It was after midnight when the hotel room door creaked open. When Brody hadn’t come back after a few hours, I’d assumed he wasn’t staying in my room tonight. And that was just fine with me. After the way he’d reacted, I had no desire to be around him.

Obviously, the two men had history. But he wasn’t the only one who would suffer the consequences from today. Behaving the way he did validated to men like Mr. CUM that women didn’t belong in the locker room. Not to mention that I really didn’t need any more attention on my personal life. My job was to report stories, not be the story. Yet, as I tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep, I wondered if he was okay.

The room was pitch dark. I considered pretending to be asleep. Morning would likely bring more clarity. Not much good usually came from getting upset at midnight.

Brody didn’t turn on any lights. He made his way to the other side of the room, and I heard him unzip his pants and toss them on the chair in the corner. He didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom until the door was closed. A few minutes later, the bed dipped, and he slipped in beside me. My eyes were shut, but I could feel him looking at me.

“Her name was Willow.” His voice was barely a whisper, and there was a sadness to it that made me forget I was pissed at him in an instant.

Even though the room was virtually dark, I could see his eyes. They were filled with an anguish that caused a physical ache in my pounding chest. I cupped his cheek, and he closed his eyes for a few moments. When he reopened them, he continued. “I was thirteen when she moved in next door to me. She and her mother moved in with her grandmother. She was beautiful. And wild. I wasn’t a saint, that was sure as shit, but Willow . . . she just had a streak in her.”

He paused for a long time. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t find the right words. It was obvious that wherever this story would lead, it wasn’t going to end well. So I waited until he was ready.

“Her mother was a drug addict. She didn’t stick around very long. She’d disappear for months at a time, and every once in a while she’d reappear long enough to rob her mother blind and screw up Willow all over again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We did normal, wild teenager things, like pool hopping in the community pool, taking the train to jump off the rocks into the Harlem River where the waterway meets Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or stealing a bottle from her grandmother’s liquor cabinet and riding the subways while passing it back and forth in a brown paper bag. Teenage shit. But Willow was always pushing for more. It seemed to get worse every time her mother would reappear. We lived in apartment buildings next to each other in Brooklyn. They were close together, but not attached. There was maybe three, three-and-a-half feet between our flat rooftops. When her mother would reappear, Willow would come to my apartment, jumping from roof to roof. She’d straddle the jump, not thinking twice about the thirty-foot drop to concrete below her. She’d go from being wild to dangerous.”

There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach listening to him talk about Willow. For so many reasons. I’d met Drew around the same age as he’d met Willow. I knew how my story ended, and now I knew his wasn’t going to be pretty either.

“I could spend hours telling you the shit we went through together over the years. But I’d rather fast forward and give you the Cliffs Notes version so you can understand why I lost it today.”

“Okay.”

“By the time we were seniors in high school, Willow had followed in her mother’s footsteps. She’d found drugs and quickly went from experimenting to chasing a high on a daily basis.” Brody let out a humorless laugh. “You should see the looks you get riding the subway at two a.m. with an eighteen-year-old you just pulled out of a crack house and a seventy-year-old woman in a bathrobe and curlers. There were nights when I’d have to toss Willow over my shoulder because she couldn’t walk, and poor Marlene would be right next to me.”

Brody paused again, and his next words hit me hard. “I hated her so damn much, but I couldn’t make myself stop loving her.”

I laced my fingers together with his and squeezed.

“I was recruited by some of the best colleges in the country, but I wanted to stay local. Senior year, I’d narrowed it down to Syracuse and University of Georgia. My dad was pushing for me to be a Bulldog and we all knew why, although we didn’t talk about it. When Willow disappeared for six weeks right before I had to commit to a school, I was so pissed off at her, I committed to Georgia. After I left, I kept in touch with Marlene and kept tabs on Willow, but I started to move on.”

“That’s understandable. It sounds like you’d already done so much.”

“The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I came home. Marlene had had a mild heart attack, and it seemed to have woken Willow up. She was clean and even had a part-time job at a music store that she loved. We spent a lot of time together, and I hated to go back to school when August rolled around. I felt like I had the girl back I’d fallen in love with, and I was afraid she’d disappear again when I left. Marlene sensed I was considering not going back, so she decided she and Willow were going to fly down for homecoming weekend to see me play. That way I was going to see her again in only three weeks.”

Brody paused again. “I promise. I’m finally getting to the point of dumping all this shit on you.”

“Take your time. We’re in no rush.”

