10. Fourth Down
Chapter ten
Fourth Down
Emma
G rayson Cole has never met a football game he couldn’t narrate like a man auditioning for ESPN.
“That’s a terrible play call. Third and seven and you run it up the gut? Fire the offensive coordinator. Fire everyone. Burn it down.”
“It’s Buffalo, Gray,” Sienna says from beside him, not looking up from her phone. “What did you expect?”
“Hope. The audacity of hope. Isn’t that what America’s built on?”
“That’s a campaign slogan, not a football philosophy.”
“Same thing.”
I’m tucked into the corner of Mom’s couch with a blanket over my legs and my third glass of wine settling warm behind my ribs.
The post-dinner haze has turned all of us into various states of horizontal.
Grayson’s manspreading across two-thirds of the main couch with Sienna curled beside him.
Mom’s in her armchair with a crossword and a cup of tea, already half-asleep.
And Luke.
Luke is on the floor again. Back against the loveseat. Close to my end but not touching. Because Luke Anderson would rather sit on hardwood than risk the couch cushion where our legs might accidentally make contact in front of my family .
As if his entire thigh wasn’t pressed against mine for forty-five minutes at the dinner table.
As if I haven’t been replaying that two-inch gap between our hands for the last hour like it’s game film.
He’s got a beer in one hand and his phone in the other, doing that thing where he pretends to check scores but is actually refreshing the same hockey stats page over and over. I can see the screen from this angle. He’s looked at the conference standings four times in ten minutes.
We’re still first.
He’s still anxious about it.
That’s Luke. Wins eleven games and spends the bye week convinced the twelfth is the one that’ll expose him as a fraud.
“It hasn’t changed in five days,” I murmur, quiet enough that it stays between us.
His thumb pauses mid-scroll. “I know.”
“Do you?”
He tips his head back against the couch, hair strands poking through my blanket and hitting my calf. And God, I want to run my hands through it. Tug. Watch those eyes roll back in his head like I know they would.
On-screen, Buffalo fumbles on their own thirty-yard line. Grayson groans like he’s been personally injured.
“Okay. Okay.” My brother sits forward, rubbing his hands together. “This is fine. They’ll rally. It’s the fourth quarter. They play different.”
“They’re still the same team,” Luke comments.
“You’re a hockey coach. Your football opinions are invalid.”
“I have an MBA. My opinions on organizational dysfunction are extremely valid.”
“He’s got you there,” Sienna murmurs.
Grayson throws a pillow at Luke’s head. Luke catches it one-handed without looking, and something about the reflex—the easy athleticism, the casual precision—makes my stomach do a thing I’m not going to examine with my mother four feet away.
The game goes to commercial. Grayson stretches, checks his phone, and the lightness in his expression flickers.
“Reminds me.” He’s scrolling through something. Team calendar, maybe. Based what he says next. “Em, what day is the BC game?”
The question lands on me like a body check I’m not expecting .
“Next Saturday,” I answer because I’ve known that day since the schedule was first announced. Since I realized I’d have to play my former team. “Away.”
“The fifth.” Luke’s tone is in that frequency he uses when he’s filing something away for later analysis. “Six o’clock start.”
“Damn.” Grayson leans back, grimacing. “We’re not flying back from Toronto until Sunday morning. There’s no way I can—”
“Gray, it’s fine.” I wave him off before he can spiral into the guilt thing he does.
The thing where he tries to rearrange NHL travel around his little sister’s college games.
Like the team will accommodate his family loyalty if he asks nicely enough.
“It’s one game. You’ve made more than I expected, actually. ”
“It’s not one game. It’s your old team. I want to be there.”
“And I want you to keep your starting position.” I pull the blanket higher, tucking it under my chin. Armor disguised as comfort. “We’ll survive without you screaming from the stands.”
“I don’t scream . I project with enthusiasm.”
“You made a ref cry at my high school tournament,” I remind him.
“He made a bad call!”
“She. She made a bad call. And it was her first game.”
“Still bad.”
Sienna pats his arm. “I’ll watch the stream and give you the updates after your game wraps up. She’ll be great.”
She’ll be great. Simple. Clean. Confident.
Except Sienna catches my eye as she says it, and I see the question underneath. The one she’s been holding since I transferred. Since I showed up at Silver Pine and gave everyone a version of the story that was technically true and emotionally incomplete.
