Fallen Fourth Down (Fallen Crest High #4)(11)
I was running drills when Matteo hollered at me from the sidelines. “Yo, Kade. We be out, man. You sticking around?”
I stopped and wiped the sweat from my forehead so I could see. “Yeah. I’ll see you back at the house.”
“We’re grilling tonight. Grab any food you want grilled up.”
“Yeah.” When they left, there weren’t many others on the field. A few of the assistant coaches were standing in a huddle, talking, but I glanced over and saw my coach watching me.
He changed my position on this team so I needed all the extra training hours I could get. I exploded to cone two, ran around to cone three, passed the second for the fourth cone, and circled back to the second cone. I finished strong going back to the first cone. Drop your shoulder. Drop your shoulder. Chop your feet, up and down, up and down. Lower the hip. Pivot with your arms.
When I was done, I repeated it four more times and turned in bounds for twenty yards. I repeated that three times, leaping as high as I could as I covered the distance. After resting for two minutes, I began again with my drills. I kept doing them until some of the lights were shut off.
One of the assistant coaches hollered from across the field, “Go home, Kade. We’re closing up.”
“Okay.” I lifted an arm, but it was too heavy, so I nodded instead. Panting, knowing every inch of me reeked, I headed off to the shower. The locker room was empty except for another player. He was in the weight room and glanced up, but neither of us said anything. We nodded to the other as I went to clean-up. When I left, he was still doing curls.
Walking into the stadium during the day was daunting. This was my dream. I’d been planning to play professional ball since I could remember. Playing for a Division One school was the next step. I was on the doorstep to the professionals. I could taste it. As I left the stadium, a lot of the hallways were dark since the late hour. I got out the doors and headed for the parking lot.
When I stepped off the curb to my vehicle, I noticed there were only a few cars in the lot.
“Mason?”
I stopped when I saw a girl leaning against the far wall of the stadium, and a wave of recognition came over me. Seeing me, she straightened from the wall. She had two friends with her, but they moved farther down. She glanced back to them, and they nodded their encouragement. When she drew closer, I took in the brown hair and dark eyes. The petite frame was the same, but she wasn’t the shy high school girl anymore. Dressed in a tight pink shirt and tight jeans like all the other girls at this school, I was surprised to see the confidence in her now.
I grinned. “Marissa.”
Her hands lifted to her side. She pressed the back of her hands against them for a second before a smile appeared. She let her arms drop down. Her head was tilted to the side, and as she drew closer, her cheeks grew pink. “Mason.” She said my name in a rush.
The confidence was there; I saw it appear for a moment. This was the shy girl from high school that I remembered. “Is this a coincidence or…” I studied her friends. They were turned towards each other with their heads bent forward. One was watching me over the other one’s shoulders. When she saw me watching them, she jerked back and whispered something to the other. The girl standing with her back to me stiffened. This wasn’t a coincidence, but I asked anyway, “Or were you waiting for me?”
“Um.” She lifted a hand to scratch her ear. It fell and linked with her other hand, and she lifted up on her tiptoes in a nervous movement. As she rocked back down to her heels, a high-pitched laugh came from her. “This is really embarrassing.”
She’d been waiting for me. I had known she was a student at Cain University. She emailed me after she was accepted. I hadn’t responded. In fact, I hadn’t responded to any of her emails in over a year. She never stopped sending them and because of that, I could understand her embarrassment. Logan told me that I was leading her on after bringing her to the cabin with us. I cut all communication after that, but I'm guessing it hadn’t been enough.
I wasn’t going to dance around the conversation this time. “Marissa,” I started.
She stopped fidgeting. Her gaze jerked to mine and she gulped. She heard the seriousness in my tone, and she held a hand up. “Wait. Mason, wait.”
I narrowed my eyes.
She ducked her head down. Her fingers slipped into her pockets, and her hands hung there. “I’ve been thinking a lot about our friendship over the years.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about this. “And I think that you started to assume I liked you. I didn’t.” Her eyes lifted, met mine, and looked away again. Her cheeks grew redder. “Okay, that was a lie. I did like you. I mean, I thought you were my knight in shining armor, the popular guy who became friends with me. I’m nothing. Then the girls started in.” She stopped and drew in a ragged breath. Her voice grew thick with emotion as she continued, “You have no idea the things they did.”
Regret stabbed at me. “They did the same to Sam.”
She still wasn’t looking at me. Her hand had been moving back and forth, but she stopped it. All motion froze for a moment. “Your girlfriend?”
“Yeah. She transferred to Public last semester and they tried to do some messed up things to her.”
“Like what?”
“Stealing her clothes was the nicest of their pranks, for one.” The image of Sam in that hospital bed, her face bruised up, and her body wrapped in bandages flashed in my mind again. It was seared there. I’d never get it out. “They put her in the hospital.”