Chapter 1 Asher Nash

I Fucking Love Wild, Unpredictable, Spontaneous Asher Nash

I glance up at the scoreboard as the two-minute warning is upon us.

We only have two minutes left, and we’re tied. But we don’t have the ball.

This is it. The Forty-Niners either force overtime or try to win, and they’re not going to give us the chance to beat them.

I’m right. They take it down the field. They run the clock down to three seconds, and if the kicker succeeds in getting the ball through the goal posts, they win. We lose.

My chest is tight as I watch helplessly from my position on the sidelines.

This is it. We’ve worked our asses off to get to this point, but so have they.

I feel it slipping away.

It’s my first full season playing on the Vegas Aces, and it’s about to end one game too early.

The ball is snapped to the holder, who spins it so the laces face out. The kicker sprints toward it, plants his foot, swings his other foot, and extends it after making contact with the ball.

The ball sails through the center of the goalposts, giving the Forty-Niners the victory with no time left on the clock to give us a chance.

Desolation fills me. Over the next few days, we’ll be told what a great season we had. There’s always next year. We worked hard.

All the shit that doesn’t give us the win.

It should have been us celebrating on our home turf. Instead, it’s them.

I shake my head in disgust. It was a team effort. We made some mistakes, but we played hard. We played to win. We just didn’t pull it through.

And now we get a little time off.

Unofficial workouts off-site start next week, but I don’t know if I’ll go.

I’m not really close with anyone on my team except my brother Grayson, who is probably about to announce his retirement, and my other brother, Lincoln, who’s the head coach. I don’t have the respect of my teammates because of a stupid lack of judgment I made a year and a half ago that cost me an entire season on the field.

And because of that, even tonight, I think I’ll probably head home after the game rather than out with the guys. I’m not really in a party kind of mood tonight, anyway.

I beeline for my bedroom as soon as I’m home so I don’t have to face the jeers of my father, who, in a strange twist of fate, is my roommate, and in the morning, I head out before he’s up.

I get to the practice facility long before exit interviews begin, and I clean out my locker. I get in one more workout. Most guys start showing up a little before ten, when our team meeting begins, and they look hungover after staying out far too late.

And it’s only a few minutes later that I stare at my brother as I try to make sense of his words, but I’m failing.

Lincoln Nash, head coach of the pro football team I play for and my oldest brother, just told the entire team the morning after a season-ending loss that our offensive coordinator took a head coaching position for another team.

The OC is leaving, and he’s taking his playbook with him—the playbook we’ve worked our asses off to memorize and execute this season.

League rules state he couldn’t interview until our season was over, and he already took a new job this morning.

He can’t rip the plays we’ve memorized over the last two years from our brains, but he can take his plays and move elsewhere.

I’m sure Lincoln is happy. He never got along with our former OC since Mike’s plays leaned on the conservative side. Lincoln is a risk-taker on the field, and I grew up worshipping his shadow.

When he scored the head coaching job here in Vegas, he pulled me from Indianapolis to play for his team. But then I did something stupid, got myself suspended for an entire season, and let him down.

I’ve been back a full year now, though, and still, the chatter hasn’t faded.

People think I’m only here because my brother got me here. I intend to prove them wrong, and I will do that by working my ass off to show that I belong here.

One more win and we’d be playing in two weeks at the big game. Instead, we’ll be sipping mai tais on a beach somewhere…or something along those lines. I guess we’ve all got different plans for the offseason.

Mine is to duck out of town for a few weeks, and then…I’m not sure.

But maybe my offseason will include more playbook memorization than I’d been planning since someone new will swoop in with his ideas. Maybe he’ll be good enough to lead us past the conference championship game next year. Time will tell.

“It’s been an honor being your head coach for a second straight season, and I pledge to all of you here with us today that with Jack and Steve’s help, we will find the best replacement for Coach Sharp that we can possibly find,” Lincoln says, naming the team owner and the general manager. “We’ll find someone that’ll help guide us past the conference championship so we can contend for a ring.”

My brother’s impassioned speech is met with cheers all around as he makes the claim that was in my head.

We might all feel a sense of disappointment in the end of a season, but Linc’s great at leaving us with that there’s always next year feeling. We made it far, and there’s no shame or disappointment in that.

I glance around at everyone gathered here. This meeting room won’t look the same come July’s training camp. The people will change. Moves are yet to be made in the offseason, and apparently the OC was the first.

“You throw any money on this game?” Austin Graham asks me once the meeting’s over. He’s bitter because he’s also a tight end who isn’t as good as me, and so he spends more time on the sidelines than on the field, but he likes to think it’s because our head coach is related to me rather than the difference in our skill set.

I’m about to open my mouth to defend myself when my other brother, Grayson, walks by. “Fuck off with that shit, Graham.” Grayson isn’t a fan of Austin, either. I guess he hit on Gray’s girl a while back. It’s complicated, but I don’t need my brother sticking up for me.

“I can handle it,” I mutter to Grayson, but the truth is that I was suspended my first season here in Vegas for betting on the outcome of games for my dad , and even though I served my punishment, I’m still paying for the sin.

I’m not sure I’ll ever live it down, but I intend to make a new name for myself.

I worked hard this season to rise above the gossip and shed the reputation that I walked in here with before last season even got underway, but it looks like it didn’t matter since a year and a half after the offense, it’s still being thrown in my face.

I guess that means I still have work to do.

I kept my nose clean this season. I ditched the wild, unpredictable nature I’ve always had and forced my spontaneity into a box. I put my full focus into the season, and now that I have an entire one under my belt with the Aces, I’ll work on stepping up into leadership roles wherever I can—provided it doesn’t look like my brother is giving me preferential treatment.

Playing for Lincoln was too good to be true. Hindsight tells me that now.

I never should’ve agreed to come here. Even without the scandal of getting caught betting on games when I was betting for us to win and in no way threw games in either direction, I never had a chance to make a name for myself that wasn’t going to be overshadowed by the fact that two of the Nash brothers were on the same team for the first time. Add Grayson into the mix as another Nash brother on the same team, and I don’t even get the chance to stand up for myself to assholes like Austin.

Hindsight also tells me that I can’t win no matter what I do. If I play like shit, I don’t deserve to be here. If I play well, I got lucky.

At least in Indy, I could be a leader without people thinking it’s because I have an in with the coach. I was never deemed old enough to be a leader back then, but now I’m twenty-eight. I’ve been playing in the league since I was twenty-two, barring that one season I was forced to sit out.

But nothing I do on that field is ever chalked up to my own skills. It’s always because of my goddamn last name.

I can’t change my name, though, and I learned that a long time ago. Rather than try to change it, I’ll do what I can to live up to it.

And now that the offseason has officially begun, maybe it’s time to go back to wild, unpredictable, spontaneous Asher Nash. I fucking love that guy.