Hate Week

An MM Rivals-to-Lovers Sports Romance by Chase Power

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Enemies with Benefits, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, Forbidden Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Grumpy/Sunshine, He Falls First, Coming Out

Two rival coaches. Seven rules. One blurry photo.

Rule 7: Walk away clean.

I hate Marco Reyes. His chaos offense, his smirk on my sideline, the way he took the best rivalry in college football and made it personal.

So when a hotel-bar argument ends with my hands in his hair, there’s only one professional solution: rules. Anonymous rooms. Cash. No feelings. We meet the night before the big games, burn off the pressure, and walk away clean.

Except Marco keeps breaking the rules. The texts. The tape around his knuckles. The night he showed up at my door and slept in my bed like he belonged there.

Now a reporter has our hotel records, the championship is a week away, and the man I swore was just stress relief is looking at me like I’m about to break his heart.

He’s right. I am. Because there’s one rule I never wrote down: never fall in love with the enemy.

You Will Love This If You Like:

✔️ Rivals-to-lovers with real teeth
✔️ A written rules list that gets gloriously destroyed
✔️ Grumpy ice-king coach vs. loud wildcard coach
✔️ Secret hotel rooms, aliases, and burner phones
✔️ Athletic tape as a love language
✔️ He falls first (they both fall hard)
✔️ Explosive high heat with a guaranteed HEA

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Content Warning: Hate Week is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, consensual sexual content between two adult men, themes of being outed and public exposure, an on-page sports injury, and brief references to past parental illness. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

The rivalry that lit up college football — and the night it stopped being about football. Start reading now.

Chapter One: Bad Blood

ETHAN

The hit came with four seconds left in a game that was already decided, which is how I knew it was personal.

Third and forever, Coastal Verde up by six, nothing left but the kneel-down — and instead Marco Reyes called a naked bootleg, sent his quarterback sprinting toward my sideline like the scoreboard had insulted his mother, and when my free safety closed on him, one of Reyes’s tackles arrived a full second after the whistle and put Deion Carter into the turf helmet-first.

The sound carried. Eighty thousand people and I heard it from thirty yards away, the specific wet crunch of a nineteen-year-old’s body meeting the ground wrong.

Deion got up. Eventually. That’s the only reason I’m not writing this from a holding cell.

I don’t remember crossing the field. That’s not a figure of speech — there is a gap in my memory between the whistle and the fifty-yard line, and when the film crew’s footage surfaced later, there I was, headset gone, jaw locked, walking through my own players like they were traffic cones, straight at the opposing head coach.

Reyes met me at the numbers. Of course he did. The man has never once in his life stepped back from anything, which is either the most admirable or the most pathological thing about him, and after four years of studying him from the far sideline I still couldn’t tell you which.

“That’s football, Cole.” He was grinning. Under the stadium lights, sweat-slicked, that stupid Coastal Verde windbreaker unzipped to the sternum like he was selling something, he was grinning. “Tell your kid to get down faster.”

“He was down. Your guy launched a full second late and you know it, because you coach it.”

“I coach effort.” He stepped closer. He always steps closer. Six-one of former linebacker gone slightly soft in the way that fools nobody, close enough that I could smell the field on him, grass and sweat and the cheap victory cigar somebody had already handed him. “Not my fault your program treats contact like a war crime.”

“If Carter’s neck—” My voice did something I didn’t authorize. Dropped. Flattened. The voice I use maybe once a season, and my own coordinators flinch when they hear it. “If that kid is hurt, Reyes, I will end you. Not the team. You.”

Something moved through his face. For a quarter of a second — I clocked it, I clock everything — the grin cracked and underneath it was something almost like hunger, like I’d finally said the thing he’d been trying to provoke out of me for four years. Then the officials arrived, and two state troopers, and my defensive coordinator’s hand closed around my arm like a manacle, and Marco Reyes walked backward toward his celebrating sideline with both arms spread wide, soaking in the boos of my home crowd like rain in a drought.

“Love you too, Ice King,” he called. Loud enough for the cameras.

They played that clip four hundred thousand times before midnight.

The press room at Harlan State is in the belly of the stadium, cinder block painted the gray-blue of institutional calm, and I have stood at its podium after wins and losses for four years without ever once saying an interesting thing. That’s deliberate. Interesting is a tax you pay later. I give injury updates, I credit the opponent, I take responsibility in complete sentences, and I leave. The beat writers call me the Ice King and think it’s an insult. It’s a job description.

That night I broke a streak I’d been proud of.

“Coach, any comment on the last play?”

I had my notes. I had my prepared line — we’ll let the conference review it — and I looked down at the paper and heard, through the concrete, the faint thump of the visitors’ locker room celebrating. Reyes’s guys. Reyes’s music. Reyes, somewhere under my stadium, laughing.

“Yes,” I said. “I think a program reflects its head coach. I think discipline reflects the man in charge, and so does the lack of it. I think everyone in this conference has watched Coastal Verde play late, dirty, and out of control for three years and called it exciting, because the man running that sideline is charming on camera. And I think tonight one of my players got hurt because of a culture that starts at the top. That’s my comment.”

Forty phones lit up like a struck match.

Twenty minutes later — I was still in the building, tie already off, watching Carter move all ten fingers and toes for the team doctor while relief hit me harder than the loss had — somebody turned up the volume on the visiting presser, piped through the training room TV.

