“I already explained that to you. Love you my girl. Call me tomorrow with an update.”
Tessa said her I love yous to her mom and spent the rest of the evening staring at the bottle of wine she so desperately wanted to obliterate and going over in her head what her first words to him would be. Needless to say, she didn’t sleep much that night.
Tristan sat in the auditorium at 8:00am sharp, sandwiched between Phillip and Chris, another teammate. His black coffee was scalding hot, his donuts soft and fluffy, and his adrenaline at an all-time high. It was their first practice of the season. They had already completed camp and were getting ready for their preseason games. The regular season was just about to start, and they were hot off a Super Bowl win, and Tristan wanted another one so bad he was ready to kill for it.
“Oh nice, donuts,” Phil said, taking one of Tristan’s donuts before he could even realize what was happening.
“Oh, come on man,” Tristan said, trying to snatch it back, but Phillip was too quick and Tristan didn’t want to spill his hot-as-fuck coffee on himself. And then in a flash, his other donut was snatched by Chris, who promptly stuffed the whole thing into his mouth in one bite.
“Gotta be quicker than that,” Chris said through his full mouth.
“I fucking can’t stand both of you,” Tristan said with a chuckle. “Fine by me. I’ll stay super lean and you guys can keep packing on your dad bods.”
“Trist you’ve had a dad bod since third garde,” Phillip retorted.
“The ladies love a big bear, if you know what I mean.”
“Hell yeah,” Chris laughed, giving Tristan a high five.
“Alright quiet down!” Coach Rice’s voice boomed over the chatter in the room. He stood at the podium, in front of a very talented and determined group of men. Anyone in their right minds would be intimidated standing up there, but Coach Rice was a natural and commanded the room in a way that only came once in a lifetime. Tristan respected the hell out of him.
“Before we jump into practice and some play review, I just want to let you all know that we will have a guest with us for the next few months. Hopefully to February, if we work hard enough to get that far. We have a reporter here from the New York Times, she’s fantastic, she’ll be following along with us during our season with a huge expose that should come out at the end of the year. You guys will probably be seeing a lot of her, she’ll likely interview many of you one on one or ask you all tons of questions, so you better be kind to her or there will be consequences. Her name is Tessa, I know her dad from back in the day, and I will only say this one more time – be nice, be kind, be welcoming, or you’ll be sorry.”
Tristan sat motionless. A journalist named Tessa? What were the chances it washisTessa?
Except she wasn’t his Tessa anymore. He hadn’t seen or heard from her in a decade. The way that she had so abruptly left his life left him borderline traumatized for at least a year. He found it nearly impossible to dig himself out of the hole of depression that engulfed him when she left, and the only thing that saved him was dedicating every living and breathing second to football. Once he was finally back on the team, after paying for his tuition with a few odd jobs, he threw all of his anger from what happened when she left into the game.
And he became the fucking best. Drafted easily to the Titans when just a few years prior the scouts were saying he didn’t have what it takes. And with the motivation and unresolved emotions that Tessa leaving had fueled in him, he became a fucking beast. So much so that for the remaining two years of his college career he didn’t date, party, or make any new friends. All he thought about was football, and Tessa.
But he never once reached out to her. Made a great deal of effort to avoid looking for her or contacting any of her friends or family. You see, they didn’t simply just break up. She hadexplicitly told him not to ever contact her, that she was moving far away from him, changing her number, and changing her whole life to stay away from him. Sure, her letter had said she was doing it for him and for his football career, but that had only made him angrier. Because he would have sacrificed it for her. He was so deeply and obsessively in love with her that she was what he wanted at the end of the day, and she didn’t even give him a choice.
So no, Tristan never reached out. He never tried to find her. Never tried to stalk her on social media. He never talked to Abigail or Amber again even though they were on the same campus and never reached out to her parents. She was gone from his life just as quickly as she had entered it, and she wanted to keep it that way, so stubbornly, he simply did what she had asked.
But despite all of this; despite his career, dedicating his whole life to football, trying to take the edge of loneliness off with partying and copious amounts of women that throw themselves at professional athletes, the void that she left in his soul was still there, and he still thought about her at least daily.
And now, he was hearing the words ‘journalist’ and ‘Tessa’ in a sentence together, and he nearly felt like his bagel from this morning was about to come up (yes he was planning on eating two donuts after having a whole ass bagel).
Before his brain could catch up, he was shooting his hand in the air, trying to get Coach Rice’s attention. “Where’s this journalist from, Coach?”
“No time for questions,” Rice said, dismissing Tristan and walking off the podium. “Out on the field in two minutes or you’re benched.”
“Shit,” Tristan immediately threw all thoughts of this mystery journalist woman to the side and jumped out of his seat, hustlingwith every single one of his teammates to get to the locker room and changed as quick as possible.
“So uh, this Tessa girl,” Tristan whispered to Phillip who was standing next to him on the field. They were both sweating bullets and panting from the relentless drills and plays that the coaches were torturing them with. Tristan’s lungs were screaming, his legs wobbling, the heat bearing down on his shoulders through his pads, and all he could think about was if this guest journalist was who he had hoped it was.
“What about her?” Phillip asked through panting breaths.
“I mean do you know anything about her? Did coach tell you anything? Other than her name being Tessa?”
“Oh um, no but Brinley had mentioned something about her being her college roommate. I met her briefly once or twice, not a lot of interaction honestly, so I don’t know. Why are you asking?”
“Oh, so she went to Texas Tech?” Tristan asked, his shoulders slumping. It probably wasn’t her then.
“Yeah, she had transferred sophomore year. Forget what school she came from.”
Tristan perked back up at that.
“You said you met her? What did she look like?”
