Chapter 25
Briar
“I don’t understand why I need to go.”
It was the third time I’d said it, but I was still waiting for the answer. Well, an answer that made sense.
“You’re the media person.”
I looked at Coach Sutherland, one of the rare times I made eye contact with the asshole.
“For raising the profile of Dustin Slater,” I reminded him. “Not for the team.”
“Coach.”
I turned to Kevin-the-Ass. “Huh?”
“You address him as coach.”
“I . . .” What an asshole. I turned back to Bobby Ray Sutherland. I glanced at him and quickly lowered my head. “Coach?”
“The spring game is Saturday. The donors, boosters, and the people who make this team possible all flock to a party after it. The team goes. You’re part of the team, ergo, you go.”
Ergo? Did he just use ergo in a sentence?
“I’m part of the team?” Was I hell! “I—”
“You put on a dress, take your camera, and stick to the wall like the wallflower you are,” Kevin-the-Ass sneered.
“Enough,” Sutherland chided firmly. “Is there anything else, Miss Holmes?”
Yes. You can suck my dick. “No.”
“Coach.” Kevin piped up.
Fuck you too. “No, Coach,” I added. “Can I go?”
“Please.”
Asshole.
I left his office on knees as shaky as they’d been when I walked in five minutes ago.
They’d told me he wanted to see me in his office, and I’d been way too nervous to come up with a reason why it was a bad idea.
Did he know who I was?
Did he know I’d kissed his middle linebacker?
Did he know I wanted to do more than kiss him?
But it had been none of those things. It was possibly worse. He wanted me to spend my Saturday night with them. He wanted to tell me he expected me to be ‘on duty’ tomorrow night after the spring game.
Socialize with the team. The team I was apparently part of. Kill me now.
“It could still have been worse,” I muttered as I headed back to the training field.
I didn’t get paid to work Saturday nights. But I didn’t have any reasonable argument against him. He was intimidating. I mean, head coaches usually are. They wrestle with the testosterone that’s in the locker room on a daily basis. They needed to be hard-asses.
A group of males were like wild turkeys. Hard to herd and deaf to reason.
I’d lived with Mason. The thought of him multiplied by fifty? Eighty? It made me shudder.
On the surface, Coach Sutherland was the exact same guy as Mason’s high-school head coach. Or his middle-school coach. A hard-ass who knew how to keep a firm line with a bunch of turkeys.
But I knew he knew what happened to Mason was bullshit, and I damn well knew Sutherland knew, or at least suspected, who attacked Tiffany. And because of that, I would never be able to think of him as anything other than a shithead who needed to be held accountable.
“Where’ve you been?” Diana asked, coming out of a room and giving me a surprised look.
“I was with Coach Sutherland,” I mumbled. “Getting told I was needed at the after-party tomorrow night to capture content for the team’s social media.”
She glanced at me. “Is that part of your job?”
“I didn’t think so.” I let out a sigh. “I’ll check with Gaby. I sure as hell am getting paid for it.”
“Yeah.”
She walked beside me, and I blew out the breath. “Oh, for God’s sake, Diana, I know, okay. You think he can keep anything a secret? The fact that you were in his closet in his garage was a big clue.”
She stopped walking, and so did I.
She’d pissed me off, and I wasn’t in the mood to play nice. “You have trouble with your boyfriend, sort it out with him. Don’t use my bro — don’t use my friend as a revenge fuck, okay?”
“Jesus, Briar!” she hissed, looking around.
“Don’t ‘Jesus’ me. You’re too old to play games, and you’re too old for him!”
She stepped back. “Yeah? How’s Matthews?”
I bit back my sharp reply. I didn’t like the sneer on her lips, or the look in her eye.
“Fuck you. I’ll see you later.” I walked away and then turned back. “And also, fuck you again.”
I stormed out into the field and ducked as a ball came flying toward me.
“Shit!” I heard Dante shout. He jogged over to me. “You weren’t supposed to be there, sorry.”
I felt like screaming. “That’s the problem. I’m not supposed to be here.” I strode past him and marched to my bag, where I’d left it.
“Matthews, you’re pushing that sled like it’s heavy, fucking move it!”
