Chapter 7
TANNER
Three weeks. Three games. Three Saturday nights spent pressing ice to bruises that bloomed fresh over the ones that hadn’t finished healing.
Seth hissed when I repositioned the pack against his ribs—same spot as last week, hit again before it could heal—and something in me finally cracked.
“This has to stop.”
He went still under my hands. “Tanner—”
“I’m serious.” I pulled back, leaving the ice pack balanced on his side.
“I can’t keep doing this. Patching you up every weekend like some kind of—” I gestured at the supplies spread across the coffee table.
Compression wraps. Anti-inflammatory gel.
Three different ice packs in rotation because one was never enough anymore.
A tube of arnica cream I’d started buying in bulk.
“Like this is normal. Like this is sustainable.”
“You know… I never asked you to do any of this.” His voice was careful, measured. “I can take care of myself.”
That was the worst part. He was right. He’d never once asked me to wait up for him after games.
Never asked me to have the ice packs ready, the couch cleared, the first-aid supplies organized in order of what I’d need first. I’d done all of it on my own, unable to stop myself, unable to sit in my room and listen to him limp through the door and not come out to help.
“I know you didn’t ask.” The words scraped out of me. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re mad at me for something I never asked you to do.”
“I’m not mad at you.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest, where something had gone tight and painful. “I’m mad at myself. Because I can’t stop. You walk through that door hurt, and I can’t just— I don’t know how to not take care of you.”
Something shifted in his expression. “Tanner… It’s almost over. Six more games, and then—”
“Six more games of watching you come home looking like this?” I stood, needing distance, and paced to the window.
The glass was cold against my palm when I braced myself against it.
“The bruise on your shoulder from the Tennessee game still hasn’t faded.
Now you’ve got fresh ones layered on top.
Your ribs are so tender that you flinch when you breathe.
And you want me to just keep icing you down and pretending it’s fine? ”
“What do you want me to do? Quit mid-season?”
“I don’t know what I want.” The words came out raw, honest in a way I hadn’t intended. “I just know I can’t keep being the one who puts you back together every week. And I can’t figure out how to stop. It’s too close to—”
I stopped. Pressed my forehead against the cold glass.
“To what?” Seth’s voice had gone quiet. I heard the couch creak as he shifted. “To your dad?”
My throat closed around his name.
Three weeks ago, after the Auburn game, we’d fallen asleep on this couch together. I’d let myself believe that was the hard part. Admitting I cared, letting him hold me, waking up with his arm around my waist and not running. But that had been the easy part. The hard part was everything after.
The hard part was watching him leave for the Tennessee game and spending four hours unable to breathe.
Tracking his stats on three different apps, refreshing the injury report obsessively, texting Hunter at halftime because I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t losing my mind.
When Seth finally walked through the door at one a.m.—limping, his shoulder already swelling, a cut above his eyebrow held together with butterfly bandages—I’d pulled him onto the couch and spent two hours icing every injury I could find.
He’d fallen asleep there with his head in my lap, and I’d stayed awake watching him breathe until my own exhaustion won.
We’d been dancing around it ever since. Sharing meals, studying together, falling asleep together on the couch more nights than either of us would admit.
His hand on my lower back when we walked to class.
My fingers in his hair when he dozed off during movie nights.
This strange, intimate limbo where we touched constantly and never talked about what it meant.
“Before I left for college, I was the one who took care of him,” I said, still facing the window.
My breath fogged the glass. “When he forgot where he was. When he couldn’t remember my name.
When he got angry because he knew his brain was failing, but he couldn’t stop it.
It killed me to see my mom hurting, so I stepped in when I could. ”
“Tanner, you don’t have to—”
“There was this one night.” The memory rose up unbidden, sharp-edged and suffocating.
“Junior year of high school. I came home from a study group and found him in the kitchen. He’d been trying to make dinner.
Mom was working late, and he wanted to surprise her.
But he’d forgotten what he was doing halfway through.
