Game Day Box Set: A College Football Romance

by Lily Cahill

  Chapter Seventeen

  Megan

  I CHECK MY PHONE FOR the ten thousandth time today, but Reggie still hasn’t texted, even though I’ve sent him multiple messages.

  Last night when he dropped me off at my apartment, he didn’t come in. Even when I tugged at his shirt sleeve and basically begged him to come to bed with me, he just said he had to be his best for practice today, since he’ll be back on the field for the first time since his injury. It could be the truth, but I can’t ignore the very real possibility that he’s mad at me.

  I mean, of course he’s mad at me. I basically rejected him last night. My head insists that I made the right choice, even though my heart is aching. It’s a terrible kind of proof—if my heart hurts this bad now, think of how bad it will be when we end up breaking up later. No, it’s better this way. It would probably be even better if Reggie never spoke to me again.

  That thought makes me want to bury my head in my book and cry. I’ve been at the team practice facility trying to study all morning, making a good show of using my highlighter and Post-its, but nothing is really sinking in. Even though practically every person on the physical therapy staff is here today, the med office feels quiet without Reggie. I’ve been so adamant about just being friends because I wanted to avoid this very thing. I never wanted anyone to get hurt.

  I’m sitting on the bed that Reggie and I sat on the first time we ate pizza together, the first time we really got to know each other, and I think I might have to get up and move somewhere else. Sitting here is not helping me, but moving would be admitting that I can’t stop thinking about him. I kick myself for being such a girl.

  The door slams open, and I jump as Garrett paces into the room.

  “Where’s Davis?”

  “He’s back on the field today.”

  Garrett stares at me. “Is he ready for that?”

  “Coach seems to think so.”

  “That’s great, Noble,” Garrett says, his voice dripping with derision. “Does the coach have any medical credentials what-so-ever?”

  I bite my bottom lip to keep from snapping back, but Garrett raises his eyebrows at me, like he actually wants me to respond to his question.

  “I would think that years of coaching experience gives him a pretty decent idea of when a player has recovered enough to get back to practice.”

  “So you’re sure Davis won’t push himself too hard, get re-injured and not be able to play on Saturday? Because it’s a big game. Our rivals. And if he’s not on the field ….” Garret shrugs his shoulders. He can’t actually come out and say that he’ll fail me if Reggie’s not better, but it’s an unspoken rule we all know. If you’re responsible for recovery and your player isn’t recovered, say goodbye to grad school.

  “I know,” I say to Garrett, but I’m suddenly nervous.

  “So you’re promising me that Davis is going to play on Saturday.”

  “I can’t promise that, Garrett. There could be a massive hail storm, he could come down with a migraine, Arizona could forfeit the entire game due to the whole team getting a horrific bout of food poisoning. Anything is possible.”

  I’m talking back to the man who holds my future in his hands. I should be nodding and doing whatever he asks. But dammit, I barely slept last night and I’m freaking out about Reggie and I just can’t with Garrett right now.

  Garrett’s face has gone very still. He stalks closer and lowers his voice to a hiss so none of the other therapy staff will overhear his threats. “You know what else is possible? That you not properly caring for a first-string player could affect my annual bonus. And Megan, you don’t want to do that. Trust me.”

  I don’t blink. I refuse to be intimidated. “He’ll be ready,” I say with more confidence than I feel. If Garrett is desperate enough to threaten me, he’s definitely vindictive enough to screw up my grad school recommendations.

  As soon as Garrett back in his little office, I start texting Reggie. I’ve just about composed the perfect text—the one that communicates “I’m sorry” and “Please talk to me” and “I’m worried about you” with an inspired string of emojis—when Reggie busts through the door. My stomach—hell, all of my internal organs—jump up into my throat.

  “Hey, I was just thinking about you.” I smile and try to pretend like things aren’t super weird, and that he hasn’t been ignoring my texts all morning. “I thought you were on the field today.”

