Game Day Box Set: A College Football Romance Read online

  Even Ben Mayhew, the arrogant new wide receiver, came sniffing around looking for a carving. No surprise—he picked a little Aston Martin I carved when the last 007 movie came out. He’s got it in his hand right now as he sits in the corner, not talking to anybody. When he looks up and catches me staring, he scoffs and stuffs the figurine away. I can’t help but shake my head. That guy makes no sense to me. Maybe I’m too country to understand him.

  Instead, I focus on Coach Prescott. He’s holding his clipboard and looking over us, chewing the inside of his lip, but not saying anything. Finally, he puts a hand up and ends the idle chatter.

  “Men,” he says. The locker room goes silent and nervous energy pings through the room. “We’ve busted our asses practicing for this moment. This is the moment where we prove that we’re more than a hashtag. We’re more than a scandal. We’re a strong tradition of excellence on the field. There’s been a lot of talk during the off-season, but now the time for talk is over. Now is the time for action.”

  He holds his hand out toward us and we stand up together, putting our hands in the center as one unit. All together, our hands dip down and we all yell from the bottom of our stomachs, “Can’t stop the stampede!” Anticipation and adrenaline flood through me, so much I’m bouncing up and down, barely holding back from sprinting out of the locker room and onto the field.

  With Coach in the lead, he leads us out of the locker room and toward our fate. Following a tradition started generations before us, we each slap a hand for good luck against the words painted over the door leaving the locker room: “Can’t stop the stampede.” The words are aged and the paint starting to chip from so many hands touching it year after year, but I swear I can feel all those other players imbuing me with strength. I’m a Mustang, dammit, and I cannot wait to show the world what that really means out on the field.

  The stands are already bursting with throngs of fans. It’s hot as hell, but the student section is going nuts as we take the field. As I look up and around the full stadium, I see fans swathed in blue and silver, with half-coconut shells strung around their necks, holding signs, cheering for us. Nearly all the students are wearing their Mustang hats, a giant thing shaped like a horse’s head with a long, blue manes flowing down their necks.

  In this moment, there’s no doubt this is where I’m meant to be. For the first time since the scandal, I feel truly at home. The green turf, the blue sky, the rowdy fans—it fills me with the simplest pleasure. I’ve been coming to this stadium since I was a kid, watching the games and playing with a miniature football. There is nothing, nothing, like college football.

  I search the crowd for Lilah, even though I told her she didn’t need to come. But I can’t quell the hope to see her anyway. I want to share this moment with her. The buzz in the air is irrepressible, and I know if she could just experience this for a second, she might see another side to football. The side I love. The camaraderie and raw energy, the anticipation and elation.

  Before I know it, special teams is lined up on the field and the coconuts are clapping, slowly at first and then gaining momentum, clattering faster and faster as our kicker, Trent Richards, approaches the ball. Hawaii won the coin toss and chose to receive, so I’m on the sidelines for the first play, and I’m beside myself with jitters.

  The clattering from the coconut shells—our “stampede”—reaches a deafening roar as Trent winds up and kicks. We’re off, the ball soaring through the air to the end zone. Hawaii catches the ball, and it’s a rush of blue and silver colliding with green and white.

  Except the Hawaii player who catches the ball slips through the collision, finding space on the field to break through. My stomach drops. Blood drains from my face. There’s nothing but open field in front of him, and he’s off like a shot. All around, the crowd groans and screams in frustration. This can’t be happening, but it is. Our men scramble to catch back up with him, but it’s too late. Far too late. He’s out of reach, and just like that, within the first ten seconds of the game, we’re down 7-0.

  “What the fuck!” Reggie bursts out at my side. His fists are clenched and a tendon in his neck is bulging. The energy he had in the locker room needs to get onto the field now, before he explodes, standing here on the sidelines. I look down the sidelines to the rest of the team. West is white as a ghost and sweating, even though we haven’t even run a play yet.

  With a whistle, we jog onto the field and line up. Reggie, at center, eyes the Rainbow Warriors.

