Page 50 of The Play

There had to be a reason Grant kept pushing him away like this.

Maybe it was the commissioner’s office, but maybe it was something else.

Deacon looked away because it hurt too much to look at him like this. At Grant rejecting him like this.

When Beck had told him to fight for Grant, he hadn’t imagined how hard it might be.

“You know it isn’t,” Grant said, and when Deacon glanced up, the sternness in his eyes had melted away, but not to love. To regret. “I’m sorry, I know I keep giving you mixed signals, but it’s true. We can’t. I can’t, specifically. But I do hope we can stay friends.”

He was trying to be nice. Deacon knew it, and his temper flared anyway.

“We’ve never been friends,” he said and meant it.

Hated it, as pain flashed across Grant’s face, right before he turned and walked away.

Chapter 8

It was a terrible week.

Exhausting and busy and full not only of the self-recriminations Grant couldn’t seem to stop, but a hundred—maybe even a thousand—reminders of Deacon.

Every time he looked at his desk, he remembered how the edge of it had dug into his thighs, just as Deacon’s fingers had dug into his hips, his ass.

Remembered just the way Deacon had tasted.

How good it had felt, for the single moment when he’d actually let himself enjoy it.

But then he always forced himself to look at his laptop, at the placard at the front of his desk. Reminders that he was responsible for more than just himself.

That he couldn’t make selfish decisions.

He’d had half a dozen conference calls with the commissioner’s office, as they’d waded through all the hard drive data Grant had sent them.

Each day seemed to be worse than the previous one.

He hadn’t even had time to look outside the windows. Knew if he did, he’d see Deacon looking equally pissed off, destroying anything and everyone in his path.

Every time he entered a room, he heard the whispers of how single-focused Deacon was on the field, these days. How hard he kept pushing himself—and everyone else on the defense.

And every time he felt sick with guilt, because he knew it was his fault.

If he hadn’t kissed Deacon first, Deacon never would’ve kissed him back, and maybe Grant could have avoided saying those things to him.

No, it was always coming, from the very beginning. You were stupid as shit to think you could avoid it forever.

Maybe. Maybe that was true.

But in moments like this one, it was a little bit of a cold comfort.

“Cheryl, we’ll have to consider that,” Darcy spoke up, and Grant was vaguely aware that she’d probably just asked him a question that he’d ignored because it was better to do that than to tell her to fuck off.

“The commissioner is just tired of having to continually vet your organization,” Cheryl said. “It always seems to be in the news. The understanding when you bought the team, Mr. Green, was that it would stay out of the news.”

“Except that ticket sales are up, probably because we can’t stay out of the news,” Darcy said, and normally Grant might be amused at the way she bared her teeth at the speaker in the center of the conference room table.

But he couldn’t dredge up even a molecule of amusement.

Not this week.

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