Chapter 2
Hunter
One Month Later
The last few reps hurt the most, but not because my muscles are giving out. Quite the opposite. It’s the feeling of knowing I’m done with my workout that makes every synapse cry the blues. My mind is only calm when I’m in motion.
Fortunately, I make a living moving around a soccer pitch and training my body to perform within an inch of its very existence. That’s when all the outside noise quiets, and I feel at peace with the world.
“Nineteen,” I grunt, pushing several hundred pounds of metal with my legs. They shake as I bring the weight back down, visibly shuddering at the load. “Twenty.” It’s all I have, at least for tonight. Tomorrow is another day.
“Good set.” Jimmy, the team trainer, is the only one in the gym, mainly because it’s after eight and most of the guys have gone home to their wives or girlfriends. I have neither, and I like it that way.
No complications, no distractions.
I grunt, knowing Jimmy doesn’t need more acknowledgment than that. “You wanna get a beer?”
He looks at me warily, no doubt remembering what happened over a year ago when he okayed a trip to a Hollywood bar.
Before we’d even ordered, three women had draped their arms around me, posing for selfies.
Two drinks in, I had one of them on my lap and was making out with her friend.
Not a good look, according to the team's publicist.
“Better not. Natalie will choke the life out of me if I let you near more empty carbs.” Oh. Right. There’s also that mandate from the team nutritionist. Clean diet: high on protein, low on scandal-causing carbs. Check. It’s the reminder my body needs because my brain wants to be numb.
I nod. “Okay.”
Jimmy smooths his mustache with his thumb and forefinger before fiddling with the string on his gray hoodie.
He’s lean and a couple of inches taller than me, which makes it impossible for me to intimidate him at my mere six-three.
His basketball career ended before it began with an Achilles’ tendon tear in high school, but he’s still an athlete in his mindset.
It’s why he works us all to the bone but stops just shy of injury.
He’s careful, thoughtful, and a mean son of a bitch when he needs to be.
I sometimes forget that he’s the team trainer and not my friend. Thus, no Hollywood bar.
At this point, my friends on the team are few and far between. I know I’ve alienated a lot of people with my aggressive playing style. Some of my teammates forgive it when it gets results, but there are a few—Jamie Plank, our starting center midfielder, to name one—who’d like to see me get canned.
It makes his job harder each time I get a red card because we play one man down for the remainder of the game. And depending on the penalty, I might be required to sit out a game.
None of that is good for continuity, not to mention that it’s harder to win when we’re down a player. But the fans love it. A little drama on the field gets them revved up, and that energy helps the team too.
I’m not about to argue that unnecessary slide tackling is smart, but it’s how I’ve always played.
A fierce rage triggers when I’m on the field, a reaction to something my unhappy drunk of a father said a decade ago.
“You succeed as an athlete because your temper drives you. You’d fail anywhere else.
That’s how life works—it gives you one asset to compensate for all the deficits. ”
At the time, I was in the heart of my push to get recruited to a professional team, so I leaned way in. And once he died, I clung to those words because they were all I had left of him.
It doesn’t matter that I have a calmer side. When I’m challenged—either on the soccer pitch or in the face of some asshole who pushes my buttons—I see red. I might as well be a bull unleashed from a holding pen. It’s all power, unrestrained energy, and killer instinct.
It’s everything wrapped up in a will to succeed, and anger at my dad for not being a better man. A perfect storm that drove me to career stardom.
And now, it will probably get me traded.
We walk back to the lockers, where I shove my zippered warm-up jacket into my bag and grab a fresh towel from a stack in the corner. Mopping the sweat from my brow, I gather the rest of my shit to go home.
“You still have that meal prep place delivering to you?” Jimmy asks, raising an eyebrow. He always pretends to be jealous of my bougie lifestyle, but his wife is a trained chef, and I know he’s going home to something a helluva lot better than my box of pre-measured proteins and greens.
“Yeah. Tonight’s either fish or fish.”
He laughs. “And then?”
“Porn marathon on pay-per-view,” I joke.
Jimmy is one of the few people I trust enough to reveal what I really do at night.
He waits, tapping a finger against his bottom lip and stretching to his full height.
