“What the hell are you looking at like that?” I asked.
His eyes widened. “Someone else applied for semi-pro status in Montpelier.”
“What?” I dropped everything I was holding and ran around the desk to look over his shoulder. He was reading a very detailed and thorough email about the protocols involved and what it meant for us as Montpelier’s other semi-pro team. “Who the hell applied? Nothing else happens related to football here except us.”
Tyler scrolled a little further down the email and came to a stop at the bottom. Our eyes scanned over the words until we found the answer.
“Who are the Black Widows?” I asked.
“That’s an odd name for a football team,” Tyler commented. I grabbed the edge of his office chair and rolled it over. “Hey!”
I bent over and took control of the keyboard. I opened a new tab and immediately navigated to Google. I typed in Montpelier, Idaho, Black Widows and hit enter. A series of images popped up at the top of the screen, and Tyler gasped.
“No,” I whispered.
All of the pictures were of a team of all women. I scrolled a bit further down the search results until I came across a website. It was for Montpelier’s Recreation Center, MontRec. I clicked it, and it brought me to a page about their all-women’s football team, the Black Widows.
“What the fuck?” I growled. “Who the hell do they think they are?”
“Women are doing all sorts of amazing things,” Tyler started. “I honestly think—”
I waved my hand in his face. “I don’t give a shit about the fact that they’re women. I’ve known women who are twelve times as strong as any man, namely my mom. She’s one of the most horrifying people I know, but this is clearly a gimmick. All-women. Black Widows.” I shook my head. “If they think they’re going to ride this act into my ring and make a mockery of the Vipers and football, they have another thing coming.”
I scrolled further down the page and saw that there was a schedule listed for their games. They just so happened to have one coming up that afternoon. I checked my watch. It was a little after nine o’clock, and their game was at three that afternoon. I walked away from the computer and back to my bag. “Shut that off. We gotta get through this stuff immediately. We’re ending practice early today.”
“What, why?”
I side-glanced at him. “Because it looks like I’m going to have to go and do a little recon.”
5
Zeke
When I pulled my car to a stop in front of the location listed on the Black Widow’s football schedule, I chuckled, but more from pity than amusement. Soccer goals had been pushed back, and there was someone on the field drawing lines on it to turn it into a football field. Someone else was stabbing flags into the field at various points, red ones seemed to mark the yards, and yellow ones marked the end zones.
“It’s like a little league game,” I huffed aloud to myself.
I climbed out of my car, pulled my baseball hat low over my head to keep my face hidden, and approached the field. Spectators were setting up folding chairs around the outside of the field, and there were two bunches of people, one toward the bottom left corner of the field and another toward the upper right. I imagined these were the teams. One team had on blue jerseys with some sort of floating creature on it; it was just a silhouette, so I couldn’t discern. The other team, the one in the bottom-left corner of the field, was wearing all black jerseys, with red names and numbers. Just judging by what a black widow looked like, I assumed those were the semi-pro hopefuls.
Everyone was settling into chairs and pulling blankets over them that they’d brought to protect them from Idaho’s chilled fall afternoons, and it irritated me. I didn’t bring a chair because I wasn’t prepared for the amateur-hour I was stepping into. Too far from the field to be meant for spectators but still close enough to view the game, there was a simple, metal bench. That would have to do. I made my way over, plopped down against the chilled surface, and waited for kick-off.
A couple of park league refs circled the field, making sure that any spectators hanging around were far enough from the sidelines to not get hurt if a player lost control, and then one walked to the middle of the field. She held up a hand and blew a whistle, and one player from each team walked out to meet her. The Black Widows’ representative was a woman with light brown hair and black greasepaint smeared under her dark eyes. She was slightly taller than average and fit, and the pads fit her like they belonged to me. Still, she walked with her head up and with a swagger to her step like she ran the place. It was very interesting. The back of her jersey read Dallen, so I opened up my phone and navigated back to the Black Widows’ page on the MontRec website. I’d looked at it a dozen or so times in the past several hours and damn near had it memorized. I went to the roster and searched for a name that matched—Quinn Dallen, the Black Widows’ founder, coach, captain, and quarterback.
“Busy girl,” I grumbled out loud.
A whistle blew, and both the representatives for the teams went back to stand alongside their teams. After another whistle blow, the teams filed out onto the field from the sidelines under a flurry of applause from the scattered spectators.
I let out an audible gasp as they walked out. Every single one of the Black Widows walked out onto the field. Assuming forty women hadn’t called in sick today, the Black Widows team was made up of a measly eleven players. That was just enough to play legally in a semi-pro league. Every single person ran the entire game? That was psychotic. I saw the short roster on the website but figured they were only listing starters, not the entire goddamn team. Who plays in a league with only eleven players? What sort of masochistic shit were they into?
“Hike!”
The first snap fired back to Quinn, and she started to back away from the center. I’d been slumped in the bench but sat straight up at the sight of her. She moved like a pro. Her back was straight up and down, something I’d been trying to get half my guys to do for the entire year I’d been there. If she was scanning the field for a receiver, I couldn’t tell. Her head was unmoving. Was she taking in the entire field without moving her head? It was like I was watching a movie that glitched. One second, she was upright and backing up, and a second later, she was ducked and running. She charged through players, skipping her way through the defense until she was over the first-down line. She was only barely over when one of the tackles slammed into her. I expected her to go down instantly, but she didn’t budge. Another player came in and plowed into her, and then she went over, but not without a struggle.
“Shit.” The word left my mouth without my permission. She was good.
She was even more of a force on defense. She was strong and could tackle like no one’s business. The team they were playing against was a coed team, and one of the men on the other team managed to get his hands on the ball. He was running straight at Quinn like he was going to blow right through her, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Quinn tucked in and rammed into him like a loose bull. Not expecting her strength, he hit the ground, and the ball got loose. She hopped over him like he wasn’t anything more than a piece of the grass, scooped up the ball, and ran it straight into the Widows end zone. My heart raced, and chills rushed over me when she casually tossed the ball to the ref and ran back to her team for a victory bump. I’d never been electrified like that watching someone play before. I barely knew what to do with myself.