Everything Has Changed

Love Again

July 28th 2023
Kansas City, Missouri

The morning sun rose bright and early over the eastern side of Kansas City. In all of his tiredness last night, Travis had forgotten to even shut his curtains and as such was blinded by the gazing sun that would ordinarily been detained by his expert black out curtains. He squinted his eyes towards the alarm clock on his nightstand

6:48am

Why was he awake so early? He only had training camp for a couple of hours that day so didn't need to be at the Chiefs Training Facility downtown until 1pm. He rolled back towards his nightstand to grab his phone only to realise that it was dead. It hadn't been on charge this whole time. He silently cursed himself for going to bed so late last night but plugged it into the charger beside his bed before returning to the covers in an attempt to squeeze out the last of any possible sleep he had left in him. To his surprise he did.

Travis woke again a mere 3 and a half hours later and decided that he could put off the day no longer. He pulled himself out of bed and towards his en suite to shower and get ready for the day. It was only training camp so he didn't have to worry about much style or anything but it was still nice to care about how you looked, especially in public. He glanced down at his phone on his way to grab breakfast for himself. His private chef was around a lot less during the off season so Travis mainly cooked for himself. This was quite a limited selection but he could handle some making some toast and eggs without too much trouble, or criminal damage. He scrolled through instagram and TikTok: nothing exciting or new captured his interest.

As he shovelled scrambled eggs into his mouth he noticed 3 unread messages. One from Patrick...

Pat: You still up for some drinks tonight after camp. Britt said she is fine at home with the kids so we are free to unwind.

Travis replied that he would indeed join his friend at the bar after a long training camp session that evening, sensing a definite need to unwind later on. The second text was from his mother...

Mama: You still ok to pick me up from the airport? My flight gets in at 10:30am.

Ofcourse, how could he almost forget. His mom was coming into town from Florida to spend a couple of days with him. He was planning on playing some golf and spending time with his mom before training camp and the pre-season hit hard again. The third message was from an unknown number. Travis grappled with whether he should open it or not. On the one hand, you will never know until you open it what it is. But it looked like, and sounded like bad news. When you are in the public eye in the way he was, receiving random messages in the middle of the night from unknown numbers is never a good sign. What he couldn't understand is how somebody got his number. Normally the weirdos sent instagram DMs or weird letters. Never iMessage. The possibilities were that somebody has some information they hound;t have, or one of his friends had just changed their phone and hadn't told him yet. He hoped and prayed it was the latter, rather than the former.

In the end he decided not to open it until later. He had too many things to deal with this afternoon so he would rather not have the feeling and knowledge of a stalker on his mind whilst he was trying to train. The day passed by slowly but surely. It had been a long and particularly tiring session that day but he was determined to still meet Pat at the bar that evening. He grabbed his bags from the locker rooms and bid farewell to his teammates before hoping into his car to drive home.

A long shower and relax later, he realised something. He still hadn't opened that message. Well here goes nothing. He clicked on his message app and onto the unknown message thread. It contained one singular message, sent last night at 11:34pm. He read the message. And then he read the message again. And again. Unable to quite comprehend what he was reading. This wasn't possibility number one thank goodness. But it was possibility number two either. He couldn't consider this person a friend. The message read...