by Rebel Hart
“Hey.”
I looked over my shoulder, and my heart jumped up into my throat. Zeke was standing there looking at me, and all malice was gone from his face, leaving only something quizzical behind. He held out a few pieces of paper to me. I took it and looked them over and noticed the pages were covered top to bottom in notes. He had all the names of the Widows listed, and under each person, he had notes specific to that person listed. There was no snark or insults, just pure, good advice.
I looked up at him and opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a hand. “Use it or don’t.”
Before I could respond, he turned his back to me and started to walk away, and I watched him unwaveringly until he was in his car and gone from sight.
14
Quinn
I was so exhausted, I didn’t have the energy I needed to argue with Alec as he laid out all of his reasoning for me liking Zeke while we were on the way home. He noticed our exchange at the end of the game, and it fueled his earlier belief that there was something going on. I kept quiet mostly because I wasn’t sure what might come out of my mouth if I didn’t.
I’d been convinced that Zeke wanted nothing more than to take my team and me down, but then I couldn’t understand why he would come to the game at all, let alone take meticulous, helpful notes and give them to me. I told Cal that I would send him a copy of the notes to review for us to go over at Saturday’s practice, but Cal told me I needed to take the day off. He finally got me to come clean about what happened with Zeke. He told me that I needed to recover, and he could use the opportunity to get to know the team better without me there. If I wasn’t in terrible shape, I wouldn’t have been inclined to accept the offer, but a day of rest wouldn’t kill me.
We got home from the first qualifier game around three in the afternoon. The semi-pro teams we were going up against were working around their existing schedules, so we were settling for late morning games with them so that they could get back home for evening games and practices. Despite this, the second I got home, I went to my bedroom and flopped down on my bed. Lately, my days were feeling two weeks long, so when I got back to my bed, it felt like it’d been forever since I’d been there last. My muscles were happy for the reprieve, and it wasn’t long before I let my eyes close and floated off to sleep.
When I woke up sometime later, my room was totally dark. Even though I kept blackout curtains hanging on my windows because I hated when the sun woke me up, there was always a bit of light in the room during the day. The pitch blackness meant it was definitely night. I grabbed my phone off of my bedside table and saw that it was well after midnight. Alec would be gone at work for another few hours, so I couldn’t rely on his kindness to feed me while my legs still preferred not moving. I dragged myself out of bed and forced my muscles to cooperate while I showered, changed into more comfortable clothes, and made myself a sandwich.
I wasn’t tired at all, so I grabbed my laptop from my backpack and went to sit down in the living room. I used our casting device to throw my computer screen to the TV screen and started clicking through some of the week’s football highlights. I skipped through the pro football highlights—not that I didn’t care about them, just that it always seemed like the popular players got more highlights than the legitimately good ones. I settled on the semi-pro highlights, and eventually, the reels got to the Vipers’ most recent game. Flashes of my running drills with Zeke came to my brain, and my body ran hot. I blamed it on the heavy blanket I had wrapped around me.
A vast majority of the Vipers’ highlights were of Zeke, which was something, considering that he was obviously distracted during their game. He was still the most controlled person on the field, and unlike my original opinion, it didn’t seem like Zeke was as mysterious with his team as I thought. He was often calling out plays and trying to coax his team in one direction or another, but they just weren’t grasping it.
The highlights were impressive because it was Zeke running plays on his own that he should have been able to trust his receivers or running backs to aid him with. He’d made a pretty impressive fifty-yard pass perfectly to one of his receivers, only for that receiver to turn right into a tackle and nearly fumble the ball. Zeke was good, and I’d be a spiteful idiot to deny that. He’d mentioned the pros more than once, and seeing his skill against that of his team, I had to wonder why he didn’t go pro.
I closed the sports website and went to Google. I typed his name into the search box, hissed at my heart for reacting when his face popped up on the screen, and scrolled through the articles. Many of them were regarding this week’s game, but eventually, I got to some older articles from a couple of years ago. All of them seemed to suggest that Zeke was favored to go pro. In fact, he was listed as the rumored number one draft pick. I kept scrolling until one article caught my attention.
Number One Draft Pick’s Dreams Dashed, the headline read.
I clicked the article and read through it. The first few paragraphs were all about Zeke Matheson’s rise to fame from high school to college. He played for a D1 school and was the starting quarterback on his college team during his freshman year. For all four years in college, he was one of the top college players highlighted on ESPN and other sports outlets, and when it got to his senior year, he immediately started to trend as the rumored number one draft pick.
I clicked through some of his highlights the article had listed and couldn’t deny that the way he ran a field was electric. He couldn’t be stopped. It didn’t matter if he was running, passing, tackling, or blocking, he had a presence about him that made it feel like the entire sport of football had been invented just so he could play. I followed college football pretty closely, but Zeke and I were almost the same age, and the height of his career took place when I was too embroiled in my own collegiate experience to pay attention. I couldn’t help but feel bad that I’d missed seeing him play at his peak.
