Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
SILAS
It’s a safe play.
That’s what I tell myself as I call it in. Short yardage. Low risk. Control the clock, settle the tempo, protect the team.
It’s the kind of play I’d call a hundred times.
Until now.
Until I’m watching number twenty-two line up, glancing toward the sideline out of habit. Something softer I can’t afford to name in front of the team.
He looks right at me.
God, he’s beautiful. Focused. Sharp. My heart lifts—and then the ball snaps.
And the world ends.
The hit is violent. Sudden. Too fast for me to process until I hear that sound—that sound cracking across the field. That gut-twisting, neck-snapping, bone-cracking sound that I’ve heard before in the worst fucking moment of my life.
Luke crumples.
I don’t breathe.
He doesn’t move.
My headset crackles with voices—Coach Harris saying something from the booth, players shouting, whistles echoing. None of it matters.
Because I’m already running.
I drop the clipboard on the turf. Sprint toward him, chest seizing with every step. The team starts to crowd, and I yell—not words, just sound—until they part. I don’t even know what I said. Just that I needed space—needed to get to him.
Then I see him.
He’s on the ground, pupils slow to track, his mouth moving sluggishly.
“Luke,” I breathe.
My knees hit the turf. Hard. I don’t care.
He tries to sit up, and I press a hand to his chest, steady, desperate. “Don’t move. Stay down. You hear me? Don’t move.”
“I’m fine,” he slurs. “Just… give me a sec—”
No. No, no, no. Not again.
Trainers descend. EMS appears. I’m vaguely aware of a neck brace being fitted, of someone checking his pupils, calling out terms I know too well—concussion protocol, spinal precaution, vitals steady but foggy.
They push me back, and I try to give them space, landing on my ass, my eyes still on Luke.
Then the stretcher appears, and I feel my stomach lurch.
Because this is too familiar.
This is Xavier.
It’s happening again.
And this time it’s Luke.
He tries to smile. “Hey. I’m okay,” he murmurs. “Just a small hit.”
But I’m back on my feet, already gripping the stretcher rail as though I might snap it off. My jaw’s locked so tight I feel the ache in my skull. I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care that my players are staring, that the stands are watching, that the whispers have already started.
Because when they lift him, and he winces, something in me breaks.
“Wait—wait, I’m coming with him,” I say, pushing forward as the EMS team moves toward the sideline.
One of them holds up a hand. “You can’t. We’ve got protocol. Only space for—”
“I know the fucking protocol,” I snap, chest heaving. “I don’t care. He’s—”
They shake their heads. They’re already loading him in. A door slams. The sirens haven’t even started yet, but the panic is already screaming through my veins.
I stand there.
On the sideline.
Staring at the ambulance as it drives away with the person I love inside.
My hands shake. My vision tunnels. All I can hear is my own pulse, crashing against the past, against every second of the last month and a half.
This can’t happen again.
Not to someone I love.
Not again.
The voice in the headset comes through, breaking me out of my haze. “I think we need to have a chat,” Coach Harris says in my ear.
My eyes drop shut, because I have just dropped a bomb on my life.
The headset goes silent. But the damage is done.
I turn slowly, barely able to breathe, barely able to hear anything past the rush in my ears. Luke’s gone—en route to the hospital—and I’m standing in the middle of the sideline with the whole damn stadium watching me come apart.
And then I hear it again. Coach Harris’s voice in my ear, low and grim.
“Meet me in the office.”
My stomach drops.
I take off the headset with numb fingers. Walk across the turf like my body’s not mine anymore. Every step feels heavier. Every player who sees me knows something’s wrong. I don’t meet their eyes.
When I reach the building, the door to the coach’s office is already open.
Harris is inside. So is the Athletic Director.
And I know.
I knew the moment I ran to him on that field. When I called him Luke. When I dropped to my knees like a man who had something to lose.
I shut the door behind me. No one speaks right away. Harris looks uncomfortable, but not surprised. The AD just stares at me, face blank and closed.
Finally, Harris sighs. “I told you from the start this job came with expectations.”
“I know.”
“You crossed a line.”
I don’t answer.
Because what could I possibly say?
It doesn’t matter that I love him. That I never meant for it to happen. That we tried to keep it separate. That we were careful—until I wasn’t. Until the second he didn’t get up from that field.
The AD speaks next. Cold and formal.
“We have a zero-tolerance policy for improper relationships between coaching staff and student-athletes.”
My spine stiffens. “He’s of age. This wasn’t coercive.”
“I didn’t say it was,” she replies. “But the optics are clear. The moment you made that scene on the field, it stopped being speculation. It became confirmation.”
I try to breathe through the burn in my lungs.
“There are no second chances,” she adds. “You’re dismissed, effective immediately. Clean out your office. Security will walk you out.”
A dull ringing echoes in my ears. I think of Luke. Of how he looked up at me, dazed and bruised, trying to smile even as they strapped him down. Of how it felt to hear that sound again.
I nod once.
“Understood.”
Harris looks away, jaw tight. There’s a flicker of sympathy in his eyes, but he doesn’t speak.
I step out of the office. The hallway spins a little around me, but I make it to the locker room. Open the drawer where I keep my clipboard, the playbook, the keys.
I leave the keys.
I take nothing but the clipboard.
Security is waiting by the exit.
They don’t say much. They don’t have to. One of them holds the door, the other watches me like I might break something on the way out.
As I pass through the doors—each one slamming shut behind me—I finally feel it settle in my chest. The weight. Not the loss of my job. Not even the way everything I built here just evaporated in the span of one afternoon.
It’s the certainty.
I can’t go to him.
Every instinct I have is screaming to get in my car and follow the ambulance. To sit beside his bed and hold his hand and tell him it’s going to be okay. That I’m here. That I’m not going anywhere.
But that’s the problem.
I’m the reason this happened. Not the hit. Not the play. Me.
If I show up—if I hover, if I cling, if I let anyone see how deep this runs—I don’t just lose my job. I put a target on his back. I turn him into a headline. A scandal. A story that never lets him just be a player again.
Luke deserves better than that.
He deserves a clean slate. A future that isn’t tangled up in my past mistakes, my grief, my inability to let go.
So I do the only thing I have left.
I choose him.
I pull my phone out of my pocket. My hands shake just enough to piss me off.
One message. That’s all I allow myself.
Me: You’re going to be okay, Luke. You don’t need me anymore. Please find love again someday.
I stare at the screen for a long time before I hit send.
Then I delete my profile and remove the app from my phone, before going into my contacts and blocking his actual phone number too.
It’s the only way I’m going to be strong enough to protect him in the only way I know how.
I cut the threads that connect us before I can unravel them and run straight back to him.
It feels like tearing something out of my chest with my bare hands. The same as lighting myself on fire and letting the fire take me. But loving him means walking away. Even if it destroys me.
I step into the afternoon sun, the noise of the stadium still echoing behind me, and keep walking. Because this time—I won’t let history repeat itself.