  “I was, but Coach didn’t want me to push it, so he thought I should come by here and do some PT to finish out the day.”

  “Great!” I force cheer into my voice, anything to cover the horrible awkwardness between us.

  We start with just stretching. My hands are tentative on his skin, but it feels good to have contact. I crouch down in front of him, moving his foot forward and back, rotating it around. His legs are so long that, even though I’m touching him, his body feels forever away. I look up at him, but he’s staring out the window.

  “Hey, Davis, looking good,” one of the PT guys high-fives Reggie on his way by. “We’re gonna kill ‘em Saturday!”

  Reggie smiles at the guy and answers with our school cheer, “Can’t stop the stampede.”

  Finally, a smile.

  “Your range of motion is looking really good,” I say to him when his focus is back on his ankle. I grab a wobble board—a plastic disc with a rubber ball in the middle that we’ve been using to strengthen his ankle and his balance to prevent re-injury—and hold Reggie’s hand as he climbs up to it. With the big game just a few days away, I couldn’t be happier about how Reggie’s ankle has healed.

  “I think I owe you a celebration dinner,” I say as I let go of his hands.

  He doesn’t look at me, but I tell myself it’s because he’s concentrating. He tilts the board until the back rim hits the floor and then tilts it forward. He knows the routine I’m going to cycle him through, and he’s doing it expertly. We really couldn’t have asked for a better turn out.

  I smile at him. “I know I told you my cooking is abysmal, and it is, but I promise to have pizza on speed dial if it goes wrong.”

  His brow is crinkled as he looks down at his feet. He hasn’t made any jokes about the wobble board, or tried to draw a nipple on it like he did the last one (that I had to replace so that Garrett wouldn’t freak out when he saw the ball turned into a boob).

  “And we still haven’t watched Terminator 2,” I add. He’s been trying to get me to watch the movie with him. I look up at him hopefully, but he still keeps his eyes focused on a far wall.

  I can hear the desperation in my voice, like I’m trying to bribe a kid with candy, but I just want things to go back to the way they were before last night. When we were friends. Who had amazing sex. I want both of those things back, not this quiet, sullen Reggie who won’t look at me.

  He steps off the board. “Megan,” he starts. “I can’t do this.” He’s talking slowly, like he’s translating what he wants to say from another language. “I thought I could. Last night when you said, just friends, I felt like I’d gotten the wind knocked out of me, only worse, because the feeling didn’t go away.”

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Is it so bad to be just friends?” I’m trying to keep my voice low, because there are other PT students and athletes in the room. “I want you in my life.”

  “As a friend.”

  “Why not?” I wish he would look at me. This is all so logical, and I’m certain he would see the sense of it if he would just look at me. “The end of college is just around the corner, and neither one of us knows where we’re going to be next year. Why do we have to label it? Friends are good. We can hang out, spend time together, just like before.”

  “What did you think we were doing before?” His voice is low, his eyes hidden by his dreadlocks as he looks down at his ankle.

  “We talked about it,” I say, frustrated. “We said—”

  “You know what, you’re right,” he says, finishing up his normal stretches
. “It’s my problem. I’m the one who caught feelings.”

  I seem to be coming down with a bad case of feelings myself—big, scary feelings that I’m afraid will kill me if I let them in too close. “Reggie, please.”

  He finally meets my eyes, and the sadness and hurt I see there make me catch my breath. “I can’t be friends with you, Megan. And I can’t keep hanging out with you and pretending that I’m not falling for you.”

  There’s blood rushing in my ears, tingles running down my spine. Some scientific part of me catalogs my body’s reaction, diagnoses shock. “Reggie. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “But you don’t want to hold on to me, either. I’m not asking you to marry me; I’m asking to date you. Either you want to be with me or you don’t. It’s that simple.”

