Chapter 2 Seth
SETH
I woke up Sunday morning with my ribs on fire.
The first breath came out shallow, catching hard against the bruising along my left side.
I lay still, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the worst of it to pass.
When it didn’t, I gritted my teeth and pushed myself upright.
The movement sent sharp, insistent pain radiating through my torso.
My mouth opened before I could stop it, and I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep the sound from escaping.
Tanner’s room was just down the hall, and he couldn’t know how bad this was.
I’d learned that lesson early. The first time I’d come home limping, he’d gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with his father. Patrick McBride had spent fifteen years in the NFL before CTE hollowed him out from the inside.
So I’d gotten good at hiding it. Downplaying the hits, brushing off the bruises, pretending my body wasn’t keeping score of every collision.
I rolled out of bed slowly, testing each breath to see how much the defensive end had actually done when he’d blindsided me yesterday. Nothing broken—I’d know if something was broken. Just deep tissue bruising, the kind that would take a week to fade and hurt like hell every time I moved wrong.
I pressed my palm flat against my ribs and breathed through it.
Fine. I was fine.
The apartment was quiet. I checked my phone out of habit—six thirty-eight a.m. Three missed calls from my father last night after I’d passed out, and two texts I didn’t bother reading. I silenced the notifications and tossed the phone onto my nightstand.
Coffee first. Family never.
The hallway was dark when I stepped out of my room, but light leaked from under Tanner’s door. I paused, listening. The soft click-clack of his keyboard filtered through. He’d probably been up all night, buried in whatever data he’d collected yesterday while I was getting my ass handed to me.
I didn’t knock. Tanner hated being interrupted when he was working, and I’d learned over the past two months that sometimes the best way to take care of him was to leave him alone until he surfaced on his own.
The kitchen was clean from last night—we’d washed the dishes together after dinner, standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink.
I started the coffee maker and wiped down the counter that didn’t need wiping, just to have something to do with my hands.
The machine gurgled to life, familiar and grounding.
My phone buzzed on the counter where I’d left it. Another call from home. I watched it ring through, then turned the phone face down.
“You’re up early.”
I turned. Tanner stood in the kitchen doorway wearing an old T-shirt with a hole near the hem and flannel pants that hung low on his narrow hips. His hair stuck up on one side. He had pillow creases on his cheek.
He looked about seventeen years old and completely exhausted.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, which was only half true. I’d slept fine until my body decided six a.m. was late enough and every bruise needed to file a formal complaint. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
I pulled down two mugs while the machine finished brewing. Tanner moved past me to the fridge, close enough that I caught the scent of his shampoo—something clean and generic that shouldn’t have made my chest do strange things.
He grabbed the creamer, added it to his mug, then leaned against the counter beside me. Our shoulders didn’t quite touch. The gap between us was maybe six inches—close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off his skin, far enough that it felt deliberate.
“How’re the ribs?” he asked.
“Fine.”
His fingers tightened on his mug. I watched it happen—the small tell he probably didn’t know he had. Tanner noticed everything, cataloged it, and filed it away for later analysis. I’d learned to read him the same way.
“Seth.”
Just my name. One syllable, soft and certain, and something warm unfurled low in my gut. Everyone else called me Landry—teammates, coaches, even Hunter. But Tanner had taken one look at me when we’d first met and said, “I’m not calling you by your last name like you’re just another player.”
So I’d told him. Seth. The name my family used, the one I’d spent years trying to distance myself from because it came with expectations I never wanted to meet.
But when Tanner said my name, it didn’t feel like an anchor pulling me under.
It felt like being seen as something other than a jock or a disappointment.
He was looking at me now with that expression, the one that made me feel like he could see straight through every wall I’d ever built. His eyes dropped to my side, tracking the way I held myself, the careful angle of my torso.
“They’re sore,” I admitted because lying to him felt impossible. “Nothing serious. I’ve had worse.”
Tanner’s jaw tightened. He took a long drink of his coffee, eyes on the window over the sink instead of on me. Morning light caught in his hair, turned it almost auburn where it was longest.
