Eleven minutes on the clock. Down six.

The fourth quarter opened without ceremony. Grant stood with his mouthguard out and the cold against his teeth. His hamstrings burned. His lower back carried every hit the turf had delivered across three quarters. None of it registered as pain. Pain was a word for things that slowed him down. Nothing about him was slowing down.

Wyatt took the snap and rolled right, buying himself a half-second with footwork that bore no resemblance to Charlie's but kept the pocket alive long enough to find Booker cutting across the middle. The ball arrived low and hard. Booker scooped it at his ankles and turned up field for six before the safety closed the angle.

The crowd found its voice. A thinner sound than the roar of the first quarter, built on survival instead of expectation. The freshman had given them a pulse to hold, and they were holding.

He cracked his knuckles. Left hand first.

Coach Reed called a timeout with eight minutes and forty seconds remaining. The offense jogged to the sideline. Grant pulled his helmet off and pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead. Sweat ran cold at his temples.

Wyatt reached him first, breath coming fast, frost thick in his exhale. "This is working."

"Don't get cocky." Grant clocked the scoreboard. "There's still time."

Seb appeared with a cup of water and pushed it into Grant's hand. "Drink. You look ready to run through a building."

"Might have to."

Booker leaned in from Grant's left, his voice low beneath the noise. "Their middle linebacker is gassed. Watch his hips on the next snap. He's a full count slower than the first half."

The cold water cut through the metallic taste in Grant's mouth.

A flash of honey-blond at the corner of his vision. His hand stopped halfway to his mouth.

Poppy had left her formation. She stood between two equipment carts near the Gatorade table, close enough that the sideline staff should have waved her away and hadn't. Her cheer uniform caught the stadium lights, navy fitted close, bare legs flushed pink from the cold. The honey-blond of her ponytail had gone dark with sweat at the edges. She held her pom-poms at her side, angled toward him, deliberate, positioned inside his line of sight without crossing into the bench area itself.

Their eyes met. The noise compressed to a low hum against his skull. Her chin lifted. Her lips parted, the movement precise enough that he could have read it from across the field.

Win this thing, Grant.

Behind his sternum, his heart clenched, hard and sudden, a fist closing around the wanting. The last game of his life was bleeding out on the clock, and after the final whistle he would walk down the tunnel, take off his pads, drive home and begin the work of unlearning her. No more diner booth. No more library runs. No more standing this close while her mouth shaped his name.

The decision he had made on his back at the end of the third quarter, the wall rebuilt, the door sealed, held. It held as a cracked foundation holds: enough to stand on, not enough to trust.

He pulled his helmet on and went back out.

The drive ate the clock.

Six plays became nine. The end zone came closer inch by inch.

Third and goal from the four.

Grant lined up behind Wyatt, weight on the balls of his feet. Everyone in the stadium could read the call. Four yards from the end zone, with the running back who had carried the offense for three quarters standing with his knuckles cracked and his hips set.

Wyatt took the snap. The handoff came clean, the ball pressed into Grant's belly with both of Wyatt's hands. He hit the hole between the left guard and the center. The linebacker met him at the line, helmet to chest, the same collision point that had put Grant on his back in the third quarter.

He did not go down.

His shoulder dropped. His legs drove. The linebacker's grip slipped from jersey to arm to nothing, and the field opened for half a second and then closed again, two safeties converging at the one-yard line. They brought him down with his arm stretched across the chalk. The ball sat inches from the white paint.

Not in.

Fourth and goal from the one.

Wyatt called the sneak before the coaches could signal. Grant lined up at fullback, shoulder to shoulder with the left guard.

"Right behind you." Low enough for Wyatt alone.

The snap came. Grant threw himself into the defensive tackle's chest with everything his legs had left. The hole opened. Wyatt dove through it low and blind with the ball tucked against his torso.

The referee's arms went up.

The stadium became one sound. Not a roar. A compression of voices into a single wall of noise that hit Grant in the chest and stayed.

