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She didn’t know how to tell him she’d seen it four times. So she didn’t. She just went up on her toes and kissed him in front of the ticket booth.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
He bought the popcorn. He bought one Coke with two straws, which he said was romantic and she knew was cheaper. She didn’t mind. Not at all. They sat in the middle of the theater with about twelve other people, and the lights went down, and Lana Turner came up on the screen, and Nicole curled into his side and didn’t move for two hours.
She knew how it ended. That didn’t help one bit.
By the time Mahalia Jackson started singing at the funeral, Nicole was gone. She tried to keep it quiet, and she couldn’t. And when Sarah Jane came running through the crowd to the casket, crying for her mother, she put her face in Drew’s shoulder and sobbed out loud in front of all twelve of those people.
“Aw, baby.” Drew’s voice was right at her ear, soft and a little amazed, like he’d never seen anybody cry this hard over a movie in his life, and he probably hadn’t. “Baby, we can go. You want to go?”
“No,” she said into his shoulder.
“I didn’t know it was gonna be like this,” he said, rubbing her back. “I swear to God. I thought it was a love story.”
She laughed in the middle of crying, and he put both arms around her and held on and let her ruin his shirt.
Out on the sidewalk afterward, under the marquee lights, he stood in front of her and wiped her face with his thumbs.
“I fucked that up,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve picked something with Fred Astaire or something.”
“Drew.”
“I’m just saying. Some dancing. Some hats.”
“Drew.” She took his face in both her hands. “That was the best date I have ever been on in my life.”
He looked at her like he didn’t believe her.
“You took me to a museum,” she said, “and you let me talk about paintings for two hours, and you found the one old movie playing in this whole city because you remembered what I like. Nobody has ever done that for me. Nobody.”
“It’s not much.”
“It’s everything.”
He didn’t say anything for a second. Then he pulled her in and held her right there on the sidewalk, with the light bulbs buzzing over their heads, and she felt him let out a long breath into her hair.
“I’m gonna take you on a real date,” he said. “When I’ve got money. Fancy as hell.”
“This was a real date.”
“You know what I mean.”
She kissed him. “Good luck topping it.”
Drew didn’t throw at the Combine.
MJ said not to, and so did the trainer, and so did every quarterback who’d been through it. Indianapolis meant doctors poking at every injury Drew had ever had, a fifty-question test he finished with time left over, a forty-yard dash he ran faster than anybody expected, and interviews with any team that had a quarterback problem. But the throwing could wait for Drayton. At home, on his own field, he’d be throwing to his own receivers instead of a bunch of guys he’d met that morning.
So the scouts came to him.
Drayton’s pro day was the second Thursday in March, and the indoor facility was packed by nine in the morning. Scouts lined the sidelines in windbreakers with team logos on the chest, and three head coaches had flown in. A general manager from a team picking in the top ten stood by the end zone in a camel coat that looked like it cost more than Drew’s truck, and he hadn’t said a word to anybody since he got there.
Drew had been back for four days. Four days of Nicole’s kitchen table and her studio and her bed, and he’d slept better in that bed than he had in six weeks.
She was up in the bleachers at the far end with Bailey on one side and Lauren on the other. Drew had told her she didn’t have to come, and she’d told him not to be ridiculous. She was in his old navy hoodie with her hair pulled back, and every time he looked up there, she was already looking at him.
He threw for an hour.
