Page 134 of Forever Relentless

“But do I get . . .” She was gone. “Paid?” I added lamely.

I read the posts again. And I waited for another one, but nothing happened. I’d been sitting there for twenty minutes. I hadn’t noticed.

Was that it? Two posts and then leave it for speculation. I leaned back in my chair and looked at my phone.

Was it this easy? I didn’t know who this was. I didn’t know what they knew. I didn’t know if they were going to make things better or get people hurt.

I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, the posts were gone.

I gave a snort of disdain. “This is why you don’t do it,” I muttered to the empty room. “They’re gone as quick as they came.”

A ping made me look.

Wrighton U can Erase what it Wants. WE KNOW THE TRUTH

Fuck.

TruthHurts1

I admired their balls. They’d obviously been expecting to be taken down. Another post popped up, TruthHurts2, and it was the post that had been deleted.

I sat and watched it unfold as the internet went wild. People had screenshotted the original posts. They were sharing them. You could take down the post, but the mob was already activated.

I saw old players repost it. Guys who were in the NFL. Some with just a question mark, or a ‘What’s Dis?’

By evening, the posts, both new and deleted, were viral across several platforms.

And all I did was watch it all like I was binge-watching Netflix.

Mason texted once to say he was having a great day, and I laughed at the pic he sent me of him grinning while holding up a beer.

It was a genuine smile. I hadn’t seen him wear one of those in a while. Whoever TruthHurts was, I owed them a beer myself for putting that smile on my brother’s face.

I went to bed that night, and I felt relaxed. Whoever the anonymous poster was, they were sharing the burden, and I appreciated it, even if they would never know.

Tomorrow might be bearable. Then I remembered that I needed to go to the after-party, and I still had to buy a dress.

Or whatever I was supposed to wear. I didn’t think I would get off with wearing jeans and a hoodie.

I was back on social media, this time looking for football events and seeing what the women wore.

I was not wearing a dress like that. There was more fabric in Noah’s practice jersey than in some of those gowns. Half of them appeared to be one strong gust of wind away from a public indecency charge.

There were lots of new posts about the spring game, and I realized that the football department was forging on as if nothing had happened.

How very Bobby Ray Sutherland.

I saw a pic of Savannah and her dad at the last event. She was wearing a simple silk dress that somehow looked classier than the designer labels around her.

I could ask Diana.

No. She slept with Mason while she professed to be falling for Coach Douchebag. I knew Mason understood what was going on with her and the football coach, and I also knew my brother wouldn’t give a fuck that he was sleeping with someone else’s girl.

Mason was sometimes very black-and-white. The gray area that he shouldn’t mess with someone else’s girlfriend wouldn’t be lost on him. He just didn’t care. She wanted to screw; he’d been with her before, and I knew he would again. The way he saw it was that the relationship drama wasn’t his. It was Diana’s.

For him, it was physical. For her, it was some messed-up revenge. For Hembry, it was irrelevant.

I could ask Savannah, but I really didn’t want to.