“Nope. There’s a thirst edit with thunder sound effects. Half a million views.”
Daphne stared at me like she was actively planning my funeral.
Coach finally pushed off the wall. “One game suspension.”
I blinked. “Just one?”
“You shoved a Vultures player,” he said. “Frankly, most of us want to do that on a weekly basis.”
Cameron let out a laugh that sounded more like a death rattle.
Mara didn’t even smile.
The walls of Conference Room 2 had seen a lot—contract negotiations, injury announcements, the time Adam accidentally knocked over the protein shake fridge during a trade meeting. But this? This had a different weight.
A quieter kind of tension.
The kind that hummed under the skin.
I sat at the end of the long table, icepack in one hand, trying not to let my leg bounce. It wasn’t nerves. Just frustration. Burned low and deep.
Daphne sat across from me, arms still crossed like a barrier. Her expression was unreadable—cool, maybe even bored, but I’d known her too long to buy that. The pulse in her jaw gave her away.
Cameron broke the silence first, dragging a hand down his face before tapping at his tablet again. “Okay, now that that's cleared up…" He rolled his eyes. "Here’s where we’re at.”
I didn’t move.
He kept talking. “The Kalamazoo Vultures filed an official report with the league office. MLS Compliance reviewed the footage this morning.”
Daphne tensed. Barely. But I saw it.
“They’re recommending a formal suspension,” Cameron said. “Possibly more than one game. ‘Assault during a preseason friendly.’ That’s how they’re framing it.”
I scoffed. “It wasn’t assault.”
“Tell that to the PR team pulling death threats off your Instagram,” he said dryly. “They don’t care about context.”
Coach Lawson hadn’t sat down. He stood behind Cameron, arms folded like a boulder waiting to shift. His silence was heavier than anything in the room.
Cameron’s voice stayed neutral. Too neutral. “It looks bad. A veteran player with a history of aggressive play?—”
“I don’t have a history of violence,” I muttered.
“You’ve been in fights before,” he corrected. “You’ve taken two misconduct fines in the last eighteen months.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But not for this.”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “That doesn’t matter. The media doesn’t see shades of gray. They see a guy with a bad temper who jumped a player during a sideline spat.”
I sat forward. “It wasn’t a spat.”
Daphne’s eyes flicked to mine. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t deny it either.
“They were harassing her,” I said again. The words came out rough. I didn’t mean them to.
But I meant them.
Daphne blinked—once—and something tightened in her posture, but she didn’t argue.
