The Striker's Forbidden Love

Chapter Ten - Under Every Eye

"You look like you're about to throw up." Priya said, tying her cleats beside Mia in a locker room gone unusually quiet for a match day. "Please don't throw up. I just did my hair."

"I'm not going to throw up." Mia said, though her stomach disagreed with her rather loudly on that point. "I'm just... aware of a lot of things right now."

"The scout?"

"The scout. The forum. My mother, who texted me eleven times last night asking if I'm 'seeing someone inappropriate.'" Mia said, counting them off on her fingers like a grim little inventory. "Take your pick."

"Eleven times?" Priya asked, eyebrows shooting up.

"She stopped at eleven because I finally called her back." Mia said. "It did not go well."

"What did you tell her?"

"That it's complicated and I'll explain everything after the season." Mia said, lacing her boots with more force than strictly necessary. "Which is either a very mature answer or a very obvious deflection, and I genuinely can't tell which anymore."

"Maybe both. Mature deflection. New genre." Priya offered, and Mia laughed despite herself, grateful for even a small c***k in the tension sitting on her chest.

"For what it's worth, I think you're handling an impossible situation with a decent amount of grace." Priya said, bumping her shoulder gently.

"Also, your hands are shaking. Might want to work on the grace part a little more before kickoff."

Mia looked down. Her hands were, in fact, shaking. She flexed her fingers, breathed out slowly, and tried to remember what her body felt like before any of this… before benched openers and burner accounts and a fan forum full of strangers speculating about her personal life like it was a puzzle they'd been assigned to solve.

Around them, the rest of the team went through their own pre-match rituals someone's headphones blasting loud enough to leak sound across the room, someone else pacing the same six feet of floor over and over, the collective nervous energy of twenty-two women who all understood, in their own way, exactly how much today mattered.

Daniel's voice cut through the locker room, calm and steady in a way that made half the tension in the air visibly loosen. "Five minutes. Let's get out there."

The team filed toward the tunnel in twos and threes, cleats clicking against concrete, the low murmur of pre-match nerves settling into something more focused. Mia fell into step near the back, close enough to hear Daniel giving last-minute instructions to the fullbacks, far enough that nobody would read anything into it.

He caught her eye once, just briefly, right before they stepped out into the noise of the stadium.

"You've got this." He mouthed, no sound, just the shape of the words.

Mia nodded, and something in her chest steadied just enough to carry her the rest of the way onto the pitch.

The scout sat in the second row of the stands, exactly where Elena had said he would, clipboard in hand, expression unreadable from this distance. Mia made herself not look at him more than once. She had ninety minutes to prove something, and none of it would matter if she spent the whole match staring at a stranger with a notepad instead of the ball at her feet.

The first half was scrappy. Brantford came out organized, disciplined, clearly having done their homework on Ironbridge's shape which meant, Mia realized with a jolt of something like gratitude, that Daniel's scouting report had been exactly right about their tendencies. She used it in the eighteenth minute, cutting inside where the notes said their right back would overcommit, and found herself one-on-one with the keeper with nothing but her own nerve standing between her and the net.

She scored. Clean, low, into the corner, the kind of finish that looked effortless on television and felt like the entire season compressed into half a second when you were the one doing it.

The stadium erupted. Her teammates piled on top of her, and for one perfect, uncomplicated moment, Mia forgot about the scout, the forum, her mother's eleven texts, all of it there was just the ball in the net and the noise and the pure animal joy of having done the thing she'd trained her whole life to do.

She glanced toward the sideline on instinct. Daniel was clapping, controlled as ever, but there was something in his face pride, unguarded and plain that made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the goal.

For a few minutes after that, the match felt almost easy. Ironbridge pressed, Brantford scrambled to reorganize, and Mia found herself in space twice more without quite converting either chance, the kind of near-misses that would've eaten at her on any other day but tonight just felt like momentum building toward something bigger.

Brantford equalized ten minutes into the second half on a set piece that shouldn't have worked, a scrambled header off a corner that squeaked through a gap in Ironbridge's defense. The stadium groaned as one. Daniel's jaw tightened on the sideline, and Mia watched him bark a correction to the back line, voice carrying clear and sharp across the pitch.

The match tightened after that end to end, both teams pressing for a winner, the crowd on its feet more often than not. Mia felt her legs starting to burn somewhere around the seventy-fifth minute, the accumulated exhaustion of a week that had given her almost no real rest catching up all at once.

She found the winner in the eighty-third minute anyway. A scrappy, ugly goal, deflected twice before it crossed the line, nothing like the clean strike from the first half but it counted exactly the same on the scoreboard, and the stadium didn't care one bit how pretty it had been.

The final whistle blew four minutes later.

Ironbridge had won.

Mia stood in the center circle afterward, chest heaving, sweat-soaked and exhausted and, for the first time in what felt like weeks, genuinely happy. Her teammates surrounded her, someone lifted her briefly off her feet, and somewhere in the chaos she caught Daniel's eye across the pitch, no smile, exactly, but something close enough to one that it made her stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with the match at all.

Sofia found her in the scrum of celebration, grinning wide, throwing an arm around Mia's shoulders like the tension of the last few weeks had temporarily dissolved into the simple,

uncomplicated joy of a hard-fought win.

"Two goals. Scout watching. You really know how to make an entrance, Torres." Sofia said, squeezing her shoulder.

"Lucky bounces, mostly." Mia said, still catching her breath.

"Lucky bounces don't happen twice in one match." Sofia said, and there was something almost proud in it, almost entirely genuine, enough that Mia let herself believe it for the length of one exhausted, happy breath.

She was still catching her breath when a club staffer approached, tablet in hand, expression carefully neutral in the way that always meant trouble.

"Torres. The scout wants a word before he leaves." The staffer said. "He's waiting by the tunnel."

Mia's stomach, which had only just settled from ninety minutes of exertion, dropped straight back into chaos.

"Now?" She asked, glancing down at herself mud-streaked, drenched in sweat, absolutely nowhere near presentable for whatever this conversation was about to be.

"Now." The staffer confirmed, already turning to lead the way. "He said it's important."

Mia followed, heart hammering harder than it had during the entire match, wondering what on earth a national scout could possibly want to say to her in person that couldn't wait until after she'd showered and whether, somewhere in the back of his mind, he already knew more about her personal life than a scout evaluating a striker's footwork ever should.

The tunnel felt longer walking toward it than it ever had walking out of it. Mia caught sight of Daniel near the touchline as she passed, still deep in a conversation with one of the assistant coaches, and for one brief second their eyes met across the emptying pitch. He didn't know yet.

She could tell by the easy set of his shoulders, the ordinary post-match satisfaction still written plainly across his face, that whatever was about to happen in that tunnel hadn't reached him yet at all.

She almost wished it could stay that way a little longer.