Is Our Season Over?

Is Our Season Over?

by The Red Lantern

DISCLAIMER: All characters are 18+.

CONTENT WARNING: The following story contains heavy emphasis on blowjobs and raceplay, specifically white-asian raceplay, and contains descriptions of things that readers may find objectifying or otherwise insensitive.

OVERVIEW: Hyunna Song finds all eyes on her in the final round of the intercollegiate blowjob conference championship. With her team behind and a partner with a grudge against her, can she deliver a performance for the ages and save their season?

THANK YOU: to BryanRichardson and Rie, my first two beta readers. Without your encouragement, this wouldn't have existed. And a big Thank You to ChloeTzang for helping me find my voice.

"Weelllcome back to the Mister Softee Arena in Elk Valley, sports fans. Life got you down? Grab a Mister Softee and enjoy yourself! Miissster Softee ice cream." The announcer's cinnamon voice echoes through the stadium, as well as being streamed live to viewers across America and who knows where else.

"If you're just joining us, we're live at the 11th Appalachian Intercollegiate Blowjob Conference finals. It's been a neck and neck matchup between the promising Iguthu Lake University team and the reigning conference champions from Elk Valley College, led by senior superstar Jenna Thompkins... who just delivered a coommmmanding nine point eight out of ten performance in the artistic event. That's going to be tough to beat. Guy Rogan, from your time judging, what's Jenna's secret? She's one of the most heavily recruited seniors in the league, her OnlyFans is on fire, and agents from both Netflix and PornHub have been spotted in Elk Valley, but does she have what it takes to go pro?"

Terror grips my insides. It's always like this. Some part of me, something buried deep, deep beneath my subconscious, is telling me that my life is in danger and I need to run. Or go mental.

It's just one blowjob, Hyunna. Just one more blowjob, and then today's behind you forever. Just one more blowjob, where, if it's not perfect enough, our season ends and we have another sad, sad "maybe next year" party.

No pressure.

Guy Rogan's meaty bald head, clamped viselike between his headphones, dominates all the giant screens in the stadium, his podcast studio visible behind him. He talks about Jenna's prospects as a pro, which are deservedly bright after what I, and the rest of the audience, just watched her do with her set. She's good, how can I ever compete with that?

"Is this one over?" the announcer asks. "Elk Valley is up by nine and a half, and this is the fiinnnnal set of the fiinnnnal event of the day. What does the final fellatrix, uh... Hyunna Song, the... uh, the Korean-American... junior from Iguthu Lake, have to do to win this? Can she even win it?"

Shit. It's time.

I relate to every animal that's ever been caught in a trap, looking at her leg and asking herself how much it's REALLY worth. The announcer barely knows my name even after three events, so maybe no one will notice if we just call it here and go home.

I stand up and straighten the sacklike, shapeless brown dress that slumps off my shoulders and down to my knees, and prepare for my execution. Some girls wear something severe, and strip it off at the beginning to call attention to their best features or to eat up the clock. That was my plan, and I specifically picked out the least sexy dress I have. It's not much more than a sleeveless cloth bag with a zipper down the front and two subtle pockets at the hips.

Not fifteen minutes ago, Jenna had bounded onstage like some kind of blonde beach volleyball player turned nerdy librarian, complete with glasses and sheer black stockings. And for fifteen minutes, she loosened and removed that outfit while she sucked her subject's dick, seemingly one part belly dancer and one part, I don't know... snake charmer? I hoped, prayed, that she might finish him early and leave everyone with a boring final few seconds and hurt her score, but she took him right to the buzzer and strutted offstage in just her red and yellow boyshorts.

She's pro material.

Even I was hypnotized by the spell she cast. How can I follow that carefully orchestrated tease and reveal of feminine sexuality, much less using a version of her idea that's in every way inferior?

I hug the other Iguthu Lake girls... Sarah, White Becky, and Colombian Becky. Today's the last time we're going to be together, although they look like they still hold a hope that, from somewhere under this dress, I can pull out a miracle.

There's nothing left to do but get this over with. I take my first step towards the single wooden chair, sitting alone on the stage inside overlapping circles of light from above. Its red and yellow cushions, the Elk Lake College colors, by the way, remind us that we tread on their turf.

