30. Charlie #2
His father’s mouth thinned. “We’re not doing this in a hallway.” A wide palm pushed open the nearest door, a windowless coaches’ office that smelled of dry-erase markers and stale coffee.
Charlie moved to block Skylar. “You should go to the party. I’ll join you soon.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” She brushed past him into the room.
He followed and angled his body between Skylar and his father without breaking stride.
With too much force, his father closed the door and leaned against a whiteboard that covered the wall, play diagrams from the first half still scrawled in blue ink. His father glanced at the Xs and Os, then at Charlie, and the comparison landed without a word.
“Sit down, Charles.”
“No.”
The refusal hung in the air.
His father’s nostrils flared. “She was at the bar too.”
His father’s gaze swept over Skylar the way he appraised a vehicle on the showroom floor. Then back to Charlie. “Every time your performance drops, she’s in the frame. The bar. The missed scout meeting. Tonight.”
“She has nothing to do with my mistakes.”
Next play.
The mantra surfaced. His teeth locked around the words.
“This is my legacy. My company. My name on every check I’ve written to this university for the last four years.
” The walls of the small room echoed with his father’s anger.
“You repay me with secrets and bar fights and a girl who’s been collecting a paycheck to stand next to you at cocktail parties. ”
Behind him, Skylar inhaled sharply.
Heat climbed Charlie’s ribs. “Leave her out of this.”
His fingers curled at his sides. Next play.
“I gave you every advantage. Every resource. Every opportunity a father can give a son. And you threw all of it away for what?”
The pressure pushed upward through his core and pressed against the backs of his teeth. His molars ground together.
Next play. Next play. Next play.
The mantra came and dissolved, came and dissolved. Water poured over a fire too large to drown.
“For what I actually want.”
The sentence ripped free before the performance machinery could intercept. Charlie’s pulse hammered in his throat, and for the first time in his life, he didn’t reach for the next play.
He reached for the match.
“I missed your scout meeting because I was up all night writing a submission for the Lighthouse Fellowship.” His hands shook from the velocity of years of silence leaving his body at once.
“I’m a writer. I have always been a writer.
I’m done pretending that the life you designed is the life I want. ”
His father’s laugh was soft, close to gentle. “My son, the quarterback, wants to write stories.” The amusement bled out. “You’re throwing away everything I’ve built for you. For sentences in a notebook.”
“For my life.”
“Your life.” His father’s chin lifted. “Your life is what I made it. Without me, you have no tuition, no housing, no car, no future. No money.” Red bloomed across his face.
“You have a useless dream and a temporary girlfriend who convinced you that the artistic flaw your mother passed on to you is a talent.”
Every blow before this one had landed on the surface.
This one went through his chest, to a place below the suppression, below the next plays, below every mechanism he had ever built.
The place where a boy sat at a kitchen table and wrote his first sentence because a mother’s caring hand had promised him those words mattered.
“Have you ever sat across from him while he writes?” Skylar stepped beside Charlie. “Or read any of his work?”
His father’s glare turned on Skylar, and Charlie’s pulse hammered in his throat.
“His future is his choice.” Her fingers found his. “You can stand there and list everything you’ve given him, but none of those things were gifts. They were traps.”
“Is that what you told him?” His father advanced on Skylar, an accusing finger leveled at her. “Whispering your plans for his life while you lie beside him in bed. Your meal ticket out of poverty.”
Skylar’s chin lifted. “I love him. Can you say the same?”
She loved him.
The words existed in the room now, out loud, aimed not at him but at the man who had never once said them without attaching a price. Skylar had given them away for free.
Her shoulders squared. “No father should treat their son like a commodity.”
She stepped closer to Charlie and honeysuckle flooded his lungs and fourteen years of next play detonated behind his sternum.
The fist beneath his breastbone unclenched all at once. The fury climbed his ribs and filled his throat and burned past every mechanism he had ever built to contain it. The room didn’t have padded walls or safety glass, and neither did the woman standing beside him.
The fury found the wrong target.
“Stop.” The demand slammed against the bare walls and came back sharper. “You don’t know what he’ll do, you don’t know what this costs.”
Her lips parted.
Every muscle in his body locked the way they locked before a hit on the field, bracing for impact,
except the impact was already inside him and there was nowhere to brace against. His vision narrowed to a single point: her.
“You don’t get to stand there and tell me what I deserve when you’ve never had a father in a room making you choose between who you are and who he needs you to be.
” The venom kept coming, propelled by a pressure he couldn’t cap, couldn’t redirect, couldn’t stuff back beneath his breastbone.
“You lost your family, Skylar. I know that. But you don’t get to tell me how to survive mine. ”
Her hand dropped from his, flying to her collarbone, fingers pressed against the hollow of her throat. The gold in her eyes drained to brown.
She stepped back. “You sound exactly like him.”
The fury that had filled every corner of his body seconds ago evaporated, and the absence was worse than the pressure had ever been.
A hollow opened in his chest, raw-edged and spreading, and Charlie understood in the space between one heartbeat and the next that the words couldn’t be unsaid, the way plates couldn’t be unbroken.
Her spine straightened and she walked out of the room. The door closed with a click that swallowed every other sound in the building.
Through the thin wall came Grant’s low voice. “Skylar. Are you okay?”
There was no answer, only footsteps fading down the hallway.
Charlie’s hands speared his hair, pulling. What had he done?
His father uncrossed his arms. “You’ll thank me. That girl wasn’t going to last.”
The sentence landed between his ribs.
“That girl!” Charlie yelled. Loud. Louder than the locker room, louder than the stadium, louder than anything he had ever aimed at the man standing three feet from him.
“That girl is the only person in my life who has ever asked me what I want instead of telling me what I owe. I used the worst thing that ever happened to her as a weapon.” He stared at the crescent marks in his palms. The same hands that had held hers on the trunk of a convertible a few hours ago.
“She’s confused you.” His father sighed. “We can fix this. I’ll speak to—”
“I’m done.” Charlie’s chest heaved. “I don’t want to play football. Or drive around in the car I never asked for. I’m done being your product.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “You’re upset. We’ll talk when you’re thinking clearly. Not under that girl’s spell.”
“I have never thought more clearly in my life.” He locked on his father’s gaze. “And her name is Skylar.”
The door opened and Grant filled the frame, one hand on the knob, his gaze passing over Brennan with the flat assessment of a man who recognized a threat. “What happened?”
Charlie looked at Grant. At his father. At the whiteboard covered in play diagrams for a game that had ended with someone else under center.
“Come on.” Grant’s hand landed on his back. “Let’s get out of here.”
He steered Charlie out of the room and down the corridor, past the locker room doors and the distant thump of a celebration he wouldn’t attend.
Grant pushed open the exit door, and the November air hit Charlie’s face, sharp and clean and merciless. Across the parking lot, the convertibles gleamed under floodlights, his father’s name on every windshield.
Skylar was out there in the dark, and Charlie understood that the only safe room he had ever known hadn’t had padded walls.
The space was her. The fury that should have gone to the man who earned it had found her instead, and he’d aimed it at the one wound guaranteed to land.
He’d spent his whole life unable to stand up to his father, and he’d finally managed it three minutes too late to matter.