by Erin Hayes
I found myself grinning, excited about my idea. “That’s the beauty of it. The science behind it is that it bypasses some parts of the brain to go directly to the memory.” I clicked through to a demo of the program, and while it was still set for grandiose military exercises, I knew it was impressive. “This would be in addition to the practices that you have with them—these are extras that I think might give our team a bit of an advantage. I think it’s worth trying, anyway.”
I let the video run all the way through, explaining how the virtual-reality practice could help imbed plays in the players’ minds.
“And what is best about it is that it allows our team to get a sense of the actual players from the other team—the ones that they’re about to play.” I pulled up the next video to play for her. “The program analyzes the team based on videos of previous games. Essentially, it learns from them. The AI then develops an algorithm to predict how that particular player will react in any given situation. So instead of simply watching video recordings of how the players that they’re about to go up against have functioned in earlier games, the virtual-reality program allows our players to see these guys coming at them and react accordingly.”
Carrie crossed her arms. “So it’s kind of like a giant game of Wii?”
“Basically.” I shrugged. “Combined with the virtual-reality of going up against specific players. That’s its value. It helps them prep for specific players and teams.”
That finally seemed to get through to Carrie. Her mouth dropped open, and she said slowly, “Oh, that is fucking brilliant.”
“And I know just the guy to develop it for us,” I said, thinking about my friend Noel Pennington, who I had taken computer science classes with back in college. “I just wanted to make sure that it was okay with you before I dumped any money or time into it.”
“It’s definitely an unconventional approach,” Carrie mused.
I laughed aloud. “Well, we’re an unconventional team. Female owner, female head coach, and now maybe a special VR training technique. I think that combination can change the team’s losing streak.”
Carrie snickered. “Let’s give it a shot and see how well it works, anyway. How much does this stuff cost?”
I grinned, as I could practically see her thinking that it would be expensive as fuck. “Well, I assume that everyone has smartphones.”
“Probably...”
“Then they can use their phones for the headset. The only costs come in for the development for changing it from a military program to one about football. And some cardboard.”
Carrie started. “Cardboard? You’re shitting me.”
I shook my head. “Nope. We just basically need to build a thing that houses their phones on their faces.” I held up my phone horizontally in front of my eyes to demonstrate. “Cheapest VR headset ever.”
“Fucking brilliant,” Carrie repeated. “If it works.”
“We’ll see. The characters in the program will be soldiers to start—just until we get a proof of concept. So long as the players are all right pretending that soldiers are football players, then this will work for now.” I closed the lid of my laptop. “The guys should be getting back from their lunch break soon, right?”
“Yeah, they’re meeting in the media room.”
I shook my head. “I will never get used to the rule that it says they have to be available to the media every day of the week.”
I had finally started to get a feel for the weekly rhythm of life with a football team—the early morning weight-lifting sessions, the coaches’ meetings (which were going much better now that we actually had a head coach), the daily media sessions, the well-oiled machine that I had stepped into when I moved here to take over the team.
Luckily, that rhythm had been in place for long enough that I hadn’t managed to screw it up with all my fumbling around during the preseason. Even the absence of a head coach hadn’t had that big an effect on it. It was a good thing Carrie was here now, of course. I was just glad I hadn’t done irreparable damage in the meantime.
Now, Carrie and I made our way down to the field. I’d learned pretty quickly that it was better to let the guys deal with their own interviews—the press was actually kinder to them when I wasn’t around. That’s what the PR team was for, anyway.
Carrie pulled a cigarette out of her pack and tapped it against the side of her leg. “I’m going to step outside for a minute.”
I’d been surprised to discover she was a smoker—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that an athletic coach should do. But it wasn’t really my business, so I just ignored it. It certainly wasn’t any worse than Rodney smoking occasionally.
I sat on the bench, staring out at the field. A few minutes later, the team streamed out onto the grass. Andre stopped and gathered me up for a quick kiss. “You were gone early this morning,” I observed. It was the only night he’d stayed over, and I’d been looking forward to waking up in his arms.
“Yeah. I’ve been slacking off a little bit on the lifting, so I decided to get up here to hit the weight room before breakfast.”
Breakfast. I’d been too busy schmoozing to get breakfast. And if I didn’t hurry, I would miss lunch, too. I was getting seriously fond of having a cafeteria on-site where I could just pop in and grab food. I hated to cook.
Carrie’s rasping voice called out from the sidelines, “Okay. Everybody over here!”
The players jogged to her, and Andre gave me another quick kiss on the lips before running out to join them. I glanced up to see both Clancy and Rodney watching us. Clancy winked and smiled, but Rodney’s jaw clenched, and he turned away.
With a sigh, I turned to head back to my office and came face-to-face with my ex-boyfriend Jacob.
Several emotions flitted through me simultaneously—surprise, anger, and a kind of leftover happy reaction that reminded me of better times that was quickly quashed by the other responses.
I hoped he hadn’t seen any of it in my gaze.
“Hey, Mads,” he hailed, as if this were in any way normal. “You look great.”
