All Chapters of Touchdown For The Devil : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

83 Chapters

The Confrontation

Ariana had been standing outside the athletics building for forty minutes, when Dante came around the corner with his gym bag over his shoulder and his hair still damp, he saw her immediately,slowing his steps She didn't give him a chance to speak first. "In there." She nodded toward the stairwell door. He looked at her for a second. Then he pushed it open. The door swung shut behind them and the outside noise completely cut off. Just the hum of the building and the two of them and whatever was about to happen. Dante dropped his bag and leaned against the wall, waiting for her to speak. Ariana turned to face him. "Mason told me your father called you that night." She kept her voice even. "That you left because of it, and that you showed up at his apartment at one in the morning saying you'd screwed something up." Dante didn't say anything. "I came up with every explanation I could think of," she said. "I thought maybe you regretted it, It meant nothing, or I'd imagined

Zoe Finds Out

Ariana pushed the dorm room door open and let her bag thud onto the floor. Zoe was sprawled on her bed, textbook open, pen tucked behind her ear. She glanced up, her expression immediately shifting. "What happened to you?" "I waited outside the athletics building and ambushed Dante." Zoe carefully removed the pen from behind her ear, holding it like a tiny weapon. "Say that again." "I waited for him to come out of practice and I made him tell me what really happened the night of the party." Zoe placed the pen on her nightstand, the small click of plastic on wood punctuating the quiet. "Sit." Ariana sank onto the edge of her own bed. "Did he tell you?" "Yes." "Everything?" "Enough." Ariana pulled her knees to her chest. "Someone at the party saw us on the patio and told his father. Richard Cole called Dante that night and told him to walk away from me or he'd face the consequence She swallowed. "So he did." Zoe was silent for a long beat. Then, "His father did that? To him?"

The Morning After the Almost

Dante found her at eleven in the morning, sitting on the back steps of the journalism building with her camera in her lap and a coffee going cold beside her, editing photos on her laptop in the thin November sunlight. She heard his footsteps on the concrete before she saw him. Recognized the rhythm without looking up. He sat down beside her on the step, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and looked out at the small courtyard below like he had nowhere else to be. Ariana kept her eyes on her screen. "You found me." "We agreed on meeting today." "I didn't think you meant before noon." "I've been up since six." He glanced at her coffee. "That's cold." "I know." He didn't say anything else. She kept editing. A sparrow landed on the courtyard railing below them, looked around with the particular suspicion of small birds, and flew off. Somewhere inside the building a printer was running. It should have been awkward, but it wasn't. That was the thing about this morning

The Truth About His Mother

The coffee shop was nearly empty when Dante told her about his mother. Ariana didn't say anything. She just waited, because something in the way he started, the slight hesitation before he spoke, told her this wasn't a story that needed interrupting. His mother's name was Elena, and she was currently in a private treatment facility somewhere outside the city. Dante didn't know where. That was the first thing Ariana needed to understand, he said. Not that his mother was in treatment, but that he didn't know where she was. Ariana set her cup down slowly, the ceramic making a soft click against the saucer. "What do you mean you don't know where she is?" "My father controls the facility. The location, the access, including the communication." He looked at his coffee, tracing the rim with a finger. "I get photographs. Sometimes a short video. Proof that she's alive and that the treatment is ongoing." A pause. "That's what he sends me." Ariana stared at him, the pieces clicking i

What Mason Knows

The football house was quiet for a Thursday. Most of the team had gone to some party across campus, a destination Dante had pointedly avoided. Mason clocked the absence while doing a mental headcount at the door, one name missing from the usual noise. He made a flimsy excuse about forgetting his wallet and doubled back, his footsteps unusually loud on the empty staircase. He knocked twice on the door at the end of the second floor hallway and let himself in without waiting. Dante was sitting on the edge of his bed, still in his practice clothes. The lamp on the nightstand was on. Everything else was off. It looked like he'd come upstairs, sat down, and just stopped there. The phone in his hand wasn't lit up. He wasn't looking at anything in particular. Mason pulled the desk chair out and turned it around, straddling it backwards with his arms folded over the back. "You good?" Dante looked up. The answer was already in his face. "Close the door." Mason closed it. He watched D