I wanted to touch him. The urge hit me suddenly and sharp, my hand halfway to his shoulder before I remembered this wasn’t that. We were roommates. Friends, maybe, in the deliberate way you built friendship around shared space and mutual avoidance of hard topics.
I dropped my hand and reached for my own coffee instead.
“You get your work done?” I asked.
“Most of it. I’ve got a report to finish today.”
“Need any help?”
His eyes cut to me, something surprised flickering across his face before he hid it. “You’ve got film review tomorrow.”
“Not until the afternoon. I’m free all day today.
” I wasn’t sure why I’d even made the offer.
I was the one barely making grades one semester after the next.
”You know, it might be good to have a player who understands what you’re trying to do and where you’re coming from look over things.
Make sure you’re not missing anything from the sports angle. ”
Tanner studied me like he was trying to figure out if I meant it. After a few seconds, he said, “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know. But your work connects to mine. Understanding impact distribution helps me understand injury patterns.”
That was true. My human performance major focused on athletic training and injury prevention, and Tanner’s biomedical engineering work on protective equipment was basically the other side of the same coin.
We’d figured that out three weeks into living together, bent over our respective laptops at the kitchen counter, and I’d made some comment about concussion protocols that had made Tanner’s head snap up.
We’d been circling each other’s coursework ever since.
“Okay,” Tanner said. “Yeah. I could use another set of eyes on the data.”
His small smile gutted me. That was the problem with living with Tanner McBride—he barely smiled, so when he did, it felt like winning something I hadn’t known I was competing for.
We took our coffee to the living room. Tanner grabbed his laptop from where he’d abandoned it last night, and I settled on the couch, close enough that I could see his screen. He pulled up spreadsheets covered in numbers I was slowly learning to read.
“These are the force measurements from yesterday’s tests,” he explained, fingers moving across the trackpad. “This column is the baseline—standard padding configuration. These three are my prototype variations.”
I leaned closer. The numbers meant something to him, told a story I was only beginning to understand. “The third variation performed best?”
“By six percent. It’s not enough.”
He’d said as much last night. I disagreed with his assessment. Six percent wasn’t the minuscule improvement he made it out to be. “It’s progress.”
“Progress doesn’t prevent anything.” His voice went flat, hollow in that specific way it got when he was thinking about things he couldn’t change. “Six percent is a statistical footnote. It’s not going to show up on anyone’s injury report as the thing that made a difference.”
Again, he was wrong, but with where he was coming from, I wasn’t sure anything less than a complete reduction would satisfy him.
I didn’t touch him. Wanted to, but Tanner flinched away from comfort when he was in this headspace. Instead, I said, “Your dad played before we knew half of what we know now. Before anyone was designing equipment with the specific goal of preventing cumulative trauma.”
“And in twenty years, someone will say the same thing about the equipment players use now.”
“Probably. But that doesn’t mean your work isn’t valuable.”
Tanner’s hands stilled on the keyboard. After a long moment, he nodded once and went back to his data.
We worked in silence for the next hour. Tanner walked me through his testing methodology, and I asked questions about material properties and impact angles.
Some of it connected to the biomechanics coursework I’d taken last semester—the way force transferred through the body, the threshold where tissue damage began.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table, the screen lighting up with my father’s name. Another call. I kept my eyes on Tanner’s laptop.
Tanner’s gaze flicked to the phone, then back to me. “You going to answer that?”
“Don’t want to.”
“Family?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded once and turned back to his spreadsheet. That was one of the things I appreciated about Tanner—he understood boundaries, respected when someone didn’t want to talk about something. God knew I’d given him plenty of space around the subject of his father.
The phone went silent. Thirty seconds later, it started buzzing again, skittering half an inch across the glass tabletop.
“Persistent,” Tanner said, not looking up.
“They usually are.” I reached over and grabbed the phone, holding down the side button until the screen went dark. “They’ll give up eventually.”
“Will they?”