Playing for Keeps: A College Football Romance by Bree Hayden

Author:Bree Hayden [Hayden, Bree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

58

Piper

Fix You Up

I sat on the bleachers during practice with a coffee and a Romans hoodie, smiling for Kassie’s sketches as Houston cold was starting to melt into Houston spring. She frowned, smudging the art a little, busy in the sketchwork.

“Okay, give me a scary face,” she said, tapping her chin.

“Like this?” I bared my teeth. Based on the grin, I hadn’t done nearly enough. I crossed my eyes. “What about this?”

“Wow. That’s perfect.”

“Frightening. Right?”

“Mm-hmm,” Kassie murmured before the snickers overtook her. She finished up the last of the pencil drawings and flashed them to me. “It’s great practice. My eyebrows are getting expressive—and trust me—that’s a good thing.” Her eyes flickered over to the field and her smile faltered. “Oh, damn. I hate when they do those.”

The football players were lining up to go at each other for practice. When they crashed together, it sounded like a bunch of buffalo smashing into each other. I instantly found Adam in the crowd, one of the few without a helmet on the sidelines, watching over the other players. His reddish-brown hair caught the red from the sun while he barked instructions.

“Do you know what Adam’s old coach told him?” I asked Kassie out of the corner of my mouth, still watching Adam. “If you don’t bleed, you don’t lead. How messed up is that? And to high school students?”

As far as I was concerned, his coach was a lost cause. Adam was better off without him.

Kassie was strangely quiet next to me and when I glanced over, she stared at me, her pencil frozen over her sketchbook.

“Um…” she hesitated. “He…told you about that?”

“About his high school coach? Yeah.”

“What…?” Kassie pulled up a new page in her sketchbook. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought she was avoiding my gaze. “What did he say about him?”

To anybody else, I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but Adam said both Ryan and Kassie knew.

I dropped my voice, keeping it out of reach of the other girls on the bleachers. “He told me about the accident. I couldn’t believe it.” That familiar taste of dread hit the back of my throat. I couldn’t picture the lanky, fun-loving boy from the party in that much pain. My heart squeezed in my chest. “It’s so horrible.”

“What…else did he tell you?” Kassie asked carefully.

“What else? What else is there?”

A horrible crack echoed across the field and stopped my train of thought. I glanced back at the players. Three of them went at each other, but they miscalculated their projection and spiraled out towards the tables. I watched, stunned, as one of the guys fell back, toppling into Adam, and hit the table, hard.

“Oh my god.” I shot up from the bleachers. “Adam!”

The football players swarmed over him in a second and I couldn’t get a good look. Ice gripped my heart. I stumbled off the bleachers, almost taking a dive myself then sprinted to the door that led to the stairs. The same stairs we lounged over while we waited for the guys to file out of the locker rooms.

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