Chapter 6
Kieren
The locker room still smelled like sweat, blood, and cheap disinfectant.
I sat on the edge of the bench, hunched forward, a half-empty water bottle on the floor between my feet and a bag of ice pressed against my knuckles.
My pulse had slowed, but that coil of heat in my chest? Still there. Still tight.
I didn’t regret it.
Not the shove. Not the threat. Not even the chaos that followed.
Guy had it coming.
He got too close to her. Smirking. Breathing her air like he had the right.
And maybe I should’ve walked away. Should’ve kept my cool like Coach kept begging me to do.
But I didn’t.
My phone buzzed on the bench beside me. Cameron.
Conference Room 2. Now. Bring ice for your jaw—just in case.
I grunted, wiped sweat from the back of my neck, and yanked a sweatshirt over my gear. No time to shower. No point.
I wasn’t walking into a meeting.
I was walking into a reckoning.
The hallway lights buzzed overhead, flickering like they always did near the weight room. My shoulder ached from the hit I took during the scrimmage, but it was nothing compared to the tension creeping up my spine with every step.
I pushed open the door.
And stopped.
Cameron sat at the far end of the table, tablet in hand, tapping it like he was trying to Morse code his way out of this meeting.
Coach Lawson leaned against the wall, arms folded, his expression unreadable—but not surprised.
Mara, the PR assistant, was perched near the door, clutching her phone like it owed her therapy.
And then there was her.
Daphne.
Legs crossed. Arms folded. Ponytail sharp enough to cut steel. Her expression? Murder in progress.
She didn’t even blink.
“Sommers,” I said.
She arched a brow. “Assailant.”
Jesus.
I stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind me.
Cameron cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about… the incident.”
I sat, dragging the ice back to my jaw even though it wasn’t what hurt. “He was touching her.”
Mara made a noise like she’d just swallowed a screw. “Great, we’re opening with caveman logic.”
“She didn’t want him near her,” I said. “He didn’t back off. I handled it.”
“You shoved him into the fucking bleachers,*” Daphne snapped.
“He deserved it.”
“That’s not the point!”
Coach hadn’t said a word yet, but I could feel his gaze like heat on the back of my neck.
“You don’t get to punch someone every time you feel something,” Daphne said, standing now.
I looked at her. Really looked.
“You’re not nothing,” I said quietly.
She froze.
“He looked at you like you were. Like you were a thing he could touch. I don’t let people treat you like that.”
Cameron pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is… weirdly romantic and also legally risky.”
Mara turned her screen around. “It’s trending. Twitter, Threads, TikTok. ‘#DaddyStorm.’ You’ve got a stan club now.”
I groaned. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. There’s a thirst edit with thunder sound effects. Half a million views.”
Daphne stared at me like she was actively planning my funeral.
Coach finally pushed off the wall. “One game suspension.”
I blinked. “Just one?”
“You shoved a Vultures player,” he said. “Frankly, most of us want to do that on a weekly basis.”
Cameron let out a laugh that sounded more like a death rattle.
Mara didn’t even smile.
The walls of Conference Room 2 had seen a lot—contract negotiations, injury announcements, the time Adam accidentally knocked over the protein shake fridge during a trade meeting. But this? This had a different weight.
A quieter kind of tension.
The kind that hummed under the skin.
I sat at the end of the long table, icepack in one hand, trying not to let my leg bounce. It wasn’t nerves. Just frustration. Burned low and deep.
Daphne sat across from me, arms still crossed like a barrier. Her expression was unreadable—cool, maybe even bored, but I’d known her too long to buy that. The pulse in her jaw gave her away.
Cameron broke the silence first, dragging a hand down his face before tapping at his tablet again. “Okay, now that that's cleared up…" He rolled his eyes. "Here’s where we’re at.”
I didn’t move.
He kept talking. “The Kalamazoo Vultures filed an official report with the league office. MLS Compliance reviewed the footage this morning.”
Daphne tensed. Barely. But I saw it.
“They’re recommending a formal suspension,” Cameron said. “Possibly more than one game. ‘Assault during a preseason friendly.’ That’s how they’re framing it.”
I scoffed. “It wasn’t assault.”
“Tell that to the PR team pulling death threats off your Instagram,” he said dryly. “They don’t care about context.”
Coach Lawson hadn’t sat down. He stood behind Cameron, arms folded like a boulder waiting to shift. His silence was heavier than anything in the room.
Cameron’s voice stayed neutral. Too neutral. “It looks bad. A veteran player with a history of aggressive play—”
“I don’t have a history of violence,” I muttered.