The Party

"We're going out," Zoe announced Friday evening, standing in the doorway with her jacket already on and her earrings already in. "Tonight. Both of us. No cameras, no laptops, no thinking about football players or journalism assignments or anything that lives in this building."Ariana looked up from her desk. "I have—""No.""I was going to say I have nothing going on tonight."Zoe blinked. Then she smiled. "Perfect. Get dressed."The party was at a house three blocks off campus. Someone from the music department lived there, which meant the playlist was actually good and the crowd was different from the usual Westbridge football scene, art students, journalism majors, a handful of people Ariana recognized from the photography lab. The kind of party where people actually talked instead of performed.Ariana stood in the doorway taking it in. The living room had been cleared of furniture, the lights turned low, colored bulbs strung along the ceiling casting everything in warm amber and d

The Opportunity

Professor Bennett's assistant sent the email at 9:47 on a Tuesday morning. That was how Ariana ended up sitting outside Bennett's office at 10:15 with no idea why she'd been summoned and a half finished coffee going cold in her hand.The hallway outside the journalism department offices was quiet at this hour. Most students were in lectures. The administrative staff moved between rooms with the purposeful efficiency of people who had too much to do.Ariana sat on the bench outside Bennett's door and tried to think of what she might have done wrong. The semester project was on time. Her last assignment had come back with a strong grade. The competition entry had been submitted correctly. She'd checked three times.The door opened."Ariana." Bennett stood in the doorway in her reading glasses and the expression she wore when she was trying not to show she was pleased about something. "Come in."Ariana came in.Bennett's office was small and chronically overfull. Stacks of student work o

What He Didn't Know

The hotel the competition put them in was a narrow building on a street full of galleries and coffee shops. Ariana checked in on Friday evening with her camera bag over one shoulder and a rolling suitcase that had seen better days. She took the elevator to the fourth floor and stood in the doorway of her room looking at it. Her room was, small, but clean. A window that faced another building's brick wall. A desk she could work at. Nobody she knew on the other side of the door. She put her suitcase down and sat on the edge of the bed. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt completely and entirely alone in a way that felt like freedom rather than loneliness. She took a photograph of the brick wall through the window. Then she unpacked and went to find dinner. The intensive started Saturday morning in a conference room on the second floor of a building two blocks from the hotel. Fourteen finalists in total. She'd expected them to be older, more polishe

Game Day

The morning of the Henderson game, Dante woke up at 6:43 and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling for eleven minutes before getting up. This was normal. Game day mornings always started like this. The particular alertness of a body that knew what was coming before the mind had fully arrived. He'd been waking up like this since high school. The stillness before everything got loud. He reached for his phone. One message from Ariana, sent at 6:51.Good luck today. I mean it. He looked at it for a moment. Then he typed back two words and put his phone face down and went to make coffee.Don't need it. He was smiling when he said it. That was new. Game day mornings hadn't felt like this in a long time. By 9 a.m., the football house was a different kind of alive. The kitchen smelled like eggs and protein shakes. Someone's prey game playlist was already bleeding through the ceiling from upstairs, something with too much bass that nobody had complained about yet because nobody complain

Let Him Think It Worked

The locker room afterwards was chaotic. Genuine. Players who had been strangers to each other's emotional lives for four quarters suddenly weren't. Someone poured water on someone else. Webb sat in front of his stall with his helmet in his lap and looked at the wall with the expression of someone processing something real before Mason sat down beside him and said something that made him laugh. Dante showered and dressed slowly. Letting the noise wash over him. Not separating himself from it, but not needing to be at the center of it either. He felt the particular calm that followed a game like this. Not quiet exactly. Just settled. The adrenaline burning off slowly, leaving something steadier underneath. He checked his phone. Two messages from Ariana. The first, sent forty minutes ago.Congratulations, I knew you'd win. The second, sent ten minutes ago.Webb's catch in the corner. I watched the live feed. Tell him I said that was ridiculous. He stood in front of his locker readin

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