They had nothing to hide. Yeah, well, people with nothing to hide didn’t make fucking announcements to say that.
The head coach looked over at Whittaker, who looked like he was trying to slip lower in his seat, and the only thing preventing him from doing that was that he was built like a brick shithouse.
“Don’t be fooled into thinking she’s your friend. She’s not. I don’t know what her agenda is, but make no mistake, it’s not what you think.”
Mike nodded rapidly, already on Coach’s shit list for leaving her the other day; he didn’t want to attract any more attention, and that was obvious.
No one questioned Coach Sutherland. I wanted to. I wanted to say, “Well, what could she have done?” but I knew when to keep my mouth shut.
Now my teammates were giving her the side-eye and snorting under their breath. A few guys didn’t even bother pretending — they straight-up stared at her with open hostility.
“Here she is again,” someone muttered as she passed. “Here to ruin someone else’s chance at being in the program?”
I didn’t react, but I watched as she pretended she didn’t hear it. Shoulders tight, her spine straight, Hadley’s pen tapped against her notebook, steady and deliberate, counting beats to keep from reacting. The once-friendly stadium had taken on an ugly energy, and she wasn’t immune to it. Mike looked like he wanted to crawl into the floor.
Coach Sutherland didn’t notice. Or he did and didn’t care. But I heard every word, and I heard them yesterday too, and the day before that.
The more they said, the more she ignored them, and the more Ididn’t. Instead of pushing her buttons, they were pushingmine. This was turning into pack-mentality bullshit — the kind where everyone laughs until someone crosses the line.
“Keep your mouth shut and focus on your coverage,” I snapped at one of the defensive backs when he made a wisecrack about her ass while walking out of film.
He blinked like he hadn’t expected me to intervene. “Relax, Slater. She’s bad news.”
“She’s allowed to be here, no matter what was said, so shut the fuck up.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Well, we have a right to be here too.” He looked at his buddy beside him. “Do you know Coach told Whittaker if he didn’t keep her on a leash, he was gone?”
Mike had told his roommate what happened, and he’d blabbed to someone else on the team, and it spread like wildfire.Plus, the fact that our head coach had sown the seed of doubt in their minuscule minds, had now convinced them she was some spy from fuck knows where.
“Use your heads,” I growled. “If she’s here on behalf of anyone else, shooting your mouth off about her ass is only going to end badly... for you.”
Because I’m going to punch you. You fucking creep.
This fucking woman was stressing me out. No one else seemed to appreciate that she was fucking difficult. Talking to her was like poking needles into my eyeballs — the very thought of it made me twitch.
I tried to talk to her in the office. Despite everything I said to my friends, I’d given her the warning, and tried to make her see sense. But she twisted things; she said sharp, barbed words with a sweet smile and an evil twinkle in her eye.
She was a menace.
And I couldn’t stop looking at her.
I watched Hadley the rest of the day, as she pretended to be fine. But the cracks were there: the too-quick swallow, the avoidance of eye contact, and the way she kept her distance even from Mike, somehow knowing that by doing so, she was trying not to make his life worse.
And it pissed me off.
It pissed me off seeing them treat her like that.
It pissed me off that she didn’t fight back. And itreallypissed me off that I noticed any of it at all.
By the end of practice, the air felt suffocating. I slammed my helmet onto the bench harder than necessary, adrenaline buzzing under my skin. The constant thought that rolled over and over in my head was that she shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be in the crosshairs. She shouldn’t be digging.
She walked past the sideline, flipping through that damn notebook, brows furrowed in concentration, oblivious to orignoring the glares at her. I saw Dante watching her, and then he looked over at me, both of us knowing we were one spark away from this powder keg blowing up in our faces.
“Peterson!” I called out.
She froze suddenly, as if she’d stepped on a landmine. When she turned, her expression was guarded. Earlier snide comments had bounced off her; this clearly hadn’t.
“What?” she asked, coolly.