  “Mike 22!” he yells out, informing West and the rest of the line that Number 22 is aiming to blitz. The player is off my right shoulder. Reggie snaps the ball and I bulldoze into the guy, stopping him on his cut toward West. I’ve given our quarterback ample time to make a decision—throw or run—but West just holds the ball. He’s scrambling backward, searching for somewhere to throw the ball, and even though I’m holding off brute of a man, I can see Ben cutting up the field. He’s tied up with a defender, but he’s faster, and if West could just let the ball fly right now—right now—we’d have a chance to retaliate with our own touchdown.

  But he sees Ben a moment too late and under-throws the ball. It drops to the field with a disappointing thud, but at least it’s not intercepted. Yet all around us, I can feel the energy in the stadium waning. We’re losing our fans, and that makes my heart twist. I steel my spine and jog back to the line. We can pull this off. We can show everyone what we’re capable of.

  Second down, and we’re back on the line. The play call is for me to act like I’m going to block, then roll out and sprint in a straight line down the field—it’s one of my secret talents as one of the best tight ends in college football. Reggie snaps the ball and barrels into the defenders coming for West, but as I juke and roll, the tackle to my left, who’s supposed to pick up my defender, has gotten distracted. I don’t know if he missed the play call or saw a butterfly, but he’s nowhere in sight, leaving a gaping hole in our line. West, left completely vulnerable, stutters and trips over his own feet, just barely catching himself before the defense hits him hard, sending him flying backward in a brutal take down. He hits the ground hard, but at least he doesn’t drop the ball.

  Groans fill the stadium, echoing within my helmet and mixing with the sound of my own labored breathing. What the fuck is happening to us? I jog over to extend a hand to West, but he shakes his head and pushes himself to his feet. His eyes look a little bleary, and I honestly don’t know if it’s from the hit or the total breakdown of the team he is ostensibly captaining.

  “You okay, West?” I shout, grabbing hold of both sides of his helmet.

  “Yeah,” he says distantly. He shakes his head again. “Yeah.”

  But he’s not okay. None of us are okay. We’re a damned mess on the field, and it’s a mercy when the clock ticks down to the half and we’re allowed to escape back to the locker room. As I trudge into the room, I spy my own figurine—a blooming rose I’ve been carving for Lilah—laying on the bench in front of my locker. Even though I don’t believe in this sort of thing, a chill comes over me. I can’t help but wonder if these lucky charms, without Lilah nearby to give them her essence, have become hexes.

  The locker room is downright depressing. No one speaks, no one even looks at each other. Heads hang, like the weight of the scoreboard is a weight on our shoulders. We’re losing 21-3. How is that even possible? This was supposed to be the cupcake game. It was supposed to be a blow out. And it is. Only it’s happening in the wrong direction.

  Whispers and grumbling starts hissing in the silence as my teammates break into groups. Blame is being laid, discord is being sown. I’m tempted to retreat, too, but these factions are the last thing we need right now.

  “We need MoFo back,” I hear Dwayne Sheehan mumble under his breath to Trent Richards. Trent nods his head. I can’t believe he actually agrees with this, as if it’s Prescott’s fault his punt was returned for a touchdown. Guys are slumped on the benches, others are pacing. Ben has his head in his locker
like he’s looking for his sanity. Reggie’s got his head rested against the wall, looking up at the ceiling with his jaw clenched. We’re acting just like we were playing on the field—broken, defeated, individuals. Not a team. Hell, we played like we’d never been on a team in our entire lives.

  I jolt up off the bench and stand tall.

  “We don’t need MoFo back,” I say suddenly. A few guys laugh incredulously, a few more curse at me. But I can’t sit back down, not until I’ve said my piece. “We don’t need Jeremy Hudson back. We had a star coach and a star quarterback, and we won games. But I’d rather have self-respect than a championship title. And that’s something I can’t have under Coach MoFo. I don’t feel a lot of pride around the way we’re playing right now, but I’m proud that we’re still here. We lost our coach. We lost some of our best players. And we’re losing this game, but we are not losers.”

