The QB's Nerdy Addiction novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twelve of Fourteen
A teammate reads Hallie's play chart aloud in the diner, the quarterback reads it silently, and she signs on as his tutor under a contract that forbids romance. She is also the anonymous writer he knows nothing about.
Brecken Truitt held my notebook over his head in front of the whole football team and read it out loud.
I was at table nine with a coffee pot in each hand, so I couldn't stop him.
It was past midnight at the diner where I waitressed.
The team had lost by four that night.
They had come in the way they always did after a loss, forty huge men who wanted pancakes and didn't want to talk.
My notebook had slid out of my apron when I bent for a dropped straw.
"Third and eight," Brecken read. "Number 7 locks on the left slot. Safety sits on it. Again."
The booths howled.
Brecken was the backup quarterback, and the nicest of them.
He tipped in cash and he asked about my classes.
"Hallie has you all in a spreadsheet, boys," he said. "Twelve times on third down. She tracked it."
"That's mine," I said, and set both pots down on the nearest table.
"Easy, I'm just reading." He grinned and kept the notebook high. "Relax. I didn't take any pictures. Promise."
"Give it here, Truitt."
It came from the last booth.
Gage Sullivan sat there with a bag of ice taped to his throwing shoulder.
He was number 7, a senior, the quarterback the whole team answered to.
He hadn't laughed once.
Brecken handed the notebook over.
Gage read the page. Then he turned to the next one and read that too.
My writing is small and square.
I rule my own columns: down and distance, where he looked, what the safety did.
He read the first page again and looked at my handwriting for a long time.
"You were at the game?" he said.
"No. I don't go to games." That was true as of that night. "The athletic department posts the film. I do statistics."
"Why this offense?"
"Because it's the only one at Valor State with a pattern in it."
Somebody whistled low.
I took a breath and said the rest, because forty people were watching and I wanted it said once.
"I keep a 4.0, I work two jobs, and I don't date athletes. So everybody can put the phones away."
"Ooooh," said the whole back half of the diner.
Gage didn't join in.
"Is it right?" he asked me. "That I look left?"
"You looked left on twelve of fourteen."
He turned the notebook over in his hands.
"Nobody's told me that," he said. "Nobody on the staff has said it once."
Then he held it out, and I took it and went to the kitchen.
Brecken came after me before the door swung shut.
"Hey. Sorry. That was a dumb thing to do." He leaned on the steel counter next to the dish pit. "Let me make it up to you."
"You can tip."
"I'm serious. Gage's tutor quit last week."
He lowered his voice.
"He's at a 2.1, and he needs a 2.5 by November first or the university sits him for the rest of the season."
"I'm sorry for him."
"The athletic department pays forty-five dollars an hour."
Dani Keller looked up from the dish sink with her arms soaked to the elbow.
She was my roommate, and she had waitressed beside me for three years.
She mouthed the number at me: *Forty-five*.
"No," I said.
"You're the smartest person in the building."
"I'm the busiest person in the building. And I have a rule."
"It's tutoring, Hallie. Nobody's asking you to marry him." Brecken pushed off the counter, smiling. "Think about it."
I thought about it all the way home.
An orange notice from our landlord was taped to the door.
Eleven hundred and forty dollars, due Friday.
My mother had texted at 12:50 from the hospital where she worked nights as an aide.
The billing office had called again about the six thousand eight hundred dollars from the winter she was sick.
I had a 4.0, and the Merit scholarship paid my tuition.
It didn't pay for anything else.
At nine the next morning I walked into the Athletic Academic Center and said yes.
The director slid a contract across her desk.
"Nine to eleven, weeknights, in the library," she said. "Forty-five dollars an hour, paid every Friday."
"One condition. No games, no parties, no team. I tutor him and I go home."
"Fine by me," Gage said from the doorway.
I hadn't heard him come in.
He was in a gray hoodie with wet hair, and he looked like he hadn't slept either.
I signed.
He took the pen after me.
Then I read the last paragraph, which I had skipped the first time.
Any romantic or sexual relationship between tutor and student-athlete would end my employment, and with it my Merit scholarship.
I almost laughed.
I had never been so sure of anything in my life.
"Tonight at nine," Gage said. "Bring the notebook."
"I'll bring a textbook."
"Bring the notebook too."
I went out into the cold with the contract folded in my bag.
At home, in the bottom of my desk drawer, was a second notebook in the same square handwriting.
Next to it was a username that nobody at Valor State knew was mine.
For two seasons, the only person who had written about number 7 where the whole campus could read it was me.
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