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I grinned with a little more satisfaction than I should have. Served him right. I wasn’t sure what he expected when he opened the floor to questions and then attempted a serious life-skills lecture with a group of guys who’d spent most of the day waiting for someone to tell us what to do. We were bored and restless. He’d done this to himself.

“What I’m trying to say is that your former coaching staff did you a disservice,” Rhodes said. “Your participation in football shouldn’t supersede your education, and it won’t with me.”

The groan was immediate. I understood his point—I even agreed with him—but I also knew at least half the guys sitting around me considered classes to be the inconvenient activity Harbor Tech required them to do between practices and games. Plenty of players had gotten very comfortable with someone else magically fixing things when their grades dipped low enough to threaten their eligibility. That era was apparently over. Rhodes was about to become wildly unpopular, but he didn’t seem remotely bothered by that possibility.

“You’ll thank me when you’re older!” he continued over them. “For now, you’re going home. Tomorrow we start training.”

“Going to drink is more like it,” Jude grumbled, and I snorted. If Rhodes really intended to follow through with this whole education-first thing, Jude was screwed. My best friend wasn’t stupid—not by a long shot. In fact, he was far smarter than most people realized. He just had no interest whatsoever in applying himself to anything that didn’t immediately entertain him.

“I’ll help you,” I told him.

“You’ll help me drink?” He gasped, slapping a hand to his chest. “It’s a weeknight! And we have training tomorrow!”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who needs it,” I said under my breath as we started down the bleachers with everyone else.

Jude immediately launched into planning the night—where we should go, who we should invite, whether Wyatt could be convinced to buy the first round after losing some stupid bet I didn’t remember them making. Honestly, I barely heard most of what he said. My attention had drifted back toward the field. Rhodes stood alone near the sideline, studying something on his clipboard while the team dispersed around him. For one miserable moment, I actually wished for him to glance up at me as we passed him by.

And the fact that he didn’t only solidified my need for a drink.

CHAPTER 07

Rhodes

WOLF: At some point we have to talk about this.

WOLF: You can’t just say we’re done and not talk about it. I deserve some answers.

Iwas ready to chuck my goddamn phone out the fucking window. Every few minutes, it buzzed against the desk, and every time, I ignored it. I knew it was Theo attempting to drag me into another conversation I’d already decided we weren’t having. Unfortunately, deciding that didn’t stop the messages, and it sure as hell didn’t make them easier to ignore. Each one seemed to cut a little deeper than the last—not because he was saying anything particularly cruel, but because I could hear the frustration behind every word.

And nothing compared to the look of hurt on his face when I told him we were done.

But I had my reputation to think about now. More importantly, I had Theo’s future to think about. Whatever we’d been doing had started months before I accepted this position, but that distinction wouldn’t matter much if someone caught me sneaking one of my players into my house. Nobody would care about chronology. They’d only care that I was his coach—that I had authority over his playing time, his development, and potentially his future.

And after the scandal that had just gutted Harbor Tech’s entire coaching staff, I’d have to be a special kind of idiot to think anyone would offer me the benefit of the doubt.

And this job was about to consume me.

I leaned back in Mason’s old chair and looked around the office I’d inherited along with every other disaster the man had left behind. The place still smelled faintly like stale coffee and whatever cheap cologne he’d worn. Most of his personal belongings had already been cleared out. All that was left were playbooks, practice schedules, player evaluations, academic reports, and stacks upon stacks of files that no one had ever bothered to organize.

The deeper I dug, the angrier I got. The Dean had spent part of the morning explaining just how far the former staff’s bullshit extended beyond the sex scandal. Academic rules had been treated more like suggestions, professors had been pressured, assignments had mysteriously appeared when players were failing, and grades had been dramatically changed. Half the roster should’ve flunked out last year, including Jude.

That one had made me see red. Not because my brother was innocent—he should’ve done the work—but he’d also been surrounded by adults whose job was supposed to include preparing him for life beyond football. Instead, they’d taught him that somebody would always clean up the consequences if he was talented enough on the field.

Some players were now so far behind they’d be lucky to graduate on time, and a few were in danger of not graduating at all. It made me livid for them. Was fixing all of that technically my responsibility? No. I’d been hired to coach football. But somebody had to start giving a shit about what happened to these guys after their eligibility expired, because clearly, nobody else had bothered.

Which meant the workload I’d already considered unreasonable had somehow doubled before I’d even survived my first day. Wonderful.

I dragged another file from the stack and opened it.

Theo McLaughlin.

Of course. I sighed and forced myself to read, even though I didn’t want to. The football side of his file was considerably more interesting than the academic mess surrounding some of the others. Three scouts already had their eye on him: the Cleveland Lakehawks, the Tampa Barracudas, and the Chicago Grizzlies. All three were good organizations. All three could give someone with Theo’s speed and instincts a legitimate future if he kept developing.

And some small part of me couldn’t resist looking up how far Tampa was from my house in Florida. A little over a hundred and fifty miles. That wasn’t a bad commute. It was only a few hours at most, depending on traffic. That was close enough for—

I shut the thought down fast. I didn’t need that information. There was no future where Theo got drafted to Tampa and I drove over to watch him play. No version where weekends became schedules and distance became something we calculated around.

There was no future for Theo and me.