For the first time since he’d called me into his office an age ago, Coach Ellis cracked a grin. “You probably should have showed her what you actually drive, McCabe.”
“Hey! There’s nothing wrong with my truck,” I protested. “I mean, other than it’s twenty years old, isn’t a crew cab, and has a stick shift, which makes doing certain activities in it dicey.” I smirked.
“And the heat is temperamental and it could use some paint, and—”
I cut Callahan off with a fist to his bicep. He laughed even as he rubbed his arm.Fucker.
Coach Ellis shook his head. “All right, you two. Get out of here. And do not do anything stupid, at least for one day.”
“Yes, Coach,” my best friend and I said in unison.
Neither of us wasted a second in scrambling out of Coach’s office. As we headed down the hall on our way back outside, Callahan asked, “Did you learn your lesson, Finnegan?”
“I haven’t hung out with a single jersey chaser since all that shit went down with you and Tory last semester. You know that,” I grumbled.
’Han relented. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But before we step outside, I need to warn you that your girl was not at all pleased with what she saw going down in that parking lot.”
“Fuck,” came out on a long exhale. Just once I could use a break from patching things up with Chessly.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chessly
Maybe there wassomething to Orch OR theory. Maybe Finn and I were connected on another universal plane.
Or maybe after being so physically and emotionally connected to him less than twenty-four hours ago, I was experiencing a kind of intuition.
Whatever it was, when Finn’s roommates exited the stadium without him, a terrible sense of doom descended over me. If someone had asked me to explain it, I doubt I could have. I only knew Finn was facing serious trouble, something life-altering, and he was terrified. More than anything, I wanted to march into the stadium to stand right beside him as he confronted whatever danger was threatening him.
Then he’d walked out behind a massive man in a fancy gray suit whose thunderous expression could put the fear of God into the Devil. Beside him walked Penelope Walker. The reason I hadn’t seen her around Hanover much protruded from the front of her long wool coat, which she couldn’t button at the moment. Next came the head coach with Finn in the rear. The pleading expression on his face had dropped a ten-ton ball into my stomach. Whatever was going on with Penelope involved Finn?
Silently, Piper and Jamaica flanked me, one rubbing her hand across the tops of my shoulders, the other wrapping her arm around my waist and hugging me close. After Finn called out to Callahan to join them, Bax narrowed his eyes, his thoughts on the tableau in front of us a total mystery.
When a second coach joined them, things heated up with Finn shouting, forcing Callahan to lay a restraining hand on him. Then everything stopped. The coaches flanked Finn and Callahan, and the four of them disappeared back into the stadium. After a minute of the man—apparently her dad—flexing his hands while Penelope stared back at him with a jutted chin, he wrapped his hand around her upper arm and led her to a fancy Porsche SUV. As he pulled out of his parking space, he laid a patch of rubber, and I felt a little sorry for the girl whose father was super angry with her.
“Do you know who that girl is?” Piper asked Bax.
“Seen her around a few times last fall with Tory Miller and the band of jailbait she hangs out with,” he answered, and my heart threatened to make a permanent move to my throat.
“Of course whatever is going on has something to do with that Miller witch,” Jamaica said, her tone pure acid.
“Not helping, J,” I managed to say over the lump in my throat.
“Finn’s an idiot.” Bax shot me a look. “Sorry, Chessly. I’m not dissing you in saying that. But he’s always been too nice to people who don’t always deserve it. Maybe he gave that girl a ride home or something last fall and now she’s ‘repaying’ him,” he explained with air quotes. “Wouldn’t be the first time a jersey chaser has tried to trap a football player.”
I couldn’t tell from his tone who he was more disgusted with: Penelope or Finn. But something about how Bax didn’t believe Finn had anything to do with her round belly let me breathe.
By the time Finn and Callahan finally walked out of the stadium again, more than hour had passed since the scrimmage ended. All my happiness at seeing Finn’s return to the starting lineup had evanesced in the intervening sixty minutes as I’d prayed that what I’d seen was not what I thought I’d seen.
“Hey, Chess.” Finn’s voice was low, tentative. “Sorry for making you wait out here so long.” He stepped in front of me but kept his hands to himself. Then he said the worst four words in the English language. “We need to talk.”
With a nod, I fell into step beside him as we headed over to his ancient truck. As usual, he held my door open for me before jogging around the front to hop into the driver’s side. For a long wordless minute, he stared out the windshield. As the silence closed in, weighing me down and making it hard to breathe, he whispered, “I’m not the father of that girl’s baby.”
“But she accused you?” I whispered back.
He blew out a breath. “Yeah.”
“Could you be? The father, I mean.”
