The Striker's Forbidden Love

Chapter Seven - The Video

Mia's thumb hovered over the screen for a long, useless moment before she finally made herself tap it.

The video was eleven seconds long. Grainy, shot from somewhere across the parking lot, catching her and Daniel from behind as they'd talked outside his office, no audio, no faces, nothing that actually proved anything at all.

Just two shapes standing close together in bad lighting, her hand briefly touching his arm as she said something, him leaning in slightly to hear her over the wind.

It looked like nothing. It also looked, if you wanted it to, like everything.

Mia sat down hard on the curb outside her building, phone gripped so tight her knuckles ached, and watched it three more times before she made herself stop. Each time it looked a little worse, somehow, even though nothing in the footage actually changed, just her own imagination filling in gaps that weren't there, building a story out of eleven grainy seconds and a hand that had barely grazed a sleeve.

"Okay..." she said out loud, to no one, to the empty street. "Okay. This is fine. This is nothing."

She didn't believe herself even a little.

Her phone buzzed again before she'd even finished saying it.

Not anything, is it?

She threw the phone into her bag like it had bitten her, stood up, and marched straight back inside to do the one thing she'd told herself all week she wasn't going to do, she called Daniel.

He picked up on the first ring. "Torres?"

"They sent a video." Mia said, breathless, words tumbling out faster than she meant them to.

"Eleven seconds. Us in the parking lot, after the office. You can't hear anything, you can't see faces, but…."

"Send it to me." Daniel said, voice tight, all business now, the softness from the office long gone.

She forwarded it. There was a long pause on the line while he watched it. She could hear him breathing, could practically hear him thinking, could picture exactly the expression he probably had on right now, jaw tight, eyes narrowed at the screen like it owed him an explanation.

"This is bad." He said finally.

"Thank you, very helpful, I hadn't gathered that myself." Mia said, and immediately regretted the sharpness in her own voice, but the fear underneath it needed somewhere to go and he was, unfortunately, the only person on the line.

"Sorry." Daniel said, and actually sounded like he meant it. "I'm not... I'm not great under pressure when it involves things I can't control. Never have been."

"Could've fooled me. You seem pretty in control most of the time." Mia said, some of the tension in her chest loosening slightly at the admission.

"That's mostly performance, Torres." Daniel said, and there was something almost rueful in it.

"Coaches aren't allowed to panic in front of their team. Doesn't mean we don't want to."

"So what, you're telling me underneath all that cone-organizing and folder-carrying, you're just as freaked out as I am right now?" Mia asked, and there was real curiosity in it, not just deflection.

"More, probably." Daniel admitted. "You've got a career to protect. I've got a career and a reputation. I spent six years of pro ball and five years of coaching building from nothing. Neither of us can afford this getting out.

But you're twenty-four. You've got time to recover from a bad season. I'm thirty-three and one scandal from being the guy nobody hires again."

Mia hadn't thought about it that way and hadn't considered that whatever risk she was carrying, he was carrying something heavier and longer, a whole career's worth of careful reputation sitting on the other side of eleven grainy seconds of footage.

"That's not fair to put all on you." She said quietly.

"Nothing about this is fair. Doesn't mean it isn't real." Daniel said.

Mia let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, sat back down on her own kitchen floor for the second time that week, phone pressed to her ear like it was the only solid thing left in the room.

"Who do you think it is?" She asked, quieter now.

"I've been going through the list all day." Daniel admitted. "Staff, players, anyone who was at the ground both times these photos got taken. It's a short list, but it's not short enough to point at one person and be sure."

"Sofia was there both times." Mia said, and hated herself a little for saying it out loud, hated how disloyal it felt even though it was just a fact, just an observation, nothing more than that.

"So was half the team." Daniel said, carefully, like he was choosing not to let her run too far down that road without more to stand on. "I'm not accusing anyone without proof. Neither should you."

"I know." Mia said. "I know, I just... it's hard not to look at everyone differently right now. Like I'm starring in my own paranoid thriller and nobody told me the plot."

"If it helps," Daniel said, and she could hear something that might have been the beginning of a smile in his voice, "you'd be a great lead in that movie. Very compelling nervous energy."

"Was that a joke? Right now? During a crisis?" Mia said, half-laughing despite everything.

"I contain multitudes." Daniel said, and this time she was sure he was smiling, wherever he was, and something about that steadied her more than anything either of them had said all night.

They talked for a few minutes about logistics, mostly, who to loop in and who not to, whether to bring it to Elena Vance now or wait for more evidence, whether reporting it risked confirming there was something worth reporting in the first place. It was a strange, careful kind of intimacy, the two of them solving a problem together at eleven at night over the phone, voices low, the whole conversation balanced on a wire neither of them wanted to look down from.

"If we go to Elena now, with what we have, she's going to ask questions we don't have good answers to." Daniel said. "An anonymous account and two blurry photos isn't proof of anything except that somebody's determined. She'll want to know why we're worried enough to bring it to her at all."

"So we wait." Mia said.

"We wait until they give us something concrete to report, or until it stops." Daniel said. "I don't love either option, for what it's worth."

"None of this is anyone's favorite option." Mia said, and laughed a little despite herself, the exhausted kind of laugh that came out when there wasn't much else left to do with the feeling.

"Get some sleep." Daniel said eventually, gentler than she'd expected. "You've got a match in two days. Whatever this is, it doesn't get to take that from you too."

"Since when do you care about my sleep schedule?" Mia asked, half teasing, mostly just not ready to hang up yet.

"Since about eleven minutes into meeting you, apparently." Daniel said, and it landed somewhere warm and unguarded in her chest before either of them could stop it. "Goodnight, Torres."

"Goodnight, Coach." Mia said, and hung up before her voice could do anything embarrassing.

She sat there a while longer in the quiet of her apartment, phone dark in her lap, replaying the conversation instead of the video for once the joke about the movie, the honesty about performance and panic, the way he'd said eleven minutes into meeting you like it had actually mattered to him, like he'd been counting.

It scared her, a little, how much she wanted to keep replaying it. How much easier it was to think about his voice on the phone than about the video sitting in her messages, or the burner accounts, or the very real possibility that this entire season could unravel over something neither of them had asked for and both of them apparently wanted anyway.

She was still sitting there when her phone buzzed one final time that night. Not the burner account. A name she actually recognized.

Elena Vance: Need you in my office first thing tomorrow. It's important.

Mia's stomach, which had only just settled, dropped all over again. She stared at the message until the letters blurred slightly, until the word important stopped meaning anything specific and just sat there, heavy and vague, doing exactly what it was designed to do, to keep her awake long past the point where sleep should have won.