FULL THROTTLE
Chapter One: Kick-Off
Mia Reyes would remember the exact second it happened, because she would spend the next three days trying to unremember it. Jordan Cole's hand landed on top of hers on the edit room table, both of them reaching for the same microphone at the same time, and for one full second neither of them moved. His thumb brushed her knuckles. The room, which had been loud with camera chatter a minute earlier, went very quiet in her ears. She looked up. He looked up. Somewhere behind them a producer was saying something about lighting, and none of it reached her, because Jordan Cole, of all people, was turning the exact color of the Northgate Falcons away jersey.
That was in about four hours. First, there was the part where she still hated him.
"They want us to what," Mia said.
Coach Whitfield did not look up from her clipboard. "Film a documentary. Together. You and the Northgate captain. Ten episodes, one a week, all the way to the Regional Cup final."
"With Jordan Cole."
"With Jordan Cole."
Mia set her water bottle down on the bench with more force than the water bottle deserved. Around her, half the Bayview Hawks had stopped stretching to listen, because gossip traveled through a girls' varsity soccer team faster than any ball ever had. Priya Shah, her center back and best friend since fourth grade, was doing a very bad job of hiding her grin.
This is exactly the kind of distraction you cannot afford this season, Mia told herself, and meant it. Somewhere across town her mother was three hours into a double shift at the clinic, and the whole reason Mia set her alarm for five a.m. every morning to get extra reps in before school was that a scholarship offer from State was the difference between her mom working two jobs forever and her mom, someday, working one. A regional title looked good on a recruiting profile. A viral collaboration with the enemy looked, at best, like a distraction, and at worst, like exactly the kind of thing college scouts loved to call "unfocused."
"It's ten episodes," Priya said, not even trying to sound sympathetic. "You're going to be on camera with Jordan Cole every week until Regionals. I would like it noted for the record that I called this in September."
"Called what."
"Nothing," Priya said, smiling at her cleats.
"Absolutely not," Mia said.
"It's not a request, it's a sponsorship obligation," Coach Whitfield said. "RYSN is putting up the trophy and the livestream rights for the whole regional bracket. Somebody in their marketing department decided the two biggest channels in the league should stop sniping at each other from a distance and start doing it on camera, together, where it drives views instead of drama."
"He drives the drama. I just respond to it."
This was, Mia felt, an entirely fair description of the situation. For eleven months now, Jordan Cole had run a channel called Offside Report, where he broke down game footage from every team in the league with commentary that was, infuriatingly, both accurate and funny. Three weeks ago he had posted a clip of Mia's game winner against Fairhaven captioned Reyes finds the net again, someone alert Fairhaven's defense that a corner flag is not a marking assignment, and it had gotten four hundred thousand views. Mia's own channel, Hawk Eye, existed almost entirely to respond to him. It had, she was proud to say, gotten three hundred and ninety thousand views on the rebuttal. She had called the clip Cole Has Opinions About Defending, Which Is Bold From A Goalkeeper Whose Team Conceded Four Goals Last Tuesday.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a rivalry. It was also, apparently, over.
"You'll shoot the first episode Thursday after practice," Coach Whitfield said. "Ms. Alvarez from RYSN is running point. Try not to set anything on fire."
The RYSN production van was parked behind the Bayview fieldhouse on Thursday, disguised as a normal white van in the way that expensive things sometimes try to look ordinary and fail completely. Ms. Alvarez turned out to be a tall woman in a blazer who talked with her hands and called everyone "champ" regardless of gender, which Mia found she did not hate.
Jordan Cole was already there.
He was leaning against the fieldhouse wall in his Northgate warmup jacket, scrolling his phone with the specific looseness of someone who had never once in his life worried about being on time for anything. He had a green paracord bracelet on his wrist, the kind kids braided at summer camp, which felt like it belonged to somebody younger and less smug than the boy currently smirking at her.
"Reyes," he said. "I was starting to think you'd chickened out."
"I was hoping you'd gotten lost. Big campus, small brain."
"There it is," he said, delighted, like she'd handed him a gift. "Alvarez, tell me we're getting that on camera."
"We are absolutely getting that on camera," Ms. Alvarez said, already walking backward toward the van with a monitor in her hands. "That's the whole show, champ. Let's go, ten minutes, mark your spots."
The first segment was supposed to be simple: two captains, two folding chairs set up at midfield, a conversation about the road to Regionals. In practice, it took forty minutes and three restarts, because every time the camera rolled, Jordan found a way to make Mia laugh before she could stop herself, and every time she laughed, she got annoyed at having laughed, and the annoyance came through as a glare that Ms. Alvarez insisted was, quote, incredible television.
"Say something nice about my team," Jordan said, midway through take four, entirely unprompted.
"Your team has excellent uniforms."
"That's not about the team, that's about the uniforms."
"It's the nicest thing I've got, Cole. Take it or leave it."
"Fine. Your turn. Say something nice about mine."
"Your goalkeeper has a big mouth and no ability to back it up on the field."
"That's not nice, that's a callout."
"You asked for nice about the team, not about you specifically. I'm being extremely generous with my phrasing."
