Do Over: A Second Chance Sports Romance: Winthrop Wolves Book 1

by Zoey Shores

  So, I’m majoring in Mechanical Engineering. It’s a grueling schedule, the classes are hard, and by the end of the season last year, I was so stressed between football and classes that I started to feel like I’d aged ten years in five months.

  But I need to take advantage of my time at Winthrop to ensure my future. It’s not just for myself, but for my mother, and brother, as well. I’m determined to become a success, whether it’s in football or not, to give my family the future they deserve.

  “Have fun at class,” Archer jokingly taunts me as I walk down the stairs with my bookbag slung over my shoulder. He’s relaxing deep in his couch seat, sipping on a beer.

  He’s one of the guys who chose an easy major, and his professors take it extra easy on him to top it off. He’s good enough to be drafted if he stays healthy, but like I said, that’s never a sure thing. Archer’s background is a lot like mine, which is why I wish he’d take the education portion of his time as Winthrop more seriously. He’s way too laid back and optimistic about the future for me to talk any sense into him on this topic, though.

  “Enjoy being a lazy bastard,” I shoot back at him with a smile on my face as I open the door.

  Archer lets out a laugh. “Always do bro, always do.”

  I step outside, closing the door behind me. This year, even more is expected from us as a football team, and from me as a Quarterback. And even more is going to be demanded academically as I begin even harder, higher-level classes in one of the most challenging majors the school offers.

  Yeah, this year isn’t gonna be easy.

  CHAPTER TEN: LUKE

  My head is spinning by the time the fifty-minute class is over. If felt like a new idea was introduced every single one of those fifty minutes, and a new complicated formula that I’ll have to memorize was introduced at least every other minute.

  Luckily, my experience as a Quarterback has always given me a leg up when it comes to memorizing information. I’ve always had to have the entirety of our playbook in my head every game, as well as all the information we’d been able to glean about the opposing team’s defensive plays.

  But, shit, this evening’s class was another level of information overload. As I walk out of the large lecture hall and into the narrow corridors of the Science building, I feel like my head is so full of facts and new information that some of it is about to start falling out of my ears.

  I step out of the main entrance and onto the campus outdoors. The sky is a light and mesmerizing twilight blue. It’s the last week of August, and we’re sitting on the fence between summer and fall. It’s still hot and humid, which feels nice after the fifty minutes spent inside the heavily air-conditioned lecture hall. But a gentle breeze and darkness descending when just weeks ago it would still be full daylight remind me that before I know it, the air will begin to chill, and the days will begin to shorten even more.

  The campus is still busy with the comings and goings of students and faculty. An air of insouciance covers the landscape, most of the students still carefree, the eventual struggles of exams and deadlines still far off. For most, their summer break has hardly even ended.

  Me, though, I feel like I’m already right in the thick of things. I’ve already been chewed out by Coach and had a heated practice session. My hardest class of the semester is already kicking my ass, and that’s after just the first lecture.

  I wonder if the other students feel as overwhelmed by that first class session as I do. There’s no doubt that I came into this school far less academically prepared than the average Winthrop student – far less academically prepared than the below-average Winthrop student, if I’m being honest. These are kids who had private tutors all through high school, went to the top schools, took the hardest classes. Is most of the stuff that the professor talked about in class just background knowledge for them?

  I take a deep breath and resolve not to allow self-doubt to crawl into my head.

  Despite all the odds, I finished last year out with an overall GPA of 3.4. Far from the top of my class, but respectable, especially in an engineering major and with a full schedule of football on top of it all from September to January. Shit, that’s more than respectable.

  I got this. I need to keep telling myself that until I believe it – because it’s true.

  I straighten my back and walk across campus to the café across the street. I can feel a couple dozen heads turning my direction as I walk across the main path through the campus green. After the way the Wolves shot up through the college football rankings last year – mostly thanks to my performance – I’m more of a campus celebrity than ever. Combine that with being the unfortunate star of my very own viral video in my scuffle with Carson, and I know that more than a few of the couples and groups of students that I pass are whispering about me.

  But if I want to make it pro, and that’s my driving ambition, I know that’s something I’ll just need to get used to, too.

  I walk into the café, Mike’s Cuppa Joe, and order a large black coffee. I take a seat at an empty table in the back corner of the room, hoping to be as inconspicuous as my recognizable face and large frame (which dwarfs every other guy in the room) allow.

  I reach into my bookbag and take out my notebook, on which I scrawled copious, detailed notes of this evening’s lecture. I’m going to pour over everything until it’s all firmly implanted into my brain.

  I bring out a second notebook and, as I go through the notes I scribbled during class, now and then I use the second notebook to practice some calculations to make sure I understand how to apply all the formulas and techniques. After a while, the super-dense information packed into my notes becomes opaquer as I begin to connect the information to some of the things I learned last year, increasingly making more sense of the new material.