You okay going back there?
I smile. Nod.
Look away before she can read the real answer.
Mom falls asleep as the game winds down, crossword pencil still loosely in her hand, reading glasses sliding down her nose. Football’s never really been her sport.
“She’s out,” Grayson confirms softly. Then, louder, to Luke: “Twenty bucks Buffalo chokes on this.”
“That’s not a bet. That’s a certainty.”
“Then take my money, coward.”
“I’m not taking money from a man who cried during his mother’s Thanksgiving toast.”
“I had something in my eye.”
“You had tears in your eye. Plural.”
“It was dusty.”
“Your mom vacuumed this morning. I could eat off these floors.”
“How do you know she vacuumed?”
“Because I have a camera set up in the house. Come on, Gray, you know she vacuums before every family event.”
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at how well Luke knows our family. How much he belongs here.
Grayson’s phone goes off. He glances at it, stands. “Alright, I need to call Novak back before he loses his mind. Team thing. Five minutes.” He points at Luke. “Don’t let Kansas City score while I’m gone.”
“I don’t control the team, Gray.”
“You control everything else. Figure it out.”
He disappears down the hallway, already talking into his phone about whatever travel details tomorrow brings him.
Sienna watches him go, then looks at me. At Luke. Back at me.
“I’m going to get more dessert,” she says smoothly, standing with a casual grace that signals she’s being strategic and wants us to know it. “Anyone want coffee?”
“I’m good,” I say.
Luke says nothing. Which Sienna registers with a slight tilt of her head before disappearing into the kitchen.
And then it’s me and Luke and my sleeping mother and a football game neither of us is watching.
Kansas City scores. The announcers are yelling. Mom doesn’t move.
Luke takes a long drink of his beer. Sets it down on the floor beside him. His fingers tap the bottle cap once, twice, three times.
“You want to talk about it?” he finally asks.
No transition. Just the question, delivered to the television screen like he can’t quite bring himself to look at me while asking.
“Talk about what?”
“BC.”
Two letters. The school I left, the team I abandoned, the life I dismantled and rebuilt a hundred miles from the boy I did it for. Not that I’ll admit it.
“What about it?” I keep my tone light. Breezy. The voice I use when Sky asks how practice went and I don’t want to admit that Luke adjusted my hip angle during breakout drills and I had to skate two extra laps to get my heart rate back to normal.
Luke’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Three months.”
“What?”
“We’ve been doing this for three months. Practice six days a week. Film review. Travel. And in three months, I haven’t asked you once why you left.”
Oh.
He turns his head slightly, not quite looking at me but no longer pretending the TV is interesting. “That’s not an accident, Em. I want you to know that. I wasn’t being… I didn’t want to push.”
“Since when?” The question slips out sharply. “You push me every single practice. Wider stance, better backcheck, fix your transition. You have no problem pushing when it’s about hockey.”
“This isn’t about hockey.”
“Everything between us is about hockey, Luke. That’s kind of the arrangement.”
He flinches. Barely. But I catch it because I catch everything about him, the same way he catches everything about me. We’re two people who’ve spent years memorizing each other’s tells while pretending we weren’t studying for an exam he'll always be too scared to take.
“You’re right,” he says. “I should have asked sooner.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He runs his thumb across his bottom lip. The thinking gesture.
“Because I was afraid the answer involved me.”
The honesty of it takes my breath away. Not the words.
I’ve gotten used to Luke’s occasional, devastating honesty, the way it surfaces without warning like a depth charge detonating in calm water.
It’s the fact that he’s saying it here .
In this house. With Grayson one room away and Mom asleep in her chair and the whole memory of “just friends” hanging over us.
“Not everything’s about you, Anderson.” I say it lightly, but my hand has found the edge of the blanket. Gripping.
“I know that.”
“Really?”
He looks at me then. Full eye contact. Those blue-gray eyes that I’ve been drowning in since I was a teenager, that I’ve tried to replicate in every guy I’ve dated and failed spectacularly every time.
“Tell me what happened. Not as your coach. Just—” He exhales. “Tell me.”
And here’s the thing about Luke that nobody warns you about: he’s patient. Annoyingly, devastatingly patient. He’ll sit in silence for as long as it takes. No pressure, no judgment, just that steady presence that makes you feel like whatever you say will be held carefully.
It’s the thing that made me fall for him. It’s the thing that makes this impossible.