  The locker room is silent, so silent I can hear my blood pumping in my ears. I stare at my teammates in turn and continue. “Every day that we get up and sweat and bleed onto that field trying to build back a dynasty, we’re proving that we have the pride to be more than what everyone expects of us. We can be better than what’s expected. We are better. Coach Prescott has made me faster and stronger than I’ve ever been. I don’t want to sulk here for the next twenty minutes and feel sorry for myself. I want to prove that we’re more than Coach MoFo. Both on and off the field. I want to win, but more than winning, I want to feel proud of who we are.”

  Every eye in the room is on me, and I for a second I think I’m going to get booed out of the locker room, but then West nods his head and Reggie pounds his fist on his chest.

  “Lotto’s right,” West says, standing next to me. “We’re acting like we’ve already lost this game. Let’s get out there and play like we know we’re going to win.”

  That gets some cheers. The guys are perked up. The dirt and grass stains transform: What once signaled a sad pummeling now looks like a hard-fought game that’s not over yet.

  All too soon, we’re back on the field, but my confidence is renewed.

  The second half feels like a new game. We’re playing better. It’s not perfect, but don’t look like a mess of guys who all speak different languages. We manage to hold off the Warriors and restrict them to the 21 points they had scored by halftime. We don’t quite come back enough to win the game, but we score two touchdowns to end the game 21-17.

  We lost the game, and with this first game, we’ve probably lost any hope of a championship. Even if we win every other game for the rest of the season, we’ll need every other team to have two losses on their record. Losing to the University of Hawaii will haunt us to the bitter end. But here’s the thing: We lost, but we played our asses off. We lost on our own terms. For as strange as it feels to say, we earned a defeat, and I can’t help but feel we’ll use it to grow stronger.

  But my dad, I’m sure, will spend his every waking hour trying to build a time machine so he can talk me into going into last year’s draft. When I turn on my phone, I have six missed calls from him, and none from Lilah. It’s the zero missed calls from Lilah that stings the most.

  I remind myself—I was the one who said she didn’t have to come to my games. I didn’t think it would matter. But it hurts knowing that I just went through something hard, and she wasn’t here to share it with me.

  I’m exhausted, and not just physically. I feel emotionally wrung out from the despair of the first half and the futile hope of the second half. All I want now is to crawl into bed and feel Lilah’s soft skin on mine. But I don’t think I can handle seeing her tonight, when I’m still so raw from the game. She doesn’t like it when I talk about football, and I doubt I’ll have anything else on my mind tonight. If she had come to the game … but she didn’t. I’ll just have to settle for dreaming about her instead.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lilah

  THE CANVAS IN FRONT OF me is empty. My colors are mixed, the canvas is prepped. But I stand there in the second-story converted studio, palette in hand, and can’t make myself lay down that first brush stroke.

  For as long as I can remember, landscapes have spoken to me. Growing up in the mountains helps, because everywhere you look there’s a stunning vista. But my love of landscapes goes far beyond that. I paint cities, too, and the plains, and the ocean. There’s something about that spot where the sky meets the ground that I can’t stop trying to capture, that never ceases to fascinate me.

  At least, it used to. I would see something and be driven to paint it, to capture how I felt in that moment, capture how the generations who have come before me may have felt standing in that exact same spot. The need to paint would tug at me until I satisfied it, until I managed to get what I felt onto a canvas. Art was a burning coal inside me, always ready to be fanned into flame.

  Or that’s how it used to be.

  With a defeated sigh, I step back from the canvas. I woke early this morning into the most glorious pink dawn spreading through the sky. The clouds were fuchsia against a cerulean blue, and I felt something rise inside me that has been dormant for months. I needed that sky; I needed to learn its secrets.

  Now, hours later, I’m nowhere. I have already tried and abandoned several sketches, disappointed with what I’m creating. Everything seems prosaic, pedestrian, no more vibrant than a Bob Ross painting. Not that I’m hating on Bob Ross, but I’m better than that. Or, at least, I was once.