“You’ve been in fights before,” he corrected. “You’ve taken two misconduct fines in the last eighteen months.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But not for this.”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “That doesn’t matter. The media doesn’t see shades of gray. They see a guy with a bad temper who jumped a player during a sideline spat.”
I sat forward. “It wasn’t a spat.”
Daphne’s eyes flicked to mine. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t deny it either.
“They were harassing her,” I said again. The words came out rough. I didn’t mean them to.
But I meant them.
Daphne blinked—once—and something tightened in her posture, but she didn’t argue.
Didn’t defend them.
Didn’t say I was overreacting.
And that was all I needed to know.
Coach Lawson finally spoke, voice low but sharp. “This can’t happen again, Walker.”
I met his gaze.
“We’re not the team with media clout. We don’t have owners with deep political pockets. We’ve only got so much leverage left—and this?” He gestured vaguely toward me, toward the ice pack, toward Daphne. “This drains it.”
Cameron sat back in his chair and exhaled. “The problem is, no one cares why you did it.” He looked directly at me. Then at her. “They care about how it looks.”
The icepack had half-melted against my knuckles when Mara broke the silence like a dropped glass.
“Oh my—” she blurted, phone in hand, eyes wide. “People already think you’re dating.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
She spun the screen around. “Look.”
A video clip played, grainy and zoomed in. Me, grabbing the Vultures player by the collar. Snarling. Threatening. The audio was patchy, but the line—Touch her again and I’ll break your fucking jaw—cut through loud and clear.
Underneath, the captions read:
MLS’s new season is already ??????
Protective boyfriend vibes or territorial drama? Either way… I’m feral.
#ShipIt #WalkerAndSommers #MLSbadboy #HeProtects
Thousands of likes. Comments spiraling. A few edits already. Slow-motion, dramatic music, glowing text.
I stared. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Mara pushed her glasses up her nose. “Oh, I’m very serious. The punch? The glare? The jawline? It’s giving ‘grumpy love interest in a Netflix original.’”
Daphne groaned under her breath. “This is ridiculous.”
“You think I planned that?” I snapped. “You think I punched a guy so I could trend on TikTok?”
“No,” Cameron said slowly, his gaze sharpening like it always did when he smelled strategy. “But people already believe it.”
I didn’t like the way he leaned forward. It meant he was about to say something insane.
And useful.
And hard to argue with.
He steepled his fingers. “Kieren, listen. If you assaulted a player in a jealous rage, the league has a PR disaster on their hands.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s supposed to help?”
“But,” he went on, “if you were defending your girlfriend—a reporter caught in the middle of a heated moment—it’s not assault. It’s loyalty. It’s romantic. Protective. You’re just a man standing up for the woman he loves.”
I blinked. “I'm sorry, love?”
Daphne made a choking sound. Whether it was offense or laughter, I couldn’t tell.
“I want to keep you on the field,” Cameron said, matter-of-fact. “I want to keep the team out of the tabloids. I want to keep our sponsors from pulling out because of optics. And I want to keep our newest star striker from Japan from blowing a gasket the second he sees this on ESPN.”
Mara was nodding way too enthusiastically. “We can do soft launches. A few ‘caught by the press’ moments. Coffee runs. Hand holding at matches. Maybe one strategic kiss if the numbers stall—”
“Absolutely not,” Daphne said flatly.
Coach Reid finally spoke, his voice rough. “We need this to work, Kieren.”
I looked at him. At the lines carved into his face, the exhaustion in his stance. He’d fought to keep me in this league when no one else would. Brought me back when I was benched. Trusted me.
“If it doesn’t?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Reid didn’t sugarcoat it. “Then they’ll find a reason to bench you. Permanently.”
I didn’t look at Daphne.
Didn’t need to.
I could feel her glare burning into the side of my face.
Fake date a reporter.
This was going to be hell.
I scoffed before I could stop myself. “No way Sommers agrees to that.”
If there was one thing I knew about Daphne Sommers, it was that she hated mess.
And I was chaos personified. She’d probably wanted me suspended the moment my fist connected with that Vultures player’s jaw.
Hell, she was likely already drafting an op-ed dragging me through the mud.
And now they expected her to play pretend?
To hold my hand in public and smile like she didn’t want me benched into oblivion?
Not a chance in hell.
But then, she turned her head.
Just slightly.
Her eyes met mine for half a second before flicking to Cameron.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Silence hit the room like a sucker punch.
I blinked. “What?”
Even Cameron paused, mouth slightly open.