The Girl
Nate Thorne’s day had begun in the dark, and it had gone steadily downhill from there.
The 5 AM film session was less a review and more an autopsy. Coach Wilson’s laser pointer had been a relentless, red accusatory dot on the screen, circling not failures, but imperfections - a half-step slow on the rollout, a read held a fraction of a second too long.
“You’re thinking, Thorne,” Coach had grunted, pausing the tape. The other offensive starters sat in silent, sympathetic stillness. “Out there, you can’t afford to think. You have to know. Instinct. It’s what separates a good quarterback from a draft pick.”
The words were a precise, professional echo of the ones that had come later.
His phone had buzzed during lunch. The screen flashed FATHER. Nate had taken the call standing in the sterile, echoing hallway of the athletics complex, a half-eaten protein bar turning to dust in his mouth.
“Nathaniel.”
“Sir.”
“Wilson’s concerned.”
No greeting. No preamble. Just the cold plunge into deep water. “He says you’re hesitating. Playing not to lose. That’s a coward’s strategy.”Nate’s knuckles had gone white around the phone. He stared at a championship banner on the far wall, its colors faded by years of sun. “I’m working on it.”“Work faster. You don’t have the luxury of a learning curve. You have a window. We,...” his father corrected, the pronoun a cage, “...have invested too much for you to develop a case of nerves now. Do you understand?”
The question wasn’t a question. It was a valve being shut.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. See that it’s fixed.”
The line went dead. Nate stood there until the silence in the hallway became a roar in his ears.
By late afternoon, the pressure had distilled into a single, superheated point between his shoulder blades. It was a physical thing, a knot of coiled frustration and cold duty that made the pads of his practice jersey feel like a lead weight.
“Yo, Thorne. You planning on murdering that locker or can we get in there?”
Vincent, his tight end and roommate, leaned against the bank of metal lockers, already showered and changed. His easy grin faltered as he took in Nate’s rigid posture, the methodical, almost violent way he was stuffing his gear into his bag.
“Rough one?” Vincent tried, his voice dropping.
“It’s fine,” Nate said, the words short and flattened.
“Didn’t look fine. Coach was up your ass all session. What gives?”
Nate slammed the locker shut, the clang echoing in the nearly empty room. He shouldered his bag. “My father had a chat with him. They’re... comparing notes.”
Understanding, followed by a flash of pity, dawned on Vincent’s face. “Ah. The weekly shareholder meeting.”
A humorless smirk touched Nate’s lips. That’s exactly what it was. His performance was a stock ticker, and his father and coach were the primary investors, panicking at any dip.
“You want to hit the gym? Blow off some steam?” Vincent offered, a peace treaty.
“I’m going for a walk,” Nate said, already moving toward the door. He couldn’t stand the thought of more enclosed space, more clanging metal, more measurable output. He needed air that didn’t smell like sweat and disappointment. He needed the quiet, empty expanse of the park that lay between campus and his apartment, where the only play he had to run was putting one foot in front of the other.
“Nate-” Vincent called after him.
“I’m fine, Vince,” Nate said, not turning around. The words weren’t a reassurance; they were a dismissal. A command. Leave it alone.
He pushed out into the crisp evening air, but the cold did nothing to cool the slow burn under his skin. He walked, his long strides eating up the path, his mind a toxic loop of his father’s clipped disapproval and Coach Wilson’s red laser dot. He didn’t yell. He didn’t punch a tree. Nate Thorne had been trained, meticulously and from childhood, not to lose his temper. Temper was a loss of control. Control was the only currency he had.
So he held it all in. The frustration, the resentment, the suffocating weight of being a living, breathing investment. He compressed it into that dense, burning knot in his back and walked faster, as if he could outpace the feeling.
He just needed to get home to his apartment. To silence. To a place where no one was watching, measuring, or dissecting his every move.
The path curved toward a small, duck choked pond, its surface reflecting the bruised purple of the twilight sky. And that’s when he heard it. A sound so utterly incongruous with the storm in his head that it physically pulled him up short.
Not crying. Not laughter.
Someone was holding court with the ducks.
That was Nate’s first disjointed thought. He heard the voice before he saw the source. A clear, passionate tone cutting through the low evening hum of the park. Not yelling, but....lecturing. He followed the sound, his own dark cloud momentarily forgotten, to a small, scummy pond fringed with wilting reeds.
