by Rebel Hart
“You stayed there all night? When you said you had something to do, I thought you might have forgotten to put something away. What were you doing?” Alec grabbed a blanket and started to pull it over me, but I flailed. “What?”
“I want to sleep in my bed.”
“You’re not gonna make it there,” Alec retorted.
I groaned as I pulled myself to sit up, even though it did very little to keep my body from trying to pull me into sleep. “I applied for semi-pro status.”
Alec’s eyes and mouth turned into saucers. “What?”
“You said we could.”
Alec shook his head. “I said it’s too bad. I didn’t mean to go do it.” He sat down on the couch. “Do the Widows know?”
I shook my head dramatically. “Nope!”
“Jesus, Quinn. What are they gonna think that you made a huge decision like this without them? You’d have to up practices. It’s a full-time job, so they’d all have to quit their day jobs.” He crossed his arms. “I wouldn’t be able to help as much as I do now.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I grumbled back. “They’re going to be just as excited as I am, trust me.”
Alec sighed. “I hope you’re right. That’s a big thing to throw on people.”
I was barely listening. My eyes closed over, and I started to fall forward.
Alec stood up and grabbed my hand. “Okay. Sleep first, then we’ll discuss it further.”
I nodded. “Yes to sleep.”
Alec pulled me up off the couch and let me lean on him as he led to my bedroom. He spilled me onto my bed and clawed my blanket over me. “I knew you were impulsive, but this is crazy, even for you.”
I put my finger to my mouth. “Shh, sleep.”
Alec rolled his eyes with a shake of his head. “Fine, but we will talk about this later.”
I barely heard him. The second I hit the pillow, my mind started to power down, and the sound of Alec closing my bedroom door as he left was the final thing I heard before I passed out.
4
Zeke
It had been two days since our loss to Minnesota, but it was still clinging to me like a life-sucking leech. My alarm went off to tell me to get up, but I stopped its screaming and continued to lay in place. I knew my team was half-baked, but it was painful to have it thrown in my face the way that it was. Knowing that it was televised and later regarded as one of the worst losses in the history of the Montpelier Vipers were small specks compared to the fact that I let it get to me toward the end and fell off my game. No one was ever going to pick me up if I acted like an amateur on the field. My next few games were going to have to be flawless. It was the only choice.
I finally threw my blankets back and willed myself to get up. I looked at the empty half of my bed for a moment and wished that I had taken home the girl I met at the bar. I wasn’t the type of guy to sleep with women for the hell of it, but it might have helped relieve some stress. It’d been a long time since I’d dated anyone. Football was my first love, so I typically held any women I dated to that impossible standard. If she didn’t excite me the way being on the field did, I wasn’t interested.
I spent the first twenty minutes of my day grinding through social media and sports websites for any sign that someone had seen our game and had anything to say about it. It was a ritual of mine. I never wanted to be one of those people who didn’t know what was being said about them online, so I made sure to search my name at least once a day to be safe.
Once I was satisfied that no new news about me had made its way to the internet, I got on with the rest of my morning. I took a shower, ate breakfast, and watched replays from Wednesday’s game. I took notes on the mistakes we’d made, which were plentiful, and made a plan to bring them to Coach and change our playbook to account for the errors. I stuck my notes into my backpack, threw in my phone and wallet, pulled it over my back, and left my house.
I complained quietly to myself during the entire hour-and-a-half drive into Montpelier. I technically lived in Pocatello, Idaho, because the thought of settling down in a small town like Montpelier made me sick to my stomach. I was hopeful that my stint with the Vipers wouldn’t be long, but I’d been there over a year with no end in sight. There were days when I thought about escaping the small town and heading for a bigger, busier city, but the Vipers gave me a chance when no one else would and deserved better than that. I knew that this would be my year. I’d whip the Vipers into shape, and then a pro team would see us and pick me up. It was just a matter of time. If I could get the Vipers to the top of the semis, my games would be seen by every recruiter in the country. That was my out if I could get to it.
A couple of cars were already parked in the Montpelier Vipers’ stadium parking lot when I arrived, so I took the closest one and pulled in my black Cadillac CTS. I blinked my eyes against the whipping dust of the Idaho town and snarled with disgust. The sooner I could get out, the better, so I wasted no time in making my way into the stadium.
A few players had already arrived and were at work in the weight room, but they were embroiled in some conversation about who was hotter between a pair of actresses. I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t imagine letting something so simple take up my brain space when football was so close to my fingertips.
I knocked on the door frame to the weight room, and all three guys jumped. “Hey. Hard at work?”
“H-hey, Zeke,” one of our running backs, Monty, stuttered. “How you feeling today?”
I ignored his question. “What are we talking about?”
They exchanged nervous glances, silently pulling straws to see who had to answer the question. Darius, one of the tackles, wasn’t doing anything in particular, and Monty locked eyes with him.
Finally, Darius sighed and looked over at me. “You know that new movie that just came out, Speed G Force?”
I scoffed. “Sure. Who hasn’t?”
