised me for being proactive about my diet. On the days I time everything right, I raid that sandwich station on my way out, throwing solid bricks of meat and cheese in a snack box, shoveling granola into a dry water bottle like a crazed squirrel.
Yesterday, I managed to get an entire loaf of a really nice sprouted-grain bread into my duffel bag without anyone seeing me.
I can see them wheeling their cart over to the table to start breaking down the station. Fuck. But I can’t blow off Maurice Bradley, the general manager for the Jugs, to raid the cafeteria. Especially if he’s about to read me the riot act for something.
I pull ahead of him and jog to his office, showing off how much energy I have by bouncing up and down. Definitely notexhausted from the three hours of sleep I got last night after I caved and jerked off in the shower and caved even worse and curled up with Tilly, letting my brain go to that soft, sacred place of Trixie, the sweet, sad, desperate, brave fantasy. Absolutely not hoping she’ll want to run some errands when I get home so I can snuggle up with Donovan for a daddy-baby nap.
Nope, Blaise Sinclair is 100%. Ready to do a whole second practice today. We. Are. Good.
Bradley has me take a seat before jumping right into it. “We want you rushing more.”
I barely catch my sigh of relief over it being a football conversation. Not about the barely contained train wreck going on off the field.
Only, this shouldn’t be a relief. My number one, top, only priority is football. That’s the rule. That’s the dream. I’ve worked my ass off my entire life for the privilege of being owned by the National Football League. So when the general manager — not the coach, the G fucking M — makes a critical comment about how I’m playing football, it should be devastating.
It’s not a criticism I haven’t heard before; I tell myself that’s why it doesn’t sting as bad as it should, why I’m not feeling like defending myself way too hard. I’m not a dual-threat guy. My instincts aren’t to run when I get that ball. There are five other guys on that field who are all there to run the ball. My job is to get the ball to them. I’m a pocket passer all the way, just like plenty of the greats have been.
But it’s not lost on me that I ranked fourth in pass completions, sixth in passing yards, and twenty-third in rushing yards last season.
“My trainer might have mentioned it,” I grumble. “And the quarterback coach. Offensive coordinator. Head coach. They all mentioned it. I’m gonna work on it.”
“You’re missing two days of camp.”
It feels like a threat over my head, like he isn’t going to let me go to Japan, after all. Andy’s already worked out the payment there, he brought in an accountant to figure out how to budget it to finally get some necessities to hold me over until my next big NFL check. It’s a month out, but we’re already dipping into it to make sure everyone left in my ecosystem is paid. If that trip is taken away from me, I’m fucked.
“We’re going to have Morales running the show then, but I need you to make a deal with me. For the next two weeks, you’re with the practice team two hours a day, and you’re doing running plays with them.”
“Fuuuuuuck,” I groan.
“Don’t start with me.”
I hold my hands up in surrender, but seriously.Fuck.I’m going to have my little red vest, they’re all going to be tolddo not hit me, do not hit me, do not hit me,but the point of these drills is to get as close as possible, and sometimes, they get too close. I’ll be racking up bruises. Bradley and the coaches know as well as I do that this is inviting off-season injury, but they must all agree that it’s worth the risk.
“Okay.” There’s nothing else for me to say.
“So here’s the good news. We’re adding incentives.”
Ooh. But I can’t get too excited about that either.
“You run a touchdown in, you get 50k.”
A nice bump. Was 25k last year.
“You run a first down over ten yards, also 50k.”