The screens above flash and I see myself in my frumpy dress and bare yellow feet. Somehow, the display seems to emphasize my Korean features. The almond-shape of my eyes. The color of my skin. My petiteness. I'm short and slender, but up there, I look absolutely tiny. Small, scared, and fragile, alone on a big empty stage. I toss a handful of jet black hair off the side of my face, smile, and wave, but inside my guts are twisting themselves into knots that sailors would take decades to make sense of.

"Four out of five Saturdays, this one's over," Guy Rogan's voice says. "But don't sleep on Hyunna Song. She's the first Korean-American on a team in the Appalachian finals, and there's a reason she's anchoring Iguthu Lake. She's got style, she's got looks, she's got poise, and all season long we've been watching her pull rabbits out of hats when the chips were down. This Iguthu Lake team is no stranger to last-minute nail-biters, and Hyunna's come through for them every time... except against Jenna and Elk Valley during the regular season. She's someone you want on your team, and she's still got a year left."

Even Guy Rogan's talking about my next season. This cannot end fast enough.

"Now let's bring out our last subject, Elk Valley's own hometown hero, Jeefffff Lunk."

A cheer goes up in the stadium crowd as a tall, broad-shouldered white man in his 30s with a scruffy brown beard and tousley brown hair walks out from the opposing side of the stage. He waves a large hand, and the sleeve of his regulation white robe falls to his bicep.

I can see how this guy can be sexy, and my eyes prowl his physique to turn me on. The way the muscles and tendons of his forearm flex. The casual confidence that exudes from his command of the audience's affection. I hate his beard, but I know a lot of my friends would like it and that makes me scrutinize it until I can see it as at least charming.

No problem.

He points into the crowd, although if the lights are as blinding to him as they are to me, he has no idea who he's pointing at. Still, they eat it up and chant his name. "Lunk! Lunk! Lunk!"

The man who will be my partner for the next fifteen minutes approaches to give me the customary pre-set kiss on the hand, and the full implications of the phrase "unforced error" are made clear to me.

Two nights ago, the team had gotten into Elk Valley, checked into our hotel, and were turning in for the night. White Becky, Columbian Becky, and I snuck out after curfew and went to the hotel bar.

It was a girls' night before a big competition, so we agreed to rotate which of us would be the one to have to tell guys who hit on us that it wasn't a good night for that. When it was my turn, we were getting off the dance floor when we were approached by three guys, one of whom I can now positively identify as Jeff Lunk. He didn't take it well.

In my defense, the line between "direct" and "curt" can sometimes be subtle.

In Jeff's defense, when I shot him down, I was so far from that line that the light from "direct" would not hit me for several minutes.

He had gotten mad, called me a "snobby Asian bitch," and then stomped off with his friends. I simply ignored him and resumed drunkenly bickering with the Beckys about the difference between the words "conclave" and "enclave."

Jeff takes my hand with a cruel smile, snapping me back into the moment, and brings it to his lips. His eyes never leave mine. His voice is a whisper, just for me. "I am really... going to enjoy watching you lose this."

I try very, very hard to wake up, or at least cause the universe to wink out of existence forever, but it's not my lucky day.

"Judges, put fifteeeeeeeeeeen minutes on the clock!" The announcer drives a stake through my heart, puts me in a coffin with garlic, and buries me on hallowed ground. My face is on the screen. I am never getting out of this one. "Aannnd... begin."

I will myself to start. Take my dress off. Take his robe off. Flirt with him. Pull a string of silk handkerchiefs out of my mouth. Anything.

The clock counts the seconds. It's silent. Someone in the audience coughs.

What a depressing epitaph. At worst, there will only be fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds more of this. At best, I will burst into flames in the next five seconds.

I don't burst into flames. Only fourteen forty to go.

"What's going on?" The announcer's voice is a whisper.

"Maybe Jenna got into her head," Guy Rogan says, his voice also subdued.

Jeff stands up arrogantly, and arrogantly unties the belt of his robe, and arrogantly lets it open before shrugging it off, denying me the chance to use stripping him naked as part of my set. To do like a sexy, flirty "ooh, let's find out what's in HERE" type of act. That's not my style, but it would have been nice to have had the option.

