The engineering buildingwas quiet at this hour. Most students were scattered across campus, enjoying the last stretch before Thanksgiving break. I’d claimed my usual corner of the lab, spreading data across dual monitors, trying to lose myself in numbers that made sense.
Force distribution. Impact absorption. Variables I could control.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d built my entire academic career around protecting people from the sport that had taken everything from my family—and now I was dating someone who played it. Someone who was getting attention for playing it well. Someone whose coach thought he had “the talent to play at the next level.”
I pulled up my latest test results. The new padding configuration had improved force distribution by another three percent. Good news. Progress. The kind of incremental gain that might, someday, mean fewer players ended up like my father.
But three percent didn’t feel like much when the voice in my head kept whispering about scouts and breakout seasons and all the ways success could change someone’s mind.
My phone buzzed. I ignored it. Buzzed again. I flipped it face down.
Through the lab window, I could see the practice field in the distance. Figures moved across the turf—too far away to identify, but I knew the routine. Drills, then scrimmage, then the endless repetition of plays until muscle memory took over. Seth was down there right now, running routes, taking hits, doing the thing that had given him that article in the campus paper.
I turned back to my monitors and tried to focus.
The numbers blurred in front of me. All I could see was that headline, those statistics, the casual mention of scouts like it was nothing. Like it didn’t change everything.
He said he was done after this season.
The thought circled like a vulture. I’d built so much on that promise—grad school plans, the future I’d let myself imagine. A future where Seth wasn’t on a field getting hit, wasn’t accumulating damage that wouldn’t show up for years, wasn’t walking the same path that had led my father to a closet floor, clutching an old jersey, unable to remember his own name.
My phone buzzed a third time. I grabbed it, ready to silence whatever notification was demanding my attention.
Seth
Practice just ended. Want to grab dinner?
That Thai place you like is doing their curry special tonight
Hello? You alive in there?
How did I tell him I felt like I was dying and it was my own damned fault? If only I hadn’t gone looking for the stories that’d been flying around lately. If I hadn’t been eavesdropping, once I heard his buddies call out to him. If only I hadn’t gone and caught feelings for my football-player roommate.
In the lab. Eat without me.
His response was almost immediate. Yes, I was being unfair to him, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to listen to him placate me. I needed a cooler head so I’d actually listen to him when we talked about this.
You okay?
Fine. Just busy.
With my concentration officially shattered, I packed up for the day. The walk home took me past the athletics complex, and I found myself slowing, watching the stream of players emerging from the locker room. A few of them glanced my way—not with recognition, just the automatic awareness athletes seemed to have about their surroundings.
Then I heard it.
“Landry!” Someone was calling across the parking lot. “Hey, Landry! That reporter from ESPN wants to follow up. She’s asking about availability next week.”
ESPN. Not the campus paper. ESPN.
I kept walking. Didn’t look back. Didn’t let myself imagine what a follow-up with ESPN might mean, what doors it might open, what plans it might derail.
By the time I reached our building, my hands were shaking.
I got home before him.
The apartment felt too quiet, too still. I dropped my bag by the door and stood there for a moment, trying to shake off the echo of that voice calling across the parking lot.ESPN. Follow up. Availability next week.
I forced myself to move. Opened the fridge, stared at the contents without seeing them, closed it again. Pulled out my laptop and pretended to work on my presentation while the minutes crawled by.
