Chapter Two #2
A pause. The smallest one. "It's nothing, Cade."
I crouched, which put me under his eyeline, which was the only way to make Theo Brooks look at you once he'd decided not to.
Up close I could see it. The sweat at his hairline that wasn't from heat.
The way he'd loaded everything onto his right side.
The gray underneath his brown skin that meant the pain had a number too, and he was as done ranking it as I was.
"There was a reporter today," I said. "Stayed the whole practice. She was watching you on the bench. You feel anybody looking at you, you tell me. You don't talk to anybody about that leg who isn't me or Wes. Okay?"
"Okay." He almost smiled. "Look at you. Protective."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are." And then his face changed—the careful slipping—and for a second the kid I came in with was there instead of the one the program had sanded down.
"You can tell me, you know," he said. "Whatever Voss's got you doing about her.
You don't have to carry it by yourself. You always do that.
You carry the whole thing and act like it doesn't weigh anything. "
And here's the thing.
Here's the thing I'd carry around all season like a stone in my shoe.
He almost told me too. Right then. I watched it come up in him—his own version of it, the leg, what Wes had said off the record, how long it had really been going on.
Watched his jaw work around it the way mine did around everything.
And for one second the door cracked, and I saw the whole shape of how bad it was, and how scared he was about the spring, about the draft, about losing the only ladder either of us had ever been handed.
Then it closed. He smiled—not her smile, not armor, something worse, something that had given up—and said, "I'm good, man," and clapped me on my taped shoulder. The bad one. Gentle. Because he knew. He always knew.
And he finished lacing his shoe and stood up on a leg that wasn't going to make it to October.
And I let him.
I let us both keep our secrets, and I told myself it was loyalty.
It's a thing I told myself a lot that year. Until a girl with a voice recorder made me say it out loud, and I heard how it sounded.
It sounded like my father.
?
Voss found me in the hallway by the equipment cage. Which was not an accident, because nothing Voss did was an accident, including the warmth.
"Twenty-seven." He always called me by the number.
Like a man naming a tool he was fond of.
He fell into step beside me and put a hand on the back of my neck—the same hand, the same place he'd put it on Theo out on the field—and I stood very still and let him, because that's what the hand was for.
Finding out if you'd let him. "Hell of a hit today.
Carter's gonna feel that Sunday. Scouts'll love it.
You keep playing angry like that, you've got a Sunday future, son. "
Son. He used it on the ones without fathers in the stands. He'd done his homework on all of us.
That was the part people missed about Hal Voss—charming on the billboard, BELIEVE under his chin. He didn't run on cruelty. He ran on attention. He saw exactly what you were missing, and then he became the only place you could get it.
"Thanks, Coach."
"Heard we had a little visitor today." The hand didn't move.
His voice didn't change. That was the menace—the lack of change.
"Pierce girl. From the paper. Stayed the whole practice, asked Corbin about the injury report.
" He said it like a small joke between us.
"Asks a lot of questions, that one. Pokes around.
I sent her your way—figured a word from you carries more than a word from Corbin. She get the message?"
"She got it," I said.
Which was true, and not true. I had no idea if she'd gotten anything except closer.
"Good." The hand finally lifted, and somehow that was worse—the absence of it, the reminder it could come back.
"You'd tell me, though. If somebody was poking around our house.
Talking to our guys. Wouldn't you." Not a question.
A reminder. "We protect each other in this building, twenty-seven.
That's the whole thing. Man keeps the locker room clean, the locker room takes care of him come spring. "
A beat. And then, easy, casual, a blade slid in between two friendly words:
"How's that back holding up, by the way? Heard a rumor from the training staff. Don't worry—stays between us. Everything stays between us. That's how it works."
There it was.
He knew about the back. Of course he knew about the back. He knew everything that could be turned into a hook—that was the job—and he'd just shown me mine. Talk, and I make sure the scouts hear you're damaged goods. Stay quiet, and the file stays clean.
He'd done it with a hand on my neck and the word son still warm in the air. And he walked off whistling before I'd decided whether I hated him or needed him.
Which was the exact state he liked to leave you in.
I stood in that hallway a long time, the equipment cage ticking as it cooled, the building emptying out around me.
Then I got my phone out—because I'm not as quiet as I let people think, I just pick my one loud thing—and I texted the only number on the team that could find anything out without it getting back to Voss.
Find out everything about Sloane Pierce. The student reporter. Quiet about it.
Miles texted back a thumbs up. Then, three seconds later:
wait why. CADE. why are we doing recon on the press
Then, before I could answer:
ohhhh my god is this a girl thing. is the scariest man in america being weird about a GIRL
I didn't answer.
I drove home to the house that got loud when it was quiet, and lay in the dark on a mattress on the floor with my back humming its number at me, and did not think about a smile in a tunnel, repeatedly, for about two hours. Which is its own kind of thinking about it.
I didn't know yet that I'd just made her my business in the one way Voss could never take from me.
Or that by the time I figured out what I actually wanted to know about Sloane Pierce, it wouldn't be anything I could put in a file.
It'd be everything I was never supposed to say out loud.
?