Ms. Alvarez, somewhere behind the monitor, made a small delighted noise she did not bother hiding. Jordan leaned forward in his folding chair like he was settling in for the long haul. "Okay, real talk, Reyes. Bayview hasn't beaten us in a final in three years. What makes this year different?"
"We have me."
"You had you last year too."
"I had a stress fracture in March last year. This year I have me at full strength, which is a completely different math problem for your defense."
"Duly noted," Jordan said, and there was something almost respectful under the smirk, like he'd filed the information away somewhere that wasn't just for the next Offside Report thumbnail.
He grinned at her, the real one, not the one he did for his thumbnail photos, and something about it landed somewhere under Mia's ribs that she did not have time to examine, because Ms. Alvarez called cut and told them they had what they needed for the interview segment, and now she wanted twenty minutes of, quote, natural behind-the-scenes footage, unquote, of the two of them helping the crew pack up gear.
This was how Mia ended up in the fieldhouse's small editing room forty minutes later, technically off camera, technically just carrying a case of lavalier mics back to the van, and technically not supposed to still be standing three feet from Jordan Cole with absolutely no plan for how to leave.
He reached for the last microphone on the table at the same moment she did.
Their hands landed together. His skin was warm, and his thumb moved, just barely, against her knuckles, not quite an accident and not quite on purpose, the kind of touch that could be explained away in a court of law and could not be explained away in Mia's own chest, where her heart had apparently decided to attempt a new personal best in beats per minute.
Neither of them pulled back right away.
"You're doing the thing," Jordan said, quietly, none of the smirk left in his voice at all.
"What thing."
"The thing where you decide whether to yell at me or not."
"I haven't decided yet," Mia said, which was true, and also not the whole truth, because the part of her currently deciding things was not the part that usually did the yelling.
"Take your time," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
Say something, Reyes. Anything. Preferably something that doesn't sound like you've forgotten how words work.
"Your bracelet is fraying," was what came out, which was, objectively, the worst possible sentence available to her in that moment, out of all the sentences in the English language.
Jordan looked down at his wrist like he'd forgotten it was there. "My brother made it. He's eight. He'll be devastated if I ever take it off, so I'm just going to let it disintegrate with dignity."
"That's oddly sweet, for someone whose entire channel is built on being mean to me."
"I'm not mean to you," he said. "I'm mean about your team's marking assignments. There's a difference."
"There is not a difference."
"There's a legal difference."
She laughed before she could stop it, and this time there was no camera rolling to blame it on, which meant it was just a laugh, hers, real, and Jordan Cole was looking at her like he'd won something a great deal more important than four hundred thousand views. His hand was still on top of hers. Neither of them had moved the microphone.
Footsteps came around the corner, and they broke apart so fast that the mic actually hit the floor, and by the time Ms. Alvarez leaned into the doorway, Mia was very intently examining a cable box and Jordan was very intently examining the ceiling.
"There you two are," Ms. Alvarez said, checking something on her phone. "Great news. Corporate loved the raw footage so much they moved up the schedule. We're not doing one shoot every two weeks like the pitch deck said. We're doing one every week, starting now, all the way through the final. You two are basically going to be joined at the hip until the trophy gets handed out."
"Every week," Mia repeated, in the voice of someone who had just been told the building was on fire and also that she lived in the building.
"Every week," Ms. Alvarez confirmed, cheerfully, already walking off to find the sound guy. "Don't look so thrilled, champ, you'll break the internet."
Mia looked at Jordan. Jordan looked at Mia. Whatever had just happened between them over one dropped microphone now had nine more weeks to keep happening, in front of a camera, in front of both their schools, in front of a fandom that had spent eleven months convinced these two people could not stand to be in the same postal code.
"This is a disaster," Mia said.
"This," Jordan said, picking the microphone up off the floor and holding it out to her, bracelet sliding down his wrist, grin already back in place like nothing at all had happened, "is going to be the best season of my life, Reyes. Try to keep up."
She took the microphone. Their fingers touched again, and neither of them said anything about it this time, and somewhere out in the parking lot, Ms. Alvarez's van was already loading the footage that would go up on both their channels by Saturday morning, the footage of two rivals who had, for exactly one unscheduled minute, forgotten to be rivals at all.
This means nothing, Mia told herself, walking back across the parking lot with the mic case banging against her knee. It was a microphone. People touch microphones. This is not a sign of anything except that folding tables are too small.
Priya was waiting by the bike rack, arms crossed, entirely too pleased with herself. "You were in there a long time for a guy you hate."
"I was packing up gear."
"For twenty minutes. With Jordan Cole. Alone."
"It's a small editing room."
"Mia."
"Priya."
"Your ears are doing the thing they do when you're lying to me. They go red at the top, like a stoplight for guilt."
Mia clapped both hands over her ears, which did not help her case even slightly, and Priya laughed so hard she had to sit down on the curb, and for a second it was almost enough to make Mia forget the warmth still sitting under her ribs where Jordan Cole's grin had landed twenty minutes earlier, half certain, half terrified, that nine more weeks of this was going to end in something a great deal more complicated than a rivalry.
Nine episodes to go. Mia had absolutely no idea how she was going to survive a single one of them.