Chapter 10
Dante
Winter workouts had their own brand of misery. No roaring crowds, no scoreboard, no adrenaline spike from a two-minute drill. Just the sound of plates clanging, guys grunting, and Coach’s voice cracking across the weight room like a whip.
“Lower, Spence. You’re not half-assing my sled pushes.”
I dropped lower, digging my cleats into the turf, ignoring the dull heat that licked across my shoulder. I’d taken a pill earlier, but still felt that lingering ache. I’d stopped mentioning it to the trainers two weeks ago. Last thing I needed was to be ‘held out’ like I was breakable.
At Wrighton, breakable meant replaceable.
The shoulder would heal. I’d make sure it did. The painkiller would tide me over in the meantime.
The sled scraped over the turf, and I pushed through the last few yards before letting it go. I rolled my shoulder once, twice, hoping no one noticed. The ache eased but didn’t leave.
“Hydrate,” Coach barked, and the room broke into small clusters around water jugs.
I reached for a bottle and caught voices from the squat racks to my left.
“I told you to keep it quiet.”
The guy speaking was a redshirt junior, built like he ate barbells for breakfast. His spotter gave a short, sharp laugh.
“Quiet? Like the payouts last year? That quiet?”
The first guy’s head whipped around. His gaze swept the room and landed on me. The conversation cut off like someone had hit mute.
I took a slow drink, never looking away. “Something I should know?”
“Nah, QB10,” the spotter said, quick and easy, like the words had been sitting on his tongue, ready. “Just old news.”
Old news didn’t make guys tense up like they were waiting for a shoe to drop.
Payouts wasn’t a casual word. Not here. Not when the NCAA loved nothing more than to dig through receipts and ruin a season.
I’d heard rumors before — tutors who ‘helped’ more than they should, classes mysteriously passed by guys who barely showed up, boosters who made things disappear. Wrighton wasn’t the only school with shadows. But sometimes shadows had teeth.
Whispers like that had a way of turning into headlines, and headlines had a way of ruining more than just one season.
It jeopardized the teams, the athletic program, and the school itself.
And that would really piss me off if anyone was stupid enough to fuck up all the hard work I put in to get here.
I rolled my shoulder again, more for something to do than because it helped. The ache was still there, a reminder that the game didn’t care how much you needed it — only how much you could give before it took more.
Coach called us back, and the redshirt’s gaze slid past me like I’d already been forgotten.
Me? The QB. Forgotten by a redshirt. Someone not even playing?
I don’t fucking think so.
On my way back, I stopped at the squat rack. The one the redshirt had been using. I picked up the weight he’d been using, then set it back.
“Hey, Coach?”
Coach turned to me. “You need something, Spence?”
My eyes fell on the redshirt. “What’s the weight supposed to be on rack four?”
Sutherland checked his paper while I watched the redshirt’s face flush.
I sniffed when Sutherland told me. “Might want to check that out,” I said to no one in particular. “Looks like it’s been loaded light.”
Coach Sutherland turned to the redshirt and the spotter, and I walked away.
I grabbed my water bottle, rolling my shoulder out of habit. The joint was fine — mostly — but there was a pull I still felt from last season. One wrong hit and it flared up like someone had struck a match under my skin.
Thinking of things getting under my skin, my mind slipped back to Savannah last night.
She had this annoying way of slipping in around the edges when I wasn’t looking.
The way she’d leaned back in her chair at the library, pen poised like a weapon.
The way she’d bitten the inside of her cheek when I’d called her out.
The fact that she didn’t flinch when I pushed, which pissed me off more than it should have.
I wanted to find the thing that made her flinch.
I’d find it. I wanted to break her facade.
Focus, Dante. In here, training and being on the field weren’t about her. This was about keeping my spot, keeping my numbers, keeping the dream alive.
I shoved the thoughts of blonde hair, stubborn blue eyes, and the plastic smile she flashed at me too often out of my head and headed back to training.
We filed back into the weight room for the next circuit, finished it, and finally, Coach blew the whistle for the day.
The locker room was already thick with steam by the time I hit the benches. Dustin was peeling off his shirt, and Noah was leaning against his locker like he had all the time in the world.
“What did Tyrell do to you?” Dust asked quietly.
“Who’s Tyrell?”
“The redshirt currently running suicides,” he told me dryly.
“Didn’t have a team player attitude.”