“Well, I took my girl to see it last night, and she said that she didn’t think Jessica Storm was a good choice for the main girl. Said she wasn’t hot, and it should have been Tessa Jolenson.” He cleared his throat. “S-so, we was just talking about who’s hotter, Jessica Storm or Tessa Jolsenson.”
I was silent.
He pointed at the third guy, another tackle, Patrick, “Pat thinks that they’re both hot but that none of ‘em hold a candle to Lolo Christie.” He watched me for signs of my response, and when I didn’t say anything, he continued. “I think Lolo’s pretty hot, but then Monty was saying how she looks like she smells bad, so then I was saying—”
“Hey, Darius.”
“Yep?”
“You do realize I don’t give a damn about this conversation, right?” I asked.
Darius swallowed hard. “I know that now.”
“You guys played like the three horsemen of shit on Wednesday. I would think you’d be more interested in trying to figure out your game than figure out who’s hot when none of you stand any chance with any of them anyway.”
“I don’t know. I think if I met Tessa, she’d go for me,” Darius replied, looking to Patrick and Monty for backup, who were smart enough not to say anything. When they left him in the cold, he turned back to me. “Sorry. I’ll go watch the highlights.”
“Do that.” I looked at Monty. “You join him. I suggest counting the yards since you didn’t seem to know how many to run on Wednesday.”
Monty frowned. “Fine.”
I pointed at Patrick. “You, fire up the treadmill and see if you can remember how to run.” Patrick didn’t respond in favor of just glaring at me, but he moved toward the row of treadmills, regardless. “I’m going to talk to Coach, and when everyone gets here, we’re running drills,” I finished before turning around and walking out.
“Who does this guy think he is? He’s a fucking rookie,” Patrick growled once my back was turned.
I looked over my shoulder. “And you’ve been here five years and play like a little-leaguer. Maybe once you’ve reintroduced yourself
with the sport of football, you’ll understand.” I continued on to the coach’s office.
Coach Tyler Ravnick was the Viper’s head coach. He’d been through fifteen assistant coaches in the past seven years because of his weak leadership, and for the fact that he had the title, salary, and office of coach, he sure deferred a lot to me when it came to running the team. It would be another one of the perks of going pro. Along with fellow pro players and a pro paycheck, I’d also get pro coaches who actually knew what they were doing.
Until then, it was up to me to steer the ship. I didn’t mind. I wouldn’t call myself a control freak, but if someone was the best person to operate a machine, why would you give it to anyone else to operate? The Viper’s got saddled with a half-rate coach because they were a half-rate team, and then the half-rate coach went on to recruit more half-rate players, so the Vipers stayed a half-rate team. It was the worst vicious cycle to contend with as a player with professional skills, but if the coach wasn’t into recruiting half-rates, I wouldn’t be there.
I walked into Tyler’s office without knocking. He was never doing anything noteworthy, so neither he nor I ever saw the harm.
“Hey, Coach,” I announced on my arrival. I barely spared him a glance as I set my backpack down in one of the chairs that was sitting against the wall opposite his desk and unzipped it. “I’ve gone over our game a few times, and I have some notes. Well, I have a lot of notes. I feel better about how we’re starting to master our own skills, but if we don’t find some cohesiveness, we’re never gonna make it past teams like Minnesota.”
I went quiet for a moment and waited for Tyler’s response, but none came. I looked back over my shoulder, and Tyler was staring at his computer like there was a hypnotist on the other side.
“Coach?”
I pulled a pen out of my backpack and chucked it across the room. When it clattered against the wall behind him, he jumped and looked up. “Oh. Hey, Matheson.”
“What the hell are you looking at like that?” I asked.
His eyes widened. “Someone else applied for semi-pro status in Montpelier.”
“What?” I dropped everything I was holding and ran around the desk to look over his shoulder. He was reading a very detailed and thorough email about the protocols involved and what it meant for us as Montpelier’s other semi-pro team. “Who the hell applied? Nothing else happens related to football here except us.”
Tyler scrolled a little further down the email and came to a stop at the bottom. Our eyes scanned over the words until we found the answer.
“Who are the Black Widows?” I asked.
“That’s an odd name for a football team,” Tyler commented. I grabbed the edge of his office chair and rolled it over. “Hey!”
I bent over and took control of the keyboard. I opened a new tab and immediately navigated to Google. I typed in Montpelier, Idaho, Black Widows and hit enter. A series of images popped up at the top of the screen, and Tyler gasped.
“No,” I whispered.
All of the pictures were of a team of all women. I scrolled a bit further down the search results until I came across a website. It was for Montpelier’s Recreation Center, MontRec. I clicked it, and it brought me to a page about their all-women’s football team, the Black Widows.
“What the fuck?” I growled. “Who the hell do they think they are?”
“Women are doing all sorts of amazing things,” Tyler started. “I honestly think—”
I waved my hand in his face. “I don’t give a shit about the fact that they’re women. I’ve known women who are twelve times as strong as any man, namely my mom. She’s one of the most horrifying people I know, but this is clearly a gimmick. All-women. Black Widows.” I shook my head. “If they think they’re going to ride this act into my ring and make a mockery of the Vipers and football, they have another thing coming.”
