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She lay there and listened to his heart, and to the house, and to nothing at all. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked, and they both went still, and then nothing else happened, and they started breathing again.

“Your sister hates me,” Drew said into the dark.

“My sister hates everybody.”

“Your mom’s still trying to figure me out.”

“I know.”

“Your grandma, though.” He sounded like he was smiling. “Your grandma made me a third plate.”

“She does that when she likes you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She only made Cedric two.”

Drew laughed, quiet, into her hair, and his arm tightened around her. And Nicole closed her eyes and decided she’d be back in her own bed before Mama Gussie came down at five to start the biscuits, and if she wasn’t, well, she’d deal with that in the morning.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Drew figured the presents under the tree were all for Nicole and her family, so when Mama Gussie pulled one out on Christmas morning and held it out to him, he just sat there looking at it.

“Well, take it,” she said. “It’s got your name on it, don’t it?”

It did. Melvin Wright’s handwriting, the same slanted capitals from the card on Nicole’s biggest box, said DREW across the top, and Drew took it from her with both hands like it might go off. The whole family was in the living room in matching green flannel pajamas, Drew included. Roxanne bought a set for everybody every Christmas Eve, and he’d found his folded on the end of his bed last night with a tag that said Drew in her neat handwriting, which he still didn’t know what to make of. Even Roxanne had hers on, but she’d done her hair and put on her pearls with them.

Mama Gussie had been up since five, and the house smelled like biscuits and the cinnamon rolls she’d made because, she said, a man couldn’t live on biscuits alone, even though Drew was pretty sure he could. Wrapping paper was everywhere. MJ had a pile of it in his lap and a new watch on his wrist, and Tiffany had already gotten up twice to refill her mimosa.

He hadn’t brought a damn thing with him when they landed, either, which his mom would’ve killed him for. She’d raised him never to show up at somebody’s door empty-handed, and he hadn’t stopped hearing her say it just because she was barely speaking to him. So on the twenty-third, when Nicole drove one of her mother’s cars into Tysons Corner to finish her Christmas shopping, he’d gone with her. They’d split up right inside the doors so neither of them could see what the other one bought.

He’d come back out with a poinsettia for her mother, a big box of chocolates for the house, some of the fancy tea Nicole said Mama Gussie drank every night, and two things for Nicole. The first was a little gold heart on a thin gold chain, real gold, fourteen karat, like the lady behind the jewelry counter kept telling him, and it cost more than he’d ever spent on anybody in his life. The second was something she was never in a million years opening in front of her family. It was black and lacy and mostly straps, from Frederick’s of Hollywood, and she’d modeled it for him last night in the guest room. They’d had to be real quiet. So much for not fucking in her mom’s house. He’d lasted two nights on that rule.

She’d opened the necklace first thing, sitting on the floor in her pajamas, and put it on right there, and she hadn’t stopped touching it since. The present she’d given him was a football. Doug Flutie had signed it, right across the laces. Flutie was the little guy from Boston College who’d beaten Miami with a Hail Mary when Drew was eleven. With no time left on the clock, he’d just heaved the ball as far as he could from way back on his own side of the field, and somehow it came down in the end zone in his receiver’s hands.

Drew had spent about a year straight trying to copy that throw in the street in front of his house. Nicole’s dad had made a phone call, she said. She’d had it for over a week. The whole splitting-up-at-the-mall thing had been for show, and he’d fallen for it like a rookie, and he’d held that ball without saying a word for so long that MJ finally asked if he was okay.

Roxanne had given him a gray cashmere scarf, and he’d thanked her and set it down next to him with the football. He had no idea what you were supposed to do with a scarf that soft. Mama Gussie had given him a tin of tea cakes “for the road.” He’d figured that was it. It was already way more than plenty.

Now he had a box from Melvin Wright on his knees.

Inside was a Celtics cap, a real one, the fitted kind they sold at the arena and not off a cart outside it, and under the cap was a white envelope. The envelope held a letter on Celtics letterhead from somebody in their ticket office. Two floor seats at the FleetCenter, the brand-new arena Boston had opened in the fall, were reserved in the name of Drew Kiernan for every home game next season. Floor seats meant courtside, right on the edge of the court where the players ran past close enough to sweat on you, the kind of seats Drew had only ever seen on TV, with movie stars and old men in suits sitting in them.

There was a note card folded in with the letter.

Drew, for you and your pops, next season. Nicole tells me you’re a Boston man. I won’t hold that against you. Merry Christmas, son. Take care of my baby girl.

-Melvin.

“No fucking way,” Drew said.

“Language,” said Mama Gussie.

“Sorry, ma’am.” He read the card again. His hands might’ve been shaking. Melvin Wright had sat down and written Merry Christmas, son to him. His dad was going to lose his fucking mind. His dad was going to sit courtside at the FleetCenter and never shut up about it for the rest of his life.

And Drew couldn’t take them.

It hit him about two seconds after the excitement did, and it hit hard. He hadn’t played his last game yet. Until the bowl was over, the NCAA said he couldn’t take anything from anybody that a regular student wouldn’t get, and floor seats at a Celtics game were about as far from a regular student as you could get. A football from his girlfriend was one thing. Floor seats for a whole season were something else. It didn’t matter that Melvin Wright was his girlfriend’s father. Hell, that made it worse.