Page 45 of Scoring the Player
No.
I widen my arms to box him in. The shot clock winds down, leaving him no choice. He passes the ball. I don’t need to look to know it’s in Sid’s hands.
That no-look dime he made to him earlier after stripping Cillian was bonkers. Somehow, we’ve all gotten used to the way they read each other.
He frowns as I back away. His energy is all over the place tonight. I keep catching him staring.
One second his gaze is filled with heat, the next fear, and the next it’s unreadable. Not its usual song of wrath and unrest, or wild woods, dark and dense with lethal life. Tonight, the trees are parting, offering a barely lit path inside.
Christ. I can’t guard him.
But I have to.
When he’s on fire, the other guys struggle to contain him.
It’s why he’s one of my favorite players to guard—he’s so unpredictable. I wait for our face-offs all season.
Not tonight.
When it’s their possession again, I fall back and let Cillian and Onyx cover him. His off-ball movement is unpredictable.If he isn’t standing still to lull the defense, he’s taking off in straight cuts or making tight curls, trying to shake whoever’s on his tail, to get an open look. He just lost Cillian by reversing direction. Sid checks him the ball, and he tosses it right back with Onyx on his heels, then he reverses. I take off as he catches the ball and then cuts down the middle, and it’s three of us surrounding him as he lifts off.
He threads the ball through my arms without drawing contact and scoops it in. I try to head off a collision with Onyx, rotating my torso midair as I come down, and a sharp pain shoots up my leg as the outer edge of my foot hits the ground, causing my ankle to roll.
“Shit,” I grunt as I hobble around, afraid to put weight on it.
The crowd’s already losing their shit, but they go bonkers as Blue, whose back is to me, points to the ground, signaling it’s his house.
“Hey, you good?” Ezekiel jogs over to me as Coach calls a time-out.
“I don’t know.” I string my arm around his neck as my other teammates surround me. “Help me to the?—”
“What happened?” Blue asks, pushing through my teammates.
I quirk my eyebrow. “Landed wrong.”
“Don’t put weight on it until the trainers check it out,” he says.
“Duh,” Cillian cuts in.
Blue glares at him, then turns to me. “It’s not your left foot. That’s good.”
He knows which foot I injured?
“You want to go in the back with him too?” Cillian teases as the trainers take over.
He ignores him, grilling my hurt foot, as I turn and limp toward the tunnel.
Huh.
After the trainerasks whether I heard a pop—I didn’t—rule out swelling and bruising, and guide me through testing the full range of motion of my foot, I am allowed to return to the game. She gives me a warning that one wrong move and I’m out. Only Coach isn’t taking any chances and benches me for the remainder of the game.
As soon as my back hits the seat, I find Blue on the court, watching me. His eyebrows crease as he stares down at my foot before turning his focus back to the game.
He and Sid are unstoppable, banking forty points in the fourth, twenty-eight of them from Blue.
“Waddup, homie?” Nick, my teammate from my Dallas seasons, pulls me in for a hug after the game.
“Good game.”
