Chapter 9
Dustin
She was everywhere.
Everywhere.
I told myself it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here for me. She wasn’t writing about me. She shouldn’t be looking at me.
But she was. Every time I looked over, she was watching me.
Constantly.
Accidentally.
Annoyingly.
Her gaze would sweep over me as if she were looking at the whole field, not me specifically. But she was. She was looking at me. Paying attention to me.
She didn’t do it to Dante or Noah; her eyes tracked me like a lioness in the wild searching for her next meal.
I wasn’t vain enough to think it was because of the bar, no.
Dante was right, she targeted me that night, and the way she tracked my movement on the field now wasn’t because she wanted a repeat.
I needed to remind her that I was not her assignment. More firmly this time.
Every time Mike Whittaker went somewhere, she went with him. Which meant she was in places I wasn’t expecting her to be.
Practice started off normal — thank fuck something about practice was normal. Warm-ups, followed by footwork drills, then route trees. Nothing special. Routine. Steady. Right up until I heard her voice drift over from the sideline.
“Why is he running that drill if he’s favoring his left foot?”
I turned before I even thought about it. She wasn’t talking to me; she was talking to Mike, in that quiet and calm way she had. Her pen was tapping her notebook like she was logging evidence for a federal case.
Whittaker blinked, then followed her gaze to the running back jogging back up the field toward where Dante was talking to the second quarterback. He looked as if he was deep in discussion, and I knew he’d be talking about depth charts.
Mike’s face was screwed up as he watched the running back. “Uh . . . what? I think that’s just how he runs.”
“No.” Hadley shook her head once, then tilted it as she considered the player. “He’s compensating,” she said with quiet confidence. “He’s stiff on his left side, he hides it better when someone’s watching him.” Her attention was on the field. “Is that something you have to do often, play injured?”
I almost answered before the freshman could, which was stupid because she wasn’t talking to me.
As Dante liked to remind me — often — not everything was about me.
But her attention was still on the field, seeing things I’d never given a second thought.
I watched Whittaker shift his weight as if he were suddenly aware of his limbs.
Great. Now the kid was nervous. That would pique her interest even more.
She wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she was digging. Looking for more and seeing it.
“Yo, Whittaker,” I called, catching his attention. “Just because you have a shadow doesn’t mean you can flake on practice. Move your ass down the field, show the coach you want to be on the first team.”
Whittaker ran off down the field like I’d lit a match under his ass, not even saying anything to his sidekick as he left.
“Nice,” she muttered, loud enough for me to hear.
I made a show of doing some stretches, my head turned toward her, but not obviously so. “Be careful what kind of questions you ask, Peterson,” I warned her. “These walls have people in them.”
Her eyes widened slightly as she looked around self-consciously. When her eyes met mine again, I waited until I saw she’d understood.
“Be smarter, or be quiet,” I murmured as Coach blew his whistle, and I jogged over to the center of the field, wondering why I’d just warned the girl on the sidelines to watch her ass.
I should have let her get caught. It would get her out of here.
Instead, I was looking out for her. Why?
Was I being reckless? No. She was, and she needed to be careful.
I watched as the backup running back joined the circle.
He flexed his foot once, twice, and winced slightly when he put it back down on the ground.
It wasn’t my business. If he was hurt, he should speak up. I shook it off. Not my issue. Except now I kept noticing every time he tried to flex the foot without making it obvious. Dante barked out a play, and I moved out of the huddle, but I snagged his arm.
“Twenty-one is hurt,” I murmured to him.
Dante looked at me casually, as if I’d made a joke like I usually did, and he grinned at me, but his eyes were sharp and intelligent as always. “Hurt how?”
“Foot. I didn’t notice,” I told him as the coach shouted about the formation. “She did.”
Dante cursed. “Later,” he promised.
After runs on the field, the weight room came next, and for once, I wasn’t thinking about maxing out — I was thinking about how damn close she stood behind Mike while he set up on the bench press.
“You always breathe out too early,” she said, scribbling something. “Does your trainer tell you to fix it?”
Whittaker spluttered. “Uh . . . Do I? Um, no, I don’t think they noticed?”
He hadn’t even lifted yet. How the hell did she catch that? I racked my own bar and pretended I wasn’t listening, which I absolutely was.
