ILLEGAL CONTACT (A Forbidden College Football Romance #1)

Chapter One

Sloane

?

People always told me football was about the ball.

It isn't.

The ball is a prop. Football is about who's allowed to hurt whom, who's expected to smile through it afterward, and which men in headsets get to decide the difference.

I figured that out at nine years old, in the bleachers at my uncle's high school games, in a town where the stadium had better lighting than the hospital.

I'd spent the twelve years since collecting evidence.

So when I climbed the press riser at Baylor Ridge that first August afternoon, I wasn't there for the ball.

I was there for the story underneath it.

There was a job at the end of it too, if I'm honest—which I try to be, professionally if not personally.

A fellowship. National outfit, the kind that does investigations for a living, the kind that takes one student a year and turns them into someone.

The application wanted a clip that proved you could do the hard thing.

Not a profile. Not a game recap. The hard thing—the kind of story that makes powerful people call your editor.

I had until December to find one.

And a Division I football program in a town that worshipped it—billboard on the interstate, booster list longer than the phone book—is the biggest rock there is.

You just have to be willing to look at what crawls out.

The heat came up off the field in visible waves, the kind of Southern August that sits on your chest like a wet towel.

Eighty-some bodies in pads moved through it like it was nothing, which was its own kind of tell.

Fresh-cut grass over sweat and turf and the chalk-bite of the lines, and under all of it, faint, the menthol-and-rubbing-alcohol smell that hangs around anyplace men are quietly being held together.

Somewhere a whistle shrieked. Somewhere else a coach screamed a man's last name like a curse.

I loved it. God help me, I loved it.

I just didn't trust it.

"You're in my light," said a voice to my left.

A photographer—older, sunburned, lanyard gone soft with age—nudged past me without looking.

I stepped sideways and let him have it. I was the only person on that riser under fifty, and the only one whose pass said STUDENT MEDIA in apologetic gray letters, and I'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way to get thrown off a story is to act like you belong on it.

So I smiled. The way I always smiled in rooms that weren't built for me—bright, easy, harmless—and clicked the recorder on inside my jacket pocket where nobody could see.

You weaponize sunshine, my roommate Brielle called it.

She wasn't wrong.

I'd had to weaponize something just to get up here.

The credential had taken three emails and a phone call to a man named Corbin, the program's Sports Information Director, who wore a quarter-zip in ninety-degree heat and smiled like a screensaver.

We just love supporting student journalism, he'd said, in the voice of a man who had never once supported student journalism.

He'd handed me a sheet of approved talking points and a schedule of when I was and wasn't allowed to point a recorder at a human being.

Anything you need, you come to me first.

Which is what people say when they mean you come to me only.

I'd thanked him with my whole face. Then I'd come up here to watch the thing they didn't put on the sheet.

Down on the field, the offense ran a script, and I let my eyes do the thing they do, which is drift to the edges.

The quarterback was the easy center of it—Jaxon Holt, number eight, golden, polished, throwing a perfect out route and then turning to find the camera before the ball was even caught.

Media-trained so thoroughly his smile arrived a half-second ahead of any actual feeling.

A receiver made everyone else look like they were running in sand, loud, laughing between reps.

Carter, hands like glue, the photographer muttered, with the fondness men reserve for boys who can do the thing they used to dream of doing.

I wrote none of it down. Perfect quarterbacks and glue-handed receivers are a different newspaper's story.

Then the defense came on for a live period.

And that's when I saw him.

Number twenty-seven.

I want to be clear that I noticed him the way you notice weather. Not as a person. As a condition. The offense broke the huddle, Carter came across the middle on a slant, and twenty-seven dropped down out of nowhere like the sky deciding something.

The hit landed before the sound did.

That's a thing nobody tells you about being close to it.

From the stands, the crack and the collision arrive together, packaged.

Up close they separate. You see the body fold first. Then, a quarter-second later, the noise reaches you—a flat, wet, final crack of pad on pad—and your own ribs flinch in sympathy.

Carter got up slow, shaking it off, laughing, because that was apparently his whole operating system.

Twenty-seven was already walking away, back to his side, like he'd dropped a glass and couldn't be bothered to look at the mess.

