Page 44 of Faking the Pass

More Than One Way to Be a Hero

P resley

Kissing Rosie again felt like surfacing after staying under water for too long.

It felt so good I wanted to keep going, taking it as far as she’d allow, but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be cool with full frontal nudity in the presence of New York and Hollywood’s fashion elite.

So I turned a firehose on my libido and managed to pull my mouth away from hers.

Her expression was dazed.

Rosie blinked a few times, staggered a bit to the side—I caught her of course—and I couldn’t have been more thrilled at what I saw.

That wasn’t just surprise on her face. There was arousal there. There was hunger for something more.

There was hope.

Thank you Randy Rump, you sawed-off little shit, for giving me an excuse to kiss my wife.

I turned my head, and there he was, standing stock still, staring at us.

So were his companions, a couple of famous directors you couldn’t help but recognize if you had even a passing knowledge of American cinema.

While they smiled and nodded in our direction, Randy scowled.

He quickly corrected himself, pasting on a smile and making some glib remark to the other men. Then he turned away.

Though his reaction to the kiss was far from my top concern, I sort of felt like I’d thrown a touchdown the other team hadn’t seen coming.

I’d always excelled at faking the pass.

Rosie finally found her voice. “Why did you do that?” she whispered.

“Erasing doubt,” I said as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

“I think that was pretty convincing. What do you think?”

She simply nodded. “So you were just… putting on a show?”

I repeated the question she hadn’t yet answered, this time in a lower, more intimate voice.

“What do you think?”

For a long moment, she stared up at me, and I thought I might actually get another kiss, but a familiar female voice broke the tension.

“Hey you two.”

Rosie and I both turned to see Jessica and Wilder approaching. I knew they’d been planning to attend tonight, but we hadn’t seen them yet.

“This is a pretty jaded bunch, but I think you might have just scandalized them with your passionate married-people kiss,” Jess teased. “They don’t see many of those.”

“I’ll be happy to remedy that,” Wilder volunteered, and Jessica laughed.

“Save it for the hotel room, Romeo,” she said.

Wilder made a show of looking at his watch. “How much longer does this damn thing last anyway?”

Jessica and Rosie hugged each other, and Wilder and I exchanged a brief embrace. He was wearing a white tunic with a plaid kilt, and she was dressed as a noblewoman from the seventeen hundreds.

I squinted down at my brother’s bare knees, displayed in what amounted to a skirt.

“Did you shave your legs?” I teased.

He gave me a murderous glare then cracked a smile. “You’ve got no room to talk there, Little Lord Fauntleroy. By the way, the whole party’s been talking about your dick.”

Jessica laughed and covered her mouth with her hand.

I noticed Rosie’s head turn away abruptly. The side of her cheek was red.

“Boys,” Jessica warned. “You’re embarrassing Rosie.”

“I’m fine,” she protested a little too quickly. “So are y’all having a good time?”

“Sure, I love getting surprised by random breezes from below,” Wilder said sarcastically.

Then he looked down at his wife with the most adoring expression. “But Jess has an obsession with Outlander , and after watching Episode Seven, I decided not to argue.”

Now it was my sister-in-law’s turn to blush. She changed the subject.

“What about you two? Looks like you’re having fun.”

She was clearly thrilled to have seen us kissing. Jessica had treated my marriage to Rosie like the real deal right from the beginning, and there were times I shared her hope.

I’d long since given up trying to resist falling in love with my wife. The fact that I’d agreed to wear these revealing pants in public was proof of that.

I only hoped she’d been coming around to the same conclusion I had—that our fake marriage wasn’t fake at all.

“It’s had its moments,” Rosie said. “You look gorgeous.”

“So do you,” Jess gushed. “You look like Cinderella was always meant to look. I can’t wait to see you in the movie. Are you going to go to the premiere?”

Rosie nodded but didn’t look happy about it.

“I have to. It’s in my contract,” she said. “Randy threatened to scrap the film and reshoot it without me, but I guess he’s changed his mind. He didn’t say anything about it tonight. Really, I just want it all to be over with so I don’t have to see him anymore.”

Jessica’s face crumpled in sympathy. “I hate that he ruined your movie debut for you.”

“It’s okay. Champagne problems, right?” Rosie said and gave her a sad smile.

The two of them got into conversation, and Wilder asked about my recovery progress.

“I feel great,” I said. “I think I’m ready to play, but I have to convince the coach, the trainers, the medical people, and my agent of that.”