“See here?” She pointed at his rib cage. “Your diaphragm rises before the strain actually hits. That’s why you wobble on rep three.”
He stared at her like she was psychic.
I stared at her like she was trouble.
Because she wasn’t wrong, I’d seen the wobble. I’d never bothered figuring out why.
“Peterson,” I said before I could stop myself, “you got a secret coaching certification I don’t know about?”
“No.” She glanced at me like I’d interrupted something sacred. “Yoga, and I just pay attention.”
“Yeah, well,” I muttered, wiping sweat off my brow, “maybe pay attention somewhere else.”
Her brows lifted, that sharp look slicing right through me. “Why? Did I say something else people shouldn’t hear?”
Goddamn woman.
Then she went back to Whittaker, and I briefly imagined spanking that sass out of her, but I brushed it aside just as quickly. I hated it even more that I kept hearing her voice in my head as I finished my reps. Early exhale. Left-side compensation. Wobble on rep three.
She saw everything.
Film session was always the worst part of my day, even before she showed up. Sitting still wasn’t my sport. But now she was in the room, tucked next to Whittaker, constantly jotting things down and whispering questions he couldn’t answer.
“What does he mean that he’s rotating his hips early on the snap?”
“What’s that? Is that supposed to be part of the technique?”
“Why does that coach look like he’s about to throw a chair?”
I choked out a laugh at that last one. She looked over at the sound, eyes locking on mine for half a breath too long. I looked away first. Like a coward. Great.
Then she said something that made me tense.
“Why do all the injured guys sit in the back corner instead of up front? Doesn’t that make it harder to follow the plays?”
Whittaker shrugged. “That’s just where they always sit.”
She didn’t accept that. I saw it in the way her lips thinned as she wrote something down.
I swallowed. Injured guys. Back corner. I looked over my shoulder.
I’d never noticed. Or maybe I had and just didn’t want to think about it.
The air suddenly felt heavier. She wasn’t here to dig.
That was the deal. But she didn’t have to dig.
All she had to do was pay attention, and the cracks showed themselves.
By the time practice wrapped for the day, I was exhausted — not from drills, not from conditioning, but from her. Her questions. Her eyes. Her brain missed nothing. Her voice in the back of my skull, pointing out things I’d trained myself to ignore.
“What is it?” Dante murmured beside me. His eyes were on the film, outwardly relaxed and calm.
“She has to go.” I said it so quietly, I wasn’t sure he’d hear me.
His head cocked to the side quickly, the way it did when he was about to throw a game-winning pass. His ‘locked and loaded’ tell. “Agreed.” He sniffed as he straightened in his chair. “Sav’s meeting us after this.”
That weirdly made me feel better. Which was crazy in itself; Savvy and Dante were so new, but somehow she was in it with us, and it felt right.
In fact, not including Savvy would feel wrong.
Looks like Dante wasn’t the only one of us who was enamored by the dean’s daughter.
The thought made me snicker, and Coach Sutherland turned to glare at me.
“Glad to see my analysis is amusing to you, Slater.”
“Coach.”
He turned to the assistant coach. “Pull up Slater’s comedy of errors. Let’s see if he’s still laughing in ten minutes.”
Fuck my life.
Film finished thirty minutes later, and as we spilled out of the auditorium, Noah shook his head. “Fuck, that was bad.” He glanced at me. “I felt for you, man.”
I looked over my shoulder, saw the coast was clear, and groaned.
“Who the fuck was editing? And why were they editing a ‘Slater fucks up’ montage? They send that to the teams interested in me, I’ll be Mr. Irrelevant, if I’m lucky.
” ‘Mr. Irrelevant’ was the nickname given to the very last player selected in the NFL Draft each year.
The name wasn’t meant to insult the player, but to poke fun at the idea that value equaled Draft position.
But my value to the NFL was not as the last pick in the seventh round of the Draft. Those players were typically released before the regular season even began, with a few noticeable exceptions, of course. But I was better than that. Smarter.
“Sav’s meeting us when we leave. You’re both clear, right?” Dante asked us. “I think you are, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I told him, my mind still on the mindfuckery that just happened in the film room. “You know my schedule as well as I do.” Which was true, he did.
“I didn’t know you knew mine,” Noah said with a quizzical look at Dante. “How do you?”
“I pay attention,” he answered with a grin. “I’m insulted you look surprised.”
