Mara had allowed me to commandeer the little bluetooth speaker we'd brought as we got ready for the dinner gala, and I faintly hummed along to my music as I finished applying my eyeliner in the brightly lit bathroom mirror.

"You have the weirdest taste in music out of anyone I know," Mara told me as she walked into the bathroom to have me zip up the back of her long black dress.

"I prefer the term eclectic," I responded with a smirk. "And besides, this is a classic. It's Finch, they were featured in Laguna Beach."

"Never heard of 'em." Mara shrugged as she spun back around to face me. She'd tied her braids into a long side ponytail, exposing one side of her sharp, glitter-dusted collarbone. "You look like you're ready to take names and numbers tonight."

I sighed as I took a step back to survey a more complete look in the bathroom mirror. The dress hugged my body in ways most clothes I wore did not, and the rhinestones that adorned the straps that wrapped around my neck glinted brightly in the light. "It's not too much, is it?"

"No way," Mara insisted. "It girl, remember? Besides, the look on Reid's face when he sees you will be so worth it."

"Who says Reid is making any kind of face?" I scoffed. "If I know Reid the way I think I do, the face he tends to make is one of disdain."

"Okay," Mara popped her lips. "Whatever you say."

We finished getting ready and made our way down to the lobby with a few minutes to spare. I was surprised to see JJ waiting for us, clad in perhaps a more traditional suit than the one he wore yesterday, but still trendy in all black except for the lapels, which were leather.

He greeted us across the lobby with a giddy wave, and as I lifted my hand to wave back, Reid stepped into the light of the big crystal chandelier that hung above us. Unlike JJ, he had on the same light blue suit he wore yesterday, but something about the way the light showered him created a halo-like glow around him. He glanced up at me with dark eyes, but not cold in the way you expected dark things to be, like night skies and deep water. They were warm, like the summer air.

"Hi," he greeted me in a breathy voice.

"Hi," I echoed.

"You look beautiful," he said with a soft smile.

"So do you," I blurted out. Not that I didn't mean it, but it wasn't the type of verbal blunder I was used to having, and I wondered if my cheeks were as pink as his.

Reid looked down at his loafers and dug his hands into his suit jacket pockets. "It's the same thing I wore yesterday."

I scoffed. "Oh just shut up and take the compliment, it was well-intentioned."

Reid shook his head at me. "Me? You-"

"Alright big guy, we've got folks to talk to," JJ tugged Reid away, although I was sure he knew he was rescuing us both.

Mara fell into step beside me as we walked out of the lobby, shaking her head with a comical disapproval.

"Don't start," I groaned as I gave her a gentle shove.

The same "ballroom" that had been the basecamp for media day had been converted once again, this time into a more basic version of what I expected a wedding reception at the hotel looked like. All the round tables were draped with white tablecloths, and the chandeliers hung high in the ceiling were dimmed for ambiance as night began to creep through the big open windows. Some subtle ambient music floated through the air, but not loud enough to have to shout your conversation at the person next to you.

And just like a wedding, our tables were organized by school, because seating teams like the University of North Carolina with North Carolina State was the same as mingling your rowdy cousins with your conservative in-laws. It might have even been worse.

Thankfully it wasn't just us and the football guys. Members of the PR team that had made the trip as well as Coach Riley's security guard had joined us, meaning there were more avenues to distract myself from trading unintentionally fervid glances with Reid all night.

There was an open bar for those of legal drinking age, which I made a beeline for the moment we set out things down at the table, catching a barely concealed smirk from Mara.

"Tequila soda with lime please," I said to the bartender as I showed him my ID.

"What kind of tequila?" he asked me.

"Casamigos, if you have it."

I could hear the pleading in my voice.

"I'll have the same," an unfamiliar voice slid in beside me.

When I glanced over at him, his face was more familiar, but even so, the garnet, black and gold coordinated suit gave away his allegiances.

"Cade Martello, Florida State," he said by way of an introduction. I knew that already, but he didn't need to know that I knew. "I'm guessing you're not, since I'd definitely know you if you were."

