Big Shot | ✓

42 | i love you, i'm sorry

I'd been marinating in anxiety since we got back from New York.

It had been a week since the Heisman ceremony and Reid's victory, and the energy in the football complex was dynamic, feeding off of his confidence and his well-earned swagger. He was all smiles, all energy, all the time. But I was emotionally lethargic, and I didn't want to become one of those energy vampires that sucked all the good and fun out of something that should be good and fun. So the solution was to avoid it - and him - altogether.

I'd sequestered myself in my office, busying myself with projects and content planning for the playoffs. By Friday, most people were getting ready to go home for Christmas break until we all reconvened before New Years and the first round of the playoffs.

"You sure you don't need anything before I go?" Mara asked, her shoulder bag hanging off of her arm as she leaned in the doorway of my office.

"Nope." I shook my head without looking up at her, my focus zeroed in on my content calendar on my laptop screen.

Mara huffed out a sigh. "You know I say this with love, but...you've been acting really weird this week. Are you sure everything's okay?"

"I'm fine, don't worry," I blurted out. I took a breath and finally looked up at her, and she offered me a soft, albeit wary smile. She didn't believe me, but she didn't press me either.

"Okay," she nodded. "Merry Christmas, Jo."

"Merry Christmas, Mara."

The moment she shut my office door behind her, I let out a groan as I leaned back into my chair, feeling my stomach start to tie itself into knots.

I couldn't focus, and every time I tried to look at my laptop screen, my vision went blurry. It felt like I'd been injected with a poison - something slow moving and made of Cade Martello's venomous words, infecting me with the threat of knowing something terrible. Something I wasn't sure I could undo.

Upon the conclusion of the football season, my work study internship was technically over. At that point, it was up to me to start looking for a real job and hope that someone like Mariah Roe would give me a recommendation for a job at ESPN based on merit, and not who I was...involved with.

My spiraling was interrupted by a text from my sister Beth, who never texted me out of the blue. I figured it had something to do with Christmas since we'd all be home, and I opened it expecting maybe some form of temporary distraction.

BETH: UM HELLO is this you???

BETH: some guys at the office were talking about it. Then realized you and I have the same last name and all came scrambling in ASKING ME IF I WAS RELATED TO YOU!

The next text was a link to an article on Barstool Sports, with the headline EVERYTHING WE FIGURED OUT ABOUT HEISMAN WINNER REID DONAHUE'S SMOKESHOW POTENTIAL GIRLFRIEND.

Despite being considered a pretty reputable sports news outlet in some circles, this was still typical Barstool (they did after all rise to frat house prominence for their initial Barstool Smokeshows bit), but being on the receiving end of it was nowhere near as flattering as anybody made it out to be. Maybe in another universe my ego would have exploded from being called a smokeshow but in this universe, I'd just been sucked into a black hole.

It didn't take cameras long to find soon-to-be Heisman winner Reid Donahue's supposed girlfriend in the audience sitting with his family, and once they found her, they stuck with her, reminding us all too well of AJ McCarron's girlfriend in that 2009 Alabama national championship game. None of us are shocked that a guy like Donahue with the looks AND the talent bagged a girl like that, but because being chronically online has made us overly nosy, we want to know WHO this girl is.