24. Charlie
Down by three with ten seconds left in the fourth quarter and the Dartmouth crowd was on their feet. Charlie crouched behind the center at the thirty-yard line, calling out adjustments, and for the first time all season his mind held nothing but the field.
The snap hit his palms. He dropped back three steps, eyes sweeping left to right. The safety bit on Grant’s route, leaving the seam wide. Booker cut across at the twenty, three steps ahead of his man.
First read. Open.
Charlie didn’t hesitate.
The ball left his hand in a spiral tight enough to hum. The leather found Booker’s hands in stride at the twelve and he crossed the goal line untouched.
The bench emptied. Seb reached him first, both hands crashing into his shoulder pads hard enough to rattle his molars.
“That’s how you do it!” Wyatt piled on from behind, arms around Charlie’s waist, screaming into his ear about playoffs.
Booker jogged back from the end zone pointing at Charlie with both hands, helmet tilted.
Grant arrived last, one palm flat against Charlie’s back, silent and solid.
Charlie pulled off his helmet. November air bit his scalp and the scoreboard shone 24–21 and his lungs expanded with ease.
First read. No hesitation. The flaw his father had dissected over midnight phone calls, the one three coaches had flagged in film sessions, had vanished for sixty seconds. Sixty seconds was enough.
In the hotel room, Seb claimed the bed nearest the bathroom because he often crept in late after everyone else had crashed, due to his usual habit of finding company in every college town the team visited.
Grant snagged the remote, plopped onto the other bed and flicked to the weather channel.
“Do you think it’s snowing in New Haven? ”
Charlie sank into the only chair in the room and unlocked his phone. “That’s three hours away from here.”
“Yeah, but she always forgets her gloves.”
Charlie barely registered Grant’s statement. The night of the rage room had cracked a seal. For weeks after Ironwood, the words had scattered every time he reached for them. Now they arrived in a rush, crowding his thumbs faster than he could type.
He wrote about the winning pass. The field narrowing to the spiral and the route and the absolute certainty that the throw was true. The collision of bodies when his teammates reached him. How the ball had left his fingers, the first throw all season that carried no apology.
On the bus ride to the away game, he’d crafted sentence after sentence about the woman who said choose me across a kitchen counter, and the force behind his ribs when he did.
How choosing had carried consequences since he was eight years old, and she’d turned his desire into the first honest act of his adult life.
He described how the scent of honeysuckle had rewired his nervous system, how a shampoo that cost three dollars at a drugstore had become the safest place he knew.
The first ring of the call from his father in the car had woken him.
He’d kept his eyes closed, gathering himself, and Skylar had stepped in.
Telling a billionaire that his son wasn’t available, without the careful politeness Charlie wrapped around every exchange with his father.
The click of her disconnect caught in his throat, the gratitude so sharp he’d swallowed against the burn.
Seb’s phone buzzed. “Booker says everyone’s headed to the bar.”
“Wyatt can’t drink in this hotel.” Grant turned off the TV.
“There’s an all-night diner across the road.” Seb checked his outfit in the mirror. “I could do waffles.”
“You do almost anything,” Grant grumbled.
Charlie kept writing, his thoughts turning back to Skylar. Less than twelve hours since he’d kissed her before boarding the bus, and he was already a man starved.
His lips pulled up as he described the reception at the campus athletics center earlier that week, Skylar’s fingers threaded through his own the entire evening.
The kiss he’d pressed to her temple between photo setups because he could, because she let him, because for two hours the cameras caught the truth instead of a lie.
He didn’t type how he’d parked the McLaren behind the athletics center and with his seat reclined Skylar had slid onto his lap, the windows fogging while they laughed into each other and fumbled with buttons because they couldn’t survive twenty minutes apart without touching.
In just a few weeks, he’d rewritten his playbook until every route curved toward her and every audible called her name.
Seb tossed a pillow at him. “Are you listening? We gotta go.”
Charlie blinked, returning to the room with his friends. Grant rolled his eyes. “Put the phone down. Skylar can wait five minutes for you to refuel.” Then Grant winked.
“One second.” Charlie finished the sentence about the rhythm of Skylar’s pulse, then pocketed the phone.
Two events remained on the Dean’s calendar: the donor gala and Senior Night. The countdown had narrowed from weeks to days, and the number sat against the back of his mind with the steady insistence of a clock in an empty room.
Charlie saved the file and locked his phone and pressed his thumb against the screen one last time. The truest pages he’d ever written, warm against his skin.
At seven a.m. the next morning, two NFL regional representatives waited in a conference room at the team hotel. His father had arranged the meeting and confirmed by text three times.
Charlie had replied within minutes. Since the night Skylar hung up on his father, Charlie replied instantly to his father’s texts, picked up on the first ring.
The end of the season crept closer and the list of ways he planned to disappoint his father grew longer by the day.
Not getting drafted. Not going to Las Vegas for Christmas.
The fellowship deadline bookmarked in his browser.
The woman his father had dismissed as a girl with a cute ass, who his father would meet face-to-face at the gala.
The least Charlie could do was answer promptly.
The representatives asked their typical questions about leadership, game management, and his ability to adapt under pressure.
Charlie answered the way his father had trained him.
