Team Hate

by Hart, Rebel

  “What do you mean John was part of it?”

  “Sebastian called him to his office today and told him the whole plan. He even sent John to try and convince me that California was the best option. When Sebastian’s little flunkie brought me the NDA, he told me that John was going to get to keep his job and would get lots of media attention if I signed. When I asked him if he knew, he said he did.”

  Jim shook his head. “I’m glad I’m quitting. Fuck these people. I’ll just go teach some gym class and live with my boyfriend and be happy.”

  “That sounds like a great plan. I wish it was going to be that cut-clean for me.”

  Jim set his hand on my head. “We’ll figure something out.” He scratched my head a little. “We’ll get through the Super Bowl and then we’ll both hit the bricks.”

  I looked up at him. “I can’t. The longer I stay, the more it hurts. When I leave today, I’m not coming back.”

  “The NFC Championship game.”

  “You’ll be fine. You’re an awesome coach, and you have a hardworking team.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve developed better chemistry with these guys in a month than I have in years. They don’t really want me. They want you.”

  “Some of them don’t.” My heart fractured and crumbled again. “I can’t do it.”

  “At least be in the stands. Be our silent good luck charm.”

  I thought about it for a long time. Could I even manage that, or would that be too hard? I remembered the guys and how much they took care of me after Dax attacked me. They all offered to be with me at all times and were so patient with me as I recovered. Still, the idea of being anywhere near that field made my stomach turn. I wasn't certain I could do it. It was something I was going to have to sleep on.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Jim rubbed my head. “So, I guess things are over with John then?”

  Tears filled my eyes. “Yeah. I don’t know how he could do that to me. Was it all just a joke to him?”

  “I don’t know. I…” He sighed. “He cares about you. I can see that in the way that he looks at you. He wouldn’t do all of that stuff just to turn around and sell you out to Sebastian.”

  “But that’s exactly what he did.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense though. I know it’s hard to believe right now because you’re so convinced he did it, but why would he when he hates Sebastian as much as we do?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Jim bit his bottom lip between his teeth as he mulled it over. “I don’t know either, but there’s still a piece of this puzzle missing. You may have signed that non-disclosure, but I have a strange feeling that this case isn’t over just yet.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: John

  The roar of thousands of fans met the booming bass of the Knights’ theme music as the NFC Championship game neared kick-off. We’d just rushed out onto the field with the confidence of men who were prepared to win a battle, when in reality, we weren’t. A huge piece of our team was missing, and for as long as she wasn’t there, we couldn’t quite knock into our groove. We were grumpy and short with one another and generally behaving like children. If only Jane was there to toss some well-placed insults our direction and whip us into shape, we’d be staring down a victory, but now, none of us were certain.

  “Alright guys, gather round.” Jim pulled off his headset as we circled around him, all with a slump to our shoulders. “I know this isn’t what any of us wanted. Obviously, we feel a step out of line without Jane, but nothing can be done. She signed a non-disclosure, she’s typed up her resignation. It’s done.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Caleb cut in, his head hung low. “I mean… She’s our coach, you know?”

  Benton slammed his fists together. “All because of that stupid pervert, Dax?”

  Jack shook his head. “Are they seriously gonna paint it like he was the good guy? How can they do that?”

  “They can do whatever they want.” All eyes shot to me at the sound of my voice. “The people with the money have the most power. That’s how its always been, that’s how it will always be.”

  Alvin looked at me. “You’re one to talk. I heard about what you did. That was fucked up man.”

  “It isn’t like it sounds.” But everyone was staring at me like they wanted to run me into the ground.

  I wasn’t really in a position to defend myself. Whether I was part of Sebastian’s master plan or not, I did let him convince me that telling Jane to go to California was the only way out. He played me and used my hand against the woman for whom I had stronger feelings than I’d ever experienced for any former woman I’d been with. Jane wasn’t there to help us through such an important game, our chance to go to the Super Bowl, and I had to accept that it was my fault.

  In the past few days, all I could think about was how it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been so awful to Jane in the beginning, maybe the team would have warmed up to her quicker, and Dax wouldn’t have had the opportunity to attack her. Maybe if I’d allowed my mind to be open to how amazing she was, we would have gotten together sooner, and the night at the club wouldn’t have happened. I could have protected her and I could have kept her from being in this horrible situation to begin with. This all was my fault, and there was nothing I could do except to accept the role I’d played in the tragedies that had befallen Jane since she started.

  I wasn’t sure how the entire team found out about the role I’d played in Sebastian’s scheme, but the fact that Jim wouldn’t even look in my direction led me to believe he may have had something to do with it.

  “Look, I know you all hate me. To be completely honest, I hate me too. It’s haunted my nightmares the number of mistakes I’ve made, but Jane put in too much work for us to go out there and choke. Don’t do it for me, don’t even do it for yourselves. Do it for her.”

  Jim nodded his head, even though his jaw was flexing with frustration. “He’s right. This will probably be the only professional mark on Jane’s resume. We want to be able to give her something to be proud of in the time she was here.”

