The Quarterback's Mate

"Tell me you didn't sleep with Coach Reeve." The question hit me before the microphone did. "No." "Then why did he make you the starter?" "I earned it." "With his help?" "On the field." The reporter stepped backward to keep my face in the frame, and three more cameras pushed through the glass doors behind him. They didn't want answers. They wanted the picture of the woman who slept her way into a starting job. I kept walking, because stopping would give them that picture. My phone buzzed in my pocket. My wolf lifted her head before I looked at the screen. I knew who it was. The headline had already done its work. CALLOWAY STAR QB ACCUSED OF SLEEPING WITH COACH TO KEEP STARTING JOB Under it, three sponsor emails. One frozen. One demanding an emergency meeting. One suspended until the university's review was complete. Three sponsors. One accusation. Ten days until the national championship. That math I understood. Numbers didn't care that I was a woman, didn't care that I had spent a season reading defenses before the snap and taking hits that left bruises under my pads. Numbers also didn't care that the bruise on my ribs was eleven days old. A shifter heals in three days. Always has, my whole life. It had been eleven. I locked the screen. The elevator opened and Tamsin was standing in it, one hand against the door. "You need to come upstairs. Compliance called twice." "I know." "Do you want me with you?" For one second, I almost said yes. Tamsin was one of the few people who could stand beside me without making me feel like I owed her something for it. "Sable." "I can handle a meeting." "That's not what I asked." I stepped in and pressed five. Just before the doors closed, she said, "You don't have to do everything alone." The doors shut on her face. I counted three breaths on the way up. Then I put my phone on silent, straightened my jacket, and decided exactly how much of myself I was willing to hand the people waiting on five. The compliance director was alone at the conference table with five folders, and the article was already on the screen behind him. They'd decided a headline was evidence before I sat down. "We are not assuming the allegation is true." "Then investigate it." "That is what we intend to do." He opened the first folder. Photographs of me and Coach Reeve. After practice. Entering his office. Late at night. "With the play sheets," I said. "Practice ended late." "What about the messages?" "Read them." He did. Film review. An injured receiver. Practice times. Nothing that should turn a football season into a scandal, unless somebody wanted it to. I pushed the pages back. "You have a rumor, photographs of a coach doing his job, and messages about a receiver's hamstring." "We also have a source." "Then ask the source what they saw." "We're asking you." "No. You're asking me to prove something didn't happen because somebody claims it did." He leaned back. "Until this is resolved, all football activities are subject to review." I looked at the championship schedule beside his folder. Ten days. "That doesn't change our process." "It changes what your process costs." A knock. The door opened before anyone answered, and Coach Reeve walked in like the room belonged to him, the way it had for thirty years. "Coach, you were asked not to, " "Is there evidence?" The director stopped. "We're investigating." Reeve looked at me for one second. Then he walked out to the cameras, and I heard it through the glass. "Did you have a s****l relationship with Sable Vance?" "Did you give her the starting job because of it?" "Did you favor her?" "Yes. I favored the quarterback who gave this team the best chance to win." The lobby erupted. He came back inside, turned his phone face down on twenty-seven missed calls, and looked at me. He didn't explain. Neither did I. My phone buzzed once in my pocket. Then three more times. I checked it in the hallway after. The scandal had changed direction. Nobody was talking about Reeve anymore. TRENDING NOW: COLE ASHCROFT LIVE I stopped breathing. Cole. His face filled the screen, older than I remembered, harder around the edges. The man who had rejected me in front of the entire country six weeks after my brother's funeral. The man who had looked into a camera and said the sentence I'd spent two years trying to bury. "The story about Coach Reeve is false." His voice didn't waver. "She's not with Coach Reeve. She's with me." A pause that lasted one heartbeat too long. "And she's been with me." The phone nearly slipped out of my hand. Within a minute the reporters outside were shouting my name instead of his, and the compliance director was reaching for his phone, and Coach Reeve was watching my face change in a way I couldn't take back. Cole had not called me. Had not warned me. Had not asked. He had simply told the world I was his. And the world believed him.