Fourth and Long (Tackled By Love #4)

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TANNER

The apartment door clicked shut behind Seth, and about thirty seconds passed before the silence became unbearable.

I grabbed my controller off the coffee table and shoved the noise-canceling headphones over my ears. The gaming laptop was already open, logged in, and waiting for me to disappear into something that had nothing to do with Saturday afternoons in Alabama.

“Hey Tanner, you sure you don’t want to come to the game?

” Seth had asked at breakfast, standing in the kitchen doorway in his Gray Wolves warm-up gear.

His duffel bag sat by the door, cleats tied to the outside strap the way every football player did.

Like some kind of uniform code I’d never understood.

I’d kept my eyes on my screen. “I’ve got lab work.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Deadlines don’t care what day it is.”

He’d hesitated in a way I was still getting used to. We’d been roommates since the end of summer, long enough to figure out whose shelf was whose in the fridge, but not long enough for me to predict what he’d do next.

“All right,” he’d said finally. “See you tonight.”

That had been enough. Seth didn’t push. Didn’t try to convince me or drag me into something I’d made clear I couldn’t handle. He just nodded and left.

Now the apartment felt too big and too quiet despite the headphones pumping game audio directly into my skull.

I loaded into a match, fingers moving through familiar patterns on the controller.

Muscle memory took over. Aim. Shoot. Reload.

Move. The commentary in my ears was British, enthusiastic, and completely unrelated to anything happening three miles away at Magnolia State’s stadium.

I made it through two matches before my phone vibrated on the table beside me.

Hunter

You watching?

I didn’t answer. Stupid questions didn’t deserve answers.

Another buzz.

Tell me you’re at least listening on the radio.

Of all people, Hunter should’ve been the one who understood why watching football was the last thing I’d do with my weekends.

And listening…? That was even worse because you had to imagine everything the commentators described.

Hunter and I had been friends since we were little.

Our dads had been teammates. His dad had been there for mine almost to the very end.

He knew what football had taken from me.

I turned the volume up and started another match.

The thing about noise-canceling headphones was that they worked.

Really worked. The world outside disappeared into whatever you piped directly into your brain, and right now, that world was a post-apocalyptic wasteland where my biggest concern was whether I had enough ammunition to clear the next checkpoint.

No stadiums. No crowds. No commentary about plays and tackles and hits that made announcers’ voices go sharp with excitement.

No wondering if one of those hits would be the one that lit a fuse that couldn’t be extinguished.

I lost track of time somewhere around match six.

Lost myself in the rhythm of it, the way the rest of the world narrowed to the screen in front of me and the sound in my ears.

This was good. This was manageable. This was a Saturday afternoon that had nothing to do with the sport that killed my father.

I needed to get to the lab and run another set of tests, but it’d been too damned long since I’d been able to immerse myself in the game. I didn’t even feel bad about slacking.

My phone lit up again, and this time I grabbed it without thinking.

Hunter

Landry just took another nasty hit. Walked it off, but he looked shaky.

My stomach dropped through the floor.

I stared at the message, controller forgotten in my other hand. My character died on screen. The game suggested I respawn. I couldn’t move.

Walked it off. That was good. That meant Seth was fine. That meant he was still playing, still moving, still—

He’s back in. He’s good. Just looked rough for a second. Might want to make sure his ice packs are in the freezer though.

I made myself breathe. Made myself set the phone down. Made myself pick up the controller and start another match, even though my hands were shaking enough that my aim went to shit.

I’m not his mom. If he’s going to need ice, he should’ve thought about that sooner.

The reaction didn’t make sense. I barely knew the guy. Two months of sharing an apartment didn’t explain the way my chest had seized up at Hunter’s text, the way I couldn’t stop thinking about the word shaky.

I tried to get back into the zone, but I couldn’t stop my mind from racing. I tossed my controller to the other end of the couch and grabbed my backpack. Might as well get some work done.

The engineering building was empty, the same as it was most weekends.

