Fast Hands

Tommy Kerrigan is the best face-off specialist in the conference and the loudest person in every room he enters. A scholarship kid from Levittown who built a whole personality out of filling the quiet so nobody asks what he sounds like when he stops. It works so well that nobody ever has. What eats at him is a number: forty-four percent against the standing clamp, the read that separates the kid who wins face-offs from the kid who wins championships.

Margot Liang runs WGRF's Under the Surface with the precision of an engineering student who fell into radio and found the same rule running both. She has a shot at a collegiate broadcasting competition and a producer in New York reviewing her tape, and she cannot afford to lose either. When Coach Callahan grants her press access to the lacrosse program, Tommy is a source. A voice on the other side of her microphone, with a performance she can hear right through.

Then he stops performing for her. Then she cuts a segment about the three seconds between the whistle and the ball, and a number in New York starts watching what it costs a broadcaster to be exactly fair to the player she covers.

A dual-POV college sports romance about face-offs, radio, and paying attention as a love language.