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“Obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be texting your girl during halftime,” he scoffed. “Who wasn’t yours to claim in the first place.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that I didn’tclaimher, because she’s not fucking property?” I spat as I spun the combination padlock on my locker. “And I wouldn’t have had to text her if Yates hadn’t body-checked me in the second quarter. She wanted to make sure I was okay.”
“If she can’t handle seeing people knocked down, maybe she shouldn’t be coming to football games. Things happen. Especially when refs are looking the other way,” he hissed.
I rolled my eyes and walked away. He could try his macho man act on someone else. He was like a caged lion: scared and lashing out at anyone he could in the name of self-preservation.
Braden came up next to me and clapped me on the shoulder. “You straight, man?”
“Yeah, I’m straight,” I sighed. “Taylor’s a punk-ass bitch, but we’ve got a game to win.”
“That’s the spirit,” he chuckled humorlessly. “Your girl okay?”
“Worried about both of us. She saw who shoved us down. I told her Yates hits like a twelve-year-old girl.”
He laughed. “Try a six-year-old girl.” Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen, I have something I want to run by you. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked earlier.”
I looked at him quizzically. “What?”
“Wasn’t she fifteen? When…” he hissed right in my ear, so low it was almost inaudible.
I nodded slowly, unsure of where he was going with this. “Yeah. Her birthday’s October twenty-seventh. It happened three weeks before that.”
And then it hit me.
The age of consent in Kansas wassixteen. What those fuckers had done to Kyler wasn’t just rape. It wasstatutoryrape, which carried a mandatory prison sentence if they were convicted, no matter if they tried to claim it was consensual or not. She’d been three weeks too young to legally consent to anything at all.
“Dude.”
“Uh-huh,” he said with a calculating grin.
“You’re a fucking genius,” I chuckled as a similar grin spread across my face.
Finally. We finally had a way to bring these fuckers down.
He snorted. “I have my moments. Now, come on. We’ve got to get back out there.”
We headed back onto the field and huddled up. And of course, because everything seemed to be going to shit from the second I’d gotten here, I ended up right next to Max.
How this asshole had ended up as the quarterback, the leader of the team, I had no idea. Because the plays he’d been telling us to run made absolutely zero sense. We were supposed to be playing to our opponents’ weaknesses, and what he was doing was pretty much the exact opposite.
But what he said went, so we got in formation and started running the play. Almost immediately, Kyle, one of our offensive linemen, went down with the ball. He didn’t even gain two yards. But we were committed to it now, so we had to keep going.
Too late, I realized why Max wanted us to be in this particular formation, running this particular play. Because it put me in his vicinity on the field. I was able to get the ball, and Braden ended up on the far side of the field, wide open for a pass. I geared up to throw the ball to him, but at the last second, Max ran straight into me, kneeing me in the balls and shoving me down on the ground by my helmet so hard that my head actually bounced up and back down again.
I saw stars for a second, and blinding pain shot all the way up my back as the wind got knocked out of me. Thankfully, the cup had taken the worst of the blow, but Max’s knee had shoved the hard plastic into my balls. I vaguely heard Coach Jefferson call for Max, but I couldn’t lift my head to find out what was going on.
Fuck me, this hurt.
“Thomason. Dude, are you okay?” I heard Drew asking as he knelt beside me.
I looked up at him, and surprisingly, he actually looked a little concerned as he tried to give me a once-over.
“Do you care?” I groaned.
“I might not like you, and I might like your girlfriend even less, but Taylor and Yates are out of control tonight. That was fucking ridiculous. So, are you okay?”
A small part of me started to wonder if maybe Braden was right. If Drew really wasn’t in on the continuing torture his friends were inflicting on Kyler.