And there she was.
A girl was perched on the damp slope of the bank, not standing, but sitting with her knees drawn up, a torn paper bag of bread crusts beside her. She was small, practically swimming in an enormous, mustard yellow cardigan, her dark black hair a chaotic escape from what might have once been a bun. A semi circle of mallards and a few bold Canadian geese milled around her in the mud, not with alarm but with the placid entitlement of a regular audience.
“....and I told him,” she was saying to a particularly attentive duck, her voice thick with grievance as she tossed it a crust. “I said, ’Professor Hayes!!, if the runtime exception was inherent to the original test parameters, then debugging it within those parameters is the assignment!’” She threw her hands up. A few ducks startled, then waddled closer, hopeful for more food. “But no! He goes and changes the compiler flags after the fact and says my solution ’lacks elegance?!!’! It’s not inelegant, it’s robust! You understand robust, right?”
The drake quacked, nudging her shoe with its beak.
“See? You get it.” She sighed, deflating, and scattered a handful of crumbs. “It’s academic injustice. It’s... it’s just mean!.”
Nate stopped dead. His brain, trained for reading defenses and dodging linebackers, short-circuited. It couldn’t compute the scene. Was she... having a serious debate with a duck?
As if the sheer force of his bewildered stare was a physical tap on the shoulder, she turned.
Their eyes locked.
Hers were a warm, deep brown, currently wide with the dawning, abject horror of a philosopher caught mid soliloquy by a passing stranger. All the animated passion drained from her face, leaving behind a mask of pure frozen oh, no!
A profound silence descended, broken only by the plip of a duck diving and the impatient quack of another.
Then, the system rebooted. Panic flashed in her eyes. She scrambled to her feet, brushing mud from her sweatpants in a frantic rhythm.
“I- this- it was-... no English!” she blurted out, the words perfectly enunciated and hilariously contradicted by everything he’d just heard. “Sorry! No... talk! Me... tourist!” She followed this with a torrent of rapid, melodic syllables which are actual, fluent sounding language this time, but delivered with such frantic, waving hand urgency it might as well have been alarm bells. She took a step back, pointed vaguely toward the campus, gave a stiff, awkward little bow of her head and then turned to flee.
She didn’t make it two steps. Her foot caught on the gnarled root of a willow tree. She pitched forward with a yelp, windmilled her arms wildly, managed to right herself, and then, without a backward glance, broke into a full cardigan-flapping sprint up the path and out of sight.
A single, fluffy duckling, distinct from the crowd, let out a peep and waddled after her for several paces before stopping, looking after her, then back at Nate, as if to say, ‘Well, that was unusual.’
Nate stood transfixed.
The seething knot of anger and pressure in his chest was just... gone. Not resolved, not eased, but completely displaced. Overwritten by a spectacle so utterly, profoundly absurd that his mind had no precedent for it. He hadn’t smiled. He hadn’t found it cute. He was in a state of pure astonishment. What... did I just witness?
He blinked slowly, scanning the now quiet pond. The ducks had already lost interest, resuming their evening paddles. The torn bread bag lay abandoned on the mud.
A disbelieving breath he didn’t know he was holding escaped him in a short puff of air. He shook his head, a slow, deliberate movement as if to clear static.
Then, he turned and continued his walk home, the image seared into his brain: the girl, the ducks, the frantic, polyglot denial. His father’s voice, Coach Wilson’s laser pointer, they felt distant, blurry, like problems from another life.
All he could think, with a clarity that cut through the remains of his bad mood, was a single baffled question:
What the hell was that?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author’s Note:
Hi everyone!!!!
Welcome to AUDIBLE HEART!!!!. This is a story about a stressed quarterback and the awesome girl that I hope you all would soon love. I like nostalgic stories that are just about having fun.
Pleaseeee be patient with me. I’m writing this with a very ADHD brain, which means I’m drafting fast to keep up with the ideas before they vanish completely from my brain. Chapters are posted as soon as they’re in a readable shape. I might come back and polish later but I did my best. (ง‘̀-’́)ง
Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback always make my day.- Onhold_ishorrible (•‿•)
