Page 7 of Studs Up
“Who raised you?” He called.
“A goddamn saint.”
The next day was no better. Even though we spent a majority of the day apart while the offense worked on runs and the defense ran drills.
We went head to head again with a scrimmage at the end of the day, even though Mirren put us on the same side.
Again and again, Monroe refused to pass in the eighteen, determined to be the one to put it in the goal. Except he had a failure rate of over fifty percent.
He was so fucking talented it was infuriating to watch him let it go to waste.
After a Coach blew the whistle, I let him have it as we headed into the locker room.
“You want to know why you lost?” I pointed an angry finger at him before he could leave the field. “You let your big fucking ego get in the way.”
“Yeah?” He stepped up to me, my finger pressing into his chest. “Then what’s your excuse for choking in the final?”
“How many trophies do you have?” I retorted.
His eyes narrowed impossibly close, and heat radiated off his skin. I had really hit a nerve. Good.
Holden
Nothing was going right. Beautiful crosses right to my feet weren’t enough, and I couldn’t get the ball on target. The shots were either too easy to save or weren’t worth the keeper’s effort as the balls sailed wide or over the top.
Reed read me like I was telling him exactly what I was going to do. He herded me down the left side of the field, knowing my left foot was weakest, and I couldn’t get around him to lob the ball into the eighteen. He read Alex, knowing exactly where he was going to slice the ball between himself and Marcel, intercepting it and sending the ball down the right to Lopez.
He had me locked down, rendering me impotent.
I worked twice as hard at drills. I had to prove myself somewhere, and beating Reed was the only thing that kept me going.
It was on. For the next week and a half, I was going to make him suffer. The one thing I hated more than seeing Reed was losing to him.
The second we got onto the field, I allowed my competitive drive to take over, and I was determined to beat him in every single drill.
True to form, he did not back down. He had the speed, but I had the endurance. He won the early sprints, but I had him in the bag as the day went on.
“Come on, old man,” I hissed as I passed him.
“I’m a year older,” he grunted in between breaths.
“It’s enough to slow you down,” I quipped and sped past him. To my utter fury, he kept pace, catching up and keeping within a hair’s breadth of me.
He didn’t let up. When it came to the scrimmage, he stuck to me like glue. I couldn’t have him near me. It was too much. His proximity made it hard to think, and he rounded on me when I was caught offside again. The assistant coach, playing the role of ref, whistled the play dead.
“Do you not know how to pay attention?” He snapped.
“Fuck you,” I snapped back. I could have walked away, been the better man, as it were, but he got under my skin, and I couldn’t bring myself to distance us.
“We can’t have every one of your mediocre goals called back because you can’t watch the fucking line.”
My lips formed the insult, mediocre goals.
“Mediocre goals,” I found myself shouting. “Are you fucking kidding me? A goal is a goal.”
The entire squad was watching us now. The assistant Coach had his head in his hand and was shaking it in dismay.
Nolan straightened and crossed his arms, the Nolan Reed stance that the Guardians practically trademarked. They even made a banner out of it.
