Tackled (Alpha Ballers #1) by Lucy Snow Read Free Book Online Page A

I’d have a lot more to say.

    A bunch of messages were from my agent, but I didn’t really pay attention to them. He was a stodgy old guy, who wasn’t really into technology. Still, he was a shark when it came to making deals, and I knew that I was in good hands.

    The league’s best new receiver needed to be making big, big cash. And not just from my contract, from endorsements too. I had expensive tastes, and now was the time to indulge in all of them.

    The question was, which team would take me? Yeah, yeah, I knew all about how my draft stock had fallen in the last few months. All those stories in the papers and on social media about me, getting into trouble, had all these coaches thinking I had character concerns.

    What the fuck were character concerns, anyway? All they needed to know was that I showed up to practice, showed up to the games, and I caught the fucking football.

    Everything else was my business and no one else’s.

    Yeah, so I liked to party it up. Yeah, so I liked to drink a little on the weekends, when I didn’t have a game. I was just like any other college guy. Except on Saturdays, instead of watching from the stands, I caught touchdowns. And they wanted to tell me what I couldn’t do with my time?

    Fuck that.

    And yeah, I liked girls. I liked to sleep with a lot of girls. So what? Who fucking cared, except maybe their fathers. I laughed to myself, remembering the look on the Dean’s face when he stormed into my room one morning and found his daughter in bed with me. I’d never forget it.

    And I guessed he wouldn’t either.

    I checked the phone part, and I had voicemails, again from my agent. All that stuff could wait till after the draft. I didn’t need to hear anything from him right now. As much as I wanted to know which team was in a play for, I kind of wanted to hold onto the surprise just a little bit longer.

    I wanted to learn with the rest of America which team Drake Rollins was going to play for.

    Finally, I got up and got ready for the draft. It was gonna be a full day, but by the end of it, I was gonna be a professional football player.

    Drake Rollins, professional football player.

    It had a nice ring to it.

CHAPTER 07 - LILY

    Three days after the draft…

    Bill Thompson wanted to see me in his office.

    A couple weeks ago if you had said that to me I’d be both giddy with anticipation and excitement and really nervous. But now, two weeks later, there was nothing but dread.

    I had only been on the job 10 days at the Boston Globe and I already was used to Bill Thompson and his attitude toward younger journalists, especially women younger journalists.

    Especially women younger journalists who covered sports.

    You see, Bill Thompson didn’t quite understand why women wanted to come to work when they could just as easily stay home and raise families while their husbands brought home the bacon. And he certainly didn’t understand how they could make it in the tough trenches of daily news coverage. And he even if he got past all that…a woman covering a professional football team? Wasn’t that what the cheerleaders were for?

    All of these things I had learned in just two weeks of working with Bill Thompson. Still, despite his terrible and outdated opinions about women in the workplace, just covering the same beat as him was exhilarating. The man had forgotten more about the Patriots than I’d ever known, and pro football in general was his thing. He was an acidic and tough to deal with even on a good day, but his writing was fantastic, and before I could read my dad would read each of Thompson’s columns to me out loud when they came in the paper.

    So yeah, I might not like being around Bill Thompson, but putting up with his sour looks and even sourer demeanor was a small price to pay to get to cover my favorite team for a living. I did hold out some small hope that some day I could bring my dad around to the Globe offices to meet Bill; he was such a big fan and