On Saturday, our administrative assistant was out with the flu, so Rebecca bumped me over to the second worst task at the Garland Country Club—calendar management. It wasn't that fielding emails and scheduling lessons and events was particularly challenging. It just meant that, on a day with cloudless skies and a comfortably cool breeze, I was locked up in a windowless office deep in the basement of the clubhouse.

My only source of a view was a framed and autographed photo of decorated Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte hung on the wall opposite the desk.

I wasn't complaining about it.

But some sunlight would've been nice.

The worst part of being stuck in the office was that I didn't have PJ around to distract me from my incessant thoughts of Bodie St. James.

It was a relief when noon rolled around and I had an excuse to take my lunch break so I'd be just in time to watch kickoff. Garland had an away game against Arizona State, who'd been struggling harder than we had this season but would probably still kick our collective ass.

PJ wasn't behind the bar, so I had to go looking for her in the back room. I found her with a clipboard tucked under one arm as she inventoried cases of alcohol.

The retired population of Garland, California consumed an absurd amount of top-shelf tequila. This was mainly due to the fact that the Real Housewives of Garland were obsessed with post-tennis-lesson frozen margs.

"Yo," I greeted, sounding a bit too much like Ryan (my group member, not the Olympian) for my liking.

PJ turned, her eyebrows pinched in concentration. Her face went slack with a smile when she saw me.

"Hi. How's Lochte?" she croaked.

"Beautiful and vacant-eyed as ever," I said. "What's wrong with your voice?"

PJ tried—and failed—to suppress a hacking cough.

"It's nothing. My throat's a little sore. I think I'm just dehydrated."

I wasn't sure if this meant she was hungover, or getting sick. For both our sakes, I hoped it was the former—working at the club when PJ wasn't there was like cannonballing into a swimming pool without any water. Not even a little bit enjoyable.

"Morning, ladies!"

Speaking of painful, our supervisor had arrived.

Rebecca bustled into the bar with a smile on her face. She had her long, dark hair in twin French braids and a white streak of sunscreen across one cheek. She never wore makeup, since she considered it false advertising—a fact she brought up every time someone made a remark about how strong PJ's eyelash game was.

I'd never had the balls to ask Rebecca who, exactly, she thought she was selling herself to.

False advertising. Fuck off. Women weren't Big Macs. Just because I looked better on Instagram than I did during Writing 140 on a Monday morning didn't mean I was any less delicious.

"Did you hear the news?" Rebecca asked us, pushing her Ray Bans onto the top of her head. "I'm sure you've heard, Laurel. I guess all those tips were fake after all! What a relief, right?"

No. It was not.

"I knew they'd clear Vaughn," Rebecca continued. "I knew he was being scapegoated."

I was good at biting my tongue. Every once and a while, my anger (or a few too many alcoholic beverages) led to a slip up—like the time I'd told Bodie St. James to eat a dick. And the time I'd called him a coward. And a dumbass, en Español.

But, for the most part, I prided myself on knowing when something wasn't worth my harshest words.

So I kept my mouth shut.

But PJ, ever a real one, combed her fingers through her hair and said, in her best impersonation of the airhead former pageant girl Rebecca thought she was, "I thought the California Department of Justice was, like, still investigating?"

Rebecca's eyes flashed, but she shrugged it off.

"They'll clear his name, too. All those tips were—"

"Oh, look!" PJ interrupted. "The game's starting."

She grabbed the remote and turned the volume up so loud that Rebecca had no choice but to abandon the conversation.

❖ ❖ ❖

"Well, fuck me," PJ said an hour and a half later, a wry smile tugging at her lips as she gazed up at the TV screen mounted over the bar. "We're actually gonna win one."

Garland was up by fourteen points in the third quarter.

I wish I could say I was enjoying our first real triumph since the first game of the season, but there was an ugly truth bubbling beneath the surface of our success: Vaughn was coaching again. He wasn't in the stadium, sure, but I saw his fingerprints on the offensive plays and defensive formations.

He'd given Chester Gordon a plan and told him to execute it.

Part one of the plan appeared to be putting Bodie St. James and Kyle Fogarty on the field. They'd both started and, in three quarters, managed four touchdowns and one two-point conversion. It was the best game Garland had managed in months.

