I looked up at him and opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a hand. “Use it or don’t.”
Before I could respond, he turned his back to me and started to walk away, and I watched him unwaveringly until he was in his car and gone from sight.
14
Quinn
I was so exhausted, I didn’t have the energy I needed to argue with Alec as he laid out all of his reasoning for me liking Zeke while we were on the way home. He noticed our exchange at the end of the game, and it fueled his earlier belief that there was something going on. I kept quiet mostly because I wasn’t sure what might come out of my mouth if I didn’t.
I’d been convinced that Zeke wanted nothing more than to take my team and me down, but then I couldn’t understand why he would come to the game at all, let alone take meticulous, helpful notes and give them to me. I told Cal that I would send him a copy of the notes to review for us to go over at Saturday’s practice, but Cal told me I needed to take the day off. He finally got me to come clean about what happened with Zeke. He told me that I needed to recover, and he could use the opportunity to get to know the team better without me there. If I wasn’t in terrible shape, I wouldn’t have been inclined to accept the offer, but a day of rest wouldn’t kill me.
We got home from the first qualifier game around three in the afternoon. The semi-pro teams we were going up against were working around their existing schedules, so we were settling for late morning games with them so that they could get back home for evening games and practices. Despite this, the second I got home, I went to my bedroom and flopped down on my bed. Lately, my days were feeling two weeks long, so when I got back to my bed, it felt like it’d been forever since I’d been there last. My muscles were happy for the reprieve, and it wasn’t long before I let my eyes close and floated off to sleep.
When I woke up sometime later, my room was totally dark. Even though I kept blackout curtains hanging on my windows because I hated when the sun woke me up, there was always a bit of light in the room during the day. The pitch blackness meant it was definitely night. I grabbed my phone off of my bedside table and saw that it was well after midnight. Alec would be gone at work for another few hours, so I couldn’t rely on his kindness to feed me while my legs still preferred not moving. I dragged myself out of bed and forced my muscles to cooperate while I showered, changed into more comfortable clothes, and made myself a sandwich.
I wasn’t tired at all, so I grabbed my laptop from my backpack and went to sit down in the living room. I used our casting device to throw my computer screen to the TV screen and started clicking through some of the week’s football highlights. I skipped through the pro football highlights—not that I didn’t care about them, just that it always seemed like the popular players got more highlights than the legitimately good ones. I settled on the semi-pro highlights, and eventually, the reels got to the Vipers’ most recent game. Flashes of my running drills with Zeke came to my brain, and my body ran hot. I blamed it on the heavy blanket I had wrapped around me.
A vast majority of the Vipers’ highlights were of Zeke, which was something, considering that he was obviously distracted during their game. He was still the most controlled person on the field, and unlike my original opinion, it didn’t seem like Zeke was as mysterious with his team as I thought. He was often calling out plays and trying to coax his team in one direction or another, but they just weren’t grasping it.
The highlights were impressive because it was Zeke running plays on his own that he should have been able to trust his receivers or running backs to aid him with. He’d made a pretty impressive fifty-yard pass perfectly to one of his receivers, only for that receiver to turn right into a tackle and nearly fumble the ball. Zeke was good, and I’d be a spiteful idiot to deny that. He’d mentioned the pros more than once, and seeing his skill against that of his team, I had to wonder why he didn’t go pro.
I closed the sports website and went to Google. I typed his name into the search box, hissed at my heart for reacting when his face popped up on the screen, and scrolled through the articles. Many of them were regarding this week’s game, but eventually, I got to some older articles from a couple of years ago. All of them seemed to suggest that Zeke was favored to go pro. In fact, he was listed as the rumored number one draft pick. I kept scrolling until one article caught my attention.
Number One Draft Pick’s Dreams Dashed, the headline read.
I clicked the article and read through it. The first few paragraphs were all about Zeke Matheson’s rise to fame from high school to college. He played for a D1 school and was the starting quarterback on his college team during his freshman year. For all four years in college, he was one of the top college players highlighted on ESPN and other sports outlets, and when it got to his senior year, he immediately started to trend as the rumored number one draft pick.
I clicked through some of his highlights the article had listed and couldn’t deny that the way he ran a field was electric. He couldn’t be stopped. It didn’t matter if he was running, passing, tackling, or blocking, he had a presence about him that made it feel like the entire sport of football had been invented just so he could play. I followed college football pretty closely, but Zeke and I were almost the same age, and the height of his career took place when I was too embroiled in my own collegiate experience to pay attention. I couldn’t help but feel bad that I’d missed seeing him play at his peak.
The article took a dark turn when it linked in a video of Zeke taking a nasty helmet-to-helmet tackle from a guy twice his size that left him a crumpled heap on the turf. It was clear the player was trying to hurt Zeke, and though he had been flagged instantly for unnecessary roughness and was ejected from the game, it didn’t change that it had done irreversible damage. When the behemoth finally climbed off of Zeke, his leg was bent back at an angle that was unnatural for anyone. The coach and players from both teams clamored around him, but he was unmoving. The game was forfeited in favor of Zeke’s team for the blatant attack, but no one cared about wins or losses as EMTs moved onto the field to collect Zeke’s unconscious body.
I started to cry myself as the entire stadium of fans remained totally silent while Zeke was loaded onto a stretcher and carried off of the field. He was gone from sight for nearly two minutes before the announcers said anything, and when one finally did, all he said was, “Is Zeke Matheson’s career over?”
What a horrific waste of talent. Zeke was favored to be the number one pick for a good reason—he was a monster on the football field. One jealous, idiotic player’s bad decisions had given his career a total one-eighty. He’d probably be super bowl bound, not held up in some semi-pro team in Montpelier, Idaho. No wonder he had a chip on his shoulder. No pro team was going to pick up someone who’d probably fight with leg weaknesses for the rest of his career. If the coach of the Vipers hadn’t been a Zeke Matheson fan and willing to take a chance on him, Zeke would probably be coaching a high-school team somewhere.
Suddenly, I felt like week-old trash. All I’d done was mock his dreams to go pro, not realizing that he was just chasing after something he’d beyond rightfully earned. I closed my laptop and wiped my eyes free of the tears. I owed him an apology. I’d been specifically instructed to stay home and rest during my day off, but I couldn’t do that. If Zeke could recover from that horrendous injury, he deserved to go against someone who was going to fight until the last drop of blood had drained from their body. Tomorrow, I would go and apologize to him, and if he challenged me again, I would meet him head-on.