  Jack put his hand in the middle. “For Jane?”

  Everyone piled in, but when I tried to reach my hand in, Julian and Robin closed in on one another and shut me out. I stepped back and let the rest of the team do our team call mixed with Jane’s name. I looked out over the sea of people looking down on us and hoped that Jane was somewhere close. I may have contributed to her losing her faith in men like me, but I hoped that she could at least see the impact she had on the rest of the team. They threw their hands into the air with a roar and the crowd exploded. We walked out onto the field and lined up ready to go.

  We won the coin toss and decided to start out on offense first. Starting the game, I thought that we may have it. Despite the fact that we were down in spirits from not having Jane around, we were working well as a team. She was in the veins of everything we did because every play we ran had her fingerprints on it. We entered the second quarter ahead of the game, but we started playing sloppy and we lost our morale. All Jim could do was give us tidbits of information because Jane was the one who’d worked exclusively with the starters in the past month. He was flipping through her notes, trying to help us the way she would, but it just wasn’t the same. The heart of our team was missing, and it was evident.

  With two minutes to go in the first half, we’d lost our lead and were down by two touchdowns.

  Jim put in the second-string quarterback with the remaining minutes of the second quarter and sat me on the bench. It wasn’t an uncommon practice in big stakes games where protecting core players’ physical health and stamina was key, but I couldn’t help but feel like it was laced with revenge. Jim, just like the rest of the team, blamed me for the situation between Jane and Sebastian, and it seemed he wasn’t going to remain entirely professional about it.

  I picked up Jane’s playbook and started to flip through it. I touched the spots where she’d written notes
in the margins. I missed her so much. I caressed my fingers along the messy script as though it would somehow connect me to her once again. Her smile flashed across my mind and it broke my heart. I would probably never recover from this mistake.

  Jim walked over and handed me a headset. I looked up at him shocked. “What?”

  “Chris needs some assistance.” I took the coach’s headset and slid it over my head.

  Chris was the second-string quarterback and he was floundering to keep up with the rest of the team. He wasn’t a bad player by any means, but he wasn’t well-practiced, and in such an important game, his nerves were just getting the best of him. I flipped to some of Jane’s notes and started to read them word for word to Chris. I had to skip over the scribbled notes of ‘John’s an asshole’ and ‘meathead quarterback,’ but they made me smile.

  Finally, the painful first half ended. We would be shuffled off the field eventually, but for the moment that the half was breaking, the team all walked over and sat down on the benches. I was standing, making sure everyone had a spot to sit, when I just happened to glance to my left. Unlike up in the owner’s box where Sebastian and his family would normally be situated, he was standing off under the overpass that led back to the locker rooms. He had a piece of paper in his hand that it was clear to see had Dax’s face on the front. It had a gold lining around it and appeared to be some sort of ‘In Memoriam’ announcement.

  I raced over to Jim. “Is he making the announcement about Dax today?”

  Jim looked at me. “What?” I pointed over to where Sebastian was standing, and Sebastian, with all the nerve he had in his body, held a hand up and waved at us. I snapped. All the pain that had been inflicted upon Jane flooded into my body and had me tearing downfield to where Sebastian was standing. “John!”

  I didn’t listen. I rushed at Sebastian, pads and all, fully prepared to tackle him directly to the cement ground beneath him. If he died and I went to prison, so be it. I didn’t want to stare at his disgusting face anymore. I closed in on him, hunching my body a bit and preparing for the tackle, when two bodyguards dressed in dark blue polos and khaki pants stepped in front of him. I ran smack into them and tried to claw my hand through their barricade to get to Sebastian, but they held me back.

  “Get over here, you fucker!”

  Sebastian chuckled. “John. Let’s not behave like animals now, we’ve got a wonderful man’s life to honor.”

  “I won’t let you go out there. I’m not going to let you honor the memory of a rapist!”

  Sebastian held out his arms. “Jane has filed no such case against him and there’s no proof to suggest such.”

  “Apart from the fact that I saw it?”

  “You saw a jezebel out of place trying to fuck her way to the top.” I rammed my shoulders into the guards and they started to give. Sebastian took a few steps back with his eyes wide. “I’ll have you arrested. You’ll never play football again.”

  “You’re going to blackmail me into that too?”

  “Blackmail. I simply gave you options.”

  “You had us followed. You took pictures without our authorization, all to make your version of the facts sound better. I had no choice but to get her to move to California to keep her out of prison, and then you made our relationship collateral damage. I wonder how your investors would feel to know what kind of man you really are.”

  “Jane’s just a woman in a man’s world, John. Dax wasn’t attempting to rape her, he was taking what he was owed. If only he’d been successful, we’d have been free of that bitch a long time ago.”

  I could feel the color draining from my body. “You told him to rape her?”

  “I told him that he should feel free to do with her what he saw fit and that I would make sure he was protected. No man should have to answer to a woman. The world wasn’t designed that way.”