Dust smirked. “The guy’s not playing.”
“Not with that attitude, he isn’t.”
“You’re rolling that shoulder again,” Dust said, watching me pull my shirt over my head. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” I said, too quickly. I grabbed my towel, ready to head for the showers.
Noah snorted. “Yeah, that’s the answer every guy gives before they end up in a sling.”
“I’m fine,” I repeated, keeping my tone even. “Just tight.”
Dust’s brows lifted. “You’re the only guy I’ve ever met who can make ‘tight’ sound like ‘probably dislocated.’”
I grinned, but it didn’t quite reach my eyes. “You two worry too much.”
“Yeah,” Noah said, snapping his locker shut, “and maybe you don’t worry enough.”
They let it go, but their eyes lingered on me longer than I liked.
I hit the showers, letting the hot water pound into the muscle until the ache dulled to something I could ignore. By the time I dressed and headed out, the redshirt junior and his spotter were gone, but their words were still looping in my head.
Payouts. Quiet.
Two words that didn’t belong in the same sentence unless you were trying to keep a program’s reputation cleaner than it actually was.
While I’d heard whispers, I’d never paid attention. Coach Sutherland was a stickler for rules. Dean Cole? The guy was so strict that his own daughter had to hide her art project from him. Neither of them had been my problem before. The redshirt had made them my problem now.
It was primarily because of those two men that I’d always brushed off the rumors. We were a D1 school, and the NCAA’s scrutiny was intense. We couldn’t afford to let redshirt junior discuss payouts in training.
Still, the words gnawed at me as I crossed the indoor field toward the doors. Payouts didn’t happen in a vacuum. They didn’t start with a couple of benchwarmers shooting the breeze between sets.
Somebody paid. Somebody knew . . . and somebody made sure no one outside the program ever heard a damn thing about it.
I thought about Sav’s access.
Not to me specifically — to the program. She moved through Wrighton’s academic side in ways no player could. Tutors saw what coaches buried. The dean’s daughter, part of the Academic Administration Liaison Program, would have seen what the coaching staff never knew she'd seen.
I told myself it was relevant, that knowing what she could see was the same as knowing what could blow back on me. I wasn't sure anymore whether that was the whole truth. She was becoming difficult to think about strategically.
Every time I tried, my mind ended up somewhere else entirely.
I rolled my shoulder again, testing the joint.
It wasn’t too bad — not right now — but it still caught on certain motions, like the joint was reminding me I wasn’t invincible.
The trainers would tell me to rest. The coaches would tell me to push through.
Both of them would be right. I’d built my career on playing through the discomfort, on never letting anyone think they had a reason to sideline me.
Which was probably why I couldn’t shake the feeling this ‘quiet’ crap was the same thing. Push through. Don’t talk. Pretend it’s fine.
By the time I stepped out into the brittle winter air, my breath coming out in steam, I’d decided to keep my ears open. Not because I gave a damn about rumors — rumors didn’t win games — but because whatever was going on could eventually land in my lap, whether I wanted it or not.
I didn’t need distractions. Not from this. Not from anything.
Except maybe the flash of Savannah Cole’s face in my head from last night, the way she’d looked at me like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to strangle me or . . . something else.
I shook it off. I pushed it to the back of my head and threw myself into the rest of the day.
Classes, notes, a coffee I didn’t really need but drank anyway — it was all noise in between the real work. By the time afternoon film study rolled around, I was running on that good edge of fatigue, the kind that kept my mind locked in and my body sharp.
We filed into the meeting room, the smell of turf and sweat trailing in with us.
I dropped into my seat, laptop open, eyes on the screen.
Coach Sutherland ran the tape back and forth, pausing to rip into a guard’s footwork or point out a receiver’s lazy release.
My name came up twice, both times for plays I already knew I’d messed up.
After the breakdown, we headed toward the hall for the position meetings.
I grinned when I saw Coach Hembry standing just outside, arms folded, watching us walk past. He was the Offensive Coordinator and QB Coach.
He’d been away from school for a family bereavement, but seeing him back boosted my day.
He saw my grin and gave me one of his own. When I went by, he reached out and slapped my left shoulder, harder than a casual pat.
Pain shot straight through the joint before I could stop it, and my face must’ve betrayed something because his eyes flicked over me sharply.
“Still feeling it?” he asked quietly.
I rolled the joint and forced a shrug. “It’s fine, Coach.”