If you ask me to identify the single greatest threat to my mental health before the age of nineteen, I don’t even need to think.
Dexter Boyd.
Bigger threat than getting folded in half by linebackers, bigger than my father’s face when I miss a read, bigger than humiliating myself on national television and having the clip survive online until the heat death of the universe, passed lovingly from algorithm to algorithm like a cursed family heirloom.
What? It could happen.
Dexter fucking Boyd.
Specifically, the fact that every time our schools play, he sacks me four times. Four. Three could at least feel fluky, and five would suggest total organizational collapse and possible demonic interference. But four? Exactly four. Unbelievably consistent, methodical, and psychotic.
I call it the Fucking Four in my head because I’m a gentleman, and because naming your trauma is apparently healthy. No one else knows that, obviously. Publicly, I’m Bryce Crawford: quarterback legacy, composure in a spotless white jersey, future of the position, et cetera, et cetera, amen. Privately, I’m one more Boyd sack away from developing an eye twitch, a stress rash, and possibly a second personality with worse impulse control.
The truly offensive part—because I’m convinced God enjoys variety in my suffering—is that Boyd isn’t just the best three-technique defensive tackle in Texas. He’s also one of the best centers in the state on offense, maybe the country. His coaches play him both ways because one line of scrimmage is clearly too limiting for whatever the hell Boyd is.
Which means I’ve seen too much of him on film. An upsetting amount, honestly. Enough that I know his first step on defense before the tackle across from him knows he’s dead. I know the violent little shoulder fake he uses to bait guards into leaning wrong, and the way he shows edge pressure just long enough to make a quarterback account for it before cutting inside and turning the pocket into a crime scene.
And on offense? Yeah, I know that too, because fun fact, my football obsession has range. I know the rhythm of his snaps with Charlie, his quarterback. I know how smooth the exchange looks, how easily Charlie’s hands fit under him, and how Boyd calls protections at the line with the same calm, ugly confidence he wears right before ruining my evening on defense.
I know every inch of that motherfucker that can be quantified statistically—height, weight, shoe size—and if you pushed me, I could probably give you his inseam.
What? At least I’m thorough.
Dexter Boyd. Dexter Felix Boyd, if you want to get technical. Which—whatever. That doesn’t mean anything. People have middle names. It’s not a crime to know them. It’s not like I spent months looking for this needle in the haystack.
And DFB can do no wrong, which I hate. I hate how good he is and how fucking good he looks doing it. I hate that he understands quarterbacks from both sides of the ball, like he got handed some secret manual the rest of us have to bleed for. Mostly, I hate that no matter how much I prepare, no matter how many hours of film I watch, no matter how obsessively I check protections and recheck them like a man trying to exorcise a demon through repetition, Dexter Boyd still lines up across from me like he knows something I don’t.
Which is, statistically speaking, pretty fucking rude.
The state championship game is in AT&T Stadium, one giant pressure chamber beneath steel and glass—bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, noise rolling down over the field in waves so loud it gets inside my chest and rattles around like it owns the place.
This is Texas football. Hometown religion. Everybody in the building acts like God Himself has a scouting report, a preferred formation, and money riding on the outcome.
The scoreboard glows blood-red over the field. The turf smells like hot rubber and wet earth, and fireworks smoke still hangs in the upper air from the pregame show because subtlety was clearly strangled and buried behind the fifty-yard line sometime around kickoff.
We have twelve seconds left, third and eight, one real shot before halftime, down by three.
Boyd has already sacked me three times tonight.
My father is in the box. I know it without looking. He stands the way he always stands, arms crossed, expression carved from old stone and family expectations, and I can feel him from all the way down here, along with my brother, my grandfather’s ghost, the whole Crawford bloodline pressing one giant invisible hand against the back of my neck.
Do not flinch. Do not crack. And for the love of God, don’t do anything humiliating on camera.
No fucking pressure.
I jog to the line and bark the protection shift over the noise. “Rip sixty-two! Rip! Rip!”
