Chapter 46 Friday Night
JAKE POV
The locker room was loud enough to hurt.
Marcus was in the middle of his lion speech again. He did it before every big game, stomping around in his cleats, voice bouncing off the tile walls, arms going everywhere. Something about lions and hunger and how prey could smell fear. Jake had heard it seven times this season. The metaphor still didn't make sense. Nobody told Marcus that.
The rest of the team was into it. Shouting back. Banging helmets together. The kind of noise that was supposed to make you feel ready.
Jake sat on the bench with his helmet in both hands and stared at the floor.
He wasn't ready. He was just somewhere else for a second.
He always went somewhere else on big game nights.
He thought about his mom.
He couldn't help it. She used to pack his bag when he was twelve, back when football was just something fun, before the scouts and the pressure and everything that came after. She'd tuck a granola bar in the side pocket of his duffel. Chocolate chip. Always the same kind. He'd never once seen her do it, but it was always there.
Go show them, she'd say. Every time. Just that.
He closed his eyes for one second.
Then Marcus shoved his shoulder. "You with us, Mercer?"
"Yeah," Jake said. He stood up. Put the helmet on. "Let's go."
Warm-ups felt good.
The field was cold, and the lights were already on, and the bleachers were filling fast, parents, students, scouts with clipboards sitting in the second row on the visitor side. Jake had been told two of them were from state schools. Maybe a third from further.
He ran his routes. Caught every throw. His arm was loose, his read was clean. His body knew what to do even when his head was somewhere else.
He scanned the bleachers once.
Student section. Row after row of Westbrook blue and gold. He was looking for, but he didn't let himself finish that thought. He was just looking. Habit. Checking the crowd.
He didn't find her.
He went back to the end zone and ran the drill again.
In the first quarter, Westbrook was up by three.
Jake played clean. Not spectacular, just solid, which was sometimes better than spectacular. He read the defense before they moved. He got the ball out fast. He took one hit on a scramble and got up without thinking about it.
The crowd was loud. His body was in it.
His head kept going back to the empty seat he'd been looking at in the student section. Third row, end of the aisle. Where Marcus's girlfriend always saved spots. Where Lily had sat last time, in her dinosaur hoodie, until she fell asleep on Marcus's shoulder in the third quarter.
He didn't let himself wonder.
He ran the next play.
Halftime came.
The score was 14-7. Good position. Coach ran through the adjustment. Their linebacker was cheating left, and their safety was slow to rotate. Jake listened. He absorbed it. He filed it.
Then he was back on the field for the second quarter start.
He threw two completions. Handed off once. Got the first down.
Third play of the drive, while the ref sorted out a flag on the other side of the field, Jake turned.
Just for a second.
He looked at the bleachers.
He found her.
He didn't know how. Three hundred people in the stands, and somehow his eyes went straight to her in four seconds flat, the way they'd been doing for months without his permission, finding her in a hallway, finding her across the cafeteria, finding her in his own kitchen like she was the first thing his eyes knew how to look for.
She was there.
Third row. End of the aisle.
His jersey.
Number seven. His name is across the back. She was wearing it over her hoodie, the sleeves a little long, and she was sitting next to Marcus's girlfriend with Lily in her lap, Lily already in the dinosaur ears she wore everywhere now.
Jake stood on that field and forgot, for exactly three seconds, that there was a game happening.
Then Marcus slapped his helmet from behind. "Flag's clear! Let's go!"
He turned back.
He ran the play.
He threw the best pass of his season, a forty-yard spiral that hit his receiver in stride without a defender within ten feet. The crowd erupted. He didn't celebrate. He just pointed at his receiver, standard, and jogged back to the huddle.
But the whole way back, something in his chest was doing something he didn't have a word for.
She came.
After everything. After the library and the duffel bag and the things he should have said months earlier and didn't. After all of it.
She was here. In his number.
He ran the next play.
He ran every play after that.
And every time there was a pause, a flag, a timeout, a measurement, he did not look at the stands again, because he already knew what he'd see, and knowing was enough to keep him standing, and looking again might break something he couldn't fix in the middle of a game.
Westbrook scored again.
21-7.
Third quarter, two minutes left, Jake was on the sideline with his helmet off when Marcus dropped down next to him, breathing hard.
"She's here," Marcus said.
"I know," Jake said.
Marcus looked at him sideways. "You gonna say something to her after?"
Jake looked at the field.
"I don't know," he said.
Which was a lie. He knew exactly what he wanted to say. He'd been constructing it in pieces for two weeks on the porch in the dark, in the kitchen at midnight, lying on his ceiling at one in the morning with Lily asleep down the hall.
The problem wasn't knowing what to say.
The problem was that Penny Cruz had stopped needing him to say anything. She'd filed the report. She'd won the decathlon. She'd walked back into that house on her own terms and built a life there that had nothing to do with him, and it was the best thing she'd ever done and also the most terrifying thing he'd ever witnessed.
He didn't know if there was still a door.
He didn't know if he'd earned the right to knock.
The ref blew the whistle. Jake put his helmet back on.
"Mercer," Coach said.
"Yeah." He stood up.
He went back out.
Final drive. Score to protect. Two minutes on the clock.
He looked at the plays on his wristband. He looked at the defense setting up across the line.
Then his phone, sitting on the bench behind him, the one Marcus was supposed to be watching, buzzed loud enough that half the sideline heard it.
Marcus picked it up.
His face changed.
He looked at Jake on the field.
Jake was already in the huddle. He couldn't see Marcus's face from here. He called the play. The line set.
He didn't know yet.
He would know in four minutes, when the game ended, and he came off the field, and Marcus held out the phone with that expression on his face.
The expression meant something had happened.
Something that wasn't about football at all.