No celebration. No chirping. He unhooked his chinstrap with two fingers and let it hang, and a vein of late sun caught the side of his face under the helmet—dark jaw, a thin pale scar splitting one eyebrow—and then he put his back to all of us, and that was that.

"Lawson," the sunburned photographer said beside me, fond, like he was naming a thunderstorm he'd survived before. "Twenty-seven. He'll go pro if he doesn't kill somebody first."

"He always like that?" I asked. Light. Just a fan. Just a girl who didn't know better.

"Quiet?" He huffed. "Quietest kid on the roster.

Hits like the end of the world, won't give you ten words for a quote.

Coaches love him—he's the one they put in front of the young guys when they want 'em to learn how to shut up and work.

" He lowered his camera and squinted at me, and for a second I thought I'd shown too much.

"You writing a feature? Because if you want quotes, you want Holt.

Lawson'll just stare at you till you leave. "

"Good to know," I said, and wrote down the name.

Lawson. #27.

I underlined it twice.

I had no idea yet that I was underlining the worst decision I'd make all year.

?

The clue came twenty minutes later, and it came the way the real ones always do—quiet, in the corner of the frame, while everyone's eyes are on the loud thing.

The loud thing was a near-fight on the offensive line, two big men shoving helmet to helmet while coaches jogged over screaming about composure. Every camera on the riser swung toward it. The sunburned photographer swore happily and started shooting; conflict is content.

The quiet thing was a linebacker on the far sideline.

He'd been favoring his left leg for two reps. Now he sat on the bench with it stretched out straight, very still—the specific stillness of a person trying not to be noticed being in pain.

I knew that stillness. I'd grown up around men who'd learned to hold it.

A trainer crouched in front of him. Young, navy polo, BAYLOR RIDGE SPORTS MEDICINE across the back in white.

They talked. The linebacker shook his head.

The trainer reached for the leg and the kid's whole body locked, just for a flash, a wince caught and swallowed.

The trainer leaned in, said something I couldn't hear—but I could read the shape of a young man arguing with a sentence he didn't want to write.

Then a man in a visor came down the sideline.

I didn't need a roster to know him. You can recognize a head coach from a hundred yards by the way the air reorganizes itself around him.

Hal Voss. Charming on camera, they said.

Won a conference title three years back.

Had that billboard on the interstate—arms crossed, the word BELIEVE under his chin, the kind that makes you trust a man before you've decided to.

He crouched too.

And I did the thing I do, the thing that's either a gift or a sickness depending on the week.

I stopped watching the fight everyone else was filming.

I watched the bench. I turned the little dial on my recorder all the way up, leaned on the rail like a bored girl killing time, and caught maybe six words on the wind.

"—not writing out. He's day-to-day. Limited."

The trainer's voice, low. Then Voss, warmer, the billboard voice, pitched to comfort and to carry exactly nowhere.

"—tougher than this. Scouts are here Saturday. The team needs you, son."

He put a hand on the back of the kid's neck.

Warm. Fatherly. The kind of touch that looks like comfort and works like a leash.

The kid nodded.

And then the kid stood up, tested the leg, and jogged—stiff, wrong, visibly wrong—back onto the field for the next rep.

The trainer stayed crouched a second longer than he needed to. Looking at the grass. Then he stood, pulled his cap down, and turned away, and even from the riser I could see the particular set of a man's shoulders when he's just lost an argument he knew he was right about.

I had my recorder. I had the trainer's profile. I had a jersey number I couldn't read from here and six words on the wind—not writing out, day-to-day, limited—which is nothing, which would never run, which a lawyer would laugh out of a room.

What I had, mostly, was the first cold pull in my stomach that I'd come to know very well over the next four months.

The feeling of a thread.

I love a thread.

I pulled it.

?

Practice broke at six. I went down to the rope where Corbin had told me I was allowed to stand, waited with the real reporters, and watched the quarterback give four minutes of nothing to the TV guys—one day at a time, the coaches have us prepared, blessed to compete.

A clinic in saying words that contain no information, performed by a twenty-two-year-old who'd been taught it the way other kids get taught piano.