The Striker's Forbidden Love

Chapter Nine - Friday Nerves

By Friday, the whole team could feel that particular electricity that showed up before a match that actually mattered, the kind that made even the easiest drills feel like they carried extra weight.

"You're going to run a hole in the grass if you keep pacing like that." Priya said, watching Mia lap the sideline for what had to be the fourth time in ten minutes.

"I'm not pacing. I'm warming up." Mia said, not breaking stride.

"You warmed up twenty minutes ago." Priya said. "This is just pacing with extra steps."

Mia stopped, hands on her hips, breathing harder than the actual warmup justified. "Fine. I'm pacing. Is that better?"

"Much." Priya said, grinning. "Honesty's good for the soul, Torres."

"My soul would prefer a distraction, actually." Mia said, dropping down onto the grass beside her, legs finally still. "Tell me something that isn't about tomorrow."

"Okay." Priya said, considering. "Did you know my cousin got engaged to a man she met at a taco truck?"

"That's not a real story."

"It's completely real. Six months of dating, entirely based on a shared love of carnitas." Priya said, entirely serious. "Love finds you in strange places, Mia. Maybe you'll meet someone at a taco truck too."

"I do not need a taco truck romance right now." Mia said, laughing despite herself, some of the tension in her chest finally loosening.

"Fine, no taco truck. What about a coffee shop? Very classic. Very low commitment." Priya continued, clearly enjoying herself now, warming to the bit. "You bump into a stranger, you both reach for the same oat milk, sparks fly"

"I hate oat milk." Mia said, flat and immediate, before cracking into a real laugh despite herself.

"Also I don't have time for sparks. I have a match tomorrow that might decide my entire career."

"You need something. You've been wound tight as a drum all week." Priya said, gentler now, studying her with real concern under the joking. "Is it the scout? Or is it something else?"

Mia hesitated a fraction too long before answering. "It's the scout."

"Uh huh." Priya said, clearly not buying it, clearly deciding again not to push. "Well. Whatever it is, you've got tomorrow to prove it doesn't own you. That's usually how it works with this stuff."

Across the pitch, Daniel was running the goalkeepers through set-piece defense, voice carrying clear and sharp in the cool evening air, completely absorbed in the work in a way that made Mia's chest do something complicated just watching him.

"You're staring." Priya said, not unkindly.

"I'm not staring, I'm... assessing the drill." Mia said, tearing her eyes away too fast to be convincing.

"Assessing." Priya repeated, deeply skeptical. "Sure. Let's go with assessing."

Practice wrapped an hour later, the team dismissed early for once. Daniel's one concession to the pressure of tomorrow, sending everyone home to rest instead of running them into the ground the night before a match that mattered this much. Mia lingered near the equipment shed, packing her bag slower than necessary, some part of her hoping for a reason to talk to Daniel before she left.

She got one, though not the kind she expected.

"Torres. A word." Daniel said, appearing beside her with a folder tucked under his arm, voice pitched low enough that it wasn't for the rest of the team still filtering toward the parking lot.

"Is this the good kind of word or the concerning kind?" Mia asked, half joking, the last few days having permanently recalibrated her sense of what counted as an emergency.

"Neither, calm down." Daniel said, and something in his tone actually did ease the knot in her stomach this time. "I wanted to give you this before tomorrow."

He handed her the folder. Inside was a single sheet a breakdown of Brantford's defense, their tendencies, the specific gaps Mia's speed could exploit if she read the runs correctly.

"You made this for me?" Mia asked, flipping through it, genuinely surprised.

"I made it for the team. You're just the one who benefits from it most." Daniel said, though something in the way he said it suggested that wasn't entirely the whole truth.

"How long did this take?" Mia asked, scanning the notes, the careful diagrams, the small handwritten arrows marking exactly where their right back tended to overcommit.

"Long enough that I should probably be embarrassed about it." Daniel admitted, and there was something almost boyish in the way he said it, a c***k in the usual composed exterior. "I may have watched their last six matches twice each."

"That's either extremely dedicated or slightly unhinged." Mia said, unable to hide her smile.

"Can't it be both?" Daniel said.

"Thank you." Mia said, quieter now, meaning it more than the two words really covered.

"Don't thank me yet. Thank me if it works." Daniel said, and there was warmth underneath the gruffness that Mia was starting to recognize as simply how he showed he cared sideways, through preparation and effort instead of anything softer.

They stood there a moment too long, the parking lot emptying around them, neither one quite ready to be the first to walk away.

"Nervous?" Mia asked finally.

"Terrified." Daniel admitted, surprising her with honesty. "Not about the match. About everything sitting underneath it."

"Yeah." Mia said. "Me too."

"You'll be brilliant tomorrow, regardless of anything else going on." Daniel said, voice low, steady, the kind of certainty that landed somewhere warm in Mia's chest despite every reason she had not to let it. "I mean that."

"You're not supposed to say things like that to me." Mia said, only half teasing.

"No." Daniel agreed. "I'm really not."

Neither of them moved. The moment stretched, charged and dangerous and entirely too easy to fall into, right there in an empty parking lot with nobody left to see.

Mia's phone buzzed in her pocket, breaking whatever was about to happen before it fully had the chance.

She pulled it out, expecting the burner account, already bracing for whatever fresh horror waited on the screen.

It wasn't the burner account.

It was a text from her brother Marcus, sent to the family group chat, the one with all three of her brothers and her mother, the one she hadn't checked in days.

Hey, does anyone know why there's a picture of Mia and some guy going around on the Ironbridge fan forums? Mom's asking questions.

Mia read it once, then again, the words landing somewhere cold and heavy in her chest. Fan forums. Not a burner account this time an actual public forum, actual strangers, actual eyes that had nothing to do with whoever had been sending her those messages all week.

"What's wrong?" Daniel asked, watching her face change in real time.

"Nothing." Mia said automatically, then caught herself, hand tightening around the phone.

"Everything. It's on a public forum now. My family's seeing it."

Daniel went very still. "Show me."

Mia turned the screen toward him, watched his jaw tighten the exact same way it had the night of the video, watched the easy warmth from thirty seconds ago disappear entirely, replaced by something sharper, more alarmed.

"This is different." Daniel said, voice low. "This isn't someone testing the water anymore."

"What do we do?" Mia asked, and hated how small her voice sounded, hated how fast the ground had shifted underneath a moment that had felt, seconds ago, almost peaceful.

"Tonight, nothing. We can't fix a public forum post at nine o'clock the night before the biggest match of the season." Daniel said, already thinking three steps ahead, already sounding more like a coach than anything else. "Tomorrow, you play like none of this touched you. That's the only thing either of us can control right now."

Mia nodded, though the calm in his voice didn't quite reach the place in her chest where the fear had settled. She thought about her mother, somewhere at home right now, staring at a grainy photo of her daughter and a stranger, waiting for an explanation nobody had given her yet.

"I have to call my mom." Mia said quietly.

"Then call her." Daniel said, gentler now. "Go home. Get some sleep if you can manage it. Tomorrow, we show up and we win, and we figure out the rest after."

Mia nodded again, gathered her bag, and walked to her car with the folder tucked under one arm and her phone burning a hole in her pocket, the whole drive home spent rehearsing yet another conversation she didn't want to have.