The celebration swallowed Wyatt. Helmets cracked against helmets. Seb lifted the freshman off his feet. Booker grabbed Wyatt's jersey and shook him. The offensive line piled on, bodies layering until the end zone was a mass of navy and gold with a twenty-year-old quarterback somewhere at the bottom.

Grant forced himself to stand, shook off the pain in his shoulder, and yanked off his helmet.

His eyes went to the bench. An instinct that had governed him all season: find Charlie, check the room, make sure the people who mattered were whole. Charlie stood where Grant had last seen him, shaking hands with Coach Reed. Grant stayed outside the celebration, helmet in hand, looking first for the person who had been left out of it.

Then movement cut across the painted line at the near sideline, and every other thing in the stadium stopped existing.

Blond hair streamed across the field.

His helmet dropped, hitting the turf somewhere behind him.

Poppy was running.

Not jogging. Not walking fast with her hands over her mouth. Running like a person runs when the distance between where they are and where they need to be has become unbearable. His legs locked.

His chest seized. Every muscle in his body that had been moving for four quarters went still, rooted to the frozen turf, because Poppy Hayes was running across a football field. Toward him. Past the celebration, past the pile of teammates, straight at him.

He blinked.

She was still running.

The cold that had lived against his skin for hours burned off in a single stroke, replaced by heat that started at the center of his chest and spread outward faster than he could track. The distance between them became the only measurement left in the stadium, ten yards collapsing to five, five collapsing to two, his whole body bracing for the impact of her.

She jumped.

She landed against him all at once and weightless, the impact rocking him back half a step before his arms closed around her. Against his pads, against the hard shell of the armor he had worn all day, she was small and solid and real: five-three of cheerleader-strong wrapped around six feet of compact power.

And she fit.

The way the ball fit in his hands on a clean carry. The way his cleats found turf on a cut. The way certain things fit before the mind can ask why.

His hands found her waist. The grip was instinct, not thought. His fingers spread across the small of her back, spanning the distance from hip to hip, and the heat of her cut through his gloves and his jersey and the hours of cold that had lived against his skin. She was warm. The warmth climbed through his palms and into his wrists and up through his arms and settled behind his ribcage. The wall he had rebuilt on the frozen turf at the end of the third quarter didn't survive the contact.

Her arms tightened around his neck. Her face was inches from his. She looked as startled as he felt, but she didn't let go. Green eyes, close enough for him to see the gold flecks near the iris, the flush on her cheeks, her lips parted on an exhale that carried orange zest and cold air. The stadium noise fell away. The scoreboard, the lights, the end zone paint under his cleats, all of it dropped out of focus until the only sharp thing left was her mouth, and the distance between her mouth and his. And the shrinking of that distance.

As her mouth hit his, the world whited out. The kiss matched the run. Full-speed. Nothing held back. It burned, her lips pressing into his with the force of a woman acting on impulse.. She tasted like citrus, cold air, and heat beneath both, and the sensation tore through him from the point of contact straight down through his chest and into the ground beneath his cleats.

His heart slammed against his breastbone so hard she must have felt it through his pads. The impossible fact was that this was happening. On this field. To him. The man who had decided in this same place that this very thing wouldn't ever happen. His knees buckled, a half-inch drop he locked them down. Because Poppy Hayes was kissing him on a football field, and his legs did not get to fail him now. He kissed her back. No. He wasn't kissing her back. He corrected that. Deliberately. Kissing her how he'd craved since August.

Four months collapsed in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Every line he had drawn around the shape of her and refused to cross disappeared. Gone. Burned out of him by the press of her mouth and replaced with a want so much larger his heart ached with joy.

The sentence he had tried to say on this field in August, the one that had died in his throat when Charlie walked up and said the easy thing, finished itself. Not with words. With his mouth against hers. With his hand sliding from her waist to the curve of her back and pulling her flush against him. She responded by arching closer, fingers curling into the hair at the back of his neck, gripping, pulling, closing every remaining inch between them. He tilted his head and deepened the kiss, and the sound she made against his mouth, low and open and wrecked, unraveled the months of silence in a single stroke.

For the first time in his life, he said exactly what he meant.