  I set my palette down and check my phone. My heart bounces when I see a text from Riley. Class got out early. Want to hang out?

  It came in twenty minutes ago. I really should keep working, but I can’t stand to keep staring at the blank canvas feeling nothing. I hurriedly text him back. Sure. What do you want to do?

  While I wait for him to text back, I make a cup of tea and pad out onto the second story porch. I have fond memories of sitting out here with my grandmother when I was a little girl, having tea parties and fashion shows. But today, with Gamma out getting her nails done and going to the store, I have the entire house to myself. I have to admit, I’m not sure what to do with myself with all this quiet.

  I glance back at my phone. Riley still hasn’t texted back. I tell myself that I’m not the sort of girl who’s desperate for attention, even as I stare at my phone, willing him to get back to me.

  It has been a few weeks since the end of the summer semester, the night Riley and I got together for the first time. We have seen each other as often as his class and practice schedule allows, but it still doesn’t seem like enough. Last week, we had to go nearly four full days without seeing each other. When he finally had a break in his schedule, we’d gone after each other like wild animals.

  I grin into my tea, thinking about it. Having sex with Riley … it’s like winning the lottery and the Olympics and an Oscar all at once. The things he does to my body make me feel kinky and adventurous, but also totally safe and cherished. And every single inch of him makes me wild. I never tire of exploring his muscular frame.

  And it isn’t all sex. Well, I won’t lie, it’s mostly sex, but in between bouts of sweaty orgasms we cuddle and laugh. We spend many nights driving up into the mountains, talking about our lives and our pasts until we find a spot we can park his truck and tear into each other. I’ve been here before, this giddy early stage of a relationship when everything is exciting and new. But something about Riley feels deeper, stronger than that.

  That thought makes a little trickle of fear drip through me. Riley’s stuck to his word—he doesn’t seem to care that I didn’t attend his first game of the season, though after how bummed he seemed, I kind of wish I would have gone. Kind of. He has barely mentioned the game, though he does talk about practice and the guys on his team. Still, when I think about what football means to him—what it means to his future—I wonder whether I can deal with it in the long term.

  But I don’t want to think about the long term. I want to think about right now … and why Riley hasn’t texted me
back.

  I’m so busy staring at my phone I almost don’t notice when his truck pulls up to the house. If my heart bounced when I saw his text earlier, it positively leaps to see him climbing out of the cab of his truck. He looks up at me, and from the expression on his face, his heart is leaping just as much as mine. “Well, hey there, Juliet.”

  “Does that make you Romeo?” I ask, leaning over the railing and grinning like a fool.

  “Don’t you think I qualify?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” I tease, shaking my head.

  He reaches back into his truck and grabs something off the seat. “How about now?” he says, offering me a bouquet of red roses.

  It’s cheesy, but my heart swells. “You brought me flowers?”

  He nods, evidently pleased with himself and my reaction. “Do I need to climb the balcony for a kiss?”

  “You could. Or you could use the stairs,” I say, gesturing to the back of the house.

  I dash romantic tears from my eyes as he bounds up the stairs, his smile wide, and I do the only thing I can think of—I throw open my arms to him.

  He lifts me into a kiss, holding me tight. His mouth is familiar by now, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. Beneath the passion, there’s happiness and affection. I can feel his heart pounding in the same rhythm as my own, smell the roses where he grips them against my back. If I could paint this moment, it would be all bright colors and big bursting rays of joy.

  He finally breaks the kiss, only to start backing me through the doorway into the studio. “I missed you.”

  “You saw me yesterday.”

  “Too long,” he says, then picks up his head and looks around. “Is this where you paint?”

  The space is slant-roofed and small, made smaller by the stack of big canvases propped against the wall. The wood floors around my easel are splattered with long-dried oil paint, and my supply closet stands open in the corner. I still have music playing faintly from my blue tooth speakers. A door leads to a second studio that we rent out, but it’s been vacant the last few months since the jewelry maker moved to New York.