I spun to look, not caring that I was obvious. Noah was here? He’d been benched. “Why is he here?”
One of the second team had been running laps and heard me as he slowed to a walk. “Because the spring game’s tomorrow and he’s a beast.”
I watched all six-four of him push the sled further down the field faster than anyone. His muscles in his legs were working hard, his arms were locked, biceps bulging, his head was down, and I was pretty confident he’d push that piece of equipment right off the corner of the earth if he could.
A beast? Yeah, I could see it.
“But he was benched,” I repeated stupidly.
The guy laughed, pointing higher up the stand, and I looked to see media — actual media — sitting in the seats. “But they wanted to know why he was missing. So, he got reinstated.”
I’d be damned. He was right. The public wanted the players, and they noticed when they weren’t there. Raising his social media presence wasn’t a dumb idea.
I picked up my camera, and I walked away from the guy as I started taking pictures of Noah fighting whatever demon was in his head. When he stopped, he looked up, and our eyes met, and I knew the zap of electricity down my spine was all him.
I turned and took a few random shots of nothing, trying to disguise the fact that I’d just been transfixed by him.
“So sloppy,” I muttered as I zoomed in and took one of Dust running tires.
I knew he had walked over beside me, and I pretended he wasn’t.
“If I say sorry for being a dick, will you forgive me?”
“I don’t know what you mean?” I took another picture, this one of Dante, who was locked in and throwing like his arm was on automatic.
“If I get down on my knees and say please as I eat you out, will you stop being mad?”
The camera shook in my hand. I lowered it before I dropped it. I looked up at him and realized that was a mistake.
My reaction to him was physical. It had always been physical. The difference was it was getting harder to hide. As I looked up at him, I saw something that made me frown.
“Why is your eye worse than it was?”
His lips twisted into a smirk. “Why is your face flushed?”
“I’m working. It’s hot.”
He grinned. “Is it?”
“Matthews? You finished?” Coach Holt screamed.
“All done, Coach,” Noah shouted back. He leaned down to me. “The offer stands. Let me apologize,” his breath was warm at my ear. “On my knees.” He drew back. “I won’t expect anything in return.”
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. He jogged back to the center of the field, and I had to physically force myself to look away.
My phone dinged, and I looked down at the notification.
Eyes widening, I opened social media.
As the Blues Get Ready for Spring Game, Learn What They Don’t Want You to Know.
I read the caption.
The Alabama Lions are champions on the field, but beneath the clean, polished organization is a department of lies and deceit.
Follow me for more.
“What the fuck?”
I looked up at the media in the stands. They were all reading their phones. I looked over the field and saw Kevin-the-Ass heading up the tunnel.
He wasn’t the only coach with a phone in his hand.
“What’s happening?” Dustin asked, coming over to me, pointing at my phone.
I showed him the post.
He whistled low. “Fuck.” He looked over his shoulder. “Dante! Noah!”
It already had over a thousand likes.
Dante took the phone out of my hand, and Noah read over his shoulder.
“Who the fuck is this?” Dante asked quietly. “Hadley?”
Dustin shook his head vehemently. “Nah, she’d have told me if she was going to do this.”
He read it again, and some of the comments. “This is wild, look at some of the comments? ‘Don’t we know it’. And this one, ‘they’re all scum.’”
“Scum?” Noah sniffed. “Scum seems harsh. For all of us.”
“Players!” Coach Merriman was in the middle of the field. “Get your asses here now!”
The three of them ran back over, and I noticed I hadn’t been the only one that players had gone to, to read phones.
My phone pinged again.
Sex in the Lions’ Den. Or is it sexual assault?
Holy fuck.
I scanned the profile. TruthHurts had shared nothing other than their name and the fact that they were brand new. Their location wasn’t even there.
They had no following. How had they managed to bypass the normal BS of social media, where you needed to build a following? I checked their hashtags and saw they’d used only Wrighton’s. But that wouldn’t have zipped them to the front of the line.
I scanned the list of likes. My eyebrows rose when I saw some past players had liked it.
I texted my brother.
Me: Check out Wrighton’s social media, shit’s happening
Mason: You know I don’t give a fuck what they post about
Me: Just look Mase
A few minutes later, he texted back three laughing emojis.