  Eventually, the anxiety of information overload begins to subside, and I start to feel more and more confident. I remember last year I felt like I was drowning in the number of things I had to learn, and all of it at a much higher level than anything I’d ever academically done before.

  As stressful as it was, and as many times as I doubted myself, I always succeeded in the end, for the same reason that I succeed on the football field, for the same reason that, despite all odds, even after being kicked out of high school and playing on the bottom-of-the-barrel local college team in my small hometown, I still ended up a starter on a top college team – because I never give up, and because I can always accomplish anything, as long as I put all of my mind and all of my will behind it.

  After a good study session, I’m about ready to call it a night and pack up my stuff and head home to finally relax, when I hear a soft voice next to me. “Hey, Luke?”

  I don’t even need to glance up to know who it is. I couldn’t forget that voice in a million years. It’s the first voice, other than one in my immediately family, that ever told me I Love You.

  Of course, that was back when we were just kids, when neither of us could really know what those words meant … but as much as I could downplay it now, but back then, nothing to me was more important than those three words escaping her full, delicate, soft lips.

  Of course, it’s Heidi Locke’s voice.

  I look up. Even though this is now the second time I’ve seen her here at Winthrop, it’s this time that the craziness of seeing her again really hits me. Maybe because this is the first time where it’s just us, without being surrounded by our friends. Just Heidi, me, and the heavy weight of the unspoken past that we both shared. Her face awakens such vivid memories. It’s the same face I knew, but at the same time so different after six years.

  Her sleek, blonde hair is done up in a bun on the top of her head. Her hair tied up reveals the soft, smooth outline of her face and her shapely, delicate neck, soft and smooth and alluring. Her eyes are still big and dewy, her irises a light and evocative brown tinged with a faint yet arresting shade of green. She wears a red t-shirt that hugs her slender body and pert, immaculately shaped breasts
.

  After taking in her features, I realize I’ve been sitting here staring at her – without answering her – for way too long now. “Heidi. What’s up.”

  A warm, rosy hue darkens her fair cheeks. “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course,” I answer, my voice tinged with intrigue.

  She pulls out the chair opposite mine and lowers herself into the seat. She exudes a strange awkwardness, and I detect a tension in her body language and facial expressions. Every one of our few interactions over the last couple days have been, to make something of an understatement, a little bit strange; this fact, combined with Heidi’s stilted body language and demeanor now, make me suspect that this one will be no different in that regard.

  “I have something to ask you – well, it might sound a little strange,” she begins, hemming and hawing.

  “You want a spot on the team?” I joke, hoping to put her at ease and inject some of the light playfulness that used to characterize our relationship.

  Heidi seems taken aback in surprise. “What?”

  “That’s what you came to ask me? You want a spot on the team? Break down gender barriers, all that?” I sigh and purse my lips as if I’m deep in thought. “Well, it’ll take some work convincing Coach but I think I could …"

  “No, no, no, why would you …” she trails off as my composure breaks and a smirk overtakes my face.

  After a moment of meeting my smirk with a deadpan expression, her façade cracks and she laughs. The sound of her laughter awakens in me even more memories and emotions long in disuse by now.

  “I never could tell when you were joking,” she says, referencing our past with such casualness that I can’t help but have my smirk turn into a wide, warm smile. It’s true what she says, after all. I loved to tease her, selling even the most ridiculous jokes as if I was being serious, trying to see how far I could draw her in.

  “What’s your real question?” I ask, expelling a short chortle.

  Heidi takes a moment to compose herself, as if she has something complicated to say, and she’s trying to figure out the best way to phrase it. “I write for the student newspaper. As I’m sure you know, what’s been going on with the football team since the beginning of last year is the story that everyone on campus wants to read about. The incredible improvement under Coach Riker, the shakeups in the roster, and of course, the drama behind the scenes. But when it comes to that drama, only one side of the story has been told – the side of the players who were here before Coach Riker came in and started changing things.”

  “You mean the side of the Winthrop rich boys,” I quip.

  Heidi smiles. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “So, then?” I ask, still unsure what her question actually is.

  “I want to tell the other side of the story. I want to help you guys tell the other side of the story. It’s not just the football team that’s changing, but the entire school. It’s becoming less an exclusive club for the rich, and more of a meritocracy where people from all over the world and all walks of life come to learn, and to learn from each other.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “Just your experiences, your feelings. What the dynamic between the old players and the transfer players really is.”

  “Like, what, an interview?”

  Heidi smiles and reaches into her bookbag, extracting a small notebook and a pencil. “Well, if you don’t mind.”

  I chuckle. “You came prepared.”

  “Always,” she quips back, a knowing smile on her face. That was another major difference between us back in high school. Heidi was always so prepared, and I was always so unprepared, that I had to borrow pencils and even loose-leaf paper from her just about every day.

