Tangled with the Tight End (Tennessee Thunder Football #1)

Winona

I don’t understand American football at all.

It looks like all-in wrestling with crash helmets.

~ Sting

There are rare moments in life when you wish you had the flu. Right now is one of those.

Every eye is on me. My best friends comfortably fill the couches and stuffed chairs in the back room of Moss and Maple, our local bookshop.

We’re surrounded by stacks of books and the smell of cinnamon and vanilla. Everything in this old craftsman-turned-bookshop is decorated for back-to-school even though the leaves on the trees outside the windows are still a vibrant green.

We’re here for book club, but we stopped talking about our monthly read ten minutes ago.

Ever since we shut our books, Daisy has been on the edge of her seat, going on about this weekend’s practice for the Tennessee Thunder football team. Daisy’s father-in-law built the team’s new practice facility—a whole building devoted to practicing. And now they want us to come watch.

“He got tickets for all of us to go. Isn’t that exciting?” Daisy exclaims.

“All of us would go to the practice?” I ask, even though she just spent the last ten minutes basically saying just that.

“Yes. Fans would go nuts for these tickets, but Declan has a friend on the team who isn’t inviting anyone, so he has enough for all of us.”

Declan is Daisy’s brother-in-law. I know him. Well, I knew him growing up. He was a few grades ahead of me in school, so we never really crossed paths. But that doesn’t matter because everyone in Waterford knows Declan now.

He’s an NFL pro player—the local boy gone big.

And he wants us to watch him practice.

I picture myself when I was ten, learning the flute.

No one wanted to watch me practice—rightfully so.

I’d make that kissy face my band teacher taught me to make, put my lips to the hole and blow.

The resulting high-pitched squeaks, sputters and airy whistles were nothing I’d sell tickets to. That’s for sure.

But here Declan is, inviting our whole friend group to watch him practice.

And it’s not that I don’t want to go out with my friends. It’s just … football. I don’t watch it. I don’t understand it. And, to be honest, if I’m going to watch something, I’d like it to be the polished outcome of lots of practice, not the practice itself.

Maybe I don’t want the flu. A quick bout of vertigo or temporary blindness would be fine too. Those might pass more quickly, but still would get me out of having to watch a group of men practice football.

I glance around at my friends. They’re all nodding at something Daisy said.

“It’s so sweet of Declan,” Cass says. “Right, Winona?”

“Yeah … uh … Yes. Very sweet.”

“I’ll tell him we’re all a yes, then,” Daisy says, standing and picking up her dessert plate off the coffee table in the middle of the room.

“I need to get a jersey,” Cass says.

“A jersey?” I ask. “The cow?”

“No, you goof,” Cass says. “The team jersey—the shirt the guys wear.”

“You can just wear anything you like,” Daisy says. “It’s only practice. It’s actually a day they’ve opened for kids camps, so the players’ families are welcome to come too. But with any luck, Patrick will score us tickets to the first game too.”

Cass bounces on her toes. “I’m so excited! Tell Patrick he’s the best.”

Emberleigh gasps and every eye in the room turns toward her. “Sorry, guys. Baby gets more active at night.” She looks around at us. “Anyone want to feel the kicks?”

Our combined, “Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes,” and Cass’s “Are you kidding me? You don’t have to ask,” all overlap as we gather around Emberleigh and she places our hands one-by-one over her abdomen.

The baby kicks feel like flutters and pulses under my palm. My eyes meet Emberleigh’s and we exchange smiles.

“Amazing,” I say on a breath.

“It’s wild,” she says. Her eyes are soft and dreamy. Then she chuckles. “It’s the most beautiful experience ... when the baby's not sitting on my sciatic nerve and I’m not rushing to the bathroom ten times a night.”

We all laugh. Emberleigh’s the first in our group to get pregnant. I’m living vicariously through her. I’d want nothing more in life than to be a mom. Of course, I’m missing the main ingredient for that recipe: a man who loves me.

I shake off my dreams of motherhood and join my friends, chatting as we put the chairs back in order, clearing snack plates and drink cups and slowly making our way to the front of the shop.

I take the leftover baked goods to bring to Sycamore Assisted Living in the morning. Then my sister, Cass, and I drive home to the house we’ve shared since we moved out of our childhood home.

We’re brushing our teeth before bed. Cass looks over at me. “Have you been assigned a new patient yet?”

“No. I’m on the waitlist for whoever needs home health next.”

“Does that make you antsy?”

“What?”

