Everyone swooned while I sweated, fanning myself with my hand, making desperate eye contact with Lucy, who knew exactly what I was thinking. Make it all end. Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get more uncomfortable, Ryan reached into his pocket and handed me a small wrapped box.
“Open it!” Lucy demanded, and I knew there was no stopping the tide now, so I tore off the wrapping paper as quickly as I could, discovering a gray velvet box, the kind that houses expensive jewelry. Holding my breath, I opened the hinged lid, the room now completely silent as we all gazed down at two huge sparkling diamond studs.
“Congratulations, Shea,” he said, a cue for feverish applause and a few whistles.
“Holy shit,” Lucy gasped.
“These are … way too much,” I said to Ryan.
He shook his head. “No. They’re not.”
“Put them on,” Lucy said.
I froze. All I wanted to do was give them back to Ryan, but I knew that wasn’t an option, at least not now, so I took off my ordinary gold hoops and replaced them with the only real diamonds I’d ever owned.
Speechless, I looked at Ryan and shook my head, while everyone kept grinning and gawking. At me, at him, at the huge rocks now adorning my lobes. I made myself smile, trying to piece together how this had happened, how we got to this so fast, from sex to jealousy to diamonds.
I reached up to touch one of the stones, almost hoping that they weren’t real. Or maybe they were real, but Ryan was so wealthy that it was like a regular guy giving a girl flowers. Then again, maybe things really were getting serious.
Whatever was happening, I had no idea what to say or how to act or, most important, how to extricate myself from the spotlight. So I just kept my eyes down, staring at Coach’s framed article lying on the coffee table, and his sloppy, half-printed, half-cursive message: We love you, too, girl.
That night, I tried to give back the earrings. Ryan refused, then got agitated. “They were a gift,” he said. “Do you always try to return gifts?”
“They’re too expensive,” I said for the third time.
“Not for me,” he said. “I can afford them.”
“But—”
He cut me off with a kiss and said, “Seriously, Shea. You’re going to piss me off if you keep this up. I bought them for you. I want you to have them. Now shut up.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding and kissing him back. Then I pulled my hair into a makeshift bun, turning my head from side to side. “How do they look?”
“Gorgeous,” he said. “Like you.”
“So are we really together … like this?” I blurted out.
“Like what?”
“Like diamond-stud-earring together?”
He laughed and said, “It’s looking that way, yeah.”
“Don’t you think it feels … fast?” I said.
“Yeah. A little,” he said, which made me feel better. At least he wasn’t pretending that this pace was normal. “But if you think about it—we’ve known each other forever. It’s not like we just met …”
“That’s true,” I said.
“And I’m very decisive. I know what I want.”
I smiled. “And what’s that?”
“You, baby,” he said, leaning down to kiss me.
I kissed him back, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.
Eighteen
The following Monday, two days after a decisive win over Arkansas, I began my job as a sports reporter. Smiley didn’t give me a start time, but I left my apartment at six in the morning so that I could beat rush-hour traffic and arrive at the Bank of America Plaza in Dallas by seven. His assistant, an older lady channeling the sixties with her teased hair and cat-eye glasses, met me in the lobby and humorlessly escorted me to his office.
“Good morning, Ms. Rigsby,” Smiley said, glancing up from a completed New York Times crossword. His office reeked of cigars, though there was no sign of ashtrays or smoke. There was, however, a half-empty bottle of scotch on the corner of his desk.
“Good morning,” I said.
Smiley cleared his throat, as if on the brink of issuing a proper welcome, but thought better of it. “C’mon. I’ll show you around,” he said instead.
He then embarked on a tour of the newsroom, consisting mostly of a maze of cubicles under drab fluorescent lighting. Smiley made a few introductions in what he referred to as the “sports corner” of the floor, but only when he absolutely couldn’t avoid it, often omitting the names of his colleagues while making me sound as uninteresting and green as he possibly could. “This is Shea Rigsby. Kenny Stone’s replacement. She comes from sports information at Walker, but contends she can be objective,” he said once, mumbling a footnote: “We’ll see about that.”