Well, no one needed that visual.
The mistake most people made was thinking the offseason changed anything.
Season over, championship won, cameras gone — some guys relaxed into it. Thought the structure loosened. Thought the order of things became negotiable when there was no scoreboard to clarify it.
If they were serious about playing football past college, they would be mistaken with that thought.
There were currently three of them at the back of the locker room. Offensive linemen, all of them, big enough to think size equated to authority.
They'd been running their mouths for ten minutes about the new conditioning schedule, Coach's decisions in the final game, and who'd earned what and who hadn't. The kind of talk that started small and needed to be addressed before it became a problem.
Amid the jokes and the general locker room buzz, they didn’t think anyone was listening to them.
I didn't look at them. I just turned my head slightly, and Dustin stopped whatever he was about to say and cocked his head. Both of us listened.
Dustin looked at me, and I nodded, but he was already moving. He walked over and stopped close enough to be part of their conversation without being invited. He said something I didn't catch that made one of them laugh.
Then he said something else that made the laughter stop.
I watched the shift happen. The mood changed without anyone able to pinpoint exactly when. Dustin had a gift for that — for making people suddenly aware they’d miscalculated something, without being able to say what. Three sentences, and the biggest of the three was rethinking everything he’d said since waking up this morning. Deciding whether the thing he'd been about to say next was actually worth saying.
Dustin turned and met my gaze. I met each of theirs.
No threats. No confrontations.
Noah hadn’t moved from his locker. He’d been there the whole time, head down, carefully peeling the tape off his wrists with the focused patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and no reason to hurry.
But I’d seen it — the moment he looked up.
Just once. As the loudest of the three, he was the one who’d been doing most of the talking. One look, steady, flat, and completely empty of anything that could be called hostility, yet somehow communicating the precise opposite.
The loud one stopped talking first.
By the time I walked to the showers, the three of them were busy studying the floor.
I thought about how some QBs ran their locker rooms — loud, physical, present. Jett Santo played that way.
That was the difference.
Not me, I didn’t need to scream for the locker room to get in line.
After a quick shower, I enjoyed my sauna, then headed for a post-workout massage for my shoulder.
It may have been two weeks ago, but I still felt every knock I’d picked up in the final game. My throwing arm was my ticket to going pro, and I couldn’t afford for it to fuck my chances up.
Another reason I was happy to wait another year for the Draft. I’d get so many medicals at the combine that my Draft position could drop significantly if I were carrying an injury.
I didn’t head to the players’ dining hall after practice. Instead, I veered left, into the quiet wing of the athletic building where the coaches’ offices and therapy rooms were. The hum of fluorescent lights replaced the chaos of the field, the hallway echoing the sound of my sneakers as I walked.
I checked over my shoulder once. Empty. I slipped into a room at the far end of the hall, one markedMaintenance, my ears straining to pick up the sound of anyone moving around. I had a very tight window where none of the coaches were in here.
Wrighton University was a D1 college. It had a lot of sports, a lot of great athletes — and it was a goldmine of information if you knew when and where to look.
I dipped into the old section of the facility. In the old locker room, I reached into the back of the shelf on the end locker, grasped the padded envelope, and brought it out of the dark, my fingers running over the seal to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with.
I stuffed it into my bag.
On my way out, I dipped into the football coaches’ offices and flicked through Coach Sutherland’s desk calendar. Sutherland still kept his schedule on paper, which made things a hell of a lot easier for me.