"What the hell are you doing here?" I demanded.
Chapter 8
“Seriously, Jacob,” I spat out as he simply smiled at me, “that wasn’t a rhetorical question. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Because—fucking hell—my ex-boyfriend was standing here. In Birmingham, Alabama. And he was looking at me like we had just randomly passed each other in the street back in San Francisco. Which could happen, but didn’t—not as frequently as you’d think. Not enough for it to be a regular occurence.
And certainly not as blasé as he was making it now.
The last time I saw him, we were in the boardroom of our tech company. I remembered standing there in front of the executive board as they voted me out. He had stood there, the man that I had loved for years, and broke my heart into a billion pieces. He cheated on me, took over the company that we created together, and left me nearly destitute.
Yet, here Jacob Reeves was, smiling at me like none of that had happened. Like everything was the way it was before.
Fury filled me, and it was all I could do not to punch him in his smug, handsome face. Because, goddammit, he was still as handsome as I remembered him. And I hated how my body immediately responded to seeing him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Yet, even as I stared at him in shock, the flood of good memories came back.
I clenched my fists and reminded myself that he was a needle-dick son of a bitch who cheated on me with his assistant. Like a bad Lifetime movie.
“Mads,” he said, using the nickname that he had claimed as his own. My cheeks burned as flashes of memory went through my head.
I shook my head. “Don’t Mads me. What are you doing here?”
He sighed, watching me as he stuck his hands in his pockets, a smirk playing about his lips. Cocky bastard.
“Things haven’t been the same without you, Madison,” he said.
&nb
sp; I snorted. “What, the company lost its sense of morality? Humanity?”
“You,” he said softly, leaning forward with a grin. “We lost you. I lost you.”
A rattle of a laugh escaped me. “You threw me away like yesterday’s trash. Hell, like last year’s trash that has been sitting in the back seat of your car.”
He grinned wider. “I miss your sense of humor, Madison.”
“Well, I don’t miss you.” Lie. “And you didn’t have to come all the way to Birmingham to tell me that.” Seriously, whatever happened to a phone call? An email? Or even a text? At least he didn’t show up with a bouquet of flowers. I would have had to burn them in that case.
Jacob sighed and averted his eyes. Almost like he really regretted everything. Almost. I trusted him as far as I could throw his cheating ass, and I didn’t have 8,000 calories a day to bulk up my muscles.
“I figured,” he said slowly, “that after the way I acted, anything short of showing up like this would be disingenuous.”
“Uh-huh.” I crossed my arms. “And where’s Leah? Or did you sleep with another assistant after her?”
His cheek twitched. “I deserve that.”
Jacob deserved a pooch punt to his balls, but I doubted that he knew what that meant. I waited for him to continue.
He cleared his throat uneasily. “When I saw that you had inherited a football team—”
“Ah,” I said, interrupting him. I shook my head and gave a mocking laugh. “I see why you’re here.”
He reached out for me as I turned away. “No, Mads, that’s not—”
“Is there a problem here?” We both looked up to see Clancy jogging over to us from the field. To add to his intimidating size, he was playing for the no-shirts on the field, which I hoped made Jacob feel like an ass. A ninety-pound-weakling ass.
God, I hoped so. Trust Clancy to be a superhero.
And then, just to add to how perfect this moment was, Andre jogged over. He must’ve noticed Clancy coming over to us. Almost immediately, he was followed by Rodney. Just seeing my ex shrink away from them brought such joy to my heart.
“Who is this, Madison?” Andre asked, crossing his arms as his massive biceps bulged.
Even Rodney came to my rescue. “Is this guy troubling you?”
I gave Jacob a knowing smile. “No, he’s not bothering me. Not anymore. Jacob here was just about to leave.” I cocked my head. “Weren’t you?”
Jacob cleared his throat and glanced between the four of us before nodding. “Okay. We’ll talk later, Mads—”
“No, we won’t,” I interrupted, holding up a hand to stop him.
“—when you’re ready to talk.”
“Won’t happen,” I said shortly.
Jacob stopped, my constant interruptions finally hitting their mark. “All right.” He dipped his head meekly. “I’ll bow out.”
I knew that Jacob never bowed out of anything. Never. And I refused to take my eyes off his retreating back until the shadows of the stadium swallowed him and he was out of sight. I doubted that he would get on a plane to fly back to San Francisco, but that tightness in my chest eased now that he was gone.
“Hey.” Andre entwined his fingers in mine and gave me a light squeeze. “Are you okay? Who was that?”
I sucked in a deep breath. “That was my ex-boyfriend.”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “The one who kicked you out of your company?” I’d told him about what Jacob had done to me and what that meant for my company.
“Yeah. The same guy.” I licked my lips and gave the three guys a tentative smile. “He’s an asshole.”
“I don’t like him,” Clancy said, frowning after Jacob, even long after he left. “I don’t like him at all.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I combed a hand through my hair. “Well, hindsight is 20/20. I wish I had known he’d been a creep before I started a company with him.” And before I loved him.