My left guard slaps his thigh. The tight end resets. Somebody on defense yells something I miss, and the crowd pitches higher, the sound climbing until it presses against the inside of my helmet.
Then there’s Boyd, number ninety-two, lined up inside like the entire game has been waiting for him. His black hair is slick with sweat beneath the back of his helmet, blue eyes darkened by eye black and mostly hidden behind the facemask, though he still looks amused. He’s low and coiled, one hand on the turf like the damn earth loaned him out for the evening. He barely moves before the snap, and everything about him says the same thing: Sooner or later, I’m getting to you.
I stare back. The truly irritating part—the thing I would deny under oath, before God, and possibly while actively bleeding out—is that the eye contact has become part of it by now, our own weird little pre-snap ritual. He looks at me like he’s about to commit a felony, and I look back like I can stop him with concentration alone.
Men have gone to war over less charged eye contact than this. I stand by that.
I give the cadence. The ball hits my hands exactly where it should, and I drop back fast—one, two, three—eyes up, feet alive, the pocket forming around me in moving white and green. Damn it, the deep route isn’t there. Nothing open downfield. The crossing route comes up late, out of reach, and pressure breathes off the right edge, close enough that I feel it slide into the pocket.
My feet move before I think, my internal mantra kicking into overdrive: step up, climb, stay alive. Because drifting against Dexter Boyd is essentially assisted suicide in cleats.
For half a second, I think I’ve got him, finally figured it out.
Then Boyd grabs my guard, throws him aside, and comes straight through the middle with one arm free and his shoulders low, all that dense, violent weight moving much too fast for a man built like a wall.
I barely have time to pull the ball tight before he hits me. Hard. My teeth click and the air leaves my body in one sharp, useless burst. His shoulder drives through my middle, my cleats leave the turf, and my back meets it a second later, fast and unforgiving, his weight driving me down while the stadium detonates around us.
The whistle blows.
He stays on me anyway, another second or two. The crowd blurs around me as his hips keep pressing into mine, until the contact stops feeling like a tackle and starts feeling like something he chose to keep doing.
My first instinct is to throw him off. My second is to punch him in the throat. My third—humiliatingly—is to breathe him in.
Up close, Dexter Boyd doesn’t smell like blood, violence, and the apocalypse the way he absolutely should. He smells clean. Soap, sweat, heat, and something stupidly fresh beneath the pads. My brilliant quarterback brain catalogs it like this is beneficial information, when I should be shoving him the fuck off me instead of noticing how completely he has me pinned between his thighs.
He lowers his helmet until his mouth lines up with my ear.
“Told you.” His breath brushes hot through the cage. “You get real pretty right before you panic.”
His cock thickens where his hips pin mine, and my gaze catches on his mouth. His tongue drags over his bottom lip like he put it there for me to see, and for one dangerous breath, I am not thinking about the clock, the score, the sack, or the fact that thousands of people just watched him fold me into the earth.
I’m thinking about his mouth, soft and wet from his tongue, and the way Lila used to lick her lip right before she kissed me.
What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
I drag my eyes back up to his and shove every ounce of heated rage I’ve got into the look. Too late, because he saw it, and worse, I think he felt me getting hard under him.
He pushes off me in one smooth motion and stands, taking his weight—and seemingly most of the oxygen in the state of Texas—with him.
The crowd roars. My left tackle reaches down to help me up, but I slap his hand away and get to my feet on my own because I would rather be lowered directly into the earth than let anyone think Dexter Fucking Boyd flattened me into needing help.
He’s already walking backward toward his side of the line when I stand, and staying pissed is easier than figuring out whatever the hell just happened. Helmet on, chest rising slowly, he wastes no movement. He looks at me like he started the fire himself and wants to watch the structural damage.
His mouth shifts into the smallest hint of a smile.
Cocky bastard. I hate him so much I could build a cathedral out of it and still have enough left to light the candles in hell.
The half ends two plays later. I jog off the field with dirt in my mouth, Boyd’s voice still in my ear, and the deeply unpleasant fact that he’s done something very few people ever do: get under my skin and make himself comfortable.
