Chapter Two

All Lucas had to do was catch the ball.

It should have been too easy. He’d read the QB’s play; he’d be in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time to snatch the ball from the air and bolt for the end zone. Simple. It was just a ball. Just a freaking ball. Nothing special about it, like the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of balls he’d caught every day since he’d hit middle school. He’d done this every day of the past four years and twice a day during the summer. Just see the ball, get his hands on the ball, and then run with the ball. Easy.

But right then, it seemed like the whole getting-the-ball-in-his-hands thing was well below his skill set.

What the hell?

The other guys looked at him weird, and Colin—the quarterback and, of course, the head coach’s son—started throwing him embarrassingly easy balls until he was virtually lobbing underhand. Lucas fumbled every single one.

He looked down at his hands in disbelief. He’d literally told Coach he was a decent player, deliberately understating his skill and experience. He’d even planned how to downplay his skills. And now—against all odds—that he’d been given a chance to play on the team, he couldn’t even catch the ball.

Seriously. What the hell was wrong with him?

Growing up, he’d always been the best player on already-great teams. He broke the high school record for receiving when he was a freshman. Hell, even when he was twelve, colleges had come around checking him out. He went along with it—he knew now—because deep inside he’d always thought that if he played college football, maybe his dad would come back. Maybe he’d come back and tell Lucas that he was proud of him. Maybe he’d stay.

And then he’d realized how stupid he was, given that by then he barely remembered what his father looked like. And when he began to play just for the love of the game, he got better and better. His whole identity was wrapped up in the Friday night lights.

By fifteen, he had narrowed the college teams down to three. The colleges weren’t allowed to actively pressure him or even contact him. But he still got birthday cards from famous coaches who were regularly interviewed on ESPN. And really old college players would stop by and watch him play. It started off small. An alumnus of MFU had come by with a set of weights, so he could train at home. It had been a gift, just because this guy “saw himself” in Lucas.

He and his mom had been blissfully ignorant about the rules of gifts from prospective colleges. But by the time he had a MacBook Pro in his bedroom and a decent car outside on the driveway, he figured something wasn’t quite right. But his mom seemed happy for the first time in nearly ten years, so he didn’t ask questions. He had a fully paid-up membership at the fancy gym in town, his mom got anonymous gift cards in the mail, and he could pay for every movie or meal he took Melissa, Julie, and all the other girls who now vied for his attention out for.

And then the college that had spent the most money on him—not directly, of course, but through old players or businesses that old players worked for now—told him to make up his mind so they could start preparing for his arrival. Told him that getting a team player tattoo—that they’d pay for, of course—would seal the deal for them. They didn’t put it like that. More like he’d belong to something important. They told him about the time Jim Wilkie—their offensive linebacker who went on to have a fifteen-year NFL career—had gotten his tattoo. It was fun. It was about loyalty to his new family—his new team. It was about being assigned a jersey number. It was about the commitment he was ready to take.

He wanted to be loyal. He got the tattoo, but before it had even healed, the world came crashing down. The college was busted for “paying” a high school student to join and had to pay a fine, which one local news report said had already been budgeted for in their football program. Lucas had been banned from playing in high school ever again, and his mother was strongly encouraged to move them away from Henderson, probably so the school district could pretend the whole thing had never happened. When she refused, the local hospital fired her and made it clear she’d never find a job in the county again.

And here he was.

In Hillside, unable to catch a freaking ball.

Maybe the universe was telling him to quit football altogether.

He looked down at the bright green grass that grew on the field in blatant defiance of the Hillside’s dusty landscape and then at the white concrete, covered bleachers with the Hammer’s motto “Keep Fighting” on a huge banner. It was cool and all but nothing compared to the stadium at his old school. He should be knocking it out of the park here.

Maybe Coach could help.

Coach was talking to the offensive line, and Colin at the other end of the field. He was tall and broad in the shoulders. What position had he played before he’d become a coach? Maybe a running back or a fullback. Colin and his father both had the same dark blond hair, so much so that when they put their heads together, you couldn’t see where Colin’s head started and his father’s finished.

What would it have been like to have a father that loved football as much as he did? Who’d have been there for all his games, who’d have been able to give him advice? Would he even be in this shit show if his father had been like Colin’s?

But he hadn’t. And here he was sucking so hard he didn’t even recognize himself. He needed help. From someone. Anyone. A tiny part of him—the seven year old still inside him—wanted to cry like he had when his father first left.

