Page 24 of The Baller

To put it kindly, he looked like shit. Thick, purple lines fanned along his orbital bone, as though he’d forgotten to remove the black anti-glare paint most of us swiped across our cheeks before a game.

It wasn’t the first black eye/broken nose he’d ever had, but it was probably the first he’d had that was not caused by a misthrow to the face, or an errant bat flying through the air. Or anything baseball related.

“Nah, think it’s just bruised.” Even though his eyes had aggressively swollen, you could still see the amusement sparkling in them. “Looks cool though, right?”

I didn’t think it looked cool. It looked fucking painful.

“You should have iced it.”

He gave a half-hearted shrug. “I did. I put arnica on it too which is why it’s so black. I need it to heal quickly because I’ve got my award ceremony to attend.”

It took me a second to realize what he was talking about. “That’s not for another six weeks, and you haven’t been nominated.”

“But I will be. There’s no way I’m not getting the Cy Young this year.” He held up a set of finger guns and blew over the top of them.

“Just tell everyone you’ve had a nose job,” I grinned, “or a face lift. They’ll believe it, too. No one can be as handsome as you without help, right?”

I think he rolled his eyes, but it was hard to tell. “How’s your shoulder?”

Ace finished topping up the glasses and pushed one over to me. The tartness of the orange had me wincing through each gulp, but I downed it anyway.

“Sore, but nothing a massage won’t fix.” I squeezed along the muscles which had taken a battering when I’d hit theground, but I’d had worse.

“Morning.”

I spun around on the stool to find Parker and Tanner walking through from their bedrooms at either ends of the apartment, both of them rubbing their eyes. While they appeared in better shape than Ace, Tanner was definitely limping, and one of Parker’s cheeks was redder than usual, including a small graze from when he’d hit the ground.

“Hey, how are you two feeling?”

“Sore.”

“This is why I never played football,” grumbled Tanner. “D’you think this is how they feel all the time? I might have a new respect for them.”

“Yeah, but they wear pads to get sacked every week. We got tossed to the ground like sacks of potatoes.”

“Ace definitely got French fried,” Parker declared as he stood in front of him and peered at his face like he had a medical degree. He didn’t. “Does it hurt?”

“Yeah, but on a scale of one to the time Reeves was tossing the ball around and I caught it with my jaw, it’s a six.”

I winced at the memory. That had been a bad week. Ace had been eating through a straw for a week, though he’d been so high on morphine that we’d managed to convince him he was Batman. I think Tanner might have actually pissed himself from laughing so hard.

“Hmmm. It looks worse.”

Tanner slid out the stool next to me, scrubbing a hand down his face and yawning wide. “Strangest fucking night of my life.”

“Tell me about it. The whole goddamn day was strange.”

Parker flicked on the coffee machine. “Do you think wehave to tell Lowe?”

It was a question I’d been going over all night – you know, in between all the thinking about Radley.

Technically, as head of communications for the Lions, Lowe needed to know about anything which could have an impact on the team. Four of its players getting involved in a… um… ‘disagreement’ – for want of a better word – with the Secret Service certainly fell into that category, but then we have to go into why we’d had a ‘disagreement’. And the less said about that, the better.

Around four a.m. I’d come to the conclusion that no, we didn’t, but that could have been sleep deprivation talking.

I shook my head, slowly. “That dickhead said he’d keep our names out of it, and as much as I hate him with every fiber of my being, I trust him, weirdly.”

“Good. Let’s keep it need-to-know.” Tanner pointed at Ace as he reached for the juice, “And tell Payton not to blab.”

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