Reyes had taken off the windbreaker. Black T-shirt, championship posture, a bottle of water he kept gesturing with like a conductor’s baton.

“—heard what Coach Cole said, yeah.” That grin. “Look. Ethan Cole is a hell of a coach. Best defensive mind in the country, I’ve said it before. But the man coaches scared. He’s coached scared for four years. Everything scripted, everything controlled, kids afraid to blink without a signal from the sideline — and when a football game gets violent, which is what football is, he comes across the field looking for me like it’s my fault his sport has contact in it.” He leaned into the microphone. He looked directly into the camera, and I will swear to my grave he was looking through it at me. “You want to end me, Cole? Get in line, baby. It’s a long one, and nobody’s managed it yet.”

Baby.

The training room went very quiet around me. Deion Carter, nineteen years old, neck freshly cleared, lying on the table between us like the actual point of all this, looked from the TV to my face and said, with the fearlessness of a teenager who’d just survived his own mortality:

“Coach, I don’t think that guy likes you.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” I said.

It was the first lie I’d told all night.

Here’s what nobody tells you about hatred: it’s a form of attention.

I have hated exactly one person in my adult life, and I have given him more sustained, detailed, high-resolution attention than I’ve given anything except the game itself. I know Marco Reyes’s play-calling tendencies on second-and-medium better than I know my own mother’s birthday. I know he tugs his left sleeve before a trick play. I know his voice goes up a third of an octave when he’s bluffing at the podium and down half an octave when he’s actually angry, which is rarer than people think. I know that four years ago we sat in the same waiting room at Harlan State for the same job interview, forty minutes apart, and that he wore a suit that didn’t fit and shook my hand and said may the best man win and meant it, and that when they gave the job to me, he took the Coastal Verde job out of what I am convinced was pure spite and turned a doormat program into a flamethrower aimed at my face.

I know he called my defense “coaching for cowards” on a podcast, eleven months ago. Episode 47. Minute 32.

I don’t know why I know the minute.

That night I sat in my kitchen — big house, dark, a mortgage worth of granite reflecting one sad bottle of beer — and watched the tunnel footage on my phone the way you press a bruise. There we were. Two grown men, two multimillion-dollar contracts, nose to nose at the fifty like a couple of undisciplined freshmen. My face was doing something in that footage I didn’t like. The rage was there, fine, rage I could account for. But the film doesn’t lie; it’s the first thing I teach my players. The film shows a man leaning in.

I wanted to put him through the wall. I told myself that was all I wanted.

I finished the beer, filed the game, and slept four hours, which was standard. What was not standard was the dream, and I woke from it at 4:40 in the morning with my heart slamming and the details already mercifully dissolving — stadium tunnel, cigar smoke, a voice pitched low saying get in line, baby — and I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and decided, with the full weight of my considerable discipline, that it had been about football.

I am a very good liar when the audience is me.

The commissioner’s call came at 8:15 Monday morning, which told me he’d waited exactly long enough to seem measured.

“Ethan.” Hal Bridgewater has the voice of a man who has introduced a thousand golf tournaments. “How’s your safety?”

“Cleared. Sore. Lucky.”

“Glad to hear it. Genuinely.” A pause with paperwork in it. “You watch much television this weekend?”

“I watch film, Hal.”

“Then let me summarize. The two of you led every sports broadcast in America for forty-eight hours. Not the game — the two of you. There’s a compilation running right now, four million views, called Ice King versus Wildcard: Best Feud in Football, and the conference office has fielded calls from three networks who want to mic you both up next season and one from a university president who wants you both suspended.” He let that sit. “I’ll be seeing you Thursday. Both of you. Separately. And Ethan — I’m going to say something to you now, friend to friend, before I say the official version in a room with lawyers in it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Whatever this thing is between you and Reyes,” Bridgewater said, “handle it. Because from where I sit, it’s the least professional thing in this conference, it’s getting worse every year, and it is going to cost one of you a career. My money says both.”

I looked out my office window. Below, the practice fields sat empty and geometric in the morning frost, everything lined, everything measured, everything exactly where I had decided it should be.

“There’s no thing, Hal,” I said. “He’s a rival coach who runs a dirty program. That’s the entire story.”

“Uh-huh,” said the commissioner. “Thursday. Bring a tie.”

He hung up. I sat there for a while with the phone in my hand, looking at the frost lines on my perfect fields, and then — because I am a professional, because film study is preparation, because knowing your opponent is the first law of the job — I opened my laptop and watched Marco Reyes’s press conference again from the beginning.

Get in line, baby.

Third time through, I noticed I wasn’t taking notes.

I closed the laptop harder than the hinge deserved, wrote CULTURE REFLECTS LEADERSHIP at the top of the week’s practice plan in block capitals, and went to work doing what I have always done with anything in my life too large and too hot to look at directly.

I scheduled around it.

Nine days later, the conference announced a mandatory leadership retreat for all fourteen head coaches. Media training. Conflict resolution. Three days, one resort, attendance non-negotiable per the commissioner’s office.

I read the memo twice, and both times my eye went to the same line, and both times something in my chest did a thing I declined to name.

All head coaches will be lodged on-site for the duration.

All of them. All fourteen.

Him.

The pact. The rules. The night they break every single one. Keep reading — Hate Week is available now.

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