He took a deep breath and shook his head. He really didn’t want to ask Coach for help. He didn’t want to appear needy or unsure or just an idiot. But he really couldn’t keep sucking this badly without being rejected outright. And being benched would kill him. Coach had forty players who he’d known for years that he could help. Why would he spend time on Lucas?

At the end of practice, however, he didn’t even need to ask.

“Black. You’re with me,” Coach said as he walked with them toward the locker room.

Shit. Was he being dropped? After a few fumbles? Actually, it’d been more than a few. And it wasn’t as if he even had a legit place on the team yet. He clenched his fists. Wasn’t this what had got him into trouble before? Getting ahead of himself?

“Sir?”

“Get changed. I’m taking you home. Talk to your parents.”

“My mother is working the late shift at the hospital, sir. There’ll be no one there.”

Coach obviously knew enough not to enquire after his father, as much good as it’d do. He was a ghost. “Fine. You can come home and have dinner with us.”

Everything in him wanted to beg off, but Coach just wasn’t the sort of guy you argued with, no matter if the subject was the weather, football, or dinner. In the few short weeks he’d been at this school, he knew that much.

By the time he’d got changed, Colin and Coach were standing by a silver Toyota waiting for him. Colin was doing something on his phone, and Coach had his eye on the door waiting for Lucas to make an appearance. Up close, Colin had a slightly squarer jaw than his dad and wider eyes. But other than that, uncannily similar.

Coach didn’t say anything, but the raised eyebrow was pretty clear. You spend more time getting changed than a girl going to prom. Fair enough. But he literally had to wait until everyone had gone before taking his shirt off. He couldn’t let anyone see the stupid tattoo he’d gotten without them asking questions. What kind of dick got a college football player tattoo before he’d even got to college? Him. That’s who.

Colin called shotgun, so Lucas got in the back.

There was silence in the car until Colin turned on the radio. The announcer was talking about Dollinger College’s football team. Swear to God, Colin lived, breathed, and bled football. Lucas leaned forward a tiny bit, not wanting to ask him to turn it up. He’d never heard of Dollinger College. Sounded like their football program was just important enough. Not enough that people had heard of the college, but important enough that its alumni attended games.

Maybe he could get into a school like that…

He took a breath. Nope. The only way he could get into any school was by concentrating on his schoolwork. And it was all a little late to prioritize academics when his whole life before had been about perfecting his football game.

The best he could do was to graduate and get a job. Football was just a means to calm his brain. To feel comfortable in his skin. Football was, and always had been, his touchstone. The place he could go and excel. Lucas Westman was football. But he’d lost that when he became Lucas Black.

He pressed his lips together to strangle the need to shout or punch something. He didn’t even have his touchstone anymore. If he didn’t have football, who the hell was he?

Coach pulled up outside Hardy’s Hardware, and a girl jumped in, nearly on top of him.

She had one leg in the car by the time she realized that she was about to sit on his lap. Her surprise, and his, stunned them into inaction for a second, her bare leg on his as she looked at him with deer-in-the-headlights shock. After a few long seconds, he got his shit together, scooted out from under her, and moved over as far as he could. Her eyes narrowed in the dim light as she recognized him.

“Avery, Lucas Black. Lucas, Avery, my twin,” Colin said so hurriedly that the words tumbled over one another.

What sweet hell…?

The girl who’d talked to him earlier. The only girl who’d really talked to him since he’d moved to Hillside.

“Hey,” he said as she slid into the seat. It came out in a half-hoarse, half-eight-year-old’s voice. Ah shit. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey.”

She tipped her head to one side and stared at him for a second then gave him a half smile that barely even reached her lips. She settled back into her seat. “Hey,” she begrudged him. She switched on the seat light and opened a spiral-bound book on her lap.

He couldn’t stop looking at her. Her hair swung over her face and touched her lap as she looked at her book. Her skin was…

Stop it.

He quickly averted his eyes and looked out of his window. But he didn’t look at the town passing by in the dusk—he watched her reflection in the glass. She slipped in her ear buds, effectively tuning out everyone without taking her eyes off her book.

The only time she looked up was to check their speed displayed in big numbers on the yellow speed camera. It said forty-three as they drove by, and he swore she smiled. Maybe that was her lucky number? Or maybe she wasn’t checking their speed at all. Maybe she was watching him the same way he’d been watching her—in the reflection. He looked away really fast.