The lights shine in my eyes and I can't see the crowd, but in my head they're seeing their local hero sympathetically offering to help an overwhelmed Asian girl from another school. My sorority sisters are seeing it. My friends on campus are seeing it. My old mentor, Danielle, is surely seeing it.

What I'm seeing is a victory dance with fourteen and a half minutes left, and that's not going to be how this ends.

Like Danielle used to tell me to do, I take a deep breath and let it out, thinking of nothing other than the feeling of air going into my body and then leaving. Tranquility wraps me from head to toe, and I'm where I need to be. In the moment.

This is my time, not his.

Jeff's attention is on the crowd as I take a big step right towards him.

His eyes return to me and his sharp eyebrows bend into an arch. He tries to take a step backward but the chair gets in his way and he falls into it.

Now he's not thinking about the crowd.

His surprise turns to amusement. He puts his hands behind the chair and I see him grab his wrists. He's not going to give me ANYTHING, not even paw at me, if it might make me look good.

"He seems reluctant," Guy Rogan says. "I don't know if something was said between them, or if this is part of her set and he's playing along, but this is unusual. Let's see how Hyunna deals with it."

Fine, then. Let's do it your way. I unzip the front of my dress, but just enough that I can see the curves of my cleavage on the big screen. Just a hint, hopefully enough to get him curious. It works on the cameraman, and the screen zooms in on my chest but backs away slowly when my hands leave the zipper.

His sneer disappears and his face turns to stone. He's concentrating on something. Or concentrating on avoiding something. What?

I slide gracefully down onto my knees in between Jeff Lunk's legs, my hands parting his thighs wide, exposing him. On the display, the camera zooms in momentarily on his dick and his balls. Thirty-five seconds ago, this was the last place that I wanted to be, but with a sense of purpose I take his limp white dick in my hands and lick up the underside from the base all the way to the tip. His eyes look down at me and meet mine. I hold his gaze as my tongue tests and probes his manhood.

I watch his face and run the tip of my tongue around the rim of his glans, exploring his cock, finding the spots. THOSE spots. The ones that make his legs jerk, his breath catch. The ones that make his eyelids twitch even though he's doing everything he can to hide it.

His green eyes give everything away, every spot and I'm reading him like a book. Why does he keep looking at me? If he hopes I'm going to fail, why give me the chance to map every sensitive, pulsing vein, every bundle of nerve endings that sends signals from my mouth straight into his brain. He's trying so hard to resist me, but he won't look away and just lets me read him until my Korean lips and tongue...

That's it.

Korean. Asian. That's his weak point and he can't hide that. Not from me.

I smile at him, a genuine smile, making sure I can feel it in my eyes. His stony face breaks for a moment. The corner of his mouth turns up but he catches himself in a flash. He can't hide his now rapidly stiffening erection, which seems to no longer be responding to his brain's orders.

That. Is. It.

Since he can't pull his eyes away, I give him what I know his soul wants. I languidly drag his stiffening white rod across my cheeks, my lips, and my nose, making sure to call attention to my golden olive skin tone, my asian eyes, my snub little nose that all the guys call cute, and last of all, my silky black hair. I play to my strengths and trail my hair across his shaft, a featherlight brushing that causes his cock to throb and jerk.

He's not Jeff Lunk, the guy I got off on the wrong foot with, subject of the biggest competition of my life... he's a white guy with yellow fever, a white guy with an Asian fetish. A white guy who's about to learn that yellow fever is real and incurable. At that realization, my body heats up beneath my dress. I can work this... if I can keep myself under control.

I delicately kiss the tip of his cock. My lips part, opening wide, then wider. I take him fully into my mouth, sliding downwards, engulfing him, making sure that my tongue touches every sensitive button on the journey down. Down until his curly hairs brush my cheeks and nose and lips. He's long and thick. It's the finals, the subjects have been selected to present a challenge. The swollen head of his cock is in my throat, but this is something we all train for and I take the full length of him easily. His lips part as he sucks in air.

My mouth fills with the delicious taste of White Cock each time I swallow.

It's easy to take my time and enjoy it when I think about him this way. This is something I know how to deal with. This is a Korean girl whose own snow fever lurks inside her like a beast in its lair, waiting to emerge. Pairing me with a white man with a smoldering Asian fetish will allow my own snow fever to burst into a white-hot fire if fanned just a little.