Most of the campus was either at the game or doing something that didn’t involve running impact tests on prototype helmet padding.

I swiped my student ID to get into the lab, dropped my bag by the door, and pulled up the data from Thursday’s test sequence on my laptop.

This was better. This made sense. Columns of numbers, graphs showing force distribution, and measurements of energy absorption across different padding configurations. This was something I could control.

My current prototype sat on the workbench, a skeleton of a helmet with modular padding inserts I could swap in and out.

I’d been testing variations on a design that used overlapping layers of different materials, each one calibrated to absorb impact at different velocities.

The idea was that a single catastrophic hit and multiple smaller impacts over time both created risk, so the padding needed to handle both scenarios.

If I could bring my vision to life and prove it worked, the sport would have a helmet that could be customized not only by position but also by players’ history and risk of future injury.

I swapped out the padding configuration for the next test sequence. The work was methodical, precise, exactly the kind of thing that required enough focus that I couldn’t think about anything else.

Couldn’t think about whether the game was over yet.

Couldn’t think about whether Seth was okay.

Couldn’t think about how many hits constituted “too many,” even if they all looked fine at the time.

My phone stayed dark in my pocket. Maybe my snippy reply had finally gotten through to Hunter. If I’d wanted to know what was going on with the game, I would’ve watched.

I ran the next test sequence. Documented the results.

Adjusted the calibration on the impact machine.

Ran another sequence. The numbers were good.

Better than the last configuration. The overlapping layers were distributing the force more evenly, reducing the peak impact measurement by another six percent.

Six percent that might matter. Might not.

The only way to know was to keep testing, keep iterating, keep trying to build something that could protect people from the consequences of the sport it seemed like half the damned country was obsessed with.

That the game players couldn’t seem to quit, even as the risks became clearer and clearer.

The sport that had turned my father’s brain into something that couldn’t recognize his own son.

I stayed in the lab until the data started blurring together, until I’d run enough sequences that I’d have material to analyze for days. When I finally checked my phone, it was past six. The game had been over for at least three hours.

No messages from Hunter. That was good. That meant nothing worth reporting had happened.

No messages from Seth either. Not that I’d expected any. Not that I’d been checking.

I packed up my equipment, locked the lab, and walked back to the apartment as the sun started sinking behind the buildings.

The campus was alive with the post-game energy that always came with a win.

People were smiling, laughing, and wearing Gray Wolves gear with the kind of pride that said we beat someone today.

Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that mostly housed graduate students and seniors who’d gotten tired of dorm life.

I’d needed a new roommate after mine graduated—couldn’t afford the place alone on the little bit I had left over from financial aid.

Seth had been looking for somewhere off campus, and Hunter had suggested we might be a good fit.

At the time, I’d figured it was just Hunter being practical, connecting two people who needed the same thing.

It had seemed practical at the time. Seth was Hunter’s friend and former teammate. We’d crossed paths a handful of times before, but I hadn’t really known him until the day Hunter sent him to the apartment after Dad died.

I’d been sitting on the kitchen floor, unable to move, unable to do anything except stare at the wall and try to remember how to breathe.

Seth had knocked, and when I didn’t answer, he’d let himself in with the spare key Hunter must have told him how to find.

He hadn’t said much. Hadn’t tried to fix anything or offer empty words about how it would get easier.

He’d just sat on the floor next to me and stayed there until I could stand again.

He’d shown up for the funeral too, standing in the back row even though he barely knew my family. Checked in on me in the weeks after, never pushing, never making it weird. Just there in a way I hadn’t expected from someone I’d barely spoken to.

I hadn’t expected much from the roommate arrangement. Hadn’t expected him to be so easy to live with, so willing to give me space without making it weird.

Hadn’t expected to notice when he wasn’t home.

I let myself into the apartment and dumped my bag by the door. The place was still empty, still quiet. I grabbed a Coke from the fridge and settled on the couch with my laptop, pulling up the data from today’s tests.