11
Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
Malachi—Friday, June 12—6:12 a.m.
“What are you really asking me?” I responded to one of Meshach’s questions with a question of my own as I finished my last round of reps on the butterfly press. Shifting to the Nautilus machine for leg curls, I adjusted the weight and slid onto the bench. Double-checking that my knee brace, which I needed less and less, was secure, I depressed the weight with both legs and then brought it back up slowly. After the third rep, I glanced up at him.
“I just want to make sure your head is on straight,” Meshach cautioned as he settled onto a bench across from me.
Raising a brow, I had to needle him a little. “Are you going to work out or just sit in your pretty blue suit and lecture me?”
Meshach had a thriving law practice based in New Orleans, at least a ninety-minute drive from here. Yet here he was at six in the morning dressed in his Armani suit, taking time out to talk to me. Shach wasn’t the kind to talk just to hear himself talk. If he had something important enough to track me down to say, I was going to listen.
“I’m heading into New Orleans after I talk to you. No workout needed. In case you forgot, I’m the natural athlete in the family.”
“You’re the natural bullshitter, that’s for damn sure.” I exhaled after the tenth rep. Some people actually liked strength training. I wasn’t one of those people. I did what I had to do and went on to the next thing.
“Mal...” he started tentatively. Meshach was rarely tentative.
“Shach, you know you don’t have to sugarcoat shit with me. We’ve never been that way. Just say it.”
“Let’s start with the career. Do you want back in the NFL just to prove you can do it or because it’s what you really want?”
“You know it’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“Yes, but let’s be real. Football came easy. You never thought about doing anything else. You’ve invested here and there, you’ve got some lines on other fields. If football isn’t your passion anymore, don’t do it.”
I looked at him in confusion. “I still love it. I was miserable when I couldn’t play. Even more because I had cut myself off from the sport.”
“You were miserable without football or without Carissa?”
“Football. I learned to live without Carissa.”
“Because football and Carissa are mutually exclusive.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Cuz it kinda seems like you want to get everything back jus’ the way it was. You can’t do that.”
“I know that, Shach,” I repeated. “Just make your point.”
He took a deep breath and unloaded. “I don’t want you to get tangled up with Carissa again if you’re going to leave her behind when you head back to the NFL.”
“Tangled up?” I was looking for clarification.
“You know what I’m saying here.”
“I don’t know that I’m getting back to the NFL. No one knows that yet.”
“C’mon, now. You damn well do know and it’s not like you to play coy.”
I tilted my head and acknowledged his statement before moving to the next machine.
He began again. “Listen, Mal, you weren’t here when she came back. She was . . .”
I paused in the middle of a lift and met his gaze. “What? She was what?”
He clasped his hands together and looked down. “She was broken, Mal. Carissa had always been a live wire, full of energy and sass. All that fire, all that spark—gone. She was just a shadow of her former self for a while. And you know you had to be heavily responsible for that.”
I let go of the bar I was pulling on and exhaled. I’d forgotten that as much as Carissa had been a part of my life, she was a part of my family’s life as well. When she hurt, they hurt. The fact that I was responsible for that weighed heavily on me. “You know, it really kills me to hear that. I never meant to do that to her.”
“I know you didn’t. But it took her a long time to come back. To find herself again. I wouldn’t want—”
I got up and moved to the free weights, interrupting him as I moved past. “I know. I do know. I may be a little slow, but I’m not an idiot. I admit I didn’t realize what I was doing to her before. You know she always just... I don’t know.”
“She always just did whatever you wanted. No questions asked,” Meshach explained.
“Well, yeah. It didn’t occur to me that she didn’t want exactly what I wanted.”
He huffed out a breath in frustration. “You’re still not getting it, Mal!”
“What?” I was confused. What was I missing?
“She did want what you wanted for you, just not at the expense of what she wanted for the both of you and for her. She put you first. Every time. Your wants, your needs, your ambitions.”
Okay. I had to set down the weights on that. It was like a lightning bolt struck me. I had never thought about it like that. Not at all. I was so focused on what I was doing and how to take the next step. I had been thinking about our relationship from my point of view. And then I thought about it from her point of view. But not until this moment had I considered our point of view—together, as a unit. Maybe I’d been too young when we met and got used to things a certain way. Maybe it took me a while to mature. Maybe being apart and alone and hurt and disillusioned made me see now what I didn’t then. It was now clear that my inability to move us forward as equal partners had been a major part of the problem all along.
I sat down next to Meshach and stared unseeingly at the ground. “I don’t think I want to do without her. But I’m not sure how to get us there,” I admitted.
“When you figure it out for sure and you know how to make it work? That’s when you make your move. Otherwise you’re being the same self-obsessed asshole she ran away from.”
My head snapped up and I glared at my brother. “Whoa! What’s with the name-calling, bro?”
“You earned it, bro.”
“When?
“Right around the time when you started believing your own press,” he said wryly.
“Jesus, was I that bad?”
He snorted. “Worse.”
“Why didn’t someone say something?”
“Carissa did. For all of us. Many times. You quit listening to any damn body.”
I gave him a small shove. “You should have kicked my ass. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
He leveled a solemn look at me. “Remember I tried?”
“Oh yeah.” Vaguely, I remembered Meshach, Burke, and Pierre coming to see me in Houston shortly after Carissa bolted, but before I injured my knee. I was in an asshole phase at that time, I could admit it in retrospect. Shach had tried to tell me about myself, but I wasn’t hearing it. “I believe you referred to my attitude as ‘stank’?” I’d called him something worse in retaliation and he drew his arm back to throw a punch. Pierre stepped in between us and reminded Meshach that assault against a brother was still considered assault and did we really want to go there? I sighed as the scene came back to me. It wasn’t pretty. “My bad?” I put my fist up.
Meshach bumped me and nodded. “Definitely your bad. That’s why I’m sitting here like a bayou-assed Dr. Phil all up in your business. If your head isn’t fully pulled out of your hind parts, if you are not ready to be all in? Please for the love of God, leave Carissa Wayne alone.”
“Duly noted,” I agreed.
“All right, then.” He looked around the gym I was using on Havenwood’s campus. “What’s with this candy-assed workout? When are you getting back on that field and testing that knee for real?”
“All in good time, Meshach. Everything will be as it should, all in good time.”
“Oh, okay, Oprah. Are we still talking about your knee or are you dropping knowledge on the state of the universe?”
“You got jokes. I’m just saying I’m hearing everything you said this morning. I’m going to put everything back to rights if I can.” Of course, I had no idea how to do that or if my idea of back to rights aligned with everyone else’s.
Meshach called my bluff. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
I shrugged and replied honestly. “Hell no.”
“Well, all right, then. Good luck.”
“I sure need every bit of it.”
“Later, bro.”
“Shach?” I called out before he crossed the threshold.
He spun back to look at me. “Yep?”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks for actually listening.”
“Don’t wrinkle your suit driving to work.”
“Don’t let your head get too big to fit in the helmet.” He slammed the door behind him.