This is MY home turf. And, besides, neither of us has any place we'd rather be. Not right now. We're both in the moment.

I'm totally ashamed to do what I do next, and I know Danielle will never let me forget this once I get back, but I ease my lips from him, take him out of my mouth, and pant like I'm out of breath. With his glistening, majestic shaft brushing my lips, I whisper, low enough for him to hear me but much too quietly for the microphones to pick up. "It's true what they say about White Cock. It's so big."

The utter ridiculousness of acting as if I'm in awe at the sight, as if it's my first-ever white dick, isn't lost on me, given that an entire stadium of people and probably millions more across North America and maybe even in Korea have watched me suck three white men already today. Despite that, I, probably along with every other Asian woman watching, know that there's pretty much a one hundred percent chance that this will work. White guys with yellow fever are predictable.

The clock rolls over. Less than ten minutes remaining.

His eyes close. His head rolls back. He groans and his body shudders. There's no resistance anymore. The part of his brain that could do that was in my way.

It's gone now.

"Look at me," I whisper, the tip of my tongue delicately licking the underside of his erection.

He does, even before I finish saying it. I've got him, any excuse to get him to look into my Asian eyes when he's feeling so, so powerful. The look of ecstasy and lust on his face is, honestly, a real pantydropper for me.

There are no cameras anymore. No stadium. No competition. Not for either of us. It's just a white man and an Asian woman who need each other, and nothing else matters. I take his swollen cock back into my mouth, sliding my lips downwards, my tongue caressing him, searching for those spots where he reacts and I let that part of me speak to that part of him.

When I unzip my dress a little further, down to my taut flat tummy, he can't look away. Neither can the camera. Jeff's eyes devour my Korean flesh. My Asian skin. The sight inflames him. When I see him lick his lips, I steal a glance at the clock. Seven and a half minutes. Halfway.

My mouth and hands take him higher, moving on him in a synchronized dance. My head bobs between his legs. He starts to grunt and I know he's close, but there's still too much time remaining.

This poor guy is lost. I might be his first Asian, almost definitely his first Korean, but I can tell already I won't be his last. Not after this. I can see it in his eyes. The way he stares down at me, watching my face, the movements of my lips.

He's addicted.

He's caught Yellow Fever.

And, my god, does it make me sweat.

I take his rock-hard cock out of my mouth, slowly, with unfeigned reluctance. I purse my lips and blow on the shaft. His whole lower body twitches. His eyes plead with me. After several lingering kisses that start at his ultra-sensitive tip and meander down each side to his balls, round and huge, his breathing slows down again.

If he calms down too much, the primal part of him might lose control. He might remember that he wants me to lose. I make a show of lapping at his balls, coating them with my saliva, letting his shaft rub wetly against my cheeks and nose. As long as I can keep his attention where I want it, I can guide where we go.

"Oh, fuck," I moan, my own desires hammer at me. Pounding. Relentless. Forceful. It takes everything I've got to keep control. My lips feel dry even though I know they're moist.

The way he looks at me when his white dick trails down the middle of my face, brushing my forehead, my nose and across my mouth, leaving wet streaks on my skin that the camera highlights... it sets me off. Triumphant. Confident. Desperately hungry. The more he feels like a man, the more I feel like a woman. I wallow in it. Revel in it. His lust fuels my own. My lust fuels his.

"I'll give your White Cock anything it wants," I breathe, knowing he can hear me. Knowing he can hear the truth in my words, knowing he can hear my desire. Desire for his cock. I brush his cock across my face again. "I'll give you anything you want."

He can see my desire.

So can the cameraman. My face fills the display, his meaty shaft moving against my skin, my dark narrow eyes brimming with lust for White Cock. Jeff leans forward, his hands finally emerging from behind the chair and brushing across my slender shoulders. Large white hands. Slender olive shoulders.

With a sharp tug, he pulls my dress down my arms to my waist, baring my perky breasts. Small. Firm. My nipples are engorged. Not the pink nipples of a White girl, but the reddish-brown nipples of an Asian girl. A Korean girl excited by her white man. By him.

I jump, startled and suddenly vulnerable. It's not an act. I'm