The spring air greeted us, and I took a deep breath. I watched Hadley walk out of the facility, her notebook pressed to her chest, still talking to Whittaker about his “baseline movement patterns” as if she were his personal analyst rather than someone who was ‘learning’ the sport.
I shouldn’t have cared, but I caught myself watching her step into the sunlight, her hair tied back in a ponytail, still managing to bounce lightly as she walked.
Her brows were furrowed in concentration, as if the entire world was one big puzzle she was determined to solve, and Whittaker was the one holding the answers.
I had a feeling she was going to be disappointed.
We needed to get her out of here. Not because she was annoyingly distracting, which she definitely was, but because she saw things. Things I had stopped noticing. Things that the program sure as hell wouldn’t want her to see.
She wasn’t just shadowing the freshman. She was shadowing us all, and I wasn’t sure it was on purpose, and that was the part that made her dangerous.
“You’re staring,” Dante murmured as we walked away.
“Do you hear how much she pays attention?” I asked them both.
“I did.” Dante slung his backpack over his shoulder, wincing slightly. “Not as much as you, I don’t think, but once you mentioned it, I noticed.”
“Was I that obvious?” I resented her even more.
“Nah.” He nudged me playfully as he walked. “You’ve just got the hearing of a bat.”
I laughed, and it felt good. “True.”
“We’re going to Sav’s shed, or workshop, I should call it.” He gave us both a hard look. “She’s territorial about her stuff, do not fucking touch anything.”
“Are you allowed to touch her stuff?” I asked him. “Or are you only allowed to touch her stuff?”
Noah choked on a laugh as Spence dug his elbow into my side. “Shut your mouth, or it won’t be the coaches sending your lowlights reel to the Draft scouts.”
Savannah’s workshop/shed was in an out-of-the-way place, and honestly, I was surprised Dante was okay with her working here at night. It was creepy as fuck.
She smiled at us as we entered, Noah and I taking in the space for the first time.
Her art stood proud in the middle of the room.
I didn’t know what it was; it looked like a giant wind chime, only upside down.
With glass. And no movement — wait, what was that glass bit, did that move? I had no idea what I was looking at.
“Guess what?” Savvy said as she rushed across the floor to meet Dante, looking slightly breathless. “Professor Yates got fired.”
Dante’s face turned to a blank slate, his tell when he didn’t want people to read his emotions. “Good. I hope the fucker gets hit by a bus.”
Savvy gave him a look of such exasperation that Noah and I grinned at each other.
“You’re better than wishing harm on the creep.
” She nervously twisted her hands. “Dad was here earlier, along with the director of the art department.” She nodded excitedly at Dante’s reaction.
“I get to do art as an elective, and they said that with this and maybe two other projects, which I have already completed, I could choose sculpture as an elective for my fourth year.”
“Really?” He looked so happy for her. She squealed and launched herself at him.
“Should we leave?” Noah asked me quietly.
While I didn’t have anything against PDA, I didn’t want to see my best friend sucking his girlfriend’s face. “Maybe?”
Savannah stepped back before Noah or I could say anything. She looked over at us, her face slightly flushed. “So, what’s going on?” she asked, slightly breathless. “Did Dustin kiss someone else he wasn’t supposed to?” she teased.
“Wow,” I muttered. “I love that your first assumption is that it’s my fault.”
She didn’t even pretend to feel bad. “You mean because you enjoy bringing chaos into your roommates’ lives? It’s reasonable.”
Noah nodded. “She’s got a point.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it. Okay, maybe that’s fair.
Dante shook his head, stepping away from her, but reaching out to take her hand. They were never not touching. It was . . . suffocating.
Dante pulled her attention back to him with a slight tug on her hand. “Hadley’s asking too many questions. She’s clever — it’s stuff that sounds innocent, but isn’t.”
Savannah’s brows shot up. “Oh, wow, I thought she’d be subtle. I’m so glad they didn’t give her to any of you.”
“I was too, but at least with us, we’d handle her, you know? The freshman just gawks a lot,” I said bitterly.
“He’s rattled,” Dante told her.
“I’m not rattled.”
“You’re rattled,” Noah agreed.
Savannah stepped in front of me, looking up with that intimidating older-sister energy she seemed to have perfected overnight. “Dustin? Why are you rattled?”