Chapter 8
Noah
I didn’t say much as we wrapped up the social media pics; even though we hadn’t been ‘purposefully’ posing for them, it was still good to take the hideous yellow off.
Dustin had done his best to lift Moore’s spirits, but the guy was wiped out. I got it. Kind of. She was his girl; he’d been stupid. Was it worth hiding his stupidity from her? I didn’t think it was. But then, I’d never had a serious girl.
The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t help concluding that this was how Head Coach Sutherland controlled his locker room. Not through discipline, or respect, or even intimidation. Through fear.
We were jocks; we weren’t known for our sensitivity. But in reality, there were way more Jasons in the locker rooms than there were Dustins. More guys with serious girlfriends than guys without.
I turned to watch Dustin and Jason sprint down the field chasing after Dante’s throw.
“You ever think football’s just playing fetch for humans?”
I turned to look at Briar. She was sitting on the seat where I told her to, her legs were crossed, her camera in her hand, and she looked for all the world like it had been her choice to sit there.
She looked up at me. “Think about it. If he throws that ball for a dog, any dog, they’ll break their necks to run and catch it.”
I pulled my usual training shirt over my head. “So we’re just a bunch of dogs?”
She scoffed. “Did you hear the hand-job story?”
“Yeah, and you shouldn’t have.” I reminded her, and she put her head down as I looked back down the field. “Not all of us get lonely enough to embarrass ourselves publicly.” When I looked back at her, she snapped my picture.
She lowered the camera and looked at me. “What’s your story, middle linebacker?”
She looked at me expectantly. It was a journalist’s question — the kind that sounded casual and wasn’t.
I shook my head slightly. “No story here. Just a guy trying to stop the other guy from playing fetch.” I gave her a pointed look. “Stay there.”
I walked away from her before she could ask another question, or I made a dig that she was a good puppy because she stayed exactly where she was. I joined Dante.
“Moore might not have been the best one to start with,” I told him with a slight smirk.
Dante rolled his shoulder. “Yeah, wasn’t expecting ‘I walked into an orgy and stayed’ to be in the conversation, I admit.”
I held back my laugh. “Not from him anyway. He really sells his brand well.”
“Yeah, which is exactly what Bobby Ray will have capitalized on.” He scratched his cheek. “How many more are there?”
“How do we even start the conversation?” I countered.
“It could be a coincidence.”
I gave Dante a flat look. “Nothing is a coincidence.”
He nodded glumly. “Yeah. Pity.” He looked over to the row of seats where Briar still sat. “You got a handle on this?”
I followed his gaze; her head was bent as she scrolled through her camera, and I nodded. “Yeah, leave it with me.”
He hesitated and then nodded. “Okay.”
Dante letting go of control of a situation? It was a day of surprises indeed.
Dustin and Jason rejoined us, and I heard the click of Briar’s camera. I turned to look at her, and she tapped the side of it.
“Okay, I am officially banana’d out. Please take them off. You’ve assaulted my retinas enough.” She pulled her hair forward and took a ballcap from her bag as if nothing had happened. “I’m going back to work.”
Jason stepped forward. “Um . . .”
She was already ahead of him. “Even if I wanted to, I have no one who wants to hear your story,” she assured him. “I do recommend you tell your girl, though. No one needs to learn that through social media, it can be a toxic environment as it is.”
“Yeah.” Jason looked defeated.
Briar stood, and I turned fully to look straight at her. I raised an eyebrow as she reconsidered the thought that she was about to walk out of here. She caught my look, and her cheeks flushed. I saw her throat bob as she swallowed.
We held each other’s stare, the others forgotten, and then slowly, she reached behind her and pushed the seat down. She retook her seat, her gaze averted across the field, her cheeks burning bright.
I turned back to look at my teammates. Dustin seemed amused, Jason wasn’t sure what was happening, and Dante was still watching Briar.
“I got this,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he murmured with a quick glance my way.
I looked at the others. “What do we do now?”
“Do you know everyone who’s involved with Coach Sutherland and his scheme?” Dante asked Jason. Gone was the sympathetic QB, and in his place was the guy I knew off the field.
Jason said nothing and then finally spoke. “The five guys you had issues with, they were basically his guys on the ground. You fucked that up when they got sent packing.”
“Someone would have replaced them. Who?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He saw our reactions and held up his hands. “I really don’t. Everything is quiet right now. It’s the same as before the season starts. It dies down, and then it picks back up again.”