Left the stove on, wandered off. When I found him, he was sitting on the floor of his closet, holding his old jersey, crying. ”
I heard Seth stand. Heard him cross the room toward me. But I couldn’t turn around, couldn’t look at him while I said this.
“He looked up at me and said, ‘I used to be somebody. I used to matter.’ And I didn’t know what to say. Because he was right. He used to be this incredible athlete, this sharp, funny, brilliant man. And football had hollowed him out until there was nothing left but confusion and grief.”
Seth’s hand settled on my shoulder. Warm, steady. I still didn’t turn around.
“I spent four hours that night getting him cleaned up, calmed down, into bed. Made him dinner. Sat with him until he fell asleep. Then I went to my room and cried until I couldn’t breathe.
” I exhaled, my breath fogging the window again.
“That was my life for two years. And I swore when he died that I was done. Done caretaking. Done watching someone I loved fall apart. Done being helpless.”
“You’re not helpless.” Seth’s voice was rough. “You’re not— This isn’t the same.”
“I know it’s not the same.” I finally turned around.
He was closer than I’d expected, close enough that I could see the exhaustion carved into his face, the way he was holding himself stiff to protect his ribs.
“But every time you walk through that door bruised and limping, I feel it. That same dread. That same certainty that I’m watching someone I care about get destroyed, and all I can do is hand them ice packs and hope it’s enough. ”
“It is enough. You are enough.” His hand slid from my shoulder to my neck, thumb tracing along my jaw. “Tanner, I’m not your father. I’m not going to forget your name. I’m not going to disappear while you watch.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But I know the odds. And I know I’m finishing this season, and then I’m done. Grad school applications are already submitted. Athletic training programs, all of them. I’m not trying to go pro. I’m not good enough, and honestly? I don’t want it. I want to help players, not be one.”
I’d known that. He’d told me weeks ago, that night on the couch when we’d first talked about the future. But hearing it again now, with his hand warm on my neck and his eyes steady on mine, something in my chest loosened.
“Your family doesn’t know that,” I said. “Do they?”
His jaw tightened. “My family doesn’t know anything about my life. By choice.”
“Tell me.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he stepped back, and I immediately missed the warmth of his hand. He lowered himself onto the arm of the couch, moving carefully around his injuries.
“They’ve never been to one of my games. Not once.
Not in high school, not in college.” He stared at the floor.
“Both my parents are academics—my dad’s in economics, my mom’s a literature professor.
They’ve always thought football was barbaric.
Violent and pointless. They never wanted me to play at all. ”
“That’s—”
“They made that clear from the start. When I joined the team in high school, they refused to sign the permission forms. Held out until the deadline, then finally relented at the last minute—but only after making sure I knew exactly how disappointed they were.” His mouth twisted.
“My mom has this whole speech about how football is ‘sanctioned violence for people who can’t find better ways to prove themselves.’ She’s given me that speech maybe fifty times.
Birthdays. Holidays. Random Tuesday phone calls. ”
I thought about my own mother, who’d watched football destroy her husband and still supported my choice to study sports engineering. Who understood that my work was about making things safer, not pretending the danger didn’t exist.
“When I changed my major to human performance instead of something ‘useful’ in their eyes, they cut off contact almost completely,” Seth continued.
“Sophomore year, right after I declared, my dad called and said that since my scholarship was paying for me to throw my life away on sports, he didn’t see the point in pretending to support it anymore. ”
“So you got scholarships.”
“Cobbled together. Academic and athletic. Took me three months of applications and appeals.” He finally looked up at me.
“After the Tennessee game, my mother left a long-ass voicemail. She’d seen the highlight of me getting hit—it made the highlight reels, apparently—and she wanted me to know I was ‘actively destroying my cognitive future for a meaningless game.’”
“Jesus, Seth.” I felt like a dick, like I was no better than them because that was also my biggest fear. At least they had a reason to be worried. He was their son.