Page 162 of It Happened on a Sunday
“Hey! Come watch this,” Marquis calls to the rest of the O-line.
I stay by my locker, watching my phone, but a text comes in from Mariana saying everyone’s fine, just watching the show. Relief sweeps through me, and I shove my phone in my back pocket as I make my way over to where Drew, Marquis, and a few of the other guys are gathered around the TV. I haven’t been to a Shaken Dirty concert in a few years, and while this isn’t quite the same, it’s still one hell of a show.
And then the music shifts—slow, haunting, utterly un–Shaken Dirty-like—and there she is. Sloane.My Sloane. Onstage, lit up like a dream and looking nothing like her typical Black Widow persona.
“Hey, is that your girlfriend?” Drew asks as he moves closer to the TV.
“Bet your ass it is,” Marquis answers as he turns the sound up.
Suddenly, half the team is gathered around the TV, watching my girl as she strides through the smoke and the lights like sheowns the place. Instead of her normal black, Sloane’s wearing a long, elegant white dress and has her hair pinned up to showcase the earrings I gave her the night of the party. She’s even got a new pair of boots—a pair of white thigh-highs that look just as good as the black.
“I didn’t know she was performing,” Drew says, shooting me a look. “Why didn’t you say something?”
I don’t answer, because at the moment Sloane is beaming, glowing, her whole body lit up from the inside out as she looks straight at the cameras and starts to sway to the same melody I heard pouring out of her hospital room the morning she woke up.
It’s soft and sweet, lighter than a lot of her other songs, and it has me even before she starts to sing. Once she does… Once she does, her deep, sexy voice grabs the entire stadium, me included, in a chokehold.
“It happened on a Sunday,
when the first three notes arrived.
A major chord that thundered through
the silence I’d survived.”
Her big, brown eyes seem to stare straight through the camera and into mine with so much love that it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to walk out of the locker room and onto the field just to be near her.
But if I do that, it’ll cause a huge commotion, and that’s the last thing I want. Not when Sloane is standing in front of a hundred million viewers and singing about me. About her, the real her.
About us.
“It happened on a Sunday,
those three notes in my head.
A wild run, a stolen kiss,
long hours safe in bed.”
She grins now, and it looks like she’s having the time of her life as the band launches into a faster, more complicated rhythm to usher in the chorus.
“Let the light in on a Sunday,
let the love come pouring in.
Let the love in on a Sunday,
let the light come pouring in.
On a Sunday.
On a Sunday.”
I don’t know if the crowd knows what’s going on, if they’re responding to the words or just the electricity in the air. But by the time Sloane finishes up the chorus and starts on the second verse, it feels like the entire stadium is on their feet.
And it’s obvious Sloane is loving every second of it.
“It happened on a Sunday,