It never ceases to amaze me how a guy that wiry can look menacing.
“Fine. I’m in the middle of Emma. Jane Austen. ”
Jimmy squints. “Don’t think I read that one, but I did read some Austen at some point in school.”
It’s one thing we have in common—a love for books. I dig reading in general, but a good classic is always in my rotation.
There are bound to be guys on the team who’d give me shit for being a bookworm. I like having some aspects of my life that aren’t available for public consumption. Another takeaway from my dad—let people think I’m a grunting athlete and nothing more because it’s a lower bar to maintain.
“Thanks for sticking around for my late sesh,” I say, feeling a little guilty about keeping Jimmy away from his wife and kids. But not guilty enough to skip a workout.
“Not a problem. I’m on dish duty anyway, so I’m not missing much. Except the girls’ bedtime routine, and I’ll roll in at the right hour to screw everything up, not to worry.”
Jimmy and I leave the sports facility and walk to the parking lot, which is empty except for our cars and tall streetlamps The sky is that periwinkle color that happens when day gives up and night pushes in.
I have to make a special effort to keep my head down when we have night games so that color doesn’t distract me.
So far, it never has.
Soccer is my entire life, so I’m not about to jeopardize it. I’ve already done a bit too much of that, putting my job on the line right as the transfer window swung wide open. I’ll probably be moving out of LA soon enough to some town with worse weather.
“How does one screw up the bedtime routine of five-year-old girls?” I’m legitimately curious, especially since I won’t be daddying it up anytime soon. If ever.
He can’t suppress a guilty smile. It comes with another finger tap on his bottom lip.
With the trucker hat Jimmy popped on when we walked outside, he looks even taller, like a eucalyptus tree stuck in the breeze.
“Hannah does the dinner and bath and gets them settled in bed. Then I rile ’em up, tickling them and stomping around like Bigfoot.
Hannah looks at me like she’ll murder me, but I can’t bring myself to stop. Pretty much a daily occurrence.”
I chuckle at his shamelessness, and for a second, I feel something strange.
It’s a tiny pang behind my ribs, and I wonder if there’s something wrong with my heart.
Maybe I went too hard on the cardio before I dug into leg day.
Because it certainly can’t be a feeling of wanting what Jimmy has.
The last thing I need in my life is a woman waiting to yell at me and kids waiting for me to do something else.
So I give Jimmy a bro hug and a slap on the back before throwing my bag onto the passenger seat of my Range Rover.
When the engine turns over, its hum vibrates through my bones.
The power and strength of the car override whatever errant stuff just happened in my heart and direct me down the narrow road between the soccer complex and the freeway.
That’s when my phone connects to my car and tells me through the speakers that I have new messages.
The first is from Gerald Moder, the club CEO who holds my fate in his hands.
He’d never tell me I’m getting transferred in a voicemail, but hearing his voice sends a chill down my spine nonetheless.
“Reyes, it’s Gerald Moder. Let’s get you in my office this week. Much to discuss.”
There’s no point in replaying it, looking for signs of what he wants to discuss. Better to drink some whiskey on my own at home to make sure I fall asleep and don’t spend the whole night spinning out. My fate will be revealed soon enough.
The second message is from my closest friend, Kyler, with the “good news” that his sister is coming to work for the team.
I roll my eyes even though no one can see me.
I remember his older sister, Gracie, and it won’t be hard to find her at Devils headquarters if memory serves.
She’ll be the one with bangs hanging halfway over her thick glasses.
She’ll be roaming around in pajama pants and a baggy shirt.
She’ll be the one who’s too brainy and too cool to talk to the likes of me. At least that’s how I remember her. Nothing I did impressed her, and by the time I was drafted to the English Premier League at nineteen, she wasn’t around to be impressed by that either, off earning her graduate degree.
I can’t imagine why she’d be working for a professional soccer team, but my phone buzzes, and the breathless voice on the other end wipes any thoughts of Gracie away. “Hunt, it’s Emily from next door. The firefighters are here.”
“What? Where? What are they doing?”
“They’re at your house. Something caught fire. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry” is not a good thing to hear when it comes to fire. “Sorry” can only mean one thing: my house is going up in flames, along with my soccer career.