Page 81 of Hard to Score

“It all looks too goddamn suspicious. The Drew Hemmings out there today isn’t the Drew Hemmings who has played for the past season. He never showed up. Instead I got a bush-league rookie who looked like he was doing everything he could to lose. Put that hand in hand with you being spotted with—”

“Fuck this.”

“I need answers and I need them right now,” Roger thunders, his voice reverberating off the walls of the empty room and forcing the point home.

He believes them.

Over me.

It’s amazing how he’s had my back when we were winning and now at the first challenge, the first bad outing, he gave up on me. I thought he believed in me—but now it seems he was only testing the waters.

I stare at him, blinking, trying to comprehend how my world is falling apart and all he can think about is the fucking score.

“Fuck this,” I repeat as I kick one of the stools and it goes flying into the wall. “Fuck. This.”

And when I walk out of the Tigers’ locker room, I leave behind the name Drew Hemmings with it.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

DREW

I LOOK AT THE CLOCK on the scoreboard and grit my teeth.

Today has been a shitshow. Hobbs’s head is somewhere fucking else and it shows in his concentration and passes.

I vibrate with anticipation that eats at me.

That owns me.

The crowd boos as Hobbs intentionally grounds yet another pass when he had two receivers wide open down the field.

“Fuckin’ A,” my teammate, Pete Umansky, yells to no one in particular. “Make the fucking play!” I glance his way and our eyes meet. “You need to be out there.”

I nod, frustrated that I’m not.

“He’s wet behind the ears,” Umansky continues. “Playing scared. You can’t play fucking scared or they’ll eat you alive.”

“Agreed,” I murmur as Justin hands off the ball to a receiver and bobbles it in the process so that the receiver loses his footing and goes down.

“Hey Lonnie!” Pete shouts to our offensive coordinator.

Lonnie looks like a heart attack waiting to happen when he slips one ear from his headset and turns our way. His face is red, his vein is pulsing in his forehead, and his scowl hasn’t changed once in the last half of the game. He throws his hands out to the side to ask what Pete wants.

“Get him out of there. The Pats are eating the fucking kid alive. His nerves are wearing on the rest of the guys out there. Quinton doesn’t drop passes. Huxley doesn’t miss routes. He’s fucking up and it’s making us look like shit.”

“He needs to learn,” Lonnie says as Hobbs jogs from the field when he fails to convert the down. But in true chickenshit fashion, he heads to the opposite end of the line so he’s as far away from Lonnie as possible.

“And we need to fucking win,” Pete snaps back. “Let him learn from the sidelines. Put Bowman in. He’ll get the job done. It’s who should be starting anyway.”

I do a double take at Pete’s words. At the unwavering conviction in them and the nods of the heads of the guys around him. I’m shocked as shit.

I know the guys respect me. I know they joke at practice that I should be the one on the field with them. But I thought it was because they were being cool. I thought it was them trying to placate me.

“Yeah, c’mon, Lon,” Jergen pipes in. “We’ve told you we want Bowie in.”

But now I know differently.

I meet Jergen’s eyes and he nods. Something to tell me he means what he says and it’s the push I need.