Chapter 42 LOVE YOU MORE THAN SWEET TEA
POV: OMAR
The film session had been running for ninety minutes.
Four of them in the small film review room off the athletic corridor, laptop propped on the desk, Myers's annotated practice footage playing through for the third time. Marcus from Atlanta who read the game better than anyone Omar had ever played with. Dre from Houston who was faster than he looked and knew it. Joel from Miami who complained about everything and was right about half of it.
And Omar, who had been watching the footage carefully enough that he'd spotted the defensive gap that Myers was going to ask about before Myers had mentioned it in his notes.
"There," he said, pointing at the screen. "Left side, sixteen seconds in. The spacing collapses when the pressure comes from the right. We're all shifting the same direction at the same time."
Marcus leaned forward. Watched it again. "Yeah. Yeah, that's it."
"Fix that," Dre said, "and we stop that play every time."
Joel said something about how fixing it was easier to say than do and he wasn't wrong, but the point was they'd found it, which was the part that mattered tonight.
This was the part of soccer Omar was genuinely good at. Not just physically. The reading of it. The way a game was a puzzle that kept rearranging its own pieces and you had to hold the whole board in your head while also moving your body through space and making decisions in fractions of a second. He'd been doing it since he was seven years old on a field in Louisville with two orange cones for goalposts.
He pulled out his phone between clips.
Thought about Piper.
Typed: Study group running late. Miss you already. See you at breakfast? Love you more than sweet tea.
Sent it.
It was not a complicated text. He missed her, so he said so. That was the whole thing. He didn't architect it or calculate what it communicated or wonder how it would land. He just missed her and said it because that was what you did when you loved someone and they weren't in the room.
He put his phone away.
The next clip started.
Joel said something twenty minutes later that Omar filed without responding to.
They were packing up, the session done, Myers's footage annotated and a shared document updated with the defensive notes they'd take to Thursday's full team review. The conversation had drifted the way conversations did at the end of long sessions, looser, less focused.
Joel had said: "You know who you don't want to be on George Morrison's list."
Not to Omar specifically. Just to the room.
Marcus had said: "Anyone."
Dre had said: "What list."
Joel had said: "The list of people he's decided are interesting. He doesn't let go of interesting."
Then the conversation had moved somewhere else and nobody had said anything else about it and Omar had zipped his bag and said good session and walked out.
He held it in the part of his mind where he held things he wasn't ready to think about yet.
It sat there with a specific weight that he was choosing not to examine.
The campus was quiet at nine PM, that particular campus quiet that only happened on weeknights when the performance of social life had temporarily suspended itself and everyone was just a person trying to get through the week. Security lights. Cold air. The smell of old stone that had started to feel familiar in a way that Louisville's smell of grass and his mother's cooking did not.
He pulled out his phone.
Piper hadn't responded.
He put it back in his pocket.
She was probably in the language lab. She'd mentioned extra Spanish practice. She was working hard here, working at fitting in, working at all the things that were supposed to come naturally to the kind of school Thornfield was but actually required enormous invisible effort. He understood that. He was doing the same thing on the field.
He passed the library building.
Lights on in the upper floors, which was strange because most students were at dinner or heading back to the dorms at this hour. Somebody up there working late, or maybe hiding from something, or maybe just needing the quiet of a place that wasn't their room.
He understood that too.
He kept walking.
Back in his room he put his bag down and sat on his bed and looked at his cleats by the door, two years old, still solid, doing what they needed to do. He'd polish them tonight. It was a thing he did when he was thinking without knowing what he was thinking about. The repetitive motion of it. The straightforward task of making something work the way it was supposed to work.
He picked up the polish and a cloth.
Thought about Joel saying: he doesn't let go of interesting.
Thought about George at the bleachers. The way he'd moved toward Piper. The way Piper had laughed.
Omar polished the left cleat.
He was here because he was good enough to be here.
He was good enough to be here.
Piper loved him and she was working hard and she was going to be fine and they were going to be fine and whatever George Morrison was doing it was not something Omar Carter needed to spend energy on because his energy had a destination and the destination was the field and the field was the thing he could actually control.
He polished the right cleat.
Checked his phone.
She still hadn't responded.
He plugged it in and put it on the nightstand and told himself it was fine.
It was probably fine.
He turned out the light.
Author's Note: Omar Carter texts "love you more than sweet tea" because he means it every single time he says it. That's not a character flaw. That's the tragedy. Drop a like if Omar just broke your heart a little. — J