Page 22 of The Longest Shot
Mills unracks the weight with a controlled exhale. The first rep is clean. The second rep, she slows halfway, but she powers through. The third rep… she hits the wall and her muscles revolt, the bar frozen six inches from her chest and her arms trembling violently.
“Spot!” she grits out.
The disaster unfolds in slow motion. My body starts moving before my brain catches up, thanks to that same goalie instinct that has me dropping before the shot’s released. And, as I'm closing the distance, I see Kellerman panic and fuck up the spot.
Instead of helping her out with steady upward pressure, finding the right amount of load to help her without totally taking over, he jerks at the bar. He's got the wrong grip, terrible leverage, and physics takes over. The barbell tilts, one end dipping toward Mills’s throat.
Time fragments.
The bar tilting past recovery.
Mills’s eyes going wide.
Kellerman’s face shifting to horror.
The trajectory that ends with a crushed windpipe.
Move.
I cover the distance in what feels like a single heartbeat and get my hands under the falling side with millimeters to spare. The knurling bites deep, tearing skin as I roar and heave upward with everything, but the alternative is watching someone's neck get crushed on my watch.
The barbell crashes into the rack. The silence after is so complete I hear Mills’s ragged breathing, each exhale a prayer of relief. My own heart is trying to escape through my ribcage, because despite whatever shit has been going on between the two teams, someone almost got badly hurt.
Kellerman stammers, “Shit, oh shit, Mills, I didn’t mean—fuck, are you OK?”
Mills is sheet-white, her hands still gripping the bar, knuckles bone-pale. Vulnerability flashes in her eyes for exactly one second, as her mind no doubt processes what almost happened, then the look is replaced by rage aimed at Kellerman.
“Are you—” I start.
But Morgan materializes beside us. She doesn’t check on Mills, her focus locked on me. “Get away from my player,” she says.
"Morgan, I?—"
"No." Her voice is low, controlled, dangerous. "Teach your goddamn puppies how to spot before they kill someone. Your guys might love you for the chaos and the laugh-a-minute fun, but sometimes you need to actuallyleadif you want to be captain of a team,James.”
Her words land like a string of body blows. The silence in the gym is a physical thing, pressing in from all sides. Her fury is a heat I can feel on my skin. And the old, familiar panic starts to crawl up my throat.Fix it. Make them laugh. Make it not serious.
It's like my brain has an automatic override sequence for social catastrophe, because my mouth moves before the smarterpart of my brain can object. A wide, brittle grin splits my face. My voice is too loud, a desperate performance for the whole, silent room.
"Alright, people, show's over! Nothing to see here!" I gesture vaguely with one of my now-bleeding hands, then zero in on the mortified Kellerman. "Except for you, kid. You and I have a date with a remedial training video called'Intro to Heavy Objects.'Don't worry, it's got pictures. Mostly."
A few of my teammates let out nervous, strangled laughs, but the sound dies instantly in the thick, horrified quiet that follows. The joke doesn't just fall flat, it crashes and burns, a Hindenburg of misplaced humor that goes up in flames just as fast and then crashes just as hard.
Morgan’s expression, which had been a mask of white-hot anger, simply vacates. The rage is gone, replaced by a profound, empty stillness. It's the look of someone who has just witnessed something so pathetic it's beneath a response. She looks at me like I am the most disappointing thing she has ever seen.
My chest constricts as her look lands like a bullet, because the disgust in her expression and the slight curl of her lip make it clear that she thinks I’m personally responsible for what just happened, and nothing I say or do is going to change that.
She turns to Mills with an instant transformation from ice to warmth. “You’re OK,” she murmurs, barely audible. “Deep breaths. Count with me.”
My palms are bleeding and stinging like hell from where the end of the bar cut into me, but I can’t stop watching her check Mills over without making it obvious, positioning herself between her player and us like a human shield. Then, in full view of everyone, Morgan walks to an empty barbell.
No warm-up. No ceremony. She loads it herself, each forty-five-pound plate sliding on with mechanical precision. The metal sings with each addition. She’s loading it heavier thanMills attempted, and the message is clear: they don’t need us, our help, or our presence in their space.
The final plate slides home with aclang, as everyone in the room watches.
Erik Schmidt appears at my elbow. “You saved her ass. Everyone saw it.”
I nod, but I know that’s the problem. Everyone saw me save her player because my player fucked up. Everyone saw Morgan’s team need us and hate us for it. Everyone saw her player's discipline in trying to lift it and my player's loose concentration and technique in fucking it up.