The locker room at halftime is a furnace with fluorescent lighting. Helmets slam, shoulder pads hit benches, and somebody swears “fuck those assholes” near the showers. Yeah, we’re losing it, and it sucks. Coach is halfway through chewing out the offensive line when I reach my locker.
“If protection breaks down one more time, we might as well hand them the whole damn game!” he barks, which feels dramatic and unfortunately reasonable.
I drop onto the bench and yank my helmet off hard enough to leave a mark on my forehead. My lungs still haven’t forgiven me, and sweat crawls down my spine in cold little lines beneath the pads.
The right thing to do—the mature thing, the quarterback thing—would be to focus on the adjustment. Review the look, check the guard’s feet, confirm the shift, reset, and move on.
Instead, Boyd’s voice keeps running under everything in that slow Southern drawl he’s been using to ruin my life for four years. Every low little comment after he got me down, every breath against my helmet, every smug piece of shit word he left behind like a handprint.
Most of it was normal enough to hate. Cute, Crawford. Panic looks good on you, Crawford. Makin’ it too easy, Crawford. That’s four, Crawford. Rivalry trash talk. Football bullshit. The kind of thing a guy says after he puts you on your ass and wants you to remember who did it.
But this one is different: You get real pretty right before you panic.
I take a desperate pull from my water bottle and nearly choke on air. That sentence skipped my head and went straight under the pads, settling where his weight had been, where his hips stayed pressed into mine after the whistle.
“Bryce.”
Coach stands over me now, one hand braced on his hip, expression tight but controlled. Behind him, my offensive line looks somewhere between offended and ashamed.
“We’ll fix the middle,” he says.
I nod once.
“We’ll fix it,” he repeats.
“Yeah.”
He can tell I’m pissed. He holds my gaze, then moves on, leaving me breathing through my nose like I’m one deep inhale away from enlightenment or murder, possibly both.
Around me, the locker room churns—tape ripping, cleats scraping concrete, receivers talking routes, my right tackle muttering an apology I can barely process because my brain has chosen one subject and plans to die there.
Dexter Boyd is my personal statistical nightmare: the Fucking Four, the way he gets his hands on me every single damn time no matter how abso-fucking-lutely I refuse to give him the satisfaction, the slow drag of his voice, his mouth wet from his tongue and lodged somewhere it has no business being while Coach draws blitz pickups on a whiteboard.
I scrub a hand over my mouth and stand.
There’s a narrow window in the locker room door where you can catch the tunnel if somebody passes at the right angle. Naturally, the football gods are personally committed to making me insane, so Boyd passes it just as I look up.
He’s there for maybe a second, helmet off, head tipped while one of his coaches says something in passing, dark hair damp at the temples and massive shoulders rolling loose beneath his pads. Calm and unbothered, as if flattening me for the fourth time in one game is routine enough to be faintly amusing. He laughs at something, low and brief, and he’s gone.
I stare at the door for another useless moment before forcing myself back to the board.
We win the game in the second half. The devil spawn does not get less elite. I remind myself that I am Bryce Goddamn Crawford, and staying rattled in public is never my thing. I throw for two touchdowns after the break, we adjust protection, I stop drifting, and my line gets meaner. The whole machine rights itself under pressure the way Crawford men are bred to do, like golden retrievers raised on protein powder and inherited emotional repression.
We win the state championship by three, and yet the thing that follows me off that field isn’t the trophy, the win, or my father’s hand on the back of my neck afterward.
It’s Dexter Boyd: the fourth sack, the weight, the voice, the way he looks at me like I’m less a rival than a problem he enjoys solving.
That should be the end of it—high school football, rival schools, one more violent chapter in the great Texas tradition of boys trying to concuss each other for scholarships and local immortality.
Instead, standing there under falling confetti while cameras flash and reporters shout my name, one deeply unpleasant fact survives the win: Dexter Boyd is still in my head. And against every better instinct I possess, some part of me already knows how much worse he’s going to make my life if I ever have to see him again.
