Head in the Game (Game Day #1)

by Lily Cahill

  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 dri
p 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.

  A smile splits Riley’s face when he sees all the carvings he’s given me lined up on the windowsill. Every time I see him, he manages to slip another one into my pocket or purse without me noticing. I keep his sculpture from the final project in my bedroom, but I like having all the whimsical little carvings here. It sort of feels like they’re cheering me on. Though maybe they need to cheer a bit louder.

  Riley turns to the canvases and starts flipping through them. “They’re all blank,” I say, before he can ask.

  “Where’s your finished work?”

  I shrug, pretending to be more casual than I am. “Nothing’s working.”

  “It will,” he says, with an easy faith I don’t reciprocate.

  Wanting to change the subject, I say, “You got out of class early?”

  He nods. “Practice isn’t until five, so I figured I’d stop by and see you.”

  “How’s practice going?” I ask, more interested in redirecting the conversation away from my art—or lack thereof—than I actually am in the subject.

  “Good. Coach has us doing this new drill with exercise balls that is killing my quads. It’s weird—I did the same drills with MoFo year after year. It was boring, but I knew it worked because we were winning games. Now Coach Prescott has us doing all this crazy shit, and it’s way more interesting, but I don’t know if any of it is going to matter. After last week …,” Riley trails off and hooks a hand behind his neck. “Even if we get our act together, we’ll have to be basically perfect to contend for the National Championship.”

  He catches himself. “Sorry, you don’t want to talk about this stuff. I’m sorry painting isn’t going well. Maybe you need to change something up. Use a different medium, or try to work somewhere else.”

  “Maybe,” I say with a noncommittal sigh. “Really, the only thing that’s been working for me lately is sketching.”

  “Oh, yeah? Can I see something you’ve been working on?”

  I usually don’t show people my sketches, but I finished one of Gamma last night that actually made me proud. After a moment’s hesitation, I grab the battered sketchbook off the top of the supply cabinet and flip to the charcoal sketch.

  Riley peers at the page over my shoulder. “Is that your grandmother?”

  I nod. I captured her sitting in her favorite chair as she worked on a sudoku puzzle and sang along with Aretha on the radio. Riley’s arm slips around me as he studies it. “She looks like you.”

  “A little.”

  “Does your mom look the same too?”

  I tense. “I guess. I haven’t seen her in a really long time.”

  Riley makes a little noise of acknowledgment and sympathy. I haven’t told him much about my mom. Not that there’s much to tell. She left, so what? I think her absence hurt Gamma more than it did me.

  Riley gently pulls the sketchbook from my grasp to look closer. “I love this. I feel like I can almost hear her voice.”

  “It’s rough,” I say, though I am pleased.

  “Still,” he says, flipping backward in the sketchpad.

  Fear grips my throat, and I can barely choke out, “No, wait, don’t!”

  But it’s too late. He’s found one of the sketches I did of his face.

  I first sketched him the day he kissed me, the day I told him about Natalie and that I wanted to be friends. And I’d kept up the habit as the weeks went on. At first, it was an outlet for my desire. I thought the impulse would fade after we started sleeping together. But if anything, I draw him more now. I know him more now; I have so many more memories to capture.

  In the sketch he’s now staring at, I’d tried to draw him in the moment just before his dimple winked, when his eyes were smiling but his mouth hadn’t quite caught up. It still wasn’t exactly right. There’s something about his eyes that I’m not seeing, that I can’t interpret.

  “You drew me?”

  When I flick my gaze up to Riley, he looks thunderstruck.

  “It’s not, like, a freaky stalker thing,” I say quickly. I have to press a hand to my cheeks. My God, they’re burning hot with embarrassment. “You have an interesting face, and I’ve been looking at it a lot.”

  “You drew me,” he says again, and I can hear something under the shock … something almost like awe. He stares at the sketch again. “I’m not this handsome.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  The naked emotion on his face makes my heart swell painfully in my chest, like it’s trying to escape. He puts the sketchbook down and frames my face with his hands. “You see me,” he says thickly. “And I see you.”

  This time when he kisses me, my heart rate slows. Time itself slows, flowing like hot, sweet honey. Emotion is pouring out of Riley, something deep and nameless that fills me to bursting with longing. To be like this forever; to never have to move past this moment. This moment when I think that Riley is falling in love with me.

  He pulls away after a long moment and buries his face in my neck. Though it’s muffled, against my skin, I can hear him say “thank you.”

  “There are more,” I admit. I pick up the sketchbook without leaving his arms. Moments ago I was nervous about showing him, but now I can’t help myself.

  He takes the book from me and flips through it. “Is this from class?”

  I’d drawn him sitting in his chair, studying a slide of a painting with his head cocked.
“Yeah.”

  “And what about this?” he asks, his voice going deeper.

  I see the sketch he’s referring to and feel heat creep up my cheeks once again. “Um. Yeah. That one is more ….”

  “Pornographic?” he supplies.

  “It’s just a figure study,” I say sheepishly, trying not to remember how lovingly I’d imagined his body as I drew it. “I hadn’t even seen you naked when I sketched this.”

  Now his warm look turns downright devious. “You were thinking about me naked?”

  “Duh,” I say, earning a chuckle in response.

  “And you’re doing these from memory?”

  “I didn’t think you were the type to sit for a portrait.”

  “Normally, no, but you for you ….” He flips to a blank page and sets my sketchbook on the easel. Then he slowly eases off his shirt, making my mouth go dry. “I’d be willing to give modeling a try.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Riley

  LILAH’S EYES TRACK DOWN MY torso in a way that makes every moment in the gym worth it. Now that we have practice nearly every day on top of mornings in the weight room, I know my body is looking lean and hard with muscle. I want her to get pleasure looking at my body the same way I feel when I gaze at her sensual form.

  My cock, always at half-mast when she’s around, raises up as she traces my muscles with her eyes. In for a penny, I think, then shove my pants to the floor. My arousal is obvious under my boxer briefs, and I harden even further when Lilah’s eyes latch on to my bulge.

  She licks her lips. “Maybe we should skip the modeling session.”

  “Nope,” I say, though I desperately want to be inside of her. “I’m curious to see what you can do. Where do you want me?”

  “I don’t do portraits.”

  “Yes, you do,” I say, gesturing at her sketchbook. “Besides, this isn’t work. This is just you and me. Now,” I say, giving her some cheesy body-builder moves, “how should I pose for you?”