  I bashed against the guards again and they got even looser. I wanted to wring his neck. I wanted to hang him on a post in the middle of the field and let everyone see what kind of man he was.

  Before I could make another attempt to get back at him, a hum of noise emanated from the field. I walked out onto the field and the noise amplified and became clear; it was a chorus of boos. I looked up at the jumbotron and could see that the camera was focused on Sebastian standing behind me with a look of horror on his face. It was as if they’d heard our conversation, though I wasn’t certain how until the camera shifted to me and I realized I still had the headset hanging around my neck. I touched the mic and the scratch rang throughout the stadium. When the technical staff saw me running off-field, they must have flipped my headset to the ‘sneak peek’ setting, which allowed the crowd to hear a ‘sneak peek’ of what we were discussing from time to time. Due to their morbid curiosity to look behind the curtain, they’d heard Sebastian’s confession loud and clear.

  I turned around and Sebastian was gone. The coward must have realized what happened and decided to roll the dice to try and get away. I turned back towards the crowd and tapped my mic.

  “Somewhere among you, I hope, is a woman named Jane Panesse. She’s been an Assistant Coach for the Knights for a little over a month, and she has changed our lives. You heard what she went through, simply because she’s a woman. Let me be the first, but certainly not the last to say, that Jane Panesse is the future of football, and if you have a problem with a woman holding the pigskin, the Knights don’t want you as fans.”

  The rest of the team jumped up off the benches and started to cheer. “Jane! Jane! Jane! Jane!”

  “Jane, if you’re out there. Come back. We need you.”

  27

  Jane

  I watched as John and the rest of the team walked off of the field with the jam-packed stands cheering my name. I was sitting in a nose-bleed seat in the far back corner of the stadium, trying to be non-descript, but now I was on the edge of an ocean when I desperately needed to be on the island in the middle. I stood up and rushed out into the hallways behind the seating and the fans in the stadium were flooding out for halftime. Obstacles of dozens of people long at concession stands and bathroom plagued me as I raced through the stadium, trying to get downstairs where I could access the locker rooms.

  I couldn’t believe it. Sebastian had blackmailed John? And he let it happen just to protect me? It threw me into a whirlwind. What was I supposed to think now? After everything that had happened and all the confusion and pain and emotions, could I really just go walking back in there and pretend as if nothing had happened at all? What apologies did I owe and were owed? How was I supposed to sort it all out?

  I finally broke free of the crowd and descended the escalators to the bottom floor. I ran up to the security doors where I could get access to the ‘teams only’ part of the stadium, and a tree-trunk armed security guard held out a hand to me.

  “Stop. Only teams beyond this point.”

  “I am part of the team. I’m with the North Carolina Knights.”

  “Can I see your security badge?”

  I envisioned my badge sitting in the garbage can in my kitchen where I’d pettily thrown it before leaving for the game. “Uh, I don’t have it on me, but if you just call—”

  “Ma’am, hundreds of people try to get in on claims that they’re with the team. Unless you have a security badge or an official team escort, I can’t let you in.”

  I stepped back from the security guard and pulled out my phone. I called Jim first. Despite the fact that I knew he didn’t keep his phone on him during games, I was hoping he’d made an exception given the circumstances. The phone rang and rang and rang until eventually, his voicemail picked up.

  “Shit!”

  I dialed John’s number next, but that was even more of a crapshoot. I’d barked at the guys that I didn’t allow cell phones at games and Jim had put the rule into effect immediately. Again, I was met with trill after trill, until John’s pre-recorded voice talked back to me. My heart thudded as I heard his bass-filled, slightly raspy voi
ce come across the line. I missed him more than I was willing to let myself accept. I could only hope that once everything had been sorted out, he would be willing to talk about what was next for us. The idea that there could actually be a shred of hope for our relationship was giving me the kind of high that I could only imagine heroin was capable of producing.

  I turned around and looked back at the security guard. “Please, sir. Can you just use your little walkie talkie and call someone. Even the guards know that I’m with the team. Please.”

  “Ma’am. I can’t just…” His eyes went from being focused on me to being focused on something behind me. “Oh…”

  I looked over my head and my jaw dropped. There were a dozen pictures of me looking back at me, for some reason, my face was splashed all over all of the plasmas hanging around the entryway. Above my picture was the title ‘NC Knights Owner Orders Rape of First Female Coach in the NFL.’

  “Well, that’s not so great,” I turned around and looked back at the security guard, “but does that get me in?”

  The security guard nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  He stepped aside and let me through the security door. I picked up speed again, racing through the concrete hallways, with my destination in sight. I thought of Jim and I thought of John. I thought of Jack and Alvin and Isaac and Benton. I thought of Shawn and Julian and Cinder and Caleb. I thought of Wyatt and Roland and Robin. They were all waiting for me, and I had to get to them. I cruised around the corner towards the wing that was dedicated to the Knights and when the security guards saw me, they lifted their heads and smiled. One of the guards opened the door and I raced right through it.

  I ran towards the locker room at top speed and tackled the door aside, appearing on the other side where the entire team flipped around to look at me.