“You could just sit out the rest of the season and make sure, go back fully healthy next season,” my brother said, as if it was no big deal.

“If I don’t do it this season, the Super Bowl record might be off the table. I’m not getting any younger.”

As a former player himself, Wilder knew this.

“You know, you’re still going to be the same person no matter how many records you break or set. It’s not really going to change anything.”

“Okay, what’s your point?”

“The point is go ahead and be happy now,” Wilder said.

“Stop waiting for things to be perfect. Perfect doesn’t exist. It’s like a goalpost that keeps on moving.

If you keep chasing it, you may wake up one day and find you’re very far from where you actually want to be.

You’ve got to find a way to be happy in the here and now. ”

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “You already proved yourself on the field of battle. My battlefield might not be life and death, but I need to do the same.”

“I nearly lost myself on the battlefield,” Wilder says. “The thing you’ve got to ask yourself is… when will it be enough?”

His question reminded me of the one Rosie had asked me the day after I found her asleep in my house. I hadn’t had the answer then, and I didn’t have it now.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m not there yet.”

Wilder shot a glance over at our wives chatting away happily. “From where I’m standing, you’re getting pretty damn close, Super Bowl record or not.”

Looking at my big brother, whom I’d followed everywhere as a child and grown up doing my best to imitate, I made an impromptu confession.

“You know I’ve always felt inadequate next to you.”

“That is total bullshit,” he said. “You’re way better than I ever was.”

“Only because you didn’t play as long,” I argued. “But I’m not just talking about football.”

Wilder shook his head in apparent amazement. “Don’t you think I have those feelings too?”

“Actually, no,” I admitted.

“Well then I’ve been a shitty big brother.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand, silently asking me to let him make his point.

“Our college coach once brought in this speaker, this psychologist who went around speaking at big professional conferences and stuff,” he said. “She’d written a book on imposter syndrome, and she said she’d once spoken to a convention of neurosurgeons—literal brain surgeons.”

He laughed and went on. “When she asked if anyone in the room had dealt with imposter syndrome, every single hand went up. Same when she spoke to a group of astronauts. Just like the brain surgeons, everyone there said they basically were just waiting for everyone to figure out they didn’t really know what they were doing and they sort of wondered how they’d ever gotten as far as they did. ”

“So you’re comparing me to astronauts and brain surgeons,” I joked, and Wilder laughed out loud.

“Exactly.”

“Thanks man,” I said. “I mean, not for that. For the other stuff you said.”

A young woman I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place interrupted, holding up her disposable event camera.

“Excuse me. Rosie and Presley, would you mind taking a picture with me?”

Then she caught sight of Jessica.

“Oh my God, Jade! I didn’t know you were here tonight,” she said, looking starstruck. “Would you be in it too?”

Jessica graciously said, “Sure. Happy to,” and Rosie and I of course agreed.

The woman looked around, presumably for someone to snap the photo. Her eyes landed on Wilder.

“Hi.” She smiled and held out the camera to him. “Would you mind?”

“That’s my husband, Wilder Lowe,” Jessica said. “And you’re Sierra aren’t you?”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you know my name,” Sierra said, placing a hand on her chest.

“Are you kidding? I love your new single,” Jessica told her.

Sierra bent over at the waist then rose again with her hands over her nose and mouth. “I am so freaking out right now.”

Then the woman’s eyelids flew wide as she looked at Wilder. “Oh, wait, are you Presley’s brother?”

Wilder grinned, taking the camera from here. “Sure am. Older and wiser. Okay, everyone move together.”

We all smiled and posed for a couple of shots, and Sierra thanked us before rushing away.

A group of men who must have witnessed the scene approached us. One of them smiled sheepishly and held up his own box camera.

“Hey, I wasn’t going to ask, but since you did one for her… I’m a big Nauticals fan. Do you mind, Pres?”

While I hadn’t minded posing with my family for the young singer, I was starting to feel uncomfortable now. In this room full of famous people, I was only a minor celebrity—at least that’s how it felt.

However, I understood being a fan of a team. I’d grown up loving the Nauticals myself.

“Sure man,” I said.

Rosie reached for his camera, obviously meaning to snap the picture for him, but he turned to Wilder.

“Actually would you mind taking it, bro?” he asked. “I’d love to have the actress and the pop star in it, too, if I could.”

And now my discomfort turned to irritation.

The guy didn’t have any idea who Wilder was. And honestly why would he?