Chapter 15
Dustin
I wasn’t looking for her.
I kept telling myself that as I scanned the practice field again. Everyone was here — offense, defense, trainers, Coach Sutherland in full ‘I will ruin your life’ mode — everyone except the one person who’d spent the last week and a bit orbiting the team like a satellite.
Hadley Peterson. Nowhere to be seen.
Good. Great. Fine.
Except something in my chest wouldn’t settle. I’d been asked about her chasing me, and I’d said she was very forward with her questioning. Not a bad thing, not a good thing. A safe, neutral word to describe her.
And now . . . she wasn’t here. She was always here. But I shoved it down and grabbed my helmet, heading toward drills. Mike jogged up beside me, his rookie enthusiasm dimmer today, like someone had dialed down his brightness.
“You lost your shadow?” I asked before I could stop myself.
Mike blinked. “Uh . . . yeah. Kind of.” He looked away, his teeth grinding like he had a problem.
“Kind of?” I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He hesitated — rookie mistake, hesitation was always a tell. “What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing!” he said quickly. Then, with more edge than I expected, “Shouldn’t I be the one asking what you did?”
“What? What the fuck does that mean?” I grabbed his arm, pulling him to a stop before he walked past me, completely.
Mike looked down at my hand, and I almost expected him to punch me. Instead, he sighed. “I thought you had something to do with it, you know, after this morning, but . . . she’s, uh . . . she’s not doing the assignment anymore.”
I didn’t hide my reaction quickly enough; my surprise was evident. “What?”
“The coaches complained, said she was distracting and in the way or something,” he mumbled. “She texted me to tell me her professor pulled her off,” Mike said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I got it before practice. Said she has to find another project.”
Relief hit me like a sharp, clean punch straight to my rib cage. I masked it with a shrug. “Well, she was kind of a distraction anyway.” He looked miserable. “You’ll do better paying attention in training when you’re not answering a thousand questions.”
Mike didn’t look convinced. “She didn’t seem happy about it.”
“No shit,” I muttered.
Because I got the impression Hadley didn’t quit anything. Not even when she should, and when it was smart to do so. Safe to do so.
I narrowed my eyes. “Did she say why her professor pulled her?”
“No. Just . . . something really vague, and she said she’d be sure I’d know more than she did.” He glanced around, lowering his voice. “She’s not going to drop it.”
My stomach dropped. “What do you mean? Why would you say that?”
“She said she’s still working on . . . something. Didn’t tell me what, but I kind of got the impression she had to be here for it.”
Of course she did. Damn it. That stubborn, relentless, infuriating fucking woman. But if she wasn’t on the assignment anymore, then she didn’t have access — but she also didn’t have any buffer between herself and whatever the hell was hiding under this program.
I tried not to clench my jaw or appear agitated. “Did she say what she’s digging into?”
“No.” Mike looked over his shoulder. “But she asked me yesterday if I knew the name Mason Sterling.”
I froze completely. It took me a second for my brain to work. “Say that again.”
“Mason Sterling,” Mike repeated, confused. “I told her I didn’t know who that was. Should I have known the name?”
No. He shouldn’t, that was the point. No one should. I shook my head.
“Nah,” I said, forcing my voice steady. “He’s a nobody, was here years ago, dropped out, I think.
” I nudged Mike. “Not everyone can handle the pressure of stopping an offensive line, know what I mean?” I was such a liar.
“Whatever she’s cooking, you stay clear of it, Whittaker, you hear me?
” He gave me a sullen nod. “Man, Coach is already pissed at you for leaving her alone in the facility. Keep your head down, your mouth shut, and work your ass off to get first team, you can do it.”
Hope flared in his eyes, everything else forgotten. “You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.” I actually did, which helped. “Hernandez is injured, our DE Hartley is playing like he already got a spot on the roster. You know what that means?” I leaned in. “Means the harder they fall, right?”
Mike grinned at me, his gaze traveling down to the far end of the field. “I do,” he said thoughtfully.
“Sorry about your feature, man,” I told him. “Best to forget it and focus on what’s important, right?”
Mike nodded. “Yeah.” He beamed at me. “Thanks, Dustin, I appreciate your insight.”
“You got it,” I told him with a smile. “Listen, Mike, if she asks you anything else, be careful. You come to me first.”
Mike’s eyes widened. “Am I in trouble?”
