I’ve never seen Zane so vulnerable, and it almost makes me forget all the reasons he’s on my shit list. Part of me wants to crawl into his arms, wrap myself around him, and kiss his trembling lips. It’s nice to see the man behind the ego. It’s a breath of fresh air.
“When I was nine,” he says, “CPS took me away from my mother. She was using drugs. Selling herself to pay the rent. I had never been to school. I was malnourished, small for my age. I looked like a five-year-old.”
“My god,” I whisper, looking at this giant muscled man and trying to imagine an emaciated little boy.
“I was given to my grandmother, Magdalena,” he continues. “I’d never met her before. She was my father’s mother, and she and my mother hated each other. My mother never let Magdalena around, and even when my grandmother sent us money, my mother would send it back. She chose to prostitute herself out rather than accept money from Magda.”
I nod, squeezing his hand to let him know I’m listening.
“Anyway, my grandmother taught me how to read, enrolled me in school,” he says. “She’s the one who signed me up for football camp one summer. I was the smallest kid on the team. Nobody wanted me there. But I loved the hell out of the game, so I never cared. Magda taught me the worst thing anyone can do in their life is care about what other people think.”
He smiles with a nostalgic distance in his eyes, as if he’s recalling a memory of her.
“She also taught me never to let the past define who we are. To live in the present.” His shoulders rise and fall. “To never settle for less than what we want.”
“Your grandmother sounds like a wise woman.”
Zane turns to me, his maple brown eyes glistening. “Yeah, she was. And she’s probably rolling in her grave at the man I’ve become.”
“I doubt that.”
He takes another sip, finishing his glass, and pours another. His lips slowly curl up in the corners.
“I’m not even supposed to be drinking,” he says.
I place my hand on his, controlling the wine glass. “Then stop.”
I take it from him and rest it carefully in the sand beside the blanket.
“She passed away my senior year in college. Just before I was recruited by Gainesville,” he says. “Never lived long enough to see me play in the pros, but that woman didn’t miss a single college home game.”
He drags in a ragged breath.
“Everything changed after I got that first signing bonus,” he says, shaking his head. “I was just some twenty-three-year-old instant millionaire. No direction. No one guiding me. No one telling me not to be a giant fucking asshole.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think it’d be hard for anyone to be responsible at that age when someone dumps all that money into their lap.”
He snorts through his nose. “I went above and beyond irresponsible. I hurt a lot of people. People I cared about. I did some bad things. Unforgivable things.”
“Nothing is unforgivable.”
Zane sits up, adjusting his position and staring blankly ahead at the rolling waves. “A few years ago, I was engaged to a girl named Mirabelle.”
He stops, his body rigid, and I’m not sure he wants to continue with his story, but I don’t say a word.
Several seconds later, he clears his throat and releases a deep breath. “She was the love of my life. I’d never been so happy. We did everything together. I’d never felt this level of inseparability with anyone before. I didn’t even know it was possible to feel that way about anyone before.”
“She was your first love.”
“Right.” He shakes his head. “We were young. And dumb. And fucking like rabbits. I convinced her to make a sex tape with me. She didn’t want to. I told her no one would see it but us. Told her I wanted to take it with me to away games so I could watch it when I missed her, you know, shit you say when you’re stupid in love. She finally agreed, and we made the filthiest fucking sex tape you could imagine.”
My lips purse together, my heart aching for this sweet girl, the pit of my stomach twisting in melancholic anticipation because I know this story isn’t going to end well.
“Anyway, it was on this little handheld video recorder,” he continues. “I took it with me to a game against the Ironfield Rivets. That Saturday night at the hotel, the night before the game, a bunch of us were hanging out in my room. I left with a couple guys to get dinner, and when I came back, half the team was gathered around my TV. One of those assholes found the camera and hooked it up. They were watching Mirabelle, ogling every square inch of her like she was some dirty porn star, hollering and cheering like a bunch of wild apes.”
“Jesus.” My eyes burn. I can’t imagine.
“I had to tell her,” he says. “Mirabelle was a very private person. You could even say shy. Just getting her to make that tape . . . it was something she did for me. She trusted me with it.”
I squeeze his hand.
“Needless to say, she was humiliated. Beyond humiliated actually.” Zane drags his palm down his face, inhaling the warm sea air that swirls around us. This night is too beautiful for a story this tragic. “She . . . got hurt. Physically.”
“Oh, my god.”
“She’d gone home, to California, the weekend after I told her. She needed to get away. Didn’t want to run into any of the guys from the team. Understandably. That Sunday, I got a call from her uncle who told me Mirabelle had been upset about something all weekend. He said she was frantic. Crying a lot. She went on a drive late Saturday night and somehow crashed her car. We don’t know if it was intentional or due to her state of mind. She was still breathing when they found her. Still alive, thank God.”