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performance.
    “Ditto.” She smiled up at him, hugging him tighter. “I say we try that again.”
    Even if she meant that she wanted to do it again because she was now free to enjoy and explore her sexuality, all he heard was criticism. Like a coach sending him back to the field after an interception. In fact, her eagerness only reminded him of exactly what he’d done and how he wished he’d done it better. Tyson’s hand stopped moving and his sense of afterglow quickly dissipated. “Once was enough.”
    “That’s okay, then let’s take a little nap,” she said, snuggling up closer to him and sighing. “We’ll have breakfast later, after we freshen up. And then I’ll take you home.”
    Take him home? Was she serious? He began to feel cornered.
    “There’s not going to be any breakfast.” His arm fell away from her shoulder.
    She picked her head up, trying to get a read on him. “Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong?”
    “No, I’m not mad.” But he was. When he had agreed to this idea, his plan was to sneak out after she’d fallen asleep. But she didn’t look too sleepy, and it wasn’t like he’d exhausted her, like he would have if he had done it right.
    “I could totally fall in love with you, Tyson,” she confessed, blurting it out before she saw the look on his face.
    Those words had fed his ego before, but it had been a while. In this particular case, he’d never felt so undeserving. “You don’t even know me.”
    His head was pounding, his ears were ringing, and the guilt was mounting. And his body was already starting to reach out for its next fix. He dislodged himself from under her and rose, beginning to search for his clothes.
    “Tyson—what’s wrong?”
    Everything was wrong. Coming back to his old college as a last resort to escape from reality, letting her sit down and fill his head with memories with her sweet talk and then trap him. Tyson stormed around the room, hating her and himself, while trying to quickly redress. Not bothering with his socks, he stuck them in his pockets while sitting down in the room’s only chair to jam his now-clammy feet into his shoes. Ella jumped up from the bed and scrambled to find her own clothes, which he had thrown all around the room. “Tyson, I don’t understand . . .”
    He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the vial that was his only friend, his Percocet. He threw two down his throat without any water. The mere action seemed to calm him. He put the bottle back in his jacket and reached for the doorknob, stopped momentarily by the sheer desperation in her voice.
    “Tyson, please don’t leave. You can trust me. I want to help you,” she pleaded.
    He looked back at her, standing in the middle of the room in nothing but her underwear, tears of bewilderment and humiliation brimming in her eyes.
    “I don’t want your help,” he stated coldly.
    She swallowed hard, trying to keep her voice from trembling and the tears from falling. “But you . . . I thought . . .”
    “Welcome to the big time,” Tyson told her cruelly before opening the door, then staggering back out into the darkness and his downfall.

 

    CHAPTER 2
    THE WEEKS THAT followed were nothing more than a blur. Tyson went back to his now-empty house and spent some quality time ignoring foreclosure notices and other bill collectors. Within days of getting the official word that he was suspended for the rest of the season and subsequently cut from the team, he packed up some of his clothes and cleaned out his medicine cabinet. He ended up in a fleabag motel near the now-deserted Blitz training camp. He just couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He wandered, mostly on foot, around the streets that were his old hangouts, where he no longer felt welcome. Every night was spent in local dives blathering randomly to anyone within earshot whenever football came on television. He celebrated Thanksgiving alone with a fifth of Wild Turkey and a ham sandwich from