“Never knowing what’s next.”

“None of us know what’s next, Cass.” My words come out around my toothpaste.

I spit and rinse my mouth.

“Okay, Miss Philosopher,” she smiles warmly at me in the mirror.

“I actually love the variety,” I tell her. “Never knowing what’s next, always having to adapt to a new situation. It keeps life interesting.”

She leans in, wrapping her arm around my shoulder and giving a squeeze. “And that’s what I love about you.” She giggles lightly. “That and the look on your face when Daisy told us we were going to the Thunder football practice.”

“Was I that obvious?” I grimace.

“No. Only a little. I might have been the only one to pick up on it.”

“I want to be excited. But watching men in tights run around chasing a ball? No. Scratch that. Watching them run around practicing chasing a ball. I don’t get the part that’s exciting.” I turn to catch her mystified expression. “Except hanging out with all of you. That’s always fun.”

“Just wait,” she assures me. “You’re going to love it. Besides, they have nachos.”

“At the practices?”

“Mmmm. Maybe not. We’ll bring snacks, okay?”

“I’m warming up to the idea. What kind of snacks?”

“Men in tights,” she mutters, shaking her head and laughing. “Only you, Winona.”

Two days later, I’m riding shotgun down one of the two-lane roads leading out of Waterford. The practice facility for the Thunder is about twenty-five minutes outside town where there’s nothing but stretches of flat fields for days.

“This isn’t even the stadium where they play games?” I ask when Cass parks in the parking lot.

I probably sound small-town as all get out, but I honestly can’t wrap my brain around building something this massive just for practicing a sport.

“No. They have a whole other stadium for games.”

“Wow.”

“The practice facility is more like their family room,” Cass says.

“They live in it. The team offices are here. Medical and training spaces. They have more than one field. It’s built for the team to use when they aren’t playing games.

The game-day stadium is like the dining room they only use when guests come over.

They don’t want to wear down the turf by practicing on it too much.

They only use the stadiums on game days. ”

Our friends pull up and park next to us, and we all approach the massive building. The words Tennessee Thunder are painted over the entrance with two lighting bolts that look like zigzaggy Ts.

“They should be called the Lightning Bolts,” I say offhandedly.

“That doesn’t go with Tennessee,” Cass says, her face as bright as if we were about to enter Disneyland for a day of rides and junk food.

“Tennesse Thunder,” she says in an airy voice, her eyes fixed on the words.

I follow my friends through the concrete hallways out onto the field. It’s nothing like I thought it would be. The bleachers are smaller than the ones we had at our high school. Did I watch those games? Not really. High school football games meant a fun night out with my friends.

“They’re wearing practice jerseys,” Cass tells me.

“Okay,” I say, trying my best to muster up an interest.

Declan waves over at us. I recognize him right away—not because of anything related to his sport.

I’ve just seen him around Waterford on and off my whole life.

Both Declan and Patrick have the darkest hair of anyone in town.

It’s practically black. He smiles and an unexpected, responsive smile spreads across my face.

I guess you might call Declan charismatic, though there’s a severity to him when he’s not smiling.

He’s intense—almost too much to look at.

His attention shifts as quickly as it landed on us.

A man with a clipboard approaches him and they confer as if they were solving a high-level math problem, the kind that gives you a headache and requires a study session to work out.

But, no. They’re talking about a brown ball and a bunch of grown men chasing it around on a field.

“How did football ever become someone’s actual job?” I ask Cass.

She takes one look at me and pulls a chocolate bar out of her purse. “Eat.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I say, taking the candy bar and unwrapping it. “I wasn’t being crabby, though. I’m seriously curious how a child’s game turned into a job.”

“I don’t know. But believe me, these are men. Not children.”

Cass waves her hand out toward the field in a swoosh as if she’s a game show host showing off the array of prizes you could win if you get lucky.

We take our seats on the smaller metal bleachers. I munch away on my candy bar, watching the action on the field, making sense of none of it.

“The point of football,” Emberleigh tells me, “Is to get the ball across the goal line. The teams take turns having possession of the ball. And the other team tries to stop them.”

“Seems pretty straightforward,” I say. “And thanks for telling me.”

I watch the men line up over and over. The ball gets shoved through the first guy’s legs—well, it’s sort of tossed backward through his legs while he tips upside down.

“Why does he bend over like that?” I ask Cass in a whisper. “It seems like he could find a better way to get the ball to the next guy.”