The article took a dark turn when it linked in a video of Zeke taking a nasty helmet-to-helmet tackle from a guy twice his size that left him a crumpled heap on the turf. It was clear the player was trying to hurt Zeke, and though he had been flagged instantly for unnecessary roughness and was ejected from the game, it didn’t change that it had done irreversible damage. When the behemoth finally climbed off of Zeke, his leg was bent back at an angle that was unnatural for anyone. The coach and players from both teams clamored around him, but he was unmoving. The game was forfeited in favor of Zeke’s team for the blatant attack, but no one cared about wins or losses as EMTs moved onto the field to collect Zeke’s unconscious body.
I started to cry myself as the entire stadium of fans remained totally silent while Zeke was loaded onto a stretcher and carried off of the field. He was gone from sight for nearly two minutes before the announcers said anything, and when one finally did, all he said was, “Is Zeke Matheson’s career over?”
What a horrific waste of talent. Zeke was favored to be the number one pick for a good reason—he was a monster on the football field. One jealous, idiotic player’s bad decisions had given his career a total one-eighty. He’d probably be super bowl bound, not held up in some semi-pro team in Montpelier, Idaho. No wonder he had a chip on his shoulder. No pro team was going to pick up someone who’d probably fight with leg weaknesses for the rest of his career. If the coach of the Vipers hadn’t been a Zeke Matheson fan and willing to take a chance on him, Zeke would probably be coaching a high-school team somewhere.
Suddenly, I felt like week-old trash. All I’d done was mock his dreams to go pro, not realizing that he was just chasing after something he’d beyond rightfully earned. I closed my laptop and wiped my eyes free of the tears. I owed him an apology. I’d been specifically instructed to stay home and rest during my day off, but I couldn’t do that. If Zeke could recover from that horrendous injury, he deserved to go against someone who was going to fight until the last drop of blood had drained from their body. Tomorrow, I would go and apologize to him, and if he challenged me again, I woul
d meet him head-on.
The sound of keys jingling in the front door pulled me to attention. A glance at my phone showed it was two-thirty in the morning. The door opened, and Alec stepped in. He took one look at me and frowned.
“What are you doing up?” He got closer and noticed my red eyes, and he dropped everything in his hands and ran over. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m okay,” I replied. “I just got done Googling Zeke. He was huge, Alec, like a huge deal. He was number one to the pros until some asshole tackled him, trying to hurt him, and shattered his leg.”
“Jesus,” Alec replied. “No wonder he’s like that.”
I nodded. “I’m going to go apologize to him tomorrow.”
“And?” Alec raised an eyebrow. I looked at him with confusion, so he continued. “And then you will ask him out?” I looked over at Alec through a half-lidded gaze, and he held his hands up. “Fine, but I maintain that you like him.”
Alec stood up to walk away, and I grumbled, “I don’t not like him.”
Alec’s face shot back to me, and he plopped back down onto the couch next to me. “I knew it!”
“Okay! Don’t get all—you—about this. I don’t really know how I feel.” I sighed. “I know that the other night was the most fun I think I’ve ever had playing football, and knowing this,” I motioned to my computer, “I think I understand him better. I know what it’s like to constantly be fighting.” I lowered my voice. “And he is gorgeous.”
Alec yelped, and I stuck a finger in his face.
“But! He’s been on a relentless warpath to end my football career. Sure, his display today, or yesterday, suggested maybe that has changed, but I can’t go and crush on someone who doesn’t want me to play football.”
“That’s fair,” Alec replied, “but if it has changed, and you go there and apologize, and he were to, say, ask you out for a drink?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t say no.”
Alec jumped up off the couch, shooting both arms above his head. “Yes! Ha! Zeke for the win! Alec is right!”
I slapped his stomach. “Shh! We have neighbors.” I chuckled. “Why are you so excited about this, anyway?”
“Let’s see, why am I, your best friend, excited to see you lusting after something other than sewn together pigskin?” He massaged his chin. “Which reason do I start with?”
I waved my hand through the air. “Nevermind, I don’t want to know.”
I leaned back against the couch and pulled the blanket I had over my legs up to my shoulders. Alec started to tell me some story about something that happened at work, but it was far from my ears. I was already thinking about how I would truly react if I felt like Zeke felt differently about me than I first thought.
15
Zeke
“You can go fuck yourself,” Darius growled at me. “I am not running end zone to end zone suicides on the fives. You have lost your goddamn mind.”
“Yeah, what the hell Matheson?” one of the guards, Desmond, huffed. “We’ve only ever done half-field on the tens. We won our last game. Why are you doubling up?”
The team’s backlash at my most recent suggestion wasn’t unexpected. I was shocked when Quinn suggested it. “We could all use the added work on our stamina. We’ve been just scraping by in our games lately. I don’t want to play on a middling team. I don’t want to straddle the fence.” I crossed my arms. “Are you saying you can’t do it?”
No one wanted to answer that question. I knew I was probably asking something unreasonable of my team, but if Quinn could do it, and I could do it—albeit slower—I wanted a team that could do it. “That’s what I thought. Line up.”
More than one swear word was thrown my way, and even Tyler was looking at me like he was going to intervene when all of their attention diverted to something else.
