THE QUARTERBACKS UNTOUCHABLE GIRL

DID YOU SEE IT

I walked home from the game with my hands shoved deep in my pockets and my ears burning from the cold. The whole way back, that touchdown kept replaying in my head like a video stuck on repeat. Dax turning around with his arms out. That real, unguarded look on his face that had nothing fake about it. I told myself to stop thinking about it, but I didn't stop. I couldn't.

By the time I got to the house, Rosa's car wasn't in the driveway, which meant she'd already left for her shift. The porch light was on though, the one Dax always left on for me even though nobody had asked him to. I let myself in quietly and went straight to check on Willa. She was dead asleep, one arm flung up over her head like she owned the whole crib and everything in it. I stood there for a minute just watching her breathe, the way I always did now. It was becoming a habit I couldn't break.

I went to my room, changed into my oldest pajamas, and got into bed. The house felt extra quiet tonight. I lay there listening to it settle around me... the heater clicking on every once in a while, a car passing somewhere far down the street. I thought about going downstairs to get some water just so I'd have something to do with my body, but I stayed put.

My phone stayed quiet for a long time.

Around eleven-forty I finally heard his car pull up. The front door opened, his bag dropped on the floor with that familiar thud, and then his footsteps came up the stairs. They sounded slower than usual, the heavy kind of tired you get after three hours of getting hit by other big guys on the field. His door closed a few seconds later.

I closed my eyes and tried to make myself fall asleep.

My phone buzzed at 12:03.

I grabbed it right away, some part of me had been waiting for that buzz even if I didn't want to admit it to myself. The screen lit up with his name.

Dax: did you see it

I stared at the message for a long time. No question mark, no capital letters. Just those four words sitting there plain on the screen like he hadn't thought about it too hard before hitting send. That somehow made the whole thing feel bigger. Or smaller. I couldn't decide which.

I typed back fast before I could overthink it.

Me: Yes

One word. That's all I gave him. I wasn't about to write three whole sentences about how he looked under those stadium lights like a completely different person. I wasn't going to tell him how something deep in my chest had shifted when he found that perfect gap before the ball even left his hand. I definitely wasn't going to admit that I'd sat in the dark back corner of the bleachers feeling like I had no business being there but also like I couldn't have left even if the whole place caught fire.

I hit send on that single word and put the phone down for a second.

The little typing dots popped up almost immediately. Then they disappeared. Then they came back again.

Dax: good

That's it. Just "good." Four lowercase letters with no punctuation, no extra explanation. The kind of short reply you'd send to a teammate or your coach or pretty much anyone after a game. Except he hadn't sent it to anyone else. As far as I knew, he hadn't texted Brynn that question. She was right there on the field the whole time in her uniform, doing her own performance fifty feet away from him. She didn't need to be asked if she saw it. She was part of the show.

He texted me.

At midnight. After driving home so tired that his footsteps on the stairs sounded like they belonged to someone twice his age. He went to his room and somewhere in there he decided to pick up his phone and ask one specific person one specific question.

And when I said yes, he said good.

Like it mattered to him that I saw it.

Like my opinion on it did something for him that the entire screaming stadium full of people hadn't quite managed.

I put the phone down on my chest and just stared at the ceiling for a while. The room was dark except for the faint glow from the streetlight outside my window. It doesn't mean anything, I told myself. He's tired. He's still buzzing from the game. People say random stuff when the adrenaline is high. It's nothing.

I almost believed it. Almost.

The thing was, I'd been telling myself some version of that sentence for two whole weeks now. It doesn't mean anything about the blanket he put over us that afternoon. It doesn't mean anything about the way he stood in doorways a little too long sometimes. It doesn't mean anything about the coffee he made exactly how I liked it without being asked, or the way Willa reached for me first now, or any of the hundred little things that kept piling up between us in this house.

At some point I had to ask myself how many things could not mean anything before I was just straight-up lying to myself for fun.

I rolled onto my side and picked the phone back up. Looked at that word again. Good.

I thought about texting something more, something that pushed at it a little. Asked him what he really meant. Made him say more than four letters. I typed out "good how" and stared at it for a second, then deleted the whole thing because it felt like opening a door I wasn't sure I wanted open at midnight on a Friday with practice at seven in the morning and school on Monday and Brynn's whole existence still sitting between us like this giant wall that neither of us had built but both of us kept hiding behind.

I typed "night" instead and sent it.

He didn't reply.

I put the phone on the nightstand face down like that would somehow stop me from thinking about it. It didn't work. I lay there in the dark running through the whole night again. Not just the touchdown. All of it. The way he looked when he found that gap in the defense before the ball even left his hand, like his brain worked two seconds ahead of everyone else on that field. The way Tyler slammed into him after the score, both of them yelling something I couldn't hear from way back where I was sitting. The way, just for half a second, his eyes had gone toward that dark corner of the bleachers where I was hiding.

I'd told myself that part didn't mean anything either.

Maybe it hadn't.

But the text at midnight? That was harder to brush off. That wasn't game adrenaline talking. That was him, alone in his room after everything, deciding to reach out to me specifically.

I turned over again and pulled the blanket up higher around my shoulders. My chest did that shifting thing again, like something heavy was moving around deep down where I had no control over it. I pressed my hand flat against my sternum like that might hold everything still.

It didn't.

This is stupid, I thought. You barely exist to him when the sun is up. You know the deal you made. You agreed to it. Don't be the i***t who turns a four-letter text into some big love letter in her head.

I believed that too. Mostly.

But underneath all the believing there was this small stubborn thing that had been growing since that night in the library, since the blanket, since every single little moment that showed the version of Dax who lived in this house was real even when the school version wasn't. I didn't want it to be there. The stubborn thing didn't ask for my permission though. It just sat in my chest, warm and dumb and dangerous, completely unbothered by every single reason I had to ignore it.

I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough that the house went totally quiet. The heater stopped clicking. The only sound left was my own breathing and, faintly through the wall, nothing at all. His light was off and there was no game film playing tonight, which felt strange. Most nights I fell asleep to the muffled sound of whistles and coaches yelling and plays getting run over and over. Tonight it was just silence on the other side of the wall.

Maybe he was already asleep.

Maybe he was lying there the same way I was, staring at his ceiling and thinking about that text he probably shouldn't have sent.

I didn't know.

I closed my eyes.

It took a long time for sleep to come. Longer than it should have, considering how tired I was from the cold walk home and how early Willa would probably be up tomorrow no matter what. But eventually it came.

And right before it did, in that soft blurry place between awake and gone, my mouth did something I wasn't paying attention to and couldn't have stopped even if I had been.

It smiled.

Small. Stupid. Completely unguarded in the way you only get when nobody's watching. Not even yourself.

I didn't examine it.

I was already asleep.