The bartender came over to take their drink orders. Thad watched Olivia’s gaze switch from her grimy surroundings to his equally grimy apron.
“I’ll have iced tea. In a bottle.” As soon as the bartender left the table, she offered an explanation. “I’m allergic to E. coli bacteria.”
They all liked that.
“I’m guessing you gentlemen are obscenely wealthy, so . . .” She made a gesture toward the nicotine-stained walls and mostly dead Christmas tree lights draping a longhorn steer skull. “Why this place?”
“Bigs chose it.” Ritchie slid his fingers over the embroidered rose on his leather bomber.
“It’s important to keep it real,” Bigs said.
Ritchie tilted back in his chair. “This is a whole new world of real.”
The Diva didn’t seem to mind when the conversation inevitably drifted to football. For someone who made a living commanding center stage, her willingness to step back surprised him. As they tossed around their opinions of sports broadcasters, team owners, and exchanged some general trash talk, she ignored her iced tea and listened patiently.
Clint, not surprisingly, tried to get her to leave with him.
“No shoes,” she said.
“I’ll buy you a couple pairs of Blahniks on the way.”
She laughed.
Thad still didn’t get why the kid had shown up in Phoenix, but it said something bad about The Diva’s character that she seemed to like the idiot. Still, his opinion of The Diva had changed. He’d made some mistakes in his time, and despite his remarks to the contrary, she’d offered up a damned good apology.
She patted Clint on the shoulder and rose from the table. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”
* * *
Crossing her legs was no longer an option. As horrifying as the idea of using this particular bathroom was, she really, really had to go. She tiptoed across the floor to the back hallway, letting as little of her bare feet touch the floor as possible. Behind her, she heard Bigs say, “You really shoulda bought her some shoes, T-Bo.”
T-Bo. Apparently, that was Thad Owens’s jock nickname. If it were up to her, she’d have nicknamed him Butthead.
The women’s toilet had a simpering mermaid on the door, while the men’s had a dramatic figure of Neptune. Total gender discrimination. She pulled the sleeve of her white top over her hand and turned the doorknob.
It was bad. Really bad. The cracked cement floor was wet in places, with a streamer of sodden toilet paper unfurling toward a semi-clogged drain. And it smelled. She absolutely could not go barefoot into this hellhole.
But if she didn’t, she’d wet her pants. And imagine what a laugh Thad Owens would get out of that.
By keeping her feet on the asbestos tiles in the hallway, holding on to the door frame with one hand, and stretching as far as her body would allow, she could just reach the rusting paper towel dispenser with her opposite hand. She pulled off one, two . . . six paper towels. Dividing her stack in half, she slipped three under one foot, three under the other, and proceeded to shuffle inside.
It was inadequate and totally disgusting. When she was done, she scrubbed her hands twice in the cracked porcelain sink and shuffled back across the floor to the door. The paper towels had gotten wet from the filthy floor and begun to shred. She opened the door to see Thad standing in the hallway.
He peered inside. “Now that is nasty.”
She shuddered. “I hate you.”
“You’re not going to say that when you see what I bought off the cook.” He dangled a pair of dirty white Crocs in front of her.
She abandoned the ruined paper towels, grabbed the Crocs, and, with another shudder, shoved her feet inside. They were barely long enough for her narrow size tens.
“I’m so not eating here.”
“Good call,” he said.
When they got back to the table, Bigs was standing in the corner with an ancient karaoke machine.
“And now the real fun begins,” Thad said. “A word of advice. Bigs can’t sing a note, but don’t tell him that.”
“For real,” Ritchie said with a head shake.
While Bigs was considering his musical options, Clint Garrett tried to get Thad off into a corner so they could talk about “the pocket,” whatever that was, but Thad refused to cooperate.
“He hates me,” Clint said cheerfully to Olivia when Thad went over to the bar to order another drink. “But he has one of the best football minds in the League, and he’s a great coach.” When she looked confused, he said, “The best backup quarterbacks do everything they can to make the starter a better player.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing much coaching.”
“He will once training camp starts. Then he’s all business. Dude’ll get me out of bed at six in the morning to watch film. Nobody reads the defense like Thad Owens.”
Olivia toyed with her unopened iced tea bottle. “So . . . if you don’t mind my asking, if he’s so great, why isn’t he the starting quarterback instead of you?”
Clint tugged at his beard. “It’s complicated. He should have been one of the greats, but he has this thing with his peripheral vision. Nothing that’d be a problem in any other job. Just in this one.”
The song choices were as cheesy as the karaoke machine, and “Achy Breaky Heart” began to play. Bigs had the mike, and she winced as he launched into a cruelly off-key version. From there, he tortured Stevie Wonder’s “Part-Time Lover.” Afterward, he took a break to down his beer and approach Olivia. “T-Bo says you’re a big-time opera singer. Let’s hear you.”
“I’m on vocal rest.”
“I heard you doing some kind of singing exercises this morning,” Thad said unhelpfully.
“That’s different.”
Bigs shrugged and took the mike again. His “Build Me Up Buttercup” wasn’t quite as bad as “Part-Time Lover,” but his rendition of “I Want to Know What Love Is” was so ugly the other customers finally rebelled.
“Shut the hell up!”
“Turn that thing off!”
“Sit down, asshole!”
Thad winced. “And now it begins.”
Bigs clenched his ham-hock fists and kept singing, his face flushing red with anger.
Junior looked worried. “If you don’t get that mike away from him, T-Bo, he’ll end up suspended before the season even starts.”
“I’m not singing,” Thad responded. “You do it.”
“Hell, no.”
“Don’t look at me,” Ritchie said. “I’m worse than he is.”
Clint had disappeared, the crowd was getting uglier, and all three men looked at her. “Vocal rest,” she repeated.
The three of them rose in unison. Thad took one arm, Ritchie the other, and they lifted her from her chair. While Junior ran interference, they propelled her to the microphone just as the crowd’s jeers grew louder and “Friends in Low Places” began to play.
Thad gently extracted the mike from Bigs. “Liv changed her mind. This is her favorite song, and she wants to sing.”
“Olivia,” she hissed.
To her dismay, Bigs handed over the microphone.
And there she was, La Belle Tornade, the toast of the Metropolitan, the jewel of La Scala, the pride of the Royal Opera House standing before a roomful of drunks with a sticky microphone in her hand and a Garth Brooks tune ringing in her ears. She gave it her worst. Perfectly pitched, but quiet. No open, rounded vowels. No soaring high notes or resonant lows. Not even a hint of vibrato. As ordinary as she could make it.