My Friend Shamed Me, He’s a Draft Pick

Chapter 3: The Draft Pick's Baby Carrier

The heavy velvet curtains were thrown back as half the party pressed against the bay windows. The pulsing hip-hop music had been abruptly cut off by whoever was manning the aux cord, leaving the room in a state of suspended, breathless anticipation.

"Holy s**t," someone breathed from the front of the pack. "Is that a Koenigsegg Jesko?"

Chase pushed his way to the glass, his eyes practically bulging out of his head. "No way. There are only, like, a hundred of those in the entire world. The sticker price is over three million dollars. Who the hell on this campus drives a three-million-dollar hypercar?"

Lyra squeezed in next to him, her expression a mix of awe and calculating ambition. "Maybe it's a scout from the NFL? Or a billionaire booster here to look at you, Chase?"

I stayed exactly where I was, arms crossed comfortably over my chest, fighting a massive grin. A billionaire booster? Not quite. But the driver certainly had the bank account of one.

Through the glass, the scene outside looked less like a college street and more like a Hollywood red carpet. The sleek, aggressive lines of the matte-black hypercar gleamed under the streetlights. But it wasn't just the car causing a scene. Three massive, blacked-out SUVs had pulled up directly behind it, boxing it in.

Before the gull-wing doors of the Koenigsegg could even open, a swarm of flashes erupted. A small army of reporters and paparazzi, apparently tipped off to the location, swarmed the sidewalk.

"Stand back! Give him some space!" a booming voice echoed from outside.

Four imposing men in sharp black suits—private security—pushed through the throng of reporters, forming a human barricade between the hypercar and the sorority house.

Chase's mouth was hanging open. "This is insane. Who is that?"

The driver’s side door swung upward in a smooth, mechanical glide.

The man who stepped out didn't look like a broken, washed-up has-been. He didn't look like someone surviving on a pity stipend, and he certainly didn't look like he needed duct tape to hold his knee together.

Nash stood at a towering six-foot-three, his shoulders broad and his physique visibly chiseled beneath a perfectly tailored, dark charcoal designer t-shirt. His dark hair was slightly tousled, and his jawline was sharp enough to cut glass. He moved with the fluid, predatory grace of an elite athlete in his absolute prime, radiating a terrifying, dominant aura that instantly silenced the reporters shouting questions.

But it was the accessory strapped to his chest that made my heart melt.

Securely fastened in a top-of-the-line, tactical-black baby carrier was our three-month-old son, Leo. The baby was sound asleep, wearing tiny noise-canceling headphones to block out the chaos, a pacifier bobbing gently in his mouth.

A collective, stunned gasp echoed through the living room.

"Is that... Nash?" Lyra whispered, her voice trembling. The color drained completely from her face as she looked from the imposing figure outside to me, and then back again.

"But his knee," Chase stammered, gripping the windowsill so hard his knuckles turned white. "He's supposed to be crippled. He's supposed to be finished. He looks like he could snap me in half."

"He could," I noted mildly. "But he’s very gentle with the baby."

The front door of the sorority house was thrown open. The security detail stepped in first, quickly scanning the room and physically pushing back a few frat boys who had drifted too close. Then, the flashbulbs intensified as Nash walked through the threshold.

He didn't spare a single glance for the awestruck crowd, the opulent sorority decorations, or the reporters shouting from the porch. His piercing, ice-blue eyes scanned the room with singular focus until they locked onto me.

Instantly, the terrifying, unapproachable superstar aura vanished. The coldness in his eyes melted into absolute adoration, and a deeply aggrieved pout formed on his lips.

He strode across the room, the crowd parting for him like the Red Sea. Chase stumbled backward, nearly tripping over his own feet to get out of Nash's way.

"Sutton," Nash groaned as he reached me, his voice a rich, deep baritone that made a few of the surrounding girls visibly shiver.

He didn't care that there were fifty people watching, or that reporters were snapping photos through the open door. He leaned down, burying his face in the crook of my neck, inhaling deeply. "I missed you."

"Nash, I've been gone for exactly forty-five minutes," I laughed softly, running a hand through his hair. "What are you doing here? You were supposed to be putting Leo to bed."

Nash pulled back, looking at me with the expression of a kicked puppy. "I tried. But then Coach Miller called. He panicked because the media got wind of my private workouts. He made me do a surprise press conference at the athletic center to officially announce I'm entering the NFL Draft. He wouldn't take no for an answer."

"A press conference?" I raised an eyebrow, glancing at the sleeping baby on his chest. "And you brought Leo to a press conference?"

"Of course I did," Nash said, sounding genuinely offended by the question. He protectively cupped the back of the baby's head. "I wasn't going to leave him with a sitter. Besides, he's my good luck charm. You should have seen the reporters' faces when I walked up to the podium with a baby carrier."

"I'm sure it was a very professional look," I teased.

Nash scoffed, leaning in to press a kiss to my forehead. "I don't care about looking professional. I care that they kept asking me about my knee. I had to throw a sixty-yard bomb across the indoor facility just to shut them up. The scouts from the Panthers and the Bears were there. They're already fighting over the number one overall pick."

The silence in the room was absolute. You could have heard a pin drop.

Number one overall pick.

The words hung in the air, heavy and irrefutable. A first-round draft pick was a millionaire. The number one overall pick was a franchise cornerstone, a player guaranteed a contract worth tens of millions of dollars before he ever played a professional snap.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye. Lyra looked like she might actually pass out. Her chest was heaving, and her eyes were darting erratically between me, Nash, and the three-million-dollar hypercar idling outside. All her cruel jokes about poverty, about me washing jerseys, about Nash being a washed-up has-been, were violently collapsing in on her.

"Anyway," Nash continued, completely oblivious to the existential crisis occurring three feet away from him, "the press conference ran late, and I missed you. So I tracked your phone. Why are you hanging out in the hallway of a frat party?"

"Sorority mixer, actually," I corrected, gently adjusting Leo's tiny noise-canceling headphones. "And I was just catching up with my old friend, Lyra. She was giving me some wonderful career advice."

Nash finally looked up, his gaze sweeping over the crowd before landing on Lyra and Chase. The warmth in his eyes instantly vanished, replaced by the cold, calculating glare of an apex predator assessing a threat. He looked at Chase the way one might look at a particularly uninteresting bug on a windshield.

"Oh," Nash said flatly. "You're the backup. The one who threw three interceptions during the spring scrimmage."

Chase visibly flinched. The bravado he had displayed just minutes earlier was completely gone. He looked terrified. But beneath the terror, there was something else. A frantic, desperate awe.

"N-Nash," Chase stammered, taking a hesitant step forward, his hands trembling. He looked like he wanted to bow. "Man, it's... it's an honor. The way you plant your back foot on a deep post route... I've watched the tape a hundred times. Could I... I mean, would you mind signing my jersey?"

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud. I looked at Lyra.

Her jaw had practically unhinged. She stared in absolute, unadulterated horror as her boyfriend—the man she had just claimed was the future of the franchise, the man she had used to humiliate me—shoved his hand in his pocket, frantically searching for a Sharpie, practically begging the "crippled has-been" for an autograph.