“No. Just . . .” I sighed. “Just keep me in the loop, okay? I want your focus on that spot on first team, not someone who was only here for eight days and runs after players in practice.”
Mike snorted at the reference. He nodded, relieved. “Yeah. Sure. You’re right. I liked her, though. She was actually helpful, and she genuinely seemed interested, you know?”
“Yeah, she was good at her job.” You’re a bastard, Slater.
But it had the desired effect on Mike; he flinched at the reminder.
I knew what I’d just done, using Mike’s admiration of Hadley against her, and I knew it would work.
I saw it in the way the light in his eyes dimmed a little, reminding him he was just an assignment.
“Hey, go practice, show me what you got when we line up against each other later, alright?”
“I’ll go easy on you,” he joked.
I watched him run off down the field and followed a little slower.
How the fuck did she find out about Sterling? A name connected to the thing Dante, Noah, and I were pretending we didn’t remember.
And she’d found it. Of course she had. I dragged a hand over my face. Mike said she was nice.
Yeah, I bet she was nice. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she didn’t know when to stop. The problem was that she was alone in something she didn’t understand. The problem was that she’d been taken off the assignment and didn’t seem to care.
She was digging anyway.
And if she dug into Mason Sterling?
I looked across the field one more time, searching for her even though I knew she wasn’t there. Mike jogged toward his group, leaving me standing in the middle of the grass, helmet dangling from my fingertips, pulse hammering hard enough to feel in my throat.
“Is there a reason you look lost on this field, Slater?” Coach Sutherland’s voice sounded from behind me.
“Enjoying the calm before the chaos, Coach,” I told him with a wide grin. “Are you looking forward to the spring game?”
“I am.” He stopped beside me. “I got rid of that menace reporter,” he said with a smug smile. “You running across the field like that this morning, genius,” he congratulated me.
Oh fuck, it really was my fault she was gone.
“She was persistent.” I tried to keep my voice light.
“Mmhmm, she was.” His stare was hard as he looked downfield.
“I’m not a man to tell his players where to spend their time when it’s not on my field, but you’d be better off away from that one.
” He gave me a side glance. “I know you’ve got a reputation.
You like the ladies, they like you back, but that one?
Poisonous. Plenty of others out there, Slater, stick to them.
That one’s not worth the aggravation, no matter how good she is in the sack. ”
Fuck you.
I forced my expression to stay neutral. Sutherland was watching me, and I gave him the nod, the easy smile that he’d come to expect from me.
“No danger of that, Coach.” I forced a grin. The last thing I wanted was for him to be looking at either me, Dante, or Noah any closer than he was.
“Good boy. Right, move your ass and get to training. You may be the best wide receiver on the team, but your place isn’t guaranteed until I put it on the roster.” He grinned.
I think he was joking, but yeah, another reminder of who held all the power here.
And it wasn’t me.
When I got to the huddle, Dante gave me a look, and I gave him the same smile I’d given the coach. Only Dante knew me better, and I saw his reaction in the way he gripped the ball a little tighter, but other than that, you wouldn’t know QB10 was pissed.
When the coach blew his whistle, we both put our all into practice and played the game, on and off the field.
* * *
I’d had a very intense, heated exchange with my roommate after practice.
He kept giving me mixed signals, and now I wasn’t sure if I was running the ball or faking the pass.
He had gone from ‘keep away from her’ to ‘okay, talk to her,’ back to ‘I think you and her together are a bad idea, but you do need to talk to her.’
I’d also seen the clips on social media from this morning, and how was I supposed to know someone would film her chasing me?
We weren’t allowed phones at practice, so it never occurred to me that it would be caught on camera.
Plus, I was just trying to avoid her, but . . . yeah. It didn’t look good.
I’d even got a text from Naya about it, telling me to get used to becoming a meme because that would be the first of many, now that I was famous. But I wasn’t famous.
Not yet.
Give me time, though, and I would be, and it wouldn’t be because I was getting chased by women.
I pulled my baseball cap lower as I headed across campus. I had to skip dinner to go find her. I needed to think about what that meant. I didn’t like it. I’d told the others what I was doing, and they hadn’t liked it either.
Noah had offered to come, but Dante vetoed that, saying it would look like we were trying to intimidate her.
Had he seen her chase me across the field?
Had he seen her stare Coach Sutherland down and not blink?
I don’t think she understood the meaning of the word ‘intimidated,’ and if she did, it was only because it was being used about her, not the other way around.