The Rookie's Secret

The facility smells like turf, antiseptic, and the faint ghost of someone else's victory — that particular scent of a place where men have bled and celebrated and failed. *You're in my spot.* Grant Wallace stands over the bench in full pads with a smirk painted on like part of the uniform, faded rose tattoos flexing on his forearms. Riley Montgomery stands up slowly, feeling the pull in a surgically repaired left knee, and goes to find a locker at the far end of the row. The nameplate reads R. MONTGOMERY, QB, in plastic still sharp at the edges. He runs his thumb across the letters and catches himself doing it. Morning light comes through the high windows. He pulls on number twelve, the same number he wore at Ohio State before the injury nearly ended everything, and reaches for his helmet, and his right hand shakes. That is the secret. Not the knee, which everybody has read about. The hand. Dahlia Torres works in the building and is the first person to notice, and the second thing she does after noticing is not tell anybody, which is a decision she is going to have to defend to people with more authority than she has. What follows: a hand he cannot trust, footage rewound twice, media training deliberately sabotaged, a cafeteria after the lights go down, a phone call overheard by accident, a date nobody is calling a date, a practice that changes the depth chart, and a book he could not hide. *Then let's not know together.* He kissed her, right there in the window, in front of the empty chairs. Contemporary sports romance set across a holiday season, a comeback quarterback with a tremor nobody has diagnosed, a woman in the building who chooses him over her own position, a locker room where a rookie's weakness is currency, explicit scenes, and a happy ending that neither of them takes for granted.