Hold my Ground

Chapter 9: The View from the Sidelines

The buzzer sounded for the start of the fourth quarter, but the tension at the scoring table hadn't gone anywhere. Seraphina sat with her pen poised over the stat sheet, heart still hammering, cheeks a stubborn red she was doing her best to will away.

Down on the court, Julian jogged back into position, his face sliding back into its usual relaxed, unbothered look.

Marcus fell into step beside him — tall, broad-shouldered in a way that made the black-and-gold jersey look almost tailored, dark hair cropped close, a scar through one eyebrow from some long-forgotten dare in middle school. He moved like nothing in the world had ever seriously stressed him out, hands loose on his hips, wearing the faint, amused grin he always wore no matter how tense a game got. He glanced over at the scoring table, where Seraphina was very aggressively staring at her paperwork, then back at Julian.

"Man." Marcus let out a low laugh. "You really don't like people crowding that table, huh?"

Julian kept his eyes on the other team's forward, not breaking stride. "They were bothering her. Someone has to say something."

"Right, right. As a batch rep, right?" Marcus's tone stayed light, easygoing, but there was a knowing edge under it.

"Yeah, obviously," Julian shot back, annoyance flickering across his face for just a second.

Marcus's grin only widened at that — he wasn't the type to push, never had been. But he'd definitely noticed how tense Julian looked all of a sudden, way more worked up than usual over some guys just talking to a table. Instead of pressing, he tucked that thought away for later and decided to just watch how it played out. "Just don't get a technical because of your duties as Batch Rep, Knight. Coach won't like it."

Before Julian could answer, a voice cut straight through the roar of the bleachers.

"Julian! Oh my gosh, Julian, that was amazing! You're literally carrying this whole game!"

Marcus groaned, though his grin never wavered. "Spoke too soon. Your number one fan's here."

Standing at the railing, waving a black-and-gold pom-pom like she was the one being cheered for, was Sophia. As the daughter of a school board member, she treated the gym like her own personal front-row seat — and treated Julian, more or less, like her own personal property. She was pretty, loud, and utterly convinced that the two of them were destined for each other, a certainty so total it never occurred to her that anyone might see it differently. She wasn't cruel about it. She simply didn't think in terms of competition, because as far as she was concerned, she'd already won.

"Julian, look over here! I brought your sports drinks!" she called out, missing entirely that the ref was about to throw the ball back in.

At the scoring table, Seraphina's pen paused for exactly half a second over the stat sheet. Nothing else about her moved — no change in posture, no glance up. Just the faintest twitch at the corner of one eye, gone as fast as it came, before her hand resumed its steady, even script like it had never stopped at all. No one at the table noticed. She made sure of that.

Sophia turned to the girl seated beside her — one of the handful of friends who'd been recruited into her personal cheering section for the day, whether they'd wanted the job or not — and flipped her hair over one shoulder with the practiced flair of someone who considered herself the real star of every event she attended.

"Did you see that assist in the second quarter?" she said, not really asking. "Obviously he gets it from being around me. I've been coming to every single one of his games since freshman year. I'm basically part of the team at this point." She said it like a simple fact of nature, the kind that didn't require agreement. "My dad's already talking about naming a scholarship after him. I told him it should have both our names on it. Symbolic, you know?"

"Uh-huh," her friend said, not looking up from her phone.

"I'm bringing him the good electrolyte kind at halftime, not the gross blue one. He mentioned once that he hates the blue one." She lifted her chin, entirely pleased with herself. "Well — he didn't mention it to me exactly, I overheard him telling Marcus, but that basically counts as us communicating." She held up the cooler bag at her feet like it was a trophy, pom-pom still going in her other hand. "I always plan ahead. That's the difference between me and everyone else who likes him."

Her eyes flicked briefly toward the scoring table, caught Seraphina's flushed face for half a second, and moved on without a flicker of concern. To Sophia, that was simply what the strict, scary President looked like when she was in over her head running a tournament — not a rival worth a second glance. Sophia didn't do rivals. As far as she was concerned, there wasn't any competition to speak of.

"Wow, the President looks so intense today," Sophia said to the girl beside her, completely missing the current running between the court and that table. "Someone should tell her to smile more, it's a game, not a funeral. I don't know how Julian deals with her every day, honestly, she seems like a lot." She cupped her hands around her mouth. "Anyway — Julian! Go get 'em! I believe in you!"

A woman two rows back leaned over with a tight, apologetic smile aimed at the people around her. "She does this every game," she said, like it explained everything, and went back to her program.

Sophia didn't hear her. She was already standing halfway out of her seat, waving both arms now, pom-pom and all, utterly convinced that somewhere on that court, Julian could feel exactly how much support was being sent his way.

Marcus shook his head, giving Julian a knowing pat on the shoulder as he dropped back into his defensive spot. "Good luck with that one, man. On and off the court."

The whistle blew, and the game snapped back into motion. Julian brought the ball up the court, weaving past his first defender with barely a change in expression, but his eyes flicked once more toward the scoring table on the way — the quiet, burning look waiting for him there doing more to throw off his rhythm than any defender on the opposing team had managed all game.

He missed the next shot. It clanged off the rim, an easy look he should have made in his sleep, and the home crowd let out a collective groan.

"Focus, Knight!" Coach barked from the sideline.

Marcus jogged past him on the way back down the court, not even bothering to hide his grin. "You good?"

"I'm fine."

"You missed a wide-open three."

"I said I'm fine."

"Sure you are." Marcus fell into position beside him, voice low enough that only Julian could hear it over the crowd. "You know you're allowed to actually look at her, right? Nobody's going to notice one guy checking the scoring table for stats."

"I wasn't checking for stats."

"I know." Marcus's grin only widened. "That's kind of my point."

Julian didn't answer, jaw tight, already moving back into position as the opposing team brought the ball up the floor. Whatever he wanted to say back died the second the play started — but the tips of his ears, Marcus noted with no small amount of satisfaction, had gone faintly red.