With a chiseled, clean shaven jaw and a mop of dark hair, something about his aesthetic said hockey player rather than football player. It could have also just been the cocky, alpha-ass attitude he was known for. Sometimes winning all of college football's most prestigious awards could do that to a guy, but he was like that before he won the Heisman last year.

Unlike him, my face wasn't all over Sportscenter Top 10 last year and the newest addition to the Heisman House commercials, so to him I was just a girl at the bar he thought he could rake his gaze over. Maybe in my own desperate way to recenter myself, I was down for a round of who could out-asshole who.

"Jo Lawrence, and yes, definitely another ACC school," I replied coyly. "I'd say I go somewhere where we're not fond of Florida State, but that's kind of everyone here, isn't it?"

That got him to laugh, and he held his hand up. "No wait, don't tell me. After four years, I've gotten really good at this game."

"Oh? What game is that?"

The bartender put our drinks down, and I made sure to take mine before he could pick it up and hand it to me.

"Figuring out what school someone goes to. When you've been around as long as I have, you learn how people tend to slot themselves into types."

"Alright, I'll humor you," I said as I took a sip of my drink.

Cade dramatically tapped his chin as he feigned being deep in thought. "Well, you're too classy to be Wake Forest or Miami. And you also look intelligent, so you probably regularly associate with other intelligent people. Let's go with...Duke? Or maybe Virginia?"

I wasn't at all surprised that someone like Cade Martello could schmooze. He seemed to be the type that could trap anyone with his sincerity.

"Flattered." I gave him a brief raise of my glass. "But flattery unfortunately doesn't make you right."

He grinned and rubbed his chin with his hand, and for a moment he'd trapped me too.

"Really stumping me. I think I need to change my strategy."

I casually swirled my drink around. "How so?"

"I'm trying to think of which head coaches would bring their personal assistants with them to this thing."

If ever there was a real-life moment to apply the record scratch sound effect from old sitcoms, it was now. Trap busted.

"Hold on." I stiffened up. "You think I'm here because I'm some coach's personal assistant?"

Cade forced out a guilty chuckle and shrugged. "Well, yeah...I mean, I guess so. I'm not trying to insult you. I said you looked intelligent and I meant that. But, why else would you be here? I assume you're not a running back."

It was almost funny, but the grip on my glass tightened so much I was worried it would start to crack. "I'm sorry, are you stuck in like, 1986? What do you think-"

A body wedged itself between us, sending me plummeting back down to earth and to the bar we'd been standing at. A big body, in a light blue suit.

"Jo's here because she runs our social media team," Reid stated plainly as he'd turned back around from the bar to face us, a beer loosely hanging from his grasp. "She's also doing a piece on me for ESPN."

Cade scoffed. "A piece on what, exactly? How you sat your ass on your couch last year, watching me win everything that you were supposed to?"

Suddenly I'd become nothing more than an innocent bystander to a hostility that had history beyond this moment. I was almost relieved, because the possibility I'd said something I regretted later was pretty much a guarantee. It was one thing to harbor internalized misogyny until you learn better, but it was another thing entirely to normalize it. I wish verbally eviscerating someone was normalized, but it was like the cardinal rule about fighting during a football game - the person who throws the first punch never gets in trouble, it's always the guy who retaliates, and because of where we were and who was present, I couldn't afford to retaliate.

"I'm sorry, but what did you win exactly?" Reid's eerily calm tone was something I'd grown used to, but hearing it so pointedly directed at someone else gave it an icy edge. "I seem to remember y'all getting blown out by TCU in the first round of the playoffs. But I guess some people are just so aware of their limitations that they consider participation the same as winning."

Cade let out a hollow laugh, twisting the class ring on his finger. "There's some things that you just have to experience to understand, which I guess you just...can't."

"You're right," Reid retorted. "I've never lost 65-7 before. You'll have to enlighten me on that one."

Cade's ears were turning almost the same shade of scarlet as his suit jacket. "Don't worry, I will when we see you in October. That is, if you last that long."

