Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 2 TRISTAN

“Rice it or you’ll be sitting,” Adrian tells me. “Rest, ice—”

“Yeah, yeah. Compression, elevation,” I say, repeating the same medical advice that has been given to me by countless trainers and other medical professionals since the beginning of time.

“And the stretches—”

I interrupt him again. “Got it. Active stretches, hip lifts, all the other shit I’ve done twenty thousand times.”

“Take it seriously, Tristan. You know you hurt your ankle your rookie season because of the hammy.”

“That’s not exactly true,” I argue, and it’s not normally like me to be argumentative with Adrian, but I’m tired of what feels like constant injury. It takes its toll after a while.

The hamstring has been an issue on and off for me since high school. I strained it a little in practice the week before my injury my rookie season, so I wasn’t playing at a hundred percent.

Nobody in this league is playing at a hundred percent.

I got tangled up with a defender when I was trying to make a catch, and my ankle got caught the wrong way under him. End of story.

Except Adrian is sort of right. If I’d have properly stretched my hamstring that day, it’s possible I wouldn’t have had to stretch to make the catch, and then the defender would’ve taken a different angle coming at me and my ankle would’ve been fine.

If should’ve and could’ve were worth money, I’d be richer than that Tesla guy.

Instead, I missed the rest of my rookie season and part of my second season. It took eight months and rigorous rehab to get it right again, and now I’m in my third season with the Vegas Aces with four seasons guaranteed and an option to add on a fifth—except my rookie contract is fairly small, and the way I’ve been playing makes me worth more money than what I’ve been making.

A lot more than I’ve been making.

Still…none of that was the biggest mistake I made my rookie year.

Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and start over, but I don’t even know how far I’d actually turn it back. Maybe all the way to middle school. I never would’ve kissed the girl who holds my heart and my life would’ve taken a completely different route.

Instead, I find myself married to the wrong woman and living in misery because of it.

My teammates tried to warn me. One in particular, Luke Dalton, a former Aces wide receiver, was married to my wife before me. He told me she was the devil in disguise, but when you’re young and stupid and someone’s making you promises when everyone else around you is trying to take something from you…well, sometimes you make the wrong decisions.

I was too trusting. I won’t make that mistake again.

And now I’m stuck in a marriage she won’t let me out of. She doesn’t give a shit about me—she only cares about the big three Fs: fortune, fame, and football. And with me in her back pocket, she gets all three along with a final f: fucking me. And not in the fun way.

I cut off as much as I can, but she’s got shit on me that I’m unwilling to allow in the public eye. And now that Luke retired…I’m thrust center square into the media.

We’ve been married almost two years now, but I filed for divorce a little less than a month after we were married. It didn’t take long to see the writing on the wall.

She has done everything in her power to stop the divorce from going through. Between blackmail, switching lawyers, and fighting over division of assets, she’s beyond unbelievable.

I told my lawyer to just give her what she wants, and when it seemed as though we finally settled the division of assets, she changed lawyers. Again.

Then the whole process started over. Again.

So why did I marry her?

It’s complicated, but the simplest explanation is that she blackmailed me into it. She got me drunk and we tied the knot at a Vegas chapel on New Year’s Eve.

The complicated answer is that I thought the girl I loved had moved on, and so I wanted to move on, too. My mother filled me in on all the ways the only girl I loved was living her best life, and too much whiskey propelled the competitive side of me to want a victory of my own.

It was a rookie mistake. I know that now.

Throughout my life, that old phrase fix your mistakes has been ingrained into me first from my father then from my high school coach, my college coaches, and now my coaches in the league. I’ve spent almost two years trying to correct mine.

There’s little else she can do to drag this shit out, though the fact that she was arrested last year wasn’t good for her case. I’m laying low, and one more little slip up from her should be enough to push through the final papers.

Every time I think I’m about to make progress, she finds some new shit on me that causes me to back down.

But I’ve been laying low since I married her, and I’m ready for a change.

My mother informed me that Tessa is in Chicago and hasn’t been back to Fallon Ridge in years, so I’ve been debating the option to get out of Vegas to spend a couple months in the off-season in the small town where I was born and raised.

It’s strange to be thinking of the off-season when we just wrapped up week one. We still have seventeen regular season games to play along with playoffs, and, fingers crossed, the big game at the end. We won last season, and we’ve got a great shot at a repeat.

Still, I look forward to the off-season this year. I look forward to heading back to Fallon Ridge and returning to Vegas after a finalized divorce as a free man. Hopefully this shit with Savannah will be tied up in a nice little bow by the time I come back for workouts ten months from now, and then my buddy Ben Olson, the biggest partier in the NFL, will throw me the most epic celebration ever and I’ll finally be able to move on with my life.

That’s the goal, anyway.

I’ve always worked hard to achieve my goals. This is no different.

I head home to the kickass house I’m renting near the Complex, our team practice facility. A pit forms in my gut as I navigate that direction.

Home would be perfect if I could just get Savannah to leave. It’s another reason I’m ready to skip town when the season’s over. The lease to this place is in my name, so I’m just waiting it out another few months and not renewing even though I don’t really want to move. But if I have to vacate the property, she will, too, and maybe the divorce will be finalized by then.

I’ve been saying on repeat that for almost two years. Sometimes it feels like it’ll never be finalized.

I pull my truck into the driveway and open the garage, which is blessedly empty of her white BMW. I don’t know where she is, and frankly, I don’t give a fuck. I’m just glad she isn’t here.

I sit on my couch watching film on a tablet with ice on my hamstring and a plate of chicken, vegetables, and rice on my lap —the same thing I eat for dinner every night. I’m a creature of habit, I guess.

We’re facing the Bears this weekend for the second game of the regular season. The Bears were the team I cheered for growing up. They were geographically the closest team to the tiny town in Iowa where I was raised, and I love playing against them. I love winning against them.

I watch the defense and how they pair up against wide receivers. I rewind and repeat. I zoom in. I study.

I feel it deep in my soul. The Aces are going back to try for another ring this year.

It’s the only mindset I can have right now, and in some ways, it feels like all I have left right now. I can’t date. I can’t party. I’m barely having any fun right now. I live for the game, and so I’m pouring every fucking ounce of myself into it because it’s the one thing that’s consistently been there for me my entire life.

At some point, maybe that’ll change. But right now, the game is my only priority. And it’s with that in mind that I finish my plate of chicken, pull off the ice pack, and start the stretches Adrian recommended even though I’m exhausted.

I’m midway through my first round of stretches when I hear the garage open, and my heart sinks as a dart of anxiety shoots through my abdomen.

She’s back.

I hate her with a fiery passion…which is why it’s so ironic that she’s only the second biggest mistake of my life.