  It’s not that simple. But to Reggie, it is. And I’m not going to be able to convince him otherwise. That’s how he lives his life, all in or all out. All in on football, all out on everything else. And I’m always hedging my bets, making backup plans. We shouldn’t work together. We’ll fall apart eventually, no matter how much we might want it to be different.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says after a long pause where I just stand there like an idiot, biting my lip and wishing I could rewind time. “I think you’re right, my ankle feels really good. So I guess that means we’re done here.”

  He gives me a tight smile that has nothing in common with the grin that normally brightens his face. I did that—I put that expression on his face. And it’s the last one I see, because he walks out the door and doesn’t look back.

  I can only stare at the door as it swings shut behind him. My mind is utterly blank. My body, on the other hand, is screaming. My heart is pounding wildly, but my veins feel like they’re filled with concrete. It hurts to breathe, and I feel as stiff as a robot as I bend over to pick up the wobble board. A droplet hits the plastic, running down the ridged surface, and it takes me a long second to understand that it’s one of my tears.

  I feel like every eye in the room is staring at me, but I refuse to meet anyone’s eye until I have myself under control. I turn back to the table—the one I automatically think of as “Our Table”—and the sight of it makes tears splash down my cheeks. I swipe them away, sniffing back a snob. If anything, I’m losing more control as I stand there, trying to reel it in. I’m about to start crying at work.

  I hate Reggie for doing this here, where I can’t fall apart. And I desperately need to fall apart.

  “You okay?” I hear someone say.

  I don’t bother to turn around and see who it is. I walk too fast to the door, probably attracting even more attention to myself, and push my way out into the hall. The tears are falling in earnest now, and I’m not sure how long I can hold back the whimpers that are piling up in my throat. I slip into the bathroom, lock the door behind me, then collapse against the tile wall and slump to the floor without hesitation. The tile feels cool against my back and echoes with my sobs.

  Sometime later, the tears subside. I feel hollowed out, without a center. My head is hanging in my hands, my knees pulled up to my chest, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get to my feet. If “just friends” was keeping me from getting my heart broken, then why am I crying on the floor of the girls’ bathroom?

  The thought only makes me feel worse.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Megan

  THE LAST COUPLE DAYS HAVE been gray and rainy. The crisp fall air has chilled with overcast skies, but even if the weather was glorious I still wouldn’t want to leave my apartment. It’s not like I’ve had much reason to. I’m in a mid-semester lull, no papers due, no exams, and no Reggie. I suddenly have loads of free time and no one to spend it with.

  Just as I think the words, Chloe knocks on my door. I don’t get up. I don’t answer her. Maybe she’ll think I’m at the library.

  “You got a package,” she chimes through the door. I sit still, not making any noise. I hear her place whatever it is at my door and walk away.

  I toss my comforter back over my head and let my breathing fill the tiny space with muggy warmth. I click on my cell phone, the glow from the phone filling up my cocoon blanket, and I scroll through Facebook, looking for posts from Reggie—trying to figure out what he’s been doing. If he’s replaced me yet. There’s no telling from the feed. By the time I emerge from my social media hole, forty minutes have gone by.

  “Disgusting,” I mutter to myself.

  I need to get out of this funk. I fling my covers off and roll out of bed, doing twenty jumping jacks just to get the blood moving. I’m not ready to admit to Chloe that I’ve been hiding in my room, so I put a blanket down on the ground to pad any noise of the exercise. Then I drop and do twenty push ups just for good measure. By the time I finish, I’m breathing hard and a little sweaty. A sure sign that I’ve been moping too long. I take a deep breath and open my computer. It’s time to stop pouting and start being productive.

  There are only two more months until applications are due for graduate school, and I need to start getting them done. I pull up my spreadsheet of all the programs I’m considering. I think I have it narrowed down to six. I’ve created a scoring system to rank the schools. MSU is at the top of the list, scoring high in all the categories: quality of program, potential for generating job leads/connections, location, and cost.

