“What?” Dani says, crossing her arms tightly in front of her chest in determination.
Hunter shakes the football in his hand toward the end zone and says, “Go long. I know you can catch.”
Dani squints her eyes at him, then says, “No,” and turns away.
Mostly, probably, because she hates being told what to do.
“Dani,” Brandy says, rushing toward her with a horrified expression and pushing her toward Hunter.
“What?” Dani asks her.
“Just do it. It’s Hunter. He likes you. He told me.”
“More like he’s still in love with Taylor, and they are back together,” Dani whispers back, looking frustrated.
“You’re so out of the loop. They are not. At all. And trust me, you’re going to love this. Just go out for the damn pass.”
Dani looks behind her and sees that the cheer squad has now formed a semicircle behind her, almost pushing her toward him.
“Come on, Diamond,” Hunter heckles. “I thought you said you could play just as well as your brother?”
A group of football players come into view, and you can hear a few snickers over his taunting of her.
Dani narrows her eyes at Hunter in challenge.
And I know exactly what she’s thinking. The girl doesn’t back down from a challenge, and she certainly knows how to catch a football.
She takes off, jogging from the twenty-yard line, where I am stretching, to the end zone.
Hunter tosses her the ball. And it’s not a very good throw.
His spiral is wobbly, and the pass is too high, but she leaps up and grabs it anyway.
The cheerleaders break out in, well, cheers.
And then the camera flashes to the scoreboard, where a message is running across it.
YOU JUST SCORED A DATE TO HOMECOMING.
Hunter runs up to Dani. “Pretty creative way to ask, right?”
The cheer squad is clapping, yelling out their names, “Hunter and Dani. Hunter and Dani. Go!!! Hunter and Dani!”
Dani is wide-eyed. Not saying anything.
I watch as her eyes seem to frantically search the crowd off camera.
I don’t ask her to pause it, but she does.
“Based on the look on my face, what do you think I was thinking and doing?”
“Well, you don’t look happy.”
“I wasn’t. I was surrounded by people, and I was trying to find you in the crowd. I wanted you to know that I hadn’t expected this to happen. I never would have gone out for the pass if I had known. Brandy and Megan rushed up to me and told me they’d helped him plan it. They thought I was so lucky. Hunter was getting high fives, but all I could think about was you. How it must look. How I needed to get out of there. Also, I should point out, I never said yes.”
“No, you didn’t.” I take a deep breath and take another sip.
“Why did you just drink?”
“Because I think I know what happens next.”
She presses play, and I was right. When she moves toward an open space in the crowd, Hunter picks her up, swings her around, and kisses her.
“That,” she says, “was a horrible kiss, by the way. He shoved his fat tongue in my mouth. I felt like I was going to cry. I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.”
“That’s when I got involved.”
“Yeah.”
“This part I’ve seen. It’s been a while though.”
“We’re going to have a great year, Dani,” Hunter says, slinging his arm around her again.
“Let go of me!” she says to him, struggling to get out of his grip.
“Oh no, you don’t, Diamond. We’re going to celebrate.” He whispers suggestively but loud enough for everyone to hear, “All night long.”
“Get your hands off her,” I hear myself say as I rush up to the asshole.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Hunter says, holding up his hands. “Relax. Dani and I are just having some fun.”
“It doesn’t look like Dani is having fun. She is trying to get away from you. She even told you point-blank to let go of her,” I say in her defense.
The cheerleaders back up at my outburst, expecting a fight. And they are right to do so because I am pissed.
“What are you, like, twelve? Obviously, you don’t know girls. Just because she said it doesn’t mean she meant it. It’s called playing coy. Dani and I have had lots of fun together already. Right, Dani? And we’re going to have lots more. I always get my way,” Hunter says, shooting Dani a wink and then giving me a look that causes me to visibly flinch.
Dani pauses the video again.
“I was pretty pissed at this point,” she says. “Because I was like, Did he really just say that he could do anything he wanted to me?”
“I was ready to kill him, honestly,” I say. I’m breathing heavily, like it’s happening now, not more than two years ago.
“And do you want to know what my next thought was?”
“Uh, maybe?”
“That if you and Hunter got into a fight, you could get kicked off the team. I didn’t want that to happen. That’s why I was so upset. He wasn’t worth you risking your dream.”
Tears form in my eyes again. “That’s what you don’t get, Dani. It’s that you were worth it. I never thought once about the repercussions. I just knew that I needed to protect you.”
“Which was the problem. But now, since we know that you didn’t end up getting in trouble, we can watch it and enjoy this. In fact, I might have rewound it and watched it a few times,” she says with a laugh.
And I can’t help but laugh with her. “Let’s see it.”
I watch as I throw a right hook, following through with my hips, like I do with a pass. A motion that adds the momentum of my body to propel the pass further or, in this case, puts the weight of that motion behind my fist, which lands squarely on Hunter’s jaw.
“If you touch her again,” I say to Hunter, venom in my voice.
“Of course, Hunter wasn’t smart enough to just go down,” Dani says with a laugh as on-screen Hunter makes an obscene gesture, causing me to jump on top of him, pin him to the ground, and punch him in the face again.
“Dani! Do something!” Megan yells out.
“Chase, stop it!” Dani yells, rushing toward us.
But within a second, Damon pushes through the crowd, shoves Dani out of the way, and pulls me off Hunter.
“What the fuck?” Hunter yells, spitting out a mouth full of blood.
“Don’t you ever talk about Dani like that again,” I growl at him.
“Chase!” Dani hisses at me.
And if things weren’t already bad enough, this is where things go south fast.
“This moment, coming up.” I say, feeling my emotions rise to the surface again as I hit pause. “I think I’ve seen enough. I’m sorry. I should have trusted you. It wasn’t your fault. I’ve blamed you this whole time. And you’ve taken it. Why?”