“We’re going to win the championship next year. And then the year after that, I’ll get drafted in the first round, and you’ll be my agent — negotiating the sickest signing bonus anyone has ever seen.”

I let out a breath of a laugh. “And what about now?”

He frowned, confused.

“What happens before all that?”

Clay inhaled a long breath, his green eyes searching mine as he thumbed a curl behind my ear. That thumb traced my jaw next, and he framed my face, pulling me closer.

“Now, I spend the entire off-season spoiling my girl,” he said easily, and as the crowd around us began to countdown from ten, he leaned in closer. “Starting with giving her her first New Year’s Eve kiss.”

Three… two… one!

With a tilt of my chin up to meet him, Clay’s mouth claimed my own, and my heart floated off on the wings of a million butterflies as fireworks splayed overhead, their booms echoing in my heart.

Epilogue

Holden

The locker room was completely silent on the first day of spring training.

My teammates sat in front of their lockers or leaned against training equipment, eyes on the floor as we waited.

I wanted to pump them up, to have some grand speech that would soothe all their worry.

But the truth was, I was worried, too.

Despite how I’d somehow managed to redirect their energy after our bowl game loss, I knew as much as everyone else in this room how much a new coach would change things. A new coach meant new drills, new ways of doing things, new plays and tactics and — possibly — new starters.

That was what scared everyone in this room the most.

All eyes snapped to the doorway that led into the hall when Coach Dawson, our defensive end coordinator, swung through it. On his heels was our special teams coach, our offensive coordinator, and our trainer staff.

And then, at the very end of the line, Coach Carson Lee.

Coach Lee shared a few similarities with our last coach. He was brutal in his training camps when he coached down south, he had a zero-tolerance attitude when it came to any of his players stepping out of line, and he expected greatness.

But he was different from Coach Sanders in many ways, too.

For starters, he was twenty years his senior, which somehow made me respect him even more just because he’d been coaching ball before I was even born. He also had a bit more of a radical approach, one that got him headlines for doing things like making his team run half the length of the Florida Panhandle one weekend after a loss to a team they were expected to beat easily.

We all stood when he entered, like soldiers coming to attention for their sergeant.