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“Can we talk?”
Nicole kept one hand on the edge of the door and didn’t move.
“Please. I just want to talk.” Cedric glanced down at the flowers. “Or apologize, really. Mostly apologize.”
She hadn’t even caught her breath from Tiffany’s call, and now this. But no matter how angry she still was, they had too much history for her to shut the door in his face without hearing him out.
That was all she was agreeing to.
She stepped back and opened the door wider. “Yeah. Okay. Come in.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Drew got back to the house a little after seven. After the photo shoot, he’d made it through two classes, a team meeting, and film before heading to practice. Whatever the morning hadn’t taken out of him, practice had finished off. He’d at least showered at the facility, but he still had homework waiting on him. All he wanted was something hot to eat and ten straight hours where nobody said his name.
The phone started ringing before he got his bedroom door shut. Of fucking course. He dropped his bag beside the bed and picked up.
“Yeah?”
“There he is. How you doing, son?”
“Hey, Dad. What’s up?”
“Sit down. Listen to this.”
Drew stayed on his feet. His old man hadn’t bothered to call after the loss.
“A guy called the house Saturday night and left a message with your mother,” his father said. “Then he called back again today. Turns out he’s an agent with a firm down in Miami.”
Drew sat on the edge of the bed with the phone wedged against his shoulder and started pulling off his shoes. “Dad, you can’t be talking to agents.”
“Would you listen to me? I know what you can and can’t do, and I told him that first thing. He knows the rules too. Said he isn’t asking you for anything. He’d rather do this right and build the relationship. And guess who his father is.”
Drew was too tired to guess. “Who?”
“Melvin Wright.”
Drew’s hand stopped on his shoe. That first night they’d stayed up on the phone, Nicole had told him her brother was a sports agent in Miami, and it hadn’t clicked until his old man said the name. What were the fucking odds? “The agent is Melvin Wright’s son?”
“I know. Can you believe it?”
With one shoe off and the other half-untied, Drew suddenly wasn’t tired at all. Had Nicole told her brother about him? He let that go almost as fast as he thought it. Every agent with an eye on the draft knew who Drew Kiernan was. Still, Nicole’s brother sniffing around his dad could complicate the hell out of things.
“Sharp kid,” his dad went on. “Called me Mr. Kiernan till I told him to knock it off and call me Tommy. We were on the phone close to forty-five minutes. And get this—he knew all about me playing at Ohio State.”
“Dad, he’s an agent. Looking that stuff up is part of his job.”
“I know that.” His dad was quiet for a second. “Just let me have it for a minute, would you?”
“Yeah, Dad. Sorry.”
For the next few minutes, his dad ran through everything Melvin Junior had said about Drew’s release, what April could look like, and why a quarterback in his position needed to think a year ahead instead of only as far as draft day. He said we enough times that Drew stopped counting. His old man had earned the right to say it, no question, but football was still the only thing in their lives he’d ever called theirs.
“I gotta go. I’m dead on my feet. They had me at the indoor facility for two hours this morning taking pictures for the Heisman poster.”
His old man already knew about the shoot. He’d appointed himself Drew’s manager, after all. “How’d it go?”
“All right, I guess.”
