Rylan -- Early September
His face graced too many places around the school as he limped toward the coach's office. Before the accident, he had been the biggest story ever coming out of the football program. The first five-star recruit from the city and the first one to start at quarterback for an FBS school in a playoff game. He was even the runner-up for the top prize for a college player in the country. Now it felt like everyone who saw him had pity in their eyes. Somedays, it was all he could do to not be angry at his own image in the mirror. It was his fault for trying to play hero ball in the spring game instead of avoiding contact like the plague.
Rylan was trying to prove something coming back from an injury that had plagued him his junior year. A new transfer was starting to make waves, reaching for his job. At least, that was how Rye saw things. In reality, the team was behind him. He was the betting favorite for the first quarterback in the draft the following spring. Had he not gotten hurt in the middle of the previous season, he could have left as a redshirt junior and been taken in the top ten. A broken throwing arm needed him to return for one more season to prove to the scouts that the injury had not degraded his ability.
A couple drives up and down the field in the spring game should have been enough to prove to himself that he was back, but he asked the coach for one more play when Rylan noticed the scouts in the front row. It was just a bootleg that he had run hundreds of times. The defense did an outstanding job covering the wideouts. He should have thrown the ball away when the linebacker had him covered up. Instead, Rye tried ducking between the fullback that had rolled out to block and the guard that had pulled with him.
The goal had been to pick up a couple yards for the first down and slide; Rylan had on the red penny and shouldn't have been tackled by anyone. He didn't count on an errant tuft of loose grass to be ignorant of the rules. He lost his footing and fell face-first into the turf, but even that should have done nothing except create something for the guys to laugh at when watching the tape later in the week. He had been on the receiving end of that type of footage many times during his playing career. His fullback got knocked on his ass by a walk-on linebacker trying to make the team. Even that should have just created a contusion on his knee and some extra time in the ice bath. When his three-hundred-pound lineman stumbled, the fullback's helmet was the anvil, and the lineman's knee was one hell of a hammer.
It was a compound fracture of his tibia and fibula. The break was so bad that the feed from the game went dead instead of showing the impact. The accident practically amputated the limb on the field. After several surgeries and a terrible infection, the surgeon had no choice but to complete the act. Rylan wasn't used to the prosthetic. He still had a crutch under one arm to keep him from tottering over.
Next semester he would return to school and complete his electrical engineering degree, but he needed to be away from the university during football season this year. It was just too painful. The college would honor his scholarship when he returned, and he only needed one more semester of credits. For the next six months, he was back home living with his grandfather as he got what was left of the farm ready to sell. He had endorsement money to keep him from feeling like a leech. A payout from the insurance policy that his parents had insisted on him getting was all invested toward his retirement.
When Rylan was still a toddler, the farm was primarily wheat, soybeans, and corn. When his grandmother retired early from her career as a programmer, she carved out a portion of the farm for a pumpkin patch and Christmas tree farm. An old hay barn was dismantled when the livestock was sold off. In its place, she put up an event space. It was locally known as the party barn. For the last twenty years, the area had been used to culminate the town's harvest festival.
Rylan and Davis, his kid brother, had persuaded his grandparents to add a haunted corn maze to the festivities. Even last year, Rye had been the one with a chainsaw for at least a few nights during the fun of the month-long harvest time. He would have to relinquish the toothless weapon to his younger brother.
Maybe next year I'll have this thing down.
Rylan looked down at the all-too-thin metallic left leg.
His Grandpa was the only one that didn't automatically look at him with pity. The two were their support systems, leaning on each other to get through the pain. Grandpa was grieving the loss of his beloved wife to the pandemic that had roiled the world a year prior. When Rye returned to school, Grandpa planned to move to Arizona with Rylan's great-uncle and his wife in the new year. First, however, he needed to sell the sliver of the farm that remained.