He nodded. “Anyway, two days after I got back to school and we started practicing again, Willow stopped answering her phone. That was never a good sign. I talked to Marlene, and she said Willow hadn’t come home all weekend. We were practicing six hours a day, NFL scouts were starting to come to practices, and all I wanted to do was go back home. But I couldn’t. Eventually, Willow surfaced again, most likely because she had run out of money, and the next three weeks she played on her grandmother’s weaknesses. I hadn’t actually expected her to show up for homecoming, but somehow Marlene got her on the plane. She meant well. She thought getting her away from her dealers and back near me might help. But scoring on a college campus is a heck of a lot easier than some people might think. After homecoming, Willow disappeared, and Marlene and I spent a week looking for her, but the drug addicts I threatened to help me find her were more scared of losing their source than they were of me beating the shit out of them. People with nothing aren’t easy to find.”

I was afraid to ask how she eventually turned up, but since we hadn’t gotten to Colin yet, I knew the worst was yet to come. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I do. I owe you an explanation and an apology. If you’ll have me when I’m done explaining, I hope to give you a long, multiple apology.” Even in the middle of an obviously painful story, Brody was . . . Brody. It made me smile, for the first time since the bleachers this afternoon.

“Well, then get on with the story so we can get to the apology,” I teased. At that moment, we needed a little levity.

“Colin was a freshman at Georgia. We’d met the first day of August practice, and I didn’t like him right away. He had a gigantic chip on his shoulder and constantly talked about women like they were sexual objects. Not to mention he had a short fuse that was easily lit. Guy’s still an asshole.”

Whereas before Brody sounded like he was close to breaking, speaking of Colin changed his tone. “Anyway, one night, some of the guys in my frat dragged me to a party. It was off campus, and I really wasn’t in the mood to begin with. When we got there, it wasn’t the standard keg-and-plastic-cup college drunk fest. The place was a hellhole, and there were some pretty seedy looking people smoking crap from a glass pipe that smelled like burned plastic. Colin was already there with some of the other freshmen from the team. He was bragging about some girl he was going to get with. She was getting high with his buddy, and he could tell she was down for it—it was shaping up to be a good party. The way he was talking about the woman made me sick. I voiced that if the woman was too high to know what the hell she was doing, it was shaping up to sound like fucking rape to me.”

“I knew it had to be something bad for you to react that way today.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

It was getting worse by the moment. My original assumption that two men had fought over sharing some cheerleader was starting to feel like wishful thinking.

“I had driven to the party, and some of the guys wanted to stay for a while, so I wound up staying longer than I wanted to. More and more people were showing up, and I didn’t like the looks of most of them. I wanted to get the hell out of there before the cops arrived. Eventually, I told the guys I was going to the bathroom and then leaving. They could come or find their own way back to campus. There were people all over the place, so at first, it didn’t seem strange that two guys were waiting outside of a closed door next to the bathroom. While I was waiting my turn, I asked what they were doing, and one of the guys said their friend was inside with some hot crackhead.”

“No—”

“I don’t know why, but I still didn’t put two and two together. I went to the bathroom, came out and saw the two guys still standing there. Halfway down the stairs, I heard one say to the other, ‘What’s the chick’s name Colin’s got in there?’ The other asshole responded, ‘I don’t know. Rose, Violet, Meadow? Some sort of flowery shit.’”

My hand went to my chest. “Oh God.”

“I’ll save you the details, but Willow was in no condition to make a decision to be with anyone. She could barely speak. I had to carry her out of there.”

“That’s rape.”

“It almost was, if you ask me. Luckily, it never got that far. Colin claimed they were fooling around, and then he realized how out of it she really was and tried to help her up. With his pants fucking open, he was trying to help her.”

“Did anything ever happen to him?”

“Other than my fist breaking his nose, no. I went to the police. But it was pretty much my word against his. Willow didn’t remember anything and had disappeared again by the time they finished their investigation. The whole thing was sealed, and I had to throw him the ball for another two years. I thought I was finally rid of the asshole, until the Steel’s midseason trade.”

“And then he used me to screw with you by making that comment about sharing.”

“I’m sorry he said anything to you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Maybe. But I’m sorry about the way I acted. And about not coming right to you after the coach reamed me a new asshole.”

“Did you get suspended?”

“I won’t know until tomorrow. A fine is definite, but I’m hoping that’s all I get. Coach was a lot calmer when I left.”

“Where did you go after you talked to him?”

“I just needed some time to clear my head. Get my shit together before I came to you. I don’t want the past to be part of my future anymore.”

“I appreciate that. I really do.”

“Do you forgive me?”

There was so much more I wanted to know. The least of which was whatever became of Willow. Was she still a part of his life? But looking into Brody’s eyes at that moment, I saw what telling the story had done to him. He really needed a break. “I don’t think I forgive you yet.”

“No?”

“Maybe I will after I get those multiple apologies you promised.”

Brody reached down and grabbed a handful of my ass, squeezing. “There’s nothing else I would like to do than fuck you full of sorry.”

What became of Willow could certainly wait until tomorrow.