"We'll see about that." Still facing Cade, Reid reached behind him, gently took hold of my wrist and began to back up. "By the way, you should really be more grateful. I just saved you from getting a drink thrown on your exceptionally tacky suit."

Guys like Reid Donahue always needed the last word.

He'd let go of my wrist as soon as we returned to the main seating area, but when he continued past our table, my body moved on its own to follow him. We maneuvered through bodies and tables until we reached the double glass doors out to a balcony, the steel railings wrapped with twinkling string lights. The late July air was warm even though the sun had completely set, and the sound of downtown Charlotte floated up slowly, like a kid who'd just let go of a balloon.

"You didn't need to intervene, you know. I can handle myself," I told him with a bit of a bite. Just because I couldn't retaliate didn't mean he had to.

Reid let out a chuckle as he leaned his elbows onto the balcony railing, setting his gaze out into the city. "Don't flatter yourself. Cade Martello and I have had plenty of those moments, all the way back to the Elite 11. Besides, I don't think throwing a drink in someone's face is considered handling yourself."

I scoffed as I leaned my hip against the railing and faced him. "Who says I was going to throw a drink in his face?"

The corners of his lips turned up ever so slightly into a smirk. "I saw how you were white-knuckling your glass."

"Well, regardless of what I might have done..." I relinquished a sigh. "Seems like you're starting to feel like your old self again."

His smirk faltered, and his gaze dropped. "Yeah, I don't...I don't know."

The Reid Donahue that existed two years ago probably would have taken that as a compliment. But I now had the understanding that this Reid Donahue standing beside me wasn't him. People changed, even if their circumstances forced them to.

"What don't you know?" I asked him.

"I don't know how much of my old self I wanna be," he admitted softly, his voice mingling with the sounds of the city. "The amount of hours I had to just sit with myself, thinking about how if I hadn't been such an obnoxious egomaniac and taken myself out of that game when Coach wanted me to...maybe none of this would have even happened." He paused, and I decided to let the silence linger. It wasn't my responsibility to pull this out of him. He had to will it out of himself.

"During all that sitting with myself, I developed this idea in my head that being the way that I was before gave all these people..." he turned his shoulder and gestured into the ballroom with his beer bottle. "...the idea that they were entitled full access to me when I was at my lowest, and really, all I wanted was to be left alone."

I mirrored his stance, leaning forward onto my elbows on the railing, unable to bring myself to look at him. "I'm sorry if I came across as one of those people. I know I misjudged you."

Something resembling a faint chuckle came from his chest. "It's alright. I feel like maybe you were one of the few people who saw me for what I actually was."

I couldn't help but smile as I nodded in understanding. "I mean, you said it yourself. You can't carve our competitiveness in someone. You're a competitor, and you can still be that guy on the field who tells a cornerback you fucking suck after scoring on him and be this guy you've become now off the field."

This time he smiled, and the brightness of it pulled my gaze to him like a moth to a porch light, knowing it was going to get fried.

"You remember that?" he asked. "That was like, week two of my sophomore year."

"Sure." I pinched my lips into a thin smile and nodded. "And I also remember thinking what a fucking egomaniac."

We shared a laugh, but as it faded into the night, an unwilling silence lingered this time.

"I think you're also one of the only people outside of the team who sees me past my injury." The admission was even softer than the first one. "I know I said yesterday that I wasn't afraid but...I am, Jo. Not about getting hit or getting hurt, but that I just can't be that guy anymore."

I slid myself a little closer to him, rebelling against every neuron in my body that begged to actually touch him. "Don't be. Despite everything, you still love the game. And I'm pretty sure the game loves you too."

"Thank you." He closed what little space there was between us, the soft fabric of his suit warm against my bare shoulder.

"Just telling it like it is."

Still looking out into the faint, flickering lights of the city, he reached over and put his hand on mine, and I finally understood what Finch meant when they wrote the song What It Is To Burn. Because I did.

━━━━━━

no football content, all *donalaw* content and DID YOU LOVE THIS AS MUCH AS I DID? OKAY GREAT TYSM <3

(ps do we like the ship name? taking suggestions)