“Stay there. It’s warmer.” I ignored her uncertainty and grabbed my phone and notepad with all the information I had. “Move over though. I’m joining you.”
She scooted so she was against the headboard and wall, letting me have the edge, and it struck me how odd it was tonothave the urge to get her the hell out of there. Most of the time I either rushed to get home, or, I’d make some excuse for them to leave. I think maybe once…or twice I’d hung around longer than an hour. It wasn’t because I was an asshole. There was just nothing to talk about.
She looked at me expectantly and made her eyes get all big. “Tell me the news, Jeff! While I know what we just did was fun, I really did come over because you said you had news to share.”
“It was more thanjustfun,” I teased. “But check out the last text I got.” I handed her my phone and waited as she scrolled to find the one I was referring to. It took about thirty seconds before she gasped.
“What the hell? Someone threatened you? When did this happen?” She threw my device onto the foot of the bed and gave me a panicked look. “We were careful.”
“I know. It freaked me out, too. I got it this afternoon. I haven’t done anything with it besides read it. It’s not like we can trace an unknown number.”
She had a thoughtful look and ran her fingers over the collar of my shirt before saying, “It means we’re getting closer. Someone’s worried.”
“I thought the same thing.”Do I tell her I’m freaked out? Act cool about it?
She did what I dubbed herthinkingface—where she had half her lip sucked into her mouth and one of her eyebrows raised—and I swore I could hear the wheels spinning in her brain. “How easy would it be to find your number?”
A dull twinge of embarrassment hit me when I admitted, “Not hard. A lot of girls have my number and anyone could’ve gotten it from them.”
She didn’t look put off. If anything, she nodded, then clapped her hands in excitement. “Duh! The entire baseball coaching staff has access to your information. They had to block the number just in case someone recognized it. I would bet thousands of dollars it came from them. It would be weird to have a grown man ask a college girl for your number.Thatwould draw attention.”
Again, she thought differently than I did and I was impressed. “It makes more sense and solidifies my coach being involved, even though it sucks.”
“Are you worried?” She scrunched her nose and her eyes softened on the sides. “I’m freaked out and it wasn’t even sent to me. Fuck! Do you think…do you think my uncle knows I’m involved?” Her voice rose an octave and her words blurred together as she exclaimed them in a hurry. I didn’t even think about it before putting my hand on her knee.
“It was sent to me. You have no reason to be worried.” I squeezed her leg and let it linger for a second before saying, “If anything, I’m glad it was my number. I can handle anything thrown my way and that can help keep attention off you—the person who’s going to write this article and expose all these assholes.”
“I don’t know, Jeff. This seems so much more real now. People know you’re asking around.” She rubbed the center of her forehead with two fingers and grabbed my notebook from my hand. “We need to wrap this thing up as fast as we can. If anyone of them knows someone’s onto their actions, they could start taking actions to cover their tracks.”
She flipped the page and started jotting down a timeline and I leaned closer to her so I could see what she was writing.
-Athletes involved
-Coaches/administration involved
-Martin Rhett
-Where is the money?
-Sports involved
“I’m going to start drafting an outline.” She bit down on the end of my pen and starting chewing before she realized it and stopped. “Shit, I’m sorry. This is yours. It’s a habit.”
“Not worried about it.” I scanned her list and something was missing. I couldn’t figure out what and while I understood hermotivation to get a head start, the fear of someone catching us wasn’t enough to get ahead of ourselves. “I know the text freaked us both out, but I don’t want to rush this. We both have people who matter to us involved in this and we can’t half-ass it.”
“I understand.” She narrowed her eyes at me and tapped the pen against her teeth, not biting it this time. “We’ve focused on baseball the majority of our questions. We need to switch it up.”
“Agreed.”
She let out a sigh and shook her head. “Photos. Documents. Evidence. We can speculate as much as we want but for anyone to take this accusation seriously, we need some hard evidence.”
“There’s no fucking way we’ll get our hands on that.” I balled my fist and hit the side of my bed in frustration. “Shit, I never thought about the lack of that. Who’s going to believe two college kids?”
She made a dismissive sound with her tongue and grinned real wide. “Evidence can be as simple as rosters from previous years that proves that some names on these lists don’t have a shred of evidence they played the sport in high school. Max assured me that my fake sister didn’t need to have any athletic experience. Said that these guys have all the tools to cover it up. I’ll have to check my notes I wrote down after I got home that night, but he said something along the lines of never touching a baseball in his life, but thisdudecould make it happen.”
“Okay,” I responded, nodding more to myself than her. That’s more manageable. We don’t only need proof of payments or anything serious.”
“We’d never get access unless we…” She tapped that pen against her front teeth again and had a crazy gleam in her eye. “Unless we got access to your coach’s or my uncle’s phone. We could search emails with the names of the guys we know.”