When I looked up again, the media guys were gone, the practice was over, and the players were all talking as they headed to the locker room.
When I saw Coach Sutherland step out of the tunnel and make sure they were all walking past him, I would have killed to be a fly on the wall to hear what he said to them.
I packed up my stuff and headed out.
Back at my desk, I showed the two posts to Gaby, who read everything with wide eyes.
“Oh God, this is going to be a PR nightmare.” She let out a sigh, picked up her tote, and shoved her laptop inside. “I’d better get to the dean’s office and see how we counteract this.”
“Counteract it?”
She looked at me as if I’d told her the earth was flat. “Yeah. It’s our job to preserve the image of Wrighton U. This crap, ugh, it’s going to blow up.” She hesitated. “You want to come?”
“God no.”
She gave a small, condescending smile. “It’s a big job, I know.” She was almost out the door when I remembered the party tomorrow.
“Hey, Gaby, the party tomorrow night after the game, do I need—”
“Oh yeah.” She waved me off. “Coach Sutherland already told me you were going.”
“But do I get . . .” She was gone. “Paid?” I added lamely.
I read the posts again. And I waited for another one, but nothing happened. I’d been sitting there for twenty minutes. I hadn’t noticed.
Was that it? Two posts and then leave it for speculation. I leaned back in my chair and looked at my phone.
Was it this easy? I didn’t know who this was. I didn’t know what they knew. I didn’t know if they were going to make things better or get people hurt.
I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, the posts were gone.
I gave a snort of disdain. “This is why you don’t do it,” I muttered to the empty room. “They’re gone as quick as they came.”
A ping made me look.
Wrighton U can Erase what it Wants. WE KNOW THE TRUTH
Fuck.
TruthHurts1
I admired their balls. They’d obviously been expecting to be taken down. Another post popped up, TruthHurts2, and it was the post that had been deleted.
I sat and watched it unfold as the internet went wild. People had screenshotted the original posts. They were sharing them. You could take down the post, but the mob was already activated.
I saw old players repost it. Guys who were in the NFL. Some with just a question mark, or a ‘What’s Dis?’
By evening, the posts, both new and deleted, were viral across several platforms.
And all I did was watch it all like I was binge-watching Netflix.
Mason texted once to say he was having a great day, and I laughed at the pic he sent me of him grinning while holding up a beer.
It was a genuine smile. I hadn’t seen him wear one of those in a while. Whoever TruthHurts was, I owed them a beer myself for putting that smile on my brother’s face.
I went to bed that night, and I felt relaxed. Whoever the anonymous poster was, they were sharing the burden, and I appreciated it, even if they would never know.
Tomorrow might be bearable. Then I remembered that I needed to go to the after-party, and I still had to buy a dress.
Or whatever I was supposed to wear. I didn’t think I would get off with wearing jeans and a hoodie.
I was back on social media, this time looking for football events and seeing what the women wore.
I was not wearing a dress like that. There was more fabric in Noah’s practice jersey than in some of those gowns. Half of them appeared to be one strong gust of wind away from a public indecency charge.
There were lots of new posts about the spring game, and I realized that the football department was forging on as if nothing had happened.
How very Bobby Ray Sutherland.
I saw a pic of Savannah and her dad at the last event. She was wearing a simple silk dress that somehow looked classier than the designer labels around her.
I could ask Diana.
No. She slept with Mason while she professed to be falling for Coach Douchebag. I knew Mason understood what was going on with her and the football coach, and I also knew my brother wouldn’t give a fuck that he was sleeping with someone else’s girl.
Mason was sometimes very black-and-white.
The gray area that he shouldn’t mess with someone else’s girlfriend wouldn’t be lost on him.
He just didn’t care. She wanted to screw; he’d been with her before, and I knew he would again.
The way he saw it was that the relationship drama wasn’t his. It was Diana’s.
For him, it was physical. For her, it was some messed-up revenge. For Hembry, it was irrelevant.
I could ask Savannah, but I really didn’t want to.
Me: What do I wear to the spring game after-party?
Matthews: As little as possible
I don’t know why I thought he’d have an answer either.
But I was smiling as I put my phone on silent, turned off the light, and went to sleep.