She chuckles as if my perfectly logical question is somehow funny. “It’s just how it’s done.”

Patrick leans over from the other side of Emberleigh so he can talk to all of us, “Declan’s at the top of his game this year. He’s going to have a season like never before.”

“What exactly does he do?” I ask.

Cass leans over from the other side of me. “Excuse her, Patrick.”

“It’s fine. Not everyone is a football fan,” Patrick says.

“I’m trying to figure it out,” I tell him.

“He’s a tight end,” Patrick says.

“Oh, my.” I can feel my eyes bug out. Should Patrick really be talking about his brother’s backside? I didn’t ask about that. Not at all. I wouldn’t. Who would?

Patrick cracks up. Then Daisy follows. Pretty soon everyone’s laughing. Maybe he’s embarrassed by his answer.

“No,” Patrick says between laughs. “His position is called tight end. It’s what they named his position.”

“So when people ask him what he does for a living, he says ‘I’m a tight end’?”

Patrick chuckles. “Yes. And up until today, I never found that odd in the least.”

“Well, that’s on you,” I say.

Cass has her hand on her forehead. “I should have brought more snacks.”

“More snacks are always good,” I say. “But I’ll leave room for dinner.”

“A tight end,” Patrick says, regaining composure and looking a lot like my ninth grade math teacher used to when I struggled with an equation.

To be fair, I don’t use any of those equations now, so I think I was right in questioning their usefulness. But that’s beside the point. Patrick, my self-appointed football teacher, is talking about Declan and his oddly-named job.

“... mainly blocks other players so he can create gaps where the other players can run or pass the ball. But he also functions as a receiver.”

“Of the ball?” I ask.

“Yes. Of the ball. He can catch the ball and make a touchdown.”

“That’s where the ball goes over the line at the end by those posts?”

“Exactly,” Patrick says, beaming.

I don’t really understand what he said except that Declan blocks something and sometimes catches the ball.

“When do they use their feet?” I ask Patrick.

“Their feet?”

“For football.”

Again, the whole row of our friends laughs like I told a joke.

“It’s called football, but the only foot that ever touches the ball is the kicker.”

I just shake my head and sit back on the bleachers. That piece of information alone tells me I will never understand this game. The sun is warm on my face and the men are sort of cute in their tights, so I watch them throwing the ball, not kicking it, and running all over the place.

After a while, a whole group of kids shows up, and the players stop practicing so they can show the kids how to throw or kick.

There’s a lot of kicking then. More than in the practice.

Seems extra since those kids won’t really kick much if they get into the real football.

I hate to break the disappointing news to them.

If they want their foot on a ball, this is not the place.

Practice eventually ends. A lot of reporters show up, sticking their microphones in front of the players’ faces and interviewing them. Some of the reporters even interview the kids.

After all that, Declan jogs over to the bleachers. His helmet is off, his hair is sweaty, but in a way that doesn’t look gross at all. How does someone manage to sweat and look attractive? It’s a phenomenon. When I sweat, I look like I nearly drowned—and not in a good way.

“Thanks for coming out,” Declan says, tucking his helmet under his arm and pinning it there with his elbow.

“Thanks for having us,” I say.

Declan looks me straight in the eyes. It’s disarming. Certain people are like really beautiful artwork. They have this quality that makes them seem almost super-human. Declan is one of those people.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Declan asks me.

Did I enjoy myself? I didn’t not enjoy myself.

“It was interesting,” I say.

“We loved it,” Cass says, practically talking over me. “Thanks so much.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty rare that they open a practice,” Declan says. “Only during training camp and on the day we bring the kids out. Family day.”

“Training camp?” I look around. “Do you pitch tents on the grass?”

Declan laughs. The sound is deep and resonant. “No. We don’t sleep here.”

“So, no s’mores?” I ask.

“No. Sadly not. I think the coaches would frown on s’mores this close to season.”

“Frowning on s’mores,” I mutter to myself, wondering what kind of monsters these coaches are. S’mores are some of the best things on earth. You have to be pretty cold-hearted to frown on them.

“We’re grabbing dinner,” Patrick says to Declan. “Want to join us? Or do you have to do anything else with the team?”

“Delaney and Linc were going to grab food,” Declan says. “But I can eat with them anytime. Give me a minute to shower and I’ll join you. My treat.”

“That’s not necessary,” Patrick says.

“Nah. Let me treat,” Declan says. And then he turns and jogs away, and I work hard not to stare at his tight end. Yep. I get it. The name makes sense now.