Even as much as they leaned on each other, Grandpa Joe wasn't about to let Rylan sit around and mope for an entire semester. The man knew better than most what Rylan was going through, getting accustomed to a prosthetic. He had lost his right leg to a land mine in Vietnam when he was just eighteen a half-century ago. His was above the knee, while Rylan's was below.
On a Saturday morning, Rye was walking through his high school on the way to a coaches' only meeting for the school year. They were stuck in the gym as the remodeling in the commons was going way over the projected time. It was more of a hobble, but he wasn't about to surrender what was left of his fragile pride and go back to a wheelchair where he had spent almost a half year waiting for his artificial leg. Most of the coaches were familiar faces from five years ago. That was except for a gorgeous young woman wearing the blue and gold of the school. Her yoga pants looked simply exceptional on a very tight booty.
Her long, slightly curled brunette hair had natural highlights of red and blonde as it dangled from a tight ponytail. She was tall and slender with curves in the right places. Rylan wasn't ready to say hello to the beautiful young woman, but getting a few peeks at the beauty wasn't hurting anyone. No one would want anything to do with the broken man he had become since the accident. He waved at his old coach across the room and limped over to the older gentleman.
When he finally got a good look at the face of the new coach, his heart nearly stopped, and his stomach dropped. It was Andrea, whose name was very much pronounced as on-dray-ah. Her best friends called her Andi, even if it wasn't how she wanted her first name to be said. They had only shared math classes back in high school. It was the other place where Rylan had excelled. Andrea had competed with him in a friendly rivalry in their math classes; he had been counted as one of the select few that could call her Andi. Back then, she had looked a little plain with hair that was a touch mousy, but her years in college had been very kind to her.
Rye smiled, remembering their senior year in high school when they battled each other all year in a competition in their calculus class. Once a week, Mrs. Ayton would have a match in the class. Rylan had worked his ass off and ended up tied with Andrea. The course had gotten a cheesy fast-food crown to give to the winner of the final math relay. She looked so happy when they crowned her the queen of calc.
Her scintillating stormy green eyes met his, and Rylan thought he detected a smile briefly before she turned sullen. He and Andrea may not have traveled in the same circles in high school, but that was not why her countenance turned dour.
It's better than pity.
Rye shook his head to himself as she turned away. Andrea's younger brother and Davis's relationship had not ended well. Davis ghosted the man when their feelings got too intense. Rylan didn't think his brother had fully figured out he was gay back in high school.
Coach Taylor wanted Rylan to become an assistant coach after one of his long-serving assistants told him he was moving across the country to support his wife. Grandpa Joe would have given him a swift kick to the posterior if Rye had said no to the man. The team was already one game into the season, but his QB coach had to leave in a week. It would give Rye something to do while he was wrangling the final harvest festival on the farm into place. The paycheck would be minuscule, and the work long, but football was inseparably entwined with his life, even if he could never play again.
He sat through an hour and a half athletics department meeting without falling asleep, even if none of the rules really applied to him as he wasn't a teacher. He took a chance to say hello to Andrea when there was some time between the slide decks to get refreshments.
"Andrea, I thought you were going premed. What are you doing back home?" Rylan tried a friendly smile.
"Teaching calculus and coaching cross-country." Andrea's responses were quick, like she wanted Rylan to move on. Her stormy green eyes looked unsettled, and he got the hint that she wanted nothing to do with him anymore.
Andrea -- The last week of September
When Andrea went to school at a private institution across the state, coming back to town was the last thing she thought would happen. Even her parents had fled from the city after she graduated; her folks were aviation engineers and relocated to Texas when the local plant closed. Andi's college required community service, and she took to tutoring and teaching high-level math concepts to high schoolers with aplomb. That wouldn't have precluded her from her premed path, but a few run-ins with med students hadn't accorded themselves well. There was far too high a ratio of self-entitled assholes. Then she had to go and date one of them for a while. The way it ended didn't help with the internal questions she was battling.