“That’s the Widow’s captain, right?” someone whispered.
“Fuck, she’s hot. A chick that hot, and she’s into football. That’s a win-win,” someone else replied.
I looked over, and Quinn was standing in the opening to the pathway back toward the locker rooms. Ordinarily, people couldn’t just walk inside, but the security at the stadium was lazy. Not only was it a semi-pro stadium, but it was a semi-pro stadium in Montpelier, Idaho. The risk of a crazed fan wandering in was low.
“I’m gonna ask her out,” Patrick said finally, and for some reason, a fiery rage burned up inside of me. I glared over at him, and he stopped in his tracks. We stared each other down, and finally, he rolled his eyes. “I didn’t realize you’d already staked a claim.”
The concept gave me a chill, but I ignored it in favor of blowing on the whistle around my neck. The entire team grumbled and started to shittily jog the suicides. Patrick was the last off the line, so I blew my whistle again, and he charged off. Once everyone was off running drills, I started over toward Quinn. She was wearing a gray, zip-up hoodie, the zipper of which was struggling to stay where Quinn had left it half-zipped down due to the size of her chest. Under her hoodie was a black t-shirt with her jersey number on it, and she was also wearing a pair of hip-hugging jeans and athletic sneakers. Her brown hair was hanging down in waves over her head, and her eyes were shimmering in the sunlight. There was a muted throb in my chest as I got closer that I wanted to rip out and throw away. We’d done little else besides argue and scrap. Why was my body suddenly reacting to seeing her?
I stopped about ten feet away and crossed my arms. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to apologize to you,” she replied. “I didn’t know about all that shit you went through your senior year. That sucks.”
The brief warmth I felt shoved aside so that anger could step through. “You came here to pity me?”
Quinn recoiled. “What? No.”
“I know that you don’t know much about me, so take this as a free lesson. I don’t accept pity. It’s my least favorite thing. I’ve worked hard for everything I’ve ever had, and I’ll continue working hard. I had to battle against four older brothers coming up, and I refused to be babied or looked down upon. So, if you came here to just make me feel shittier about that stuff, you can get out and not come back.”
“Hey,” Quinn snapped. “Don’t scream at me because of the shit you’ve been through. I didn’t do it.”
I opened my mouth to respond and then stopped. No one had ever given it to me like that before.
“I didn’t come here to pity you, I know what that feels like. No one ever took me seriously coming up because I was a girl who wanted to play football. If anything, I’ll treat you harsher now because I know what you’re fighting for. No special treatment.” She rolled her eyes. “I suppose it shouldn’t shock me that this is how you’d react. You’re an ass after all.”
I imagined Daniel nicely trying to tell me that people’s entire worlds don’t revolve around me, and suddenly, it all locked into place. I immediately assumed that Quinn’s whole thought process was based on me, but it was much more about comparing her own experiences.
“Your team needs work, but you’re good, Zeke. I guess I just thought you’d like to hear that from someone who knows what it feels like to be looked down upon. Bye.”
She turned around, and an unexpected jolt of panic cracked through me. “Wait.”
Quinn turned to face me, and I suddenly found myself without a plan. “Stay.” That sounded desperate. “Watch what a real team practices like.” That sounded mean. I wasn’t sure what feeling I was going for, but I was failing regardless.
“Oh, do show me, football master,” Quinn hissed sarcastically, but she walked past me toward the team bench.
I took a deep breath and tried to shove Quinn as far away from my brain as possible. Why did I stop her when she tried to leave? Why was I suddenly nervous knowing she was watching? I continued to run my team through our typical practice and tried not to be too much of an ass and prove her single insult right. The way my team all stared daggers into me as they shoveled off the field when
our practice was over was a good indicator that I had probably failed. I waited until they were all gone before I approached Quinn again. I couldn’t stand her just a few days ago, so why did it all of a sudden make me nervous to go near her?
I walked over and sat down on the bench as far away from Quinn as I could. “So, did you learn something?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I learned that you’re pretty fucking unfair to your team.”
I looked over at her. “What?”
“You’re militant to them, and so little of what you’re doing reinforces that team mentality that you’re missing. It’s like they all hate you.” I didn’t want to admit that she was right. Most of them did hate me. “You have all the pieces here, but you’re just not putting them together right. You have to focus more on rewarding your team’s strengths rather than punishing their weaknesses. Every gap that’s out there could be filled with someone else, but you’re too busy focusing on trying to make everyone great at everything. Not everyone can be like you.”
I remained silent. She was so right that it was painful. My goal from the start had been to bring my team up to my level rather than finding a level that worked for all of us. I thought about some of the players I used to play with when I was younger. The bigger and stronger ones. If they were never willing to play down, I never would have learned how to play up. Practice was going to change a lot from now on, but I didn’t say it out loud. Maybe it was that I didn’t want to give Quinn the satisfaction, but it felt more like keeping my mouth shut for once was a good way to prove I was internalizing what she said.
After an extended period of silence, Quinn spoke again. “So…you have four older brothers?”