They pulled into a quiet neighborhood, one he hadn’t been to before. The road was wide, and old-fashioned lampposts cast a weird glimmering light over tiny parts of the sidewalks. Must be nice to live in a place that the streetlights were just for show.

The bright lights in the neighborhood he’d just moved to kept the drug dealers at bay—mostly, anyway. On his street, all the bedrooms were at the back of houses. No one wanted to get pegged in a drive-by while they were sleeping. He bet there was no chance of that here.

They stopped in front of a large red brick house, and everyone except Coach got out. Lucas followed Colin. The garage door slid open slowly to reveal a gleaming red car—an old one—in one of the spaces. Lucas watched as Coach slowly drove his Toyota so that the passenger side almost touched the wall, leaving him plenty of room to get out without dinging the red car.

Lucas stood there in the cast-off light from the garage. This was the moment in a movie where he would say, “Wow, Coach. Is that a 1943 Studebaker Corvette Ford with a three in the back, double muffler, a thousand horses, and wide-boy trim?” and then instantly be accepted as a part of the family, even when he started dating Avery. Except he knew nothing about cars, so stringing together a bunch of words that might possibly be related to cars—or very probably wasn’t—would not work for him.

Wait. Dating Avery? Dude. Get your head back in the game.

Instead, he followed them into the house. Avery was flicking on light switches as she passed, making the house so bright it could have been a film set. Colin switched half of them off again as he passed.

He looked back at Lucas. “She’s scared of the dark.”

“Am not,” came her voice from the kitchen.

“She is,” he whispered this time before barging through the kitchen door that swung back at Lucas as he followed. He just managed to prevent it from smashing him in the face, which he was grateful for. Nothing like walking right into a door to cement the image of a capable athlete.

He sighed inwardly. He’d never been this anxious about anything in his life. Not even when his dad had given instructions to the seven-year-old Lucas that he “be the man of the house and look after your mother” as he had walked out of the front door with a bulging suitcase that bore stickers and tags from trips Lucas and his mother had never been invited on.

Lucas had to make the team. He’d gotten an extremely lucky break by even being allowed to practice, so he needed to prove himself if he had any shot of staying. He couldn’t bear disappointing his mother. He couldn’t let her keep working the shitty shifts so they could stay in their shitty apartment, in their shitty neighborhood, for nothing. He couldn’t keep fucking dropping the ball. Or being in the wrong place when the ball was thrown to him. A couple more practices like the one he’d had today and Colin would never throw to him again. No one would. Not kids on the beach. Not even dogs would bring him balls. No one.

“Hey, dude,” Colin said, thrusting plates at him. “You eat, you help.” He nodded through a different swing door. “Don’t drop anything.”

Lucas swallowed his reaction to the dig, took the plates, and set them around the table. He moved slowly, taking in the photos and trophies that seemed to prop up the walls. There were pictures of a blond girl—presumably Avery—and her mother, pictures of Colin and his face-cracking smile, holding pennants and trophies that seemed to grow in size as he did. He was thinking about the stark difference between his dining room and theirs when Avery came in. Alone.

He opened his mouth to say something, but even his girl-mojo had apparently left him. She passed him going back into the kitchen.

“Flies,” she said.

He frowned and then caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sideboard. He literally had his mouth open. He closed his mouth and stared at himself for a second.

So, let’s count. He’d lost his place at college, lost all his football ability, lost his ability to speak to girls, lost his car—okay, just its wheels, but still—lost his home, lost his friends, lost his iPhone, lost his Macbook Pro, and his mom had lost her job.

He may as well be a completely different person. It was as if some total loser had jumped in his body and made it his. Except he was the loser. His mom called it “hubris.” Maybe that should be the tattoo he used to cover up the college one.

Avery breezed back in again, and just to prove himself wrong, he actually articulated some real words. “Where’s your mom?”

Her face fell, and instantly he realized his mistake. Had she left? Were they divorced? He knew what that felt like, so at least he could empathize.

Avery’s gaze touched on the photos around the room. “She died last year.” She held her lips in a slightly unnatural line, and he guessed she was trying not to cry. Absolute weariness and uselessness turned his guts inside out.

“I’m so sorry,” he said with the understanding that his words meant nothing. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be anywhere that real, live people were. He was a piece of shit. He couldn’t even start a conversation without fucking it up.

He opened his mouth to apologize again, but it was too late. Coach and Colin had come in with the food. He’d been hungry a minute before, but the expression on Avery’s face was like a gut punch.

