4. The Grind
FOUR
The Grind
CALEB
“I still play chess,” he muttered, fingers clenched so tight he thought he might bend the steering wheel with his bare hands as he battled the urge to run after her and beg her forgiveness for something he didn’t regret.
Only minutes before, his face ached from smiling, and his lips tingled from kissing her. When his Mystery Girl turned him into her Mystery Boy, he left Caleb Fields behind for a night. Mystery Boy wasn’t a closed-off college freshman whose only strength was physical. Nameless in a dark hallway or a borrowed room, he could let go of every inhibition, give in to chemistry, and fall in love. He could touch her and please her and leave her breathless from his kisses, but the thud of his heart all night told him his bravery was fueled by more than the lust that hit him like a bolt to the chest when she fell in his lap. In the absurdity of anonymity, he let her break through every wall he’d constructed and tangle her fingers in his secrets—she was the heroine of their game, whose eyes looked like home.
Shannon Van Pelt .
It was already impossible, and over.
One girl who messed with his head about pregnancy was quite enough. He’d been an inexperienced, fumbling moron with Shannon the night before because he chose to be. No one had ever been worth that risk.
Now, regret swamped his lungs like water, and he couldn’t undo any of it.
He was too edgy to return to his dorm, and drove until he found himself where he often wound up before dawn on Sundays: nearly alone in the football program’s state-of-the-art training facility. Instead of another morning in the endless grind—lift more, run faster, and jump higher in a carefully calibrated routine designed for his checklist of weekly goals—he stormed through his regular circuits with added pounds and reps, slamming down weights and medicine balls in a haphazard search of a burn in his muscles that might distract from the heat of her body against his.
Each time he blinked, Shannon still writhed beneath him as he traced his initials everywhere he could reach. The small circles of her knees. Her earlobes and elbows, the soft dimples of her thighs and the ridges of her ribs. His hands shook as he lifted, fighting the sensation of her delicate fingers curled around his to show him where she wanted to be touched. He drove his feet down harder with every jump. At the pull-up bar, he nearly flung himself into flight.
She lingered in the scratches on his back and the ache in his groin, and his heart already hurt from hating her for what she did.
He shook out his sweaty hair and clamped on his headphones, clicking through songs for a beat he wanted as he dragged three long step-over blocks in front of a mirror. For footwork, he had to concentrate, and in his dizziness he’d try anything to dig into a place in his mind she hadn’t taken over. He had to get in the zone, sync his muscles and brain stem into a machine as fast as a heartbeat on cocaine.
Caleb had to be accurate and dialed into every twitch of his nerves to break up a catch without the dreaded pass interference penalty. On the run to beat a receiver who might change his route in a blink, his feet had to do precisely what he needed them to do without thinking, nimble in every direction no matter which way he was looking, so he could focus on his arms and hands.
Focus was impossible when a rack of medicine balls in his line of sight were the same blue as the streaks in her hair. The morning’s swipe with a harsh disinfectant scorched his nose when he grabbed one, and he dropped it back onto the stand with a heavy thud. The equipment should be red, like everything else in the place that made him stronger: red and black and gray and silver. His team’s sworn enemies at the school to the north were blue and maize.
Blue and blonde.
Bouncing on his toes, he bent his knees, held a stance for two seconds, and started a basic drill. Up, over, back, moving between the blocks without looking down—a quick tempo that fit with the music, his heels never touching the floor. From his hips down, he could move freely, but he kept eye contact with his reflection and kept his upper body still so he didn’t lean too far into his momentum.
He mis-stepped, grazed a block, and barely righted himself before falling. After a deep breath, he restarted the drill he’d run since he was ten years old, watched himself falter in the mirror, then growled in frustration and stuttered to a stop.
She was related to Missy Van Pelt, of all people. The freshman class at the university was more than twice the size of their hometown, and he still couldn’t get rid of her. Even in his fastest footwork drills, he couldn’t outrun or undo the fact that it was Missy, a lifelong dancer, who once taught him ballet tricks for keeping his torso and shoulders aligned. When his last-ditch efforts to be a gentleman in their breakup were met with nothing but the venom, Caleb buried the simmering resentment, told himself he was right on principle and very mature for his age, and walked away to get on with his life.
The irony of being the fastest high school safety in his state, yet unable to shake off a high school ex-girlfriend, tensed his muscles until his neck corded with strain. The scowl lining his face aged him ten years.
He picked the university from the pile of Division I football offers at his feet because it was close to home, but not too close, and massive enough to allow him the anonymity he never had with the eyes of a small town on him since the day he was born. Back in his little corner of western Michigan, his family had been unofficial royalty for generations. Caleb enjoyed the view from the bleachers for the first time in his life in Ohio. As a quiet underclassman in a red-and-gray-clad wave, he could keep his thoughts and his time to himself outside of football. Once, he went twenty hours without speaking to anyone but his roommate. It was bliss.
He paced the route between the blocks—once, twice, faster and a little jumpy the third time—oblivious to the sideways glances from a few teammates who saw the look on his face and thought it best not to greet him with a friendly smack on the shoulder and a joke about looking a little slow that morning.
Missy had been his only girlfriend, and his feelings for her didn’t prepare him to have his socks—and his pants—knocked off by a captivating stranger with stormy lake eyes that felt like home before they ever spoke. He should count himself well-rid of a girl who could lie about the worst thing to lie about and call it fun. He should say he never liked storms that much anyway.
He dragged the blocks a foot closer to one another, then held his own gaze in the mirror and bounced on his toes again as his headphones blared one of his favorite warm-up songs. Caleb murmured a line about haters trying to hold him down.
Watch me now .
On his first backward motion, he stumbled and tripped, and didn’t catch himself in time.