Poised. Rehearsed. He offered his completion percentage and his fourth-quarter rating and the adjustments he’d made since the early-season interceptions.
He sat with good posture and held eye contact and delivered the version of himself that his father had engineered over years of training.
The shorter man leaned forward. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
On a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean with a laptop and a finished manuscript.
“Building on the platform football has given me to develop opportunities off the field.”
The words tasted flat. The men nodded and the ploy worked. His father would approve, and for a little while longer, approval was the only currency Charlie could afford.
When the meeting ended, Charlie shook their hands and walked back to his room and stood in the shower until the hot water pruned his fingers. The winning pass already belonged to someone else’s highlight reel.
Charlie stepped off the bus and headed straight to Skylar’s.
Everything in his chest seized when she opened the door in an oversized T-shirt with her hair piled on top of her head and her face bare.
She launched herself across the threshold and wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist. His arms closed around her and the ache he’d carried for two days dissolved on contact.
Her lips found his and the world narrowed to her.
“Is Poppy home?” He managed the words between kisses.
“Library.” Skylar inched back just enough to study his face. She traced the line of his jaw. “You won.”
“We won.”
“I watched on my laptop.” Her thumb grazed the corner of his mouth. “That last throw, Charlie.”
The way she said his name made his knees unreliable.
He carried her inside, kicked the door shut behind him, and counted the ten steps to her bedroom.
He set her on the bed and she tugged him down by the collar and the urgency caught fire between them, a two-day separation that might as well have been a month.
The first time burned fast and desperate, forty-eight hours of separation compressed into minutes, and when they finished she laughed against his neck and the vibration traveled down his spine and pooled at the base of his back.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi.”
His thumb traced the ridge of her hip bone, back and forth, an absent rhythm that matched the pulse still hammering in his throat.
Then her mouth found the hinge of his jaw.
She kissed lower. The tendon at the side of his neck.
The hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse beat hard enough she had to feel it.
One roll and she was beneath him. His stubble dragged across her jaw and she inhaled sharply and the sound tucked itself behind his sternum.
He kissed the curve of her neck. The dip between her collarbones. Lower. The soft skin beneath her breast where her ribs expanded and contracted in uneven pulls. She arched into him and the mattress creaked beneath the shift of weight and her fingers raked through his hair and twisted.
He paused.
“Charlie.” A breath. A demand. Her hips rolled against him in protest and the friction pulled a groan from him.
Forehead against her stomach, he held still. “I’ve never felt like this.” The words
against her skin were barely louder than the creak of the bed frame.
Her fingers stilled in his hair. “What? Extra horny?”
He lay his cheek against her hip. Three words he’d written early today tried to pry their way up his throat, but he swallowed them. Too soon. Too much.
Skylar caressed his face. “Me either.”
The words landed against the place where his mantra lived, the place that had held next play for fourteen years, and for one unguarded moment the mantra dissolved. There was just warmth, her soft skin, and her hand on his jaw.
Her trust unmade him because this woman had lost everyone she’d ever needed. Here, in this bed, in the dark, with his hand between her thighs, she was shaking because she had chosen to need him.
One slow caress and she gasped. The sound was wet and open. A tempo emerged that turned her gasps longer and more desperate. Nails bit half-moons into his forearm and the pain sharpened his focus until the only thing in the world was the catch of her breathing and the slick heat beneath his hand.
“Please.” The word broke in half.
Didn’t she know he’d give her anything? He sucked on her hip bone, her muscles contracting. Then he stamped kisses across her belly, lower, and her fingers twisted in the sheets.
“Charlie, if you don’t . . .”
One lick and her spine arched off the mattress.
The trust in that arch, the complete surrender of a woman who didn’t lose control, was a privilege that sat so heavy behind his ribs he could barely breath.
He’d spent his life performing for people who demanded his time, his image, his obedience.
Skylar was asking him for this. Trembling beneath his mouth and trusting him with the most unguarded version of herself.
He let her guide him, reading her body the way he read a defense, adjusting, recalibrating, following the signals her breathing gave him until she crested and retreated and crested higher.
Her thighs clamped against his ears and the world narrowed to the taste of her and the ragged sound of his own name tearing from her throat.
He stayed until the aftershocks faded to tremors, then kissed his way back up her body, her ribs, the hollow of her throat, the corner of her mouth.
When she whispered his name against the hollow behind his ear, the sound lodged in a hole in his heart that waited twenty-two years for exactly those syllables in exactly that voice.
Her thumb traced the corner of his mouth. “I need you. And I don’t know how to do that.”
It was a mistake looking at her. The openness in her expression, stripped of every defense she carried, landed at the center of his chest. The woman who refused to need anyone.
Needing him.
“You’re the only real thing in my life.” He kissed her, cradling her jaw with the kind of care he reserved for sentences that mattered too much to rush.
Every second with her had to last. Three games left in the season, and then the uniform came off.
His father would call tomorrow with another meeting arranged, another handshake scheduled, another opportunity Charlie hadn’t asked for.
He would perform, be the son his father required while he could.
Before every secret he carried detonated at once.
Two minutes on the clock. Score tied. And Charlie didn’t know which version of himself would take the field when the whistle blew.