“Were any of those five with you when you were at the party?” Dante asked. Jason’s gaze flicked my way nervously before answering Dante.
“No. I didn’t know them, except that they threw their weight around a lot. Scared the freshman shitless and stuff like that.”
“Who else knows?” Dustin was looking at the tunnel. “You’re close with who? Hartley?”
Jason scoffed. “The only thing I’d tell Hartley is the stuff I want people to know.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” Dustin conceded. “Does anyone else know? Other than Sutherland and us?”
Jason shook his head. “I only told him. He told . . .” For the first time, he looked agitated. “He told Coach Merriman — fucker makes jokes when no one’s listening.”
“Little Man Syndrome.” Dante’s tone was thoughtful. “He’s like a peacock but a gust of wind would knock him over.”
“Or a fist,” Jason added darkly. His shoulders looked more relaxed than they had at the beginning. “How do I fix it?”
“I think what Briar said is right,” Dante told him. “I think you need to come clean with Laurie-Anne.”
I didn’t disagree; that didn’t mean I could have taken the same advice myself.
Dustin nodded. “I panicked — full-out panicked — when I got mine. I was ready to call it a day and go flip burgers, not that there’s anything wrong with flipping burgers. But it was actually Hadley who took one look at it and said, ‘stuff them.’”
“She didn’t mind?” Jason asked in fascinated horror.
“Yeah, she minded, but she controlled the situation. So if it did come out, the impact wouldn’t be so bad.” He shrugged. “I mean, my mom would go insane and curse me out, but she wouldn’t disown me. I mean . . . not outright.”
“Your mom wouldn’t have disowned you,” Dante told him in exasperation.
“No.” Dustin looked wistful. “I wouldn’t get off that lightly.”
Even Jason laughed.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked as he pulled his shirt over his head.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Dante told him smoothly. “Report everything to us.”
“You mean spy?”
“They had no fucking issue spying on you,” I reminded him darkly. “They made you prey,” I told him quietly. “You either stay prey . . . or you learn to bite back.”
Jason nodded, not bothering to put his other shirt on. He looked at the stadium. “Think I might run some routes.”
Dustin nodded slowly. “Want some company?”
“You want to?” Jason asked him dubiously. “Or you think you need to?”
Dust sniffed. “Done my best thinking while I was running routes, quiets the mind.” He switched into his training top. “We need it, let’s do it.”
I took his gear off him, and Dante picked up Jason’s, and we left them to it.
“I like running routes.”
Dante looked over at me. “But?”
“It’s not the method I would use to talk someone off the edge.”
“Dustin has a unique perspective, sometimes.”
He saw me looking over at Briar, who had her camera up in front of her, pointed toward Dust and Jason.
“How are you going to deal with her?” He rolled his shoulder.
“Is that giving you an issue?” I asked, looking at his shoulder and ignoring his question about Briar.
“Yeah, niggling more than it should.” He let out a loud exhale. “I don’t know how much more I can take of this.”
“The shoulder or the . . . everything else?”
Dante huffed. “Both?” His fingers dug into his shoulder and rubbed. “I’m not good at secrets. I forget I’m not supposed to say anything.”
He hadn’t said it out loud before, but yeah, I knew. He wasn’t patient, and that could make him reckless. He liked to keep things moving. It was the same way he played the game, driving the offense up the field on every play.
“I think we need more before we expose it,” I reminded him.
“I know.”
And that’s what was pissing us both off, and probably for entirely different reasons.
Dante, Savvy, and Hadley wanted to shout about the injustice of the situation. I just wanted it out there so I could move on and put it behind me. The sooner it was out there, the sooner I could get back to focusing on just the game.
“I need two years of tape at a D1 school,” I told him. “Or that was the plan. Now I wish the date to declare was at the end of the college year instead of January, know what I mean?”
Dante didn’t comment, but he didn’t look like he disagreed.
“I mean, after the national championship, how do you even know if you’re ready to go pro? You could declare while high on the wine and make a big mistake.”
“Or you don’t declare, the moment passes you by, and a month later you know you fucked up by wanting to have a degree when you left college,” he muttered.
“Exactly.” I sucked my teeth. “Ask me today, I’d be declaring.”
I saw her move out of the corner of my eye, and I looked over. She was glaring at me, obviously pissed off about waiting, but not so pissed off that she tried to leave again.