  Nodding to myself, I pull up the MSU application and start filling out the easy parts. I get to employment record and have to start looking up the phone numbers and addresses of old jobs. It leads me to the website of the football summer camp where I worked two summers ago. I stayed in Granite, assisting high school kids with strength training. Mack Oaks, the coach I worked for, is still there, and as I input his information into the application, it occurs to me that he might need some help again this summer.

  It would be a great way for Reggie to get some experience. I could refer him. I’m sure it wouldn’t pay much, but at least it’s a foot in the door. I’m sure he’d think I’m interfering, but all I’m really doing is giving him a chance. Even if he no longer wants anything to do with me doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring.

  Before I think too much about it, I click on the spreadsheet and insert another column titled “Reggie.” I give MSU a ten out ten possible points in the category and paste the link that has Oak’s phone number and email on it into the notes section. I don’t know why I do it. Reggie has expressed clearly that he’s not interested in coaching, but there’s a nagging feeling inside of me. I can’t seem to let go of Reggie’s future. There’s so much potential there, but all he can see is a dead end.

  His future is more important than our relationship, or whatever it was. He doesn’t want to be friends anymore, fine. Tears well up in my eyes and spill over. It’s happened so often lately that I’m used to it, and I just let them roll down my cheeks.

  Reggie and I aren’t friends anymore. The reality of it punches me in the gut. Again. It sucks. It really sucks, because I didn’t even realize that Reggie was one of my best friends until he was gone.

  But so what. Even if we’re not friends, that doesn’t mean I can just sit and watch him throw away his future. He doesn’t believe he’s special, but I know deep down in my bones that he would be a great coach. He’s so kind and insightful, yet he always manages to make things fun. Maybe he doesn’t want to hear it from me, but even if I have to send him what I find anonymously, I still feel compelled to do the research. At least I’ll have done what I can to show him what he could be.

  The next school on my list is the University of Delaware. I start searching for coaching jobs and filling in the Reggie column of my spreadsheet. When I get to the bottom of the spreadsheet, I realize that I haven’t looked at anything that doesn’t coincide with my plans.

  I get up from my desk and a pile of tissues fall from my lap to the ground. I’ve spent all this time talking about being just friends and avoiding getting involved because I didn’t want a broken heart, but appare
ntly I’ve failed.

  Well, dammit, I didn’t sign up for this. I have goals, and plans, and I’m not going to let this pain slow me down. If I’m going to be heartbroken either way, then I would rather have more of him than less. I can’t protect myself from pain forever. But why am I denying myself the joy of being with him now?

  I need to find him. I need to fix this.

  I open my door, and the package Chloe left leaning against it falls flat next to my foot. And it gives me an idea.

  Chapter Ninteen

  Reggie

  COACH PRESCOTT SITS BEHIND HIS desk, waiting for me to continue.

  I take a breath before saying, “We’ve mostly been running old tape. I make West call the play before the QB lets the ball go. I try to get in his face or distract him while we do it, and he’s getting better. He’s making the calls faster.”

  Prescott nods his head. He’s called me into his office to debrief him on how West has been doing in our sessions.

  “I was about to the end of my rope with him,” Coach admits. He tugs at the brim of his ball cap and settles it back into place. “But he doesn’t seem as nervous in practice as he has been. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s working. And I thank you for that.”

  “Yes, sir.” I nod my head and squirm a little in my chair, trying to get comfortable. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to that. “West had to get more confident eventually. You can’t spend every day on the field and not start to get more comfortable.”

  “So far it hasn’t translated to a game, but it’s progress nonetheless.” Coach Prescott leans back in his chair and takes a long look at me. “I’m impressed with you, Reggie.”

  My eyebrows raise.

  “I told you to help West mostly because I needed to get him out of my sight for a minute. I know he can throw so much better than what he gives me in a scrimmage. I was frustrated, and I thought if I kept him on the field, I’d make a mistake by pushing him too hard or breaking down his confidence even more. I thought you might talk to him, make him see that he needs to change his outlook. But not only did you take my request seriously, you’ve done better with the task than any of the coaches I have on staff.”