Chapter One #2
When the cameras drifted off, I caught Corbin by the rope. Quarter-zip. Screensaver smile.
"Hey—the linebacker who tweaked his leg out there," I said, all sunshine. "Forty-something? Just want to make sure I've got the injury report right for our little game preview. Is he—"
"We don't have any injuries to report at this time." Smooth as a banister, smile never moving. "Everybody's healthy and ready to go. You'll want to wait for the official availability report. Comes out Thursday." A beat. "You got everything you need? You let me know if you need anything."
We don't have any injuries to report.
I'd watched a man limp off a field and get put back on it by his own head coach forty minutes ago, and the program's official position, delivered with a smile, was that I hadn't.
That's the thing about a wall. It tells you exactly where the door is by standing in front of it.
"Totally," I said, beaming. "Thank you so much."
And then I did the thing I was very much not allowed to do.
Which was not leave.
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I should have gone out through the gate with everyone else.
Instead, when the rope thinned and the real reporters wandered toward the parking lot already arguing about the depth chart, I went the other way.
Down the back stairs. Along the chain-link, toward the mouth of the tunnel where the team would funnel off the field—because that's where a person might catch a trainer alone for thirty seconds and ask a casual, sunny, harmless question about a leg that nobody had any injuries to report about.
The tunnel breathed cool air at me. Concrete and old paint and liniment. I'd just gotten close enough to read the signs about authorized personnel when a body filled the entrance and the cool air stopped.
He'd taken the helmet off.
That was the first thing. In pads, helmeted, he'd been weather. Bare-headed—six feet of him and then some, dark hair sweat-flat to his skull, a fresh bruise coming up purple along his jaw—he was a person, and somehow that was worse.
His eyes found me before I'd finished arranging my face. Gray. Or the color gray gets when it's tired of being looked at. The scar through his eyebrow was older than the bruise. Everything about him was older than it should have been.
He looked at my lanyard. Then at me. The math he did took about half a second and came out unfavorable.
"You're not supposed to be down here," he said.
His voice was quiet. I'd expected loud—men built like that are usually loud; it's free, the volume, it costs them nothing. His was low and even, and it landed harder for it. The verbal equivalent of that hit. The crack arriving a beat after the fold.
I smiled. "There wasn't a sign."
"There's four signs."
"There's four signs now," I agreed, like he'd made an excellent point in my favor, and stuck out my hand. "Sloane Pierce. Student media."
He looked at my hand the way you'd look at something left on your porch.
"I know what you are," he said.
"Do you? Because most people guess intern, and then they get very comfortable, and it's honestly the most useful thing about me." I let the hand drop, unbothered, still bright. "You're Lawson. Twenty-seven."
Something moved behind his eyes. Not surprise. Recalibration. He hadn't expected me to have a name ready—and I filed away the fact that being known landed on him like a flinch.
"Whatever you think you saw out there," he said, "you didn't."
"I didn't see anything." True, technically. I'd recorded it. "I'm just a fan. Big believer." I nodded at the BELIEVE stenciled somewhere over our heads. "Go Hawks."
His jaw ticked. He didn't move out of the tunnel mouth, and he didn't let me into it, and we stood there in the cool air with the menthol smell and a wall of warning signs between us. I watched him not be the brainless slab the photographer had described. I watched him think.
Which was so much more dangerous than I'd bargained for.
"You were on the riser the whole practice," he said. Not a question. "Two and a half hours. Press leaves after the live period, gets their depth-chart quotes, goes home. You stayed."
"It was a riveting walkthrough."
"You're not a fan." Flat. Certain. He took one step closer, and the cool tunnel air came with him, and I had to actively decide not to move—which was new, because I never had to decide that. "Fans watch the ball. You were watching the bench."
Oh.
That was the moment. If I'm honest. Not the hit. Not the jaw or the scar or the gray eyes.
That.
The fact that while I'd been clocking everyone on that field, one person had been clocking me—and he'd seen exactly what I was looking at, and he'd come down here to stand in the doorway of it.
He wasn't the muscle the billboard wanted him to be. He was paying attention.
People who pay attention are the dangerous ones.
My pulse did something undignified, and I smiled wider to cover it.
"You always glare like that," I said, "or am I special?"
"I'm not glaring."
"You're unclenching your jaw to do it. That's commitment."
His jaw, which had in fact been clenched, did not unclench.
A muscle ticked in it instead, which I counted as a win.
Behind him, cleats clattered on concrete and a voice yelled Lawson, you coming or what, and he didn't turn around.
Didn't break the look. He had a stillness too, I realized.
Same as the kid on the bench. The stillness of someone who'd learned that the safest thing to do with what you're feeling is nothing at all.
"Whoever told you there's a story here," he said, lower now, "they were wrong, and they put you in front of people you don't want to be in front of. So go home. Cover the gymnastics team. They win, nobody gets hurt, you get a nice clip." A beat. "There's nothing here for you to write about."
And here's the strange part, the part I replayed a hundred times later and am still not sure about.
It almost wasn't a threat.
There was something underneath the threat that the threat seemed to be protecting. A warning that wanted, very badly, to be a kindness, and didn't know how.
"See," I said, "when people have nothing to hide, they don't usually walk all the way down a tunnel to tell you so."
For half a second—the crack after the fold—I watched that land on him.
Then a third figure appeared at his shoulder, half in the dark.
The young trainer. Navy polo. The one who'd lost the argument over the bench.
He stopped dead when he saw me. Looked from me, to Lawson, to my lanyard, and his face did something close to panic before he caught it—the look of a man who has just realized the reporter and the enforcer are standing in the same sentence.
"We're good here," Lawson said to him, without looking. Then, to me, quieter: "Go home, Sloane Pierce."
He stepped back into the dark of the tunnel.
The trainer scrambled after him. The cool air came rushing past me again, and they were gone, swallowed into the concrete and the menthol and the BELIEVE, and I was alone in the mouth of a place I wasn't allowed to be—heart going, recorder still running, the August heat closing back over the spot where the cold had been.
There's nothing here for you to write about.
I got out my phone, opened my notes, and under Lawson, #27 I typed a single line. The line that started all of it. The line I'd think about much later, in a hotel room I had no business being in, with his mouth at my throat and a story I had no business killing burning a hole in my bag.
He knew exactly what I was looking at.
Then I pulled up the roster, scrolled the linebackers, matched the number I'd finally caught—forty-three—to a name, and wrote that down too.
Theo Brooks.
I didn't know yet that one of these men would break my heart and the other would nearly cost me everything—and that I'd spend a whole season unable to tell, on any given night, which was which.
I just knew I had a thread.
And I pulled it all the way home.
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