Forcing himself to eat, he tried to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him even once. How did he apologize for something so stupid, anyway? Then he thought about this whole family. Colin didn’t seem like anything bothered him—how could he possibly have dealt with something like that? What about Coach? Shame and anxiety flooded through him. He was worried about fucking football while sitting with a family who was dealing with something legit horrible? He stopped eating and stared at his food, unable to look at anyone.

Finally, Coach set his knife and fork down and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Let’s talk about your game,” he said, planting his elbows on the table.

Okay. I can handle this.

“Extenuating circumstances are demanding that I fill a hole in my offense this Friday. I spoke to the school board, and they said that you could play instead of waiting the requisite eight weeks.” When he said “extenuating circumstances,” he looked hard at Colin, who tucked his head down and played with his food. What was that about?

“So, I need to know. Have you actually caught a ball in your high school career? Because I might be better playing my defensive tackle if you haven’t.”

Lucas could feel his face flushing. He couldn’t believe his ability was so far down the toilet that his new coach wanted to know if he’d ever caught a ball. He wanted to tell him how many receiving yards he’d made last year, which was nearly 2,000; how many touchdowns, which was thirteen by the way; and how many MVP trophies he’d gotten over the years. But he couldn’t.

“Yes, sir. I can,” he said, hoping it was true.

“Okay, then. You can come to practice the rest of the week, and I’ll let you know on Thursday if I’m playing you or not. We need a decent receiver if we have any chance of getting to the playoffs this year.”

Lucas opened his mouth to say something, but a sharp clang from Avery’s end of the table stopped him. Everyone looked at her.

She grabbed for her dropped fork. “Sorry,” she said and dipped her head down again to the book she was reading.

Lucas was so far out of his comfort zone that the room felt half the size and twice as stifling as it was when he’d sat down. He tried to breathe. He had to get out of there.

…

One by one, they stopped looking at Avery and went back to what they were doing. Her dad interrogating Lucas and her brother trying not to look at her father after the pointed reference to the party Colin had attended where one of the team’s receivers had broken his ankle mis-timing—well mis-everything—jumping off a roof into the pool.

Her gaze was on her planner, but she was laser-focused on what her dad was saying. She’d been hoping this guy could help the team win more and help her dad keep his job and just keep things on an even keel for a bit.

But if her dad was so unsure about him that he’d asked if Lucas could even catch a ball?

Her father didn’t usually ask players back to the house for dinner. What was different about this guy? Also, now she came to think about it, why had he been chanting his own name over and over as he was waiting to cross the sidewalk?

“I can see you’ve got moves. I can see you have the training. I can see you’ve got some speed. What I can’t see is you catching the ball. What’s the problem?” Her father seemed genuinely interested.

“I…I don’t know, sir,” he replied in a low, almost cracking voice.

Avery couldn’t help but look up. Colin did, too. Lucas put his napkin on the table and looked for anything as if he were about to bolt for the door. But her dad began to talk again.

“I looked for you online. I wanted to be sure you understood what’s at stake here in Hillside.” Her dad rubbed his nose in a way that Avery knew meant that he didn’t understand. “You have no social media that I can find. Which is strange, I think.”

Yeah, no kidding that was weird. That couldn’t be right. Everyone she knew had some kind of social media, even if they just reposted the same memes over and over and over.

“I was going to warn you about your social media presence. Hillside is small. Everything you post, every time you forget to use your turn signal, every disabled parking spot you use, and every time you don’t say please and thank you, or if you shout at someone down the main street—people will notice that. Judge you. The local papers will write about you. Brady’s Balls will be all over you. Being on the team is a big deal here. If you think they won’t think the worst of you, you’re wrong. If you think they won’t find and talk to your ‘romantic friends,’ you’re wrong. If you think those headlines won’t mess with your head, you’re wrong.”

Lucas looked down at his empty plate. Avery felt for him.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“And if you make the team as a regular, you have to give up your girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever floats your boat, at least while the season is in play. We practice most nights, and when you’re not on the field, you need to study the playbook. It’s called commitment, son. You’re in or you’re out.”

“In, sir,” Lucas said almost before the last word was out of her dad’s mouth.

Avery saw a small fire in his eyes as he said the words. Lucas must need this. He must need to play. His fast response bordered on desperate.

But was he as desperate as she was to get the team to the playoffs?

Dad is going to lose his job if the Hillside Hammers don’t finish the season high up the bracket in the playoffs. Dad can’t lose his job. The Hammers have to get to the playoffs.

She couldn’t let that happen.