All Broke Down (Rusk University #2)(66)
Author: Cora Carmack

What I don’t expect is to find the weight room already occupied on a Sunday morning after a game.

Keyon has two of the larger dumbbells and is doing lunges across the weight room. His back is to me, and for a moment I consider leaving, but instead I watch him. His head is down, and he’s moving at a fast pace. He’s focused. Determined.

“Your strength isn’t why you can’t break a tackle.”

He drops the weights and whirls around to look at me.

He’s immediately tense and defensive.

“What do you want?”

“For this team to win games.”

Keyon scowls and waves a hand at me. “I get it. I ran my mouth and now it’s your turn to give some back. Go ahead. I can take it.”

“I’m not here to cut you down, man. I came here to work out, same as you. But I’m serious. Strength isn’t your problem. It’s your pad level. You’re getting laid out because your body is too high, and you can’t fight them off when they come up underneath you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you the lowest man wins?”

“Do I look like an idiot? Of course I know that.”

“Then why aren’t you working on that instead of being in here lifting weights?”

“I am working on it. Stronger legs can stay lower longer.”

“I told you strength isn’t your issue. It’s your head. And muscle memory. You need to get used to staying low.”

“I’m trying.”

I’m probably going to regret this. I don’t even f**king like the guy, but I think back to how I felt watching that game, like the only thing I had left was slipping through my fingers, but I didn’t have control over my own hands to do anything about it.

Seems like I’m feeling that way a lot lately.

“I’ve got an idea. Let’s go for a run. I think I might know something that can help you out.”

I grab a football from the locker room, and tell him to follow me.

Sometimes to switch things up, I run away from campus instead of toward it. So, I know the neighborhood behind ours is mostly families. Professors who want to live close to campus, grad students who are married and have kids. When I run that way, I always end up passing this park with a cool, modern playground.

Williams looks confused as f**k when our run ends up there.

“Is this some kind of joke? Hazing or something? Because if so, you suck at it.”

I laugh. “No joke, man. We could have done this with some of the official stuff on campus, but I don’t have a key to the equipment closet, so we’re improvising.”

“On what? The merry-go-round?” I step up into the playground area, deserted this early on a Sunday morning, and feel my feet sink into the soft wood chips that cover the ground. That’s going to make things even more difficult for him, but that might be a good thing.

“Anyone ever make you run arches?”

He shrugs.

“They look like giant versions of those metal croquet things you hit the ball through. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Not a f**king clue.”

I laugh. “Yeah, I’d never heard of it, either, when my high school coach mentioned it. It’s a rich-people thing, I think. Or old people. Both probably. Anyway, they’re small enough that you can’t run through them upright, and they’re narrow so that you have to keep your arms in close, the ball tucked tight against your body. Run through those long enough and it becomes second nature to bend your knees and stay low.”

“But we don’t have those.”

“No, we have this.” I place my hand on top of a long set of monkey bars, made for kids. I’d guess it’s about five and a half feet tall, maybe a little more. Point is, it’s low enough to make it hard for guys like us to run underneath at full speed. I toss him the football and he automatically holds it tight against his stomach the way we’re taught. I walk to the end of one set of the monkey bars and look down the length of them. It’s a little less than ten yards, so not ideal, but I think we can make it work. I decide to have him work on his feet at the same time, too.

“Let’s do it like this.” Slowly, I show him what to do, running beneath the bars with my knees bent and my body hunched. There are three sets of bracing on the sides of the monkey bars that also serve as miniature fireman’s poles, and I use them like cones, popping out from underneath the bars to weave around one pole and then back under the bars until I weave around the next fireman’s pole on the opposite side. I round one more pole, and then circle completely around the ladder at the other end of the monkey bars before ducking underneath them and repeating the same process on the way back. It’s a little lower than the practice arches we have on the team, but he’s not wearing a helmet or pads, so I figure that evens out the difficulty level.

He follows my lead, moving through it once at half speed to get a feel for it, and then he tries it at full speed. After rounding the second fireman’s pole, he knocks his head going back under the monkey bars and drops to one knee.

He curses, and I do my best to hide my smile.

“I don’t want to be a dick,” I say. “But I told you that you were running too high.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be a dick?”

“It comes naturally. I’ve learned not to fight it.”

“Well, if it’s so easy, you do it.”

He tosses me the ball, and I try not to look too smug as I walk over to the starting spot. I might be a dick now, but high-school-me was an outright ass**le. That’s what happens when you don’t have a parent around to put you in your place: You become pretty damn certain that you know what’s best about everything. Coach Cervera, my football coach the last two years of high school, had no problem showing me how wrong I was. The guy made me run arches every day until, I swear to God, I was walking around bent and hunched even outside of practice. I take a deep breath, blink to make sure my vision is completely clear, and then I speed through the course as fast as I can. My feet slip a few times on the wood chips, but I don’t think Williams noticed, at least not based on the suspiciously blank expression he has when I’m done.

“Fine. Give me the damn ball.”

I do smile then, tossing it like he asked.

I lose track of time while we work. Football does that to me. Dylan is the only other thing that has ever been that way. I could listen to her talk, watch her sleep, run my fingers through her hair . . . anything. I could do that all day long, and never get bored.