Four years on the bench. One throw to change everything.

I've been the backup quarterback at Bellhaven State since I was eighteen.

Four years of getting up at 4:40 in the morning. Four years of filling notebooks nobody reads. Four years of my dad driving four hours to watch me hold a clipboard, then asking how the starter is doing.

Then Theo Franklin's knee gives out in the fourth quarter, and suddenly forty thousand people are watching me.

I throw it high. Andre Kessler doesn't catch it.

He's the best receiver in the conference. He's going to the league. He's spent three years not knowing my name.

And now we're stuck together every night on an empty field under half the lights, learning each other one throw at a time.

I know things about him nobody else knows. He's starting to know things about me.

Things I've never said out loud to anyone.

He's the one thing I've never seen coming.

I've had one job since I was nine years old. Be great. Make my father proud. Don't want anything he didn't pick for me.

I was good at that job.

Then a quiet kid from a town of twenty-three hundred people tells me he's known about a flaw in my release since sophomore year and never said a word — because nobody would have listened to the backup.

He's been paying attention to me for three years.

Nobody has ever paid attention to me.

I have a scouting report going out to thirty-two teams in January. I have a father who calls after every game. I have a whole life already built and waiting for me.

And I have four hundred hours in the dark with a man I can't stop looking for in every room I walk into.

One photograph is all it takes to bring it down.

Second String is a slow burn, closed door MM college football romance with two guys who have everything to lose, fathers who can't say the words, and a love story built one small moment at a time.