“I have to deal with this,” I told him quietly.
He nodded and picked up the shirts and other stuff. Dante put his fingers to his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. Dustin looked over, tapped Jason on the shoulder, and the two of them changed course and headed our way. So much for running laps.
“Have fun,” Dante smirked before he walked away.
Briar was sitting with her back straight, fully alert as I walked over to her. I saw her look me up and down, her tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip before she looked away.
She had her camera in her lap, her hands clutching it tightly. I made her nervous. Good, she should be.
“So . . . Now you’ve had time to think about it, what the fuck were you thinking?”
She didn’t look at me; her head shook slightly as she kept her gaze fixed across the stadium.
“I’m not standing over there, Briar. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you back, now answer the question.”
That earned me a look. Green eyes wide with indignation. “You think you can speak to me like that because you’re big and scary?”
“I’m not scary,” I told her, folding my arms across my chest.
She looked me up and down haughtily. “Well, you have the intimidation pose spot on,” she said scathingly. “Did you practice it in the mirror to get it right?”
“Yeah, every day for a week, mustn’t have worked because you don’t look like you’re trembling,” I scoffed at her attitude. “Now answer my question. What the fuck were you thinking?”
She leaned back in the seat, her arms across her chest, mimicking my pose. “That you might have some information that would help me.” She pulled the cap off her head, shaking her hair loose. “Instead, all I got was a pathetic hand-job story.”
I didn’t care that she was mocking Jason.
It really was an embarrassing story. “That’s what you get for crawling along the stadium floor to listen to something that didn’t concern you.
” I looked her up and down in a quick sweep.
“Not quite sure which is sadder, Jason being blackmailed by his head coach, or you lying face down on the fucking concrete.” I leaned forward, her green eyes wary as she looked up at me.
“People in glass houses, Briar. You get what I’m saying? ”
“You’re a dick.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t move, and I could see her try not to press back any further away from me. “What else you got?”
She stood, our bodies almost touching because I didn’t step back. “I’m not repeating anything he said,” she snapped at me. “I feel for the guy, if it leaks, it won’t leak from me.”
I shook my head. “Not good enough.”
She gaped at me. “What the hell do you want me to do? Write it in blood in a contract?”
I thought about it.
“Blood.” I said it softly, turning it over like I was considering the possibility. “That’s very dramatic. Very . . . intimate, don’t you think? Mixing something of yours into something of mine. Binding.” I tilted my head. “I didn’t take you for the type, but I can work with it.”
Her cheeks went pink, and she opened her mouth, and I watched her reach for something to say, something to throw back at me.
“That’s not— I didn’t mean— God, you’re disgusting.”
Her hand slammed into my chest.
“I’m not writing it in blood you sick perverted fuck!”
I caught her wrist as she pulled away, then dragged her one step closer to me. Our height difference was amplified as I looked down into her shocked gaze, noting tiny gold flecks around her iris. Interesting.
“Sick. Perverted. Fuck.” I repeated it slowly, drawing out each word.
I felt her tug at her wrist, and I tightened my grip.
“I said binding. I said dramatic.” I leaned down, closing the space.
“You’re the one who heard all that and went somewhere .
. . filthy with it.” She opened her mouth to protest, and I pressed my index finger against her lips to silence her.
“So, either you’re projecting your own perversion onto me, or you’ve been thinking .
. .” I paused, and I could feel her body go still as I drew her just a little closer.
“You’ve been thinking some perverted thoughts. About me?”
Briar held my gaze for a moment. Her head drew back slightly, losing contact with me, and she snapped at my finger with her teeth.
I had her turned, my arm just above her breasts, her back pressed to my chest, and one hand loosely around her throat.
“No biting,” I scolded her.
“Take your hands off me.”
“You tried to bite me. Like a dog. I’m protecting myself.” I turned her head with my hand around her throat. I lowered my head to talk into her ear. “You don’t say fuck about Jason. You don’t say fuck about any of us. You do, and you’re in the back of a cop car for fraud. Understand me?”
She instantly protested. “I wasn’t going to, I—”
My hand tightened slightly. “Do you understand me?”
She spoke through gritted teeth. “Yes.”
I let her go. “Good. Now I think we’re done here for today.” I stepped back. “Keep your mouth shut and your snooping less obvious. See you around.”
I walked back to the tunnel, her curses following me, and grinned. I didn’t look back.
That had been fun.