Page 45 of Near Miss

“Practicing?” Nathaniel asks, eyes sweeping over me and pausing on the exposed muscle of my thigh. I can feel it jumping—a sign it’s too tired. “You ready for the season to start?”

No.

But I grin, grabbing my water and taking a swig before shrugging. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Historically, my family haven’t been good at telling the difference between a fake smile and a real one—they went almost two decades without noticing.

Something flashes behind my brother’s eyes, and he might notice today.

All it took was my public decimation before any of them started to realize that I was a real person.

Nathaniel nods. His jaw tenses, and he looks like he might say more, but his eyes go to my thigh right as the muscle gives another twitch. “Make sure you—”

I raise my eyebrows at him, pointing with my water bottle to the hallway behind him. “I know what to eat for muscle recovery, Nathaniel. I’m good.”

He holds his hands up before pushing off the doorframe and disappearing down the hallway.

I pocket my phone, even though I know it’s not going to go off, take one last look at the football nestled into the corner of the net, and follow my brother.

He’s halfway down the wrought-iron spiral staircase, but he calls back, “I saw you guys traded for Pat Perez. Didn’t you play together in college?”

“Yeah, for a bit. He came up last week. Should be good.” I wince on the first step, a cramp starting in my right leg. I consider hobbling down the stairs after my brother, but I don’t want to prove his point.

Fortunately, he’s looking away when I step off the final stair, and a lazy grin slides into place just as he glances back at me.

Nathaniel stops at the kitchen island, drumming his fingers on the granite. “I saw your photos online, the spread Yara did about you volunteering at the hospital. Nice article about all the inner work you’ve been doing in the offseason. Visualization. Yoga. Time on the lake. Connecting to important causes.”

His voice drips with irony when he says it. None of it was true, just a sad attempt at convincing everyone Beckett Davis won’t fuck up again. I shake my head. “I didn’t read it.”

Yara told me it went live, and she seemed happy with the media pickup and response. But I wasn’t interested. I stoppedlooking at the comments section of my social media when everyone started telling me how much they hated me.

Disbelief colours his face, and he folds his arms across the counter, leaning down. “You didn’t read it? That’s unlike media darling Beck Davis.”

I know he doesn’t mean for it to be rude. I know he sees all the media and press I’ve done—the endorsements and the commercials, everything the team’s publicist and Yara trotted me out to do because I happened to be more likeable and photogenic than any other kicker alive—and he thinks it means I revel in the attention.

I don’t, not really. I just did it because it was what was expected of me.

That’s the thing about my family—they don’t mean for any of it to hurt.

They love me, but they don’t love me the same as they love each other.

I lift a shoulder, offering him another lazy grin, and change the subject. “What are you doing here? It’s Sunday night. Shouldn’t you be prepping for a week of saving lives?”

His eyes flash, like he wants to press, but he doesn’t. “I was dropping off some stuff to Sarah and Lily. Lily just had another egg retrieval on Friday, and she’s feeling pretty tired.”

“Oh.” I glance at the calendar hanging beside the fridge. It’s littered with my messy penmanship, marking different workouts, daily caloric intake, and anything else I need to remember. But it’s not the type of thing I would have forgotten. “Sarah didn’t tell me. I guess I just write the cheques.”

Nathaniel cocks his head. That same muscle in his jaw jumps, but his voice is uncharacteristically soft. “I think she just didn’t want to stress you out this close to the start of the season.”

He pauses, and when I don’t say anything, he clears his throat and continues. “She worries about you, you know. We all do. Ithink you put an astronomical amount of pressure on yourself, Beckett.”

I open my mouth to tell him it doesn’t feel like that—that it’s never felt like that—but I blink, and I see my brother the way I used to: small shoulders curved inwards over his textbooks, scribbling away to make sure his homework was done before our parents got home from the hospital. All while I studied game tape and memorized routes in between making sure everything was clean, neat, and tidy for our parents, because their minds and their hearts certainly weren’t, and tried not to burn his dinner.

I blink again, and he’s the adult version of himself now—and logically, I know he’s fine on his own. That he’s big enough and old enough and mature enough to navigate a difficult conversation with his brother—that maybe they all are—but I think a part of me got stuck back there and the idea of adding another brick, another weight, to those small shoulders of my brother makes me want to vomit.

“Thought you were an oncologist, not a psychiatrist.” I raise my hands and start walking backwards towards the fridge.

Nathaniel narrows his eyes at me, like he isn’t going to let this go and it’s a hill he’s happy to die on today, but his gaze cuts to the middle of the island. Greer’s award’s still there, right where I left it when I got home the other night. “Why do you have this?”

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