I scrolled further down the page and saw that there was a schedule listed for their games. They just so happened to have one coming up that afternoon. I checked my watch. It was a little after nine o’clock, and their game was at three that afternoon. I walked away from the computer and back to my bag. “Shut that off. We gotta get through this stuff immediately. We’re ending practice early today.”
“What, why?”
I side-glanced at him. “Because it looks like I’m going to have to go and do a little recon.”
5
Zeke
When I pulled my car to a stop in front of the location listed on the Black Widow’s football schedule, I chuckled, but more from pity than amusement. Soccer goals had been pushed back, and there was someone on the field drawing lines on it to turn it into a football field. Someone else was stabbing flags into the field at various points, red ones seemed to mark the yards, and yellow ones marked the end zones.
“It’s like a little league game,” I huffed aloud to myself.
I climbed out of my car, pulled my baseball hat low over my head to keep my face hidden, and approached the field. Spectators were setting up folding chairs around the outside of the field, and there were two bunches of people, one toward the bottom left corner of the field and another toward the upper right. I imagined these were the teams. One team had on blue jerseys with some sort of floating creature on it; it was just a silhouette, so I couldn’t discern. The other team, the one in the bottom-left corner of the field, was wearing all black jerseys, with red names and numbers. Just judging by what a black widow looked like, I assumed those were the semi-pro hopefuls.
Everyone was settling into chairs and pulling blankets over them that they’d brought to protect them from Idaho’s chilled fall afternoons, and it irritated me. I didn’t bring a chair because I wasn’t prepared for the amateur-hour I was stepping into. Too far from the field to be meant for spectators but still close enough to view the game, there was a simple, metal bench. That would have to do. I made my way over, plopped down against the chilled surface, and waited for kick-off.
A couple of park league refs circled the field, making sure that any spectators hanging around were far enough from the sidelines to not get hurt if a player lost control, and then one walked to the middle of the field. She held up a hand and blew a whistle, and one player from each team walked out to meet her. The Black Widows’ representative was a woman with light brown hair and black greasepaint smeared under her dark eyes. She was slightly taller than average and fit, and the pads fit her like they belonged to me. Still, she walked with her head up and with a swagger to her step like she ran the place. It was very interesting. The back of her jersey read Dallen, so I opened up my phone and navigated back to the Black Widows’ page on the MontRec website. I’d looked at it a dozen or so times in the past several hours and damn near had it memorized. I went to the roster and searched for a name that matched—Quinn Dallen, the Black Widows’ founder, coach, captain, and quarterback.
“Busy girl,” I grumbled out loud.
A whistle blew, and both the representatives for the teams went back to stand alongside their teams. After another whistle blow, the teams filed out onto the field from the sidelines under a flurry of applause from the scattered spectators.
I let out an audible gasp as they walked out. Every single one of the Black Widows walked out onto the field. Assuming forty women hadn’t called in sick today, the Black Widows team was made up of a measly eleven players. That was just enough to play legally in a semi-pro league. Every single person ran the entire game? That was psychotic. I saw the short roster on the website but figured they were only listing starters, not the entire goddamn team. Who plays in a league with only eleven players? What sort of masochistic shit were they into?
“Hike!”
The first snap fired back to Quinn, and she started to back away from the center. I’d been slumped in the bench but sat straight up at the sight of her. She moved like a pro. Her back was straight up and down, something I’d been trying to get half my guys to do for the entire year I’d been there. If she was scanning the fie
ld for a receiver, I couldn’t tell. Her head was unmoving. Was she taking in the entire field without moving her head? It was like I was watching a movie that glitched. One second, she was upright and backing up, and a second later, she was ducked and running. She charged through players, skipping her way through the defense until she was over the first-down line. She was only barely over when one of the tackles slammed into her. I expected her to go down instantly, but she didn’t budge. Another player came in and plowed into her, and then she went over, but not without a struggle.
“Shit.” The word left my mouth without my permission. She was good.
She was even more of a force on defense. She was strong and could tackle like no one’s business. The team they were playing against was a coed team, and one of the men on the other team managed to get his hands on the ball. He was running straight at Quinn like he was going to blow right through her, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Quinn tucked in and rammed into him like a loose bull. Not expecting her strength, he hit the ground, and the ball got loose. She hopped over him like he wasn’t anything more than a piece of the grass, scooped up the ball, and ran it straight into the Widows end zone. My heart raced, and chills rushed over me when she casually tossed the ball to the ref and ran back to her team for a victory bump. I’d never been electrified like that watching someone play before. I barely knew what to do with myself.
I managed to drag my eyes away from Quinn long enough to watch the rest of the team, and the impressed feeling I had quickly left. They had one player on their team who was pile-driving through people like she was suffering from roid rage, and the rest of the players were struggling to keep up. Everyone seemed to be doing her own thing. I could tell that Quinn was stressed trying to keep her team in line. It was unfortunate, sad even. All respect I had for Quinn jumped headfirst out the window. What did she think of football if she was actually willing to submit this team for semi-pro consideration?