But that all ended less than a minute into the fourth quarter.

It was a reckless play. Too reckless. Chester Gordon never would've come up with something so brash—it had to be one of Vaughn's. I thought of the binder Gordon had been reading when I ran into him at the training facility. Vaughn had given it to him, hadn't he?

After the snap, chaos.

Both tackles—the guys in charge of protecting Bodie's blind side—seemed to disappear, taking the defense with them.

Bodie faked left and took off right.

At the very same moment, the opposition's widest and heaviest linebacker appeared in a gap left by the scattered offensive line, charging like a bull aiming to skewer a matador on its horns.

It was a brutal hit.

A head-on-collision-with-a-semi-truck hit.

But for the split second after Bodie was knocked back, it felt good.

I wanted him to hurt the way I hurt. Selfishly, I thought it was something that could be balanced out. Like a linebacker to the chest for ignoring the fact we'd kissed was a fair trade-off.

But after that initial wave of bitter hurt passed, my stomach knotted tight with guilt.

The medics were already jogging out onto the field.

No, I take it back.

Chester Gordon tucked his clipboard under his arm and joined them.

I didn't mean it.

The camera angles kept shifting as the TV station tried to get a straight shot through the crush of bodies huddled around him—the coaching staff and a few of his teammates and a small army of medics. At last, somebody held out their arms and bellowed for everyone to step back and give him some space, and the crowd cleared enough so we could see through.

Bodie sat up, blinking at Gordon like he recognized him but couldn't figure out why he was there, kneeling beside him on the grass.

There was blood trickling out of his nose. It was already swelling. Broken, probably.

His helmet had been knocked clean off.

PJ gasped softly.

"Oh my God," she said. Then, again, "Oh my God. Look at his eyes. That's a concussion. Has to be. Lights are on and no one's home."

Bodie St. James looked like he didn't know where he was.

Or who he was.

It was a small relief to see him get to his feet and walk off the field, instead of being loaded onto the stretcher that'd been carried out, but I didn't like how slow and deliberate his steps were. Like he had to think about them. His head was down, his sweat-soaked bangs hanging down over his forehead and casting his face in shadow.

We won the game by seven points.

Neither PJ nor I celebrated.

I trudged back down to the basement in silence and sat at the rickety little desk across from Ryan Lochte's impressive abs. When I clicked open the calendar, there were five new notifications from people requesting event slots.

But all I could think about was Bodie.

Were his ears still ringing? Did his head ache, along with whatever parts of him had hit the ground first? Did Bodie realize—somewhere in the back of his mind—that Truman Vaughn had known a play that left his blind side uncovered would be a risk?

Did Bodie know that Vaughn understood the risks, and had asked Gordon to execute it anyway?

❖ ❖ ❖

We learned, later, it was a mild concussion—nothing too severe, despite the initial horror of his dazed expression and limp body—and that he'd broken his nose. PJ read the news off of Twitter. I tried my best to sound casually relieved, but a few minutes later, I tucked myself in a bathroom stall in the women's locker room and scrubbed at my eyes until my mascara was gone.

I didn't want to care this much. Caring this much hurt.

Why did I have to care?

If PJ noticed my blotchy face when I said I'd see her tomorrow, bright and early, she didn't comment.

But she did reach across the bar to offer a very heartfelt fist bump.

Out in the parking lot, I started towards my usual space out of habit before I remembered that my car was still in the parking garage across the street for The Palazzo. I'd taken the bus to work that morning—two buses, actually, because (shockingly) there wasn't enough overlap in the lives of college students and retirees to warrant a direct shot between Garland University and the country club.

I had a long commute home.

And Bodie St. James had a long flight back to California.

_________________

Empathy, thou art a bitch (and simultaneously Laurel's greatest strength and greatest weakness).

On Wednesday, I will be posting TWO (2) updates. I have split Chapter 35 into two parts and labeled them accordingly. I was going to post them on separate days (because they're both full-length), but due to reader feedback, I've decided to put them up at the same time. I'll leave a note at the top of part two, as a reminder, but I wanted to give advance notice as well!

Your friendly author,

Kate