Chapter 32 WHAT HE WON'T NAME
POV: TEDDY
Myers sent the practice footage at nine sharp.
Teddy was stretched out on his bed, phone above his face, scrolling through the video like he always did after practice. He was searching for flaws to fix. Where was his positioning off? Was he hesitating when he should have just gone for it? When had he made the wrong call?
He found what he needed at the eleven minute mark. There he was, holding the defensive line. He watched it twice. Not perfect, but not terrible either.
He kept scrolling.
At minute twenty-three, he stopped. Watched more closely.
James Blake was cutting left across the line during the scrimmage, slipping past a senior who was bigger, older, and way more experienced. James made it look easy. He moved in this way that just did not match up with anything Teddy had seen before. It was not a soccer thing, exactly. It was something else—like James had learned to move by making himself as invisible as possible, efficient because he had to be, not because someone taught him how.
Teddy watched that section again. Then again. He had been playing since he was a little kid, club teams, school teams, all of it. He could usually tell where a player came from just by how they played. Club training made one kind of player. Public school made another. Street soccer was its own animal. Travel teams, another.
James did not fit any of those molds.
He played like he had learned on his own, in places where nobody was telling him what to do, but at the same time there was a polish to him, like he had definitely been coached—well, and by someone who knew what they were doing.
Those two things did not usually go together.
Teddy put his phone down on his chest and stared at the ceiling.
The dorm was quiet. Typical Thursday—people in their rooms or hanging out in the common spaces. Outside, the quad was dark, yellow security lights throwing weird, broken shapes across the grass.
He thought about the locker room earlier.
He remembered that moment when James looked at him before Myers called second string. Just two seconds of eye contact, but it had felt like more. He had been thinking about it all night, more than he wanted to admit.
He picked up his phone and scrolled to his messages. Found the group chat with James, which only had one old message about practice times.
He started to type: Good session today. You up for extra drills before school tomorrow?
Stopped. Deleted it.
Typed: Hey. Good game.
Deleted that, too.
He left the phone face-down on the bed.
He knew he was good at reading people. His mom always said he had a sixth sense for the real stuff going on under the surface, even when people were trying to hide it. He could always tell when someone was performing and when they were not.
James Blake was performing something.
He was not bad at it, either. He was one of the best Teddy had ever seen. But the act was still there, and Teddy could see the cost of it. He knew what it felt like to keep up a version of yourself for everyone else while the real you got pushed out of sight.
Teddy knew how that felt, maybe more than he wanted to admit.
But he never picked at that thread. He had learned that the hard way, back when he was fourteen, in a conversation with his father that was not supposed to be about him but absolutely was. He knew there were places you did not go. Subjects you did not bring up. He recognized the look on his father’s face when the subject got too close, and he had spent a lot of energy making sure he never saw it again.
He was aware of Jack Porter, just like he kept tabs on everything at Thornfield. Noted, filed, not examined.
Teddy rolled onto his side.
He was not going to text James tonight. Not because he did not want to, but because he needed to figure out what he was actually feeling and why. And he could not do that with his phone lighting up in his hand.
He would keep paying attention. That was the one thing he trusted himself to do. Pay attention, wait for the pattern to show itself, wait until the thing he was noticing finally had a name.
He had only been watching James Blake for a week.
He already had more thoughts about him than he usually had about anybody, even after a month.
That had to mean something.
He was not ready to figure out what.
He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back to the clip at the twenty-three minute mark. The way James moved, making himself small, never taking up more space than he had to.
That felt familiar, too.
Maybe that was the most important thing he had seen all night.
Teddy did not sleep for a while. When he finally did, soccer was the last thing on his mind.