Biggest mistake of my life.
Rodney only snickered and crossed his arms. I wondered what he thought about my relationship woes. Probably not much.
“What do you think he wanted?” Andre asked.
I shook my head with a sigh. “I don’t know.”
And wasn’t that the truth?
Chapter 9
God. It was as if just talking to Carrie about tech stuff had summoned Jacob—like an evil genie or a demon or something.
Not that far off, really.
Maybe a banished demon, I thought hopefully. The thing with demons, you could exorcise them. I doubted Jacob would go willingly.
I just had to keep my mind off him, even two days later as the team geared up to play their next home game.
There had been no sign of Jacob in all that time.
I wanted to believe that he had realized his quest—whatever it might have been—was hopeless and had gotten on the first plane back to San Francisco.
I didn’t really believe it, though. Whatever he was here to do, he was far too sneaky and persistent to let being turned down once dissuade him from his plans.
Come to think of it, that’s kind of how I ended up dating him.
I shook off the depressing thought as I made my way to the owner’s suite.
It was a big night—Coach Carrie Drew’s professional debut. I was really proud of how easily the Hammers had taken to the idea of a female coach. Granted, I had prefaced it with something along the lines of, “This is the way it’s going to be, so deal.” I hadn’t been quite that abrupt, but the sentiment was the same. Also, Andre had helped smooth over the transition. So had Clancy, and even Rodney.
If there was any grumbling about her from the team, they weren’t telling me about it.
The potential sponsors had shown up tonight in record numbers for us, too. Especially the corporations and local businesses owned by women. I’d been delighted to discover there was an auto repair shop owned and operated by women that catered to women who didn’t trust mechanics to talk to them like maybe they weren’t stupid. The owner of that business had called me up personally to ask if they could figure out a way to start a coalition of women’s small businesses to act as sponsors, too.
So none of them were the giant corporate sponsor I might’ve hoped for initially—but there was something satisfying about walking into the owner’s suite tonight and seeing all these female-owned businesses represented.
Through the first half of the game, I moved around the room, greeting people, introducing them to one another, matching names to faces and working to remember which potential sponsors were already on board and which were needing a little extra attention.
“So I was thinking that we could call ourselves Women for Football.” Darlene Burroughs, the owner of the women’s auto shop, used her hands to put air-quotes around the title. She had been expounding on her ideas for at least ten minutes.
At least they were regular minutes and not football minutes. Those felt like ten times longer than a normal minute.
I wanted to tell her that her name for the coalition that she had in mind was boring, but decided that would be counterproductive. “Absolutely.” I smiled. “Or maybe take suggestions once you have all the people involved that you want to?”
I kept stealing glances out of the corner of my eye at the screens playing the football game. Those were my guys down there, and it was difficult to keep from sitting down and staring at the screens intently.
That wasn’t the kind of thing I thought I would ever say about football before I had inherited a team.
But today they were winning. And even I was beginning to be able to tell the difference between how they played before and how they were playing now. To be honest, everybody talking about the team not playing together had made me want to bang my head against the wall. On the field, I simply couldn’t see it. I knew enough about their lives off the field to know about the tensions, and I believed everyone when they told me those tensions were affecting game-play, but I hadn’t watched enough football in my li
fe to really see it for myself.
I could see the improvement now, though. It was as if they had been stumbling around half-blind, and the light had suddenly gone on for them.
It made me feel guilty. I should have gotten them a new coach sooner.
I dragged my attention back to Darlene. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, not quite interrupting her, but close. “Why don’t we get together, just the two of us, sometime next week and have lunch? We can sketch out a strategy for how the Hammers and your coalition can help each other.”
Her face brightened. “I would love that. I look forward to it.”
I felt like I was half-politician, half-saleswoman, with a dash of con artist for spice—though the con artist feeling was lessening as I learned more about football. Thank you, Clancy, for my notecards.
I moved on to say hello to Jimmy Clayton, the owner of Alabama Proud Laundry Detergent. He was chatting with another group of men who were all about his age. He waved me over. “Madison, come meet my friends.”
I was shaking hands with each man when a collective gasp went up around the room.
My first instinct was to spin around and stare up at the television screen closest to me.
One of the players was down. “Somebody turn up the volume,” I snapped.
I don’t know who did it, but the announcer’s voice filled the room almost instantly. “... Clancy Drew is down.” My stomach clenched as I watched the team doctors rush out on the field.
On the field, Clancy tried to sit up. The doctors helped him, and it looked like he was shaking them off, but then the camera moved in for a close-up. His face was ashen, bloodless, sickly looking. And when the field medic wrapped his hand around Clancy’s leg, he flinched. The announcers kept up a running commentary about his potentially broken ankle.
I felt the blood drain from my own face. How bad was an injury like that? I had no idea. I knew the football players got hurt and did rehab, in part because we had the facilities for it and the players were always using them. But they didn’t really talk about it.
I turned to the man I had been greeting moments before.
