The Striker's Forbidden Love

Chapter Five- Two Unread Messages

Mia didn't check her phone until the extra fitness work was finally, mercifully over legs shaking, lungs burning, the whole team scattered across the pitch like they'd been dropped there from a great height.

She sat down hard on the grass, grabbed her bag, and found the screen already lit up before she'd even unlocked it.

Two messages. Same blocked account.

"That's not possible." Mia muttered, staring at the screen like it had personally betrayed her.

"What's not possible?" Priya asked, flopping down beside her, drenched in sweat, entirely too cheerful for someone who'd just run suicides for twenty minutes straight.

"Nothing." Mia said, thumb already moving to open the messages despite every instinct telling her not to, not here, not with people around.

Block didn't work? Cute. New number, same me.

You looked good out there this morning. He looked better watching you.

Mia's stomach dropped so fast it nearly took her lunch with it.

"You've gone the color of old milk." Priya said, squinting at her. "That's not a normal color for a human person.

"I'm fine." Mia said, phone face-down on her knee now, heart doing something erratic and unhelpful.

"You keep saying that. It keeps not being true."

Priya said, not unkindly, propping herself up on one elbow to actually look at Mia properly.

"Seriously. What's going on?"

Mia opened her mouth to deflect again, and then, for reasons she couldn't entirely explain even to herself, she didn't.

"Someone's sending me weird messages. About me and Coach." Mia said, voice low, glancing around to make sure nobody else was close enough to hear. "I blocked the account. They just came back on a new one."

Priya's easy grin dropped away, replaced by something more serious. "Weird how?"

"Like they're watching us. Like they know things they shouldn't." Mia said, and saying it out loud made it feel realer than it had felt sitting alone in her kitchen at midnight, which was somehow worse.

"Do you think it's someone on the team?" Priya asked, quiet now, glancing instinctively toward the rest of the squad still sprawled across the grass.

Mia followed her eyes without meaning to, landing for just a second, just long enough to feel guilty about it on Sofia, sitting a little apart from the group, water bottle in hand, gaze somewhere else entirely.

"I don't know." Mia said honestly. "I really don't know."

"You should tell someone. Like, an actual someone. Not just me." Priya said, and for once there wasn't a joke waiting behind it.

"Tell them what? That an anonymous account thinks I'm too friendly with my own coach?" Mia said, laughing without any real humor in it. "That'll go over great."

"Better than getting blindsided by it later." Priya said, shrugging, which was annoyingly a fair point.

Mia didn't have a good answer for that, so she didn't try to give one. She stood instead, brushing grass off her shorts, using the movement as an excuse to end the conversation before it went somewhere she wasn't ready to follow it.

Practice that week ran the way all of Daniel's practices ran like the man had personally taken offense at the concept of a wasted minute.

Monday was fitness and shape work. Tuesday was set pieces run so many times that Mia could've executed the corner-kick routine blindfolded, half asleep, possibly underwater. Wednesday, the grumbling started for real.

"He's going to run us into the ground before Saturday even gets here." Sofia said at the water table, wiping sweat off her face with the hem of her shirt, voice pitched for the group rather than anyone in particular.

"There's preparation and there's exhaustion. We're closer to the second one."

"He knows what he's doing." Mia said, more defensively than she meant to.

"Sure he does." Sofia said, raising an eyebrow, not unkindly, just observant in the specific way Sofia always seemed to be lately. "You'd know better than most of us, I guess."

A couple of the other players laughed, and Mia felt her face heat despite having absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing anyone could point to, nothing that had actually happened, no matter what an anonymous account with two burner numbers wanted to imply.

"I show up on time. That's the whole secret." Mia said, aiming for lightness and mostly landing it.

"Ooh. Scandalous." Sofia said, mischievously, and the group laughed again, easier this time, tension dissolving back into ordinary team banter the way it usually did.

Daniel's voice cut across the pitch before Mia could relax fully into it. "Water break's over. Line up for the passing drill."

The team groaned in near-unison, the specific groan of twenty-two women who'd already run more this week than most weeks combined, and dragged themselves back into formation. Mia lined up beside Sofia, close enough to bump shoulders, an old habit from before either of them had any reason to watch each other for anything.

"Hey." Sofia said, low, just between them, as they jogged into position. "For what it's worth I was kidding earlier. About the coach thing."

"I know." Mia said, and mostly meant it.

"You'd tell me, though. If there was actually something." Sofia said, not quite a question, watching Mia's face a beat too long for comfort.

"There's nothing to tell." Mia said, and hated, immediately and completely, how practiced the lie had already started to sound coming out of her mouth.

Sofia didn't push further. She just nodded, jogged ahead to take her mark, and left Mia standing there a half-second longer than the drill really allowed, turning the exchange over in her head, trying to decide if she'd imagined the flicker of something unreadable crossing Sofia's face right before she looked away.

Practice ground on. Daniel barked corrections, adjusted shape, ran them through the same passing sequence four times until it finally clicked the way he wanted it to click. By the final whistle, the whole team was wrecked in a good, honest way, legs heavy, minds quiet, the satisfying kind of tiredness that came from work well done instead of work that merely survived.

Mia was gathering her bag when Daniel fell into step beside her, voice low enough that it wasn't for anyone else.

"Torres. My office. Two minutes." He said, already walking, not waiting for her answer.

Mia's stomach did the same unpleasant drop it had done twice already that day.

"Is this about the schedule again?" She called after him, only half joking.

He didn't answer. He just kept walking, and something about his silence measured, deliberate, nothing like his usual bluntness told her this conversation wasn't going to be about cones or fitness plans or anything nearly that simple.