  She asks me questions and follow-up questions about my experience on the team. What the Winthrop students were like when we got here, how the transfer students get along, if there were any old pre-Coach Riker players that we could actually get along with, how Coach Riker addresses the behind-the-scenes controversy. Of course, I ask that she not reveal any specific names as I give her the rundown – she just wants enough information to make a solid, informed analysis of the drama from the new students’ side of things.

  “Wow, Luke, thank you. This is great information. I’ll really be able to work with this.”

  “Don’t forget me when you’re a famous New York Times journalist.”

  She blushes and laughs. “Yeah, right. I have a feeling that between us two, I won’t be the famous one.”

  “Let me walk you home.”

  She hesitates; briefly, but noticeably. “Yeah, sure.”

  Even though she’s warmed to me during the conversation we had here at the café, enough so that sometimes it even felt like I was talking to the Heidi I used to know, there remain minute but perceptible indications in the way she talks, the way she moves, the way she looks at me, that make it clear she’s still maintaining a wall between us.

  After all, even this evening, it’s not like she sought me out because she wanted to catch up and reminisce about old times. It was for a reason – to get a good story to write in the paper. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, the story she’s working on sounds good, and, shit, I’ll probably come out of it looking better.

  But, still, it sits heavy in my mind that the three times we’ve talked have been either by total accident, or for other motives on her part. And that’s after her having spent an entire year with me also at Winthrop, and not having tried to reconnect with me even once.

  I mean, sure, it can be awkward to run into an old ex after a long time of not talking. But it’s not as if our relationship ended on a bad note – hell, it's not even like we actually broke up of our own accord. And besides, even before we dated, we were friends to some extent ever since elementary school.

  We both put away our notebooks and sling out bookbags over our shoulders and walk out the door into the dark night. Not only was I studying for a while, but that little informal interview must have gone on for a while, too, because by now the sky is pitch black. The warm, fuzzy glow of the streetlights around campus dimly and cozily illuminate our walk back across the other side of the campus green toward the section of the small college town that holds most of the student housing.

  “Is this your first year off campus?” I ask her after we’ve walked a couple yards without exchanging more words.

  “Yep. Thank God. I was totally over the whole dorm thing. How about you?”

  “We actually weren’t in the dorms last year. Me and the other transfer players, I mean. Coach Riker was really scrambling to get everything together for the team last minute last year, and a lot of us only ended up getting accepted way past the usual admittance date. They helped us find off-campus housing, though. Actually, I’ve never lived in a dorm.”

  “Wow, really? Not even freshman year before you came to Winthrop?”

  “Nope. I was just at the local community college for that year. Me, playing for a rag-tag community college football team, and now I’m here. Crazy to think about. Coach Riker remembered hearing buzz about me as a potential future recruit back when I was a freshman in high school. He tried to look me up and ended up finding tape of me playing my freshman year. He liked what he saw and gave me a chance.”

  We continue walking home in silence. The streets seem unusually calm for the first Monday of the semester.

  All of a sudden, Heidi muses, “I remember watching your first game freshman year.”

  It’s the first time she’s referenced our past unprompted.

  “Hm?” I query.

  “You really were amazing out there. I didn’t understand anything about the game … I still don’t to be honest. But even I could tell you were leaving everyone else in the dust. None of the opposing players could take you down, and every one of your throws was perfectly accurate. People in the crowd around me were buzzing with excitement. The next day, everyone, even all the teachers, were talking about how we could go
all the way to the national championships with a quarterback like that.”

  I scoff lightly. “They underestimate what the competition is like at the top. I never could have competed against national championship level teams back then, certainly not as a freshman. Even now, I’m far from the best quarterback in college ball. I don’t think any serious analyst would even put me in the top ten.”

  “You’ll just have to prove them wrong this year, them.”

  My chest swells hearing her words of encouragement.

  “Well, here I am.” Heidi stops in front of a small four-unit housing complex.

  “Hope I see you around more often this year,” I say as she turns toward her complex’s short walkway.

  She demurely smiles and nods her head. I can still sense some hesitation in that head nod. I don’t know if it’s just the awkwardness of the time that’s passed between when we were together in high school and now, or if she’s intimidated by my new identity as a big-name college football player, or what else it might be that’s made her seemingly stand-offish with me.

  I do know one thing, though, and it’s only becoming more and more certain to me as I watch her shapely, delicious hips sway while she walks down her walkway toward her apartment.

  I’m not ready to leave Heidi Locke in the past.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: HEIDI

  I read over my final draft of the article I stayed up all night finishing. Based on my interview with Luke yesterday, I expanded it to a profile of Luke, alongside a general summary of the changes in the Winthrop Wolves and the drama it’s incited during Coach Riker’s tenure as head coach.

  The juicy piece of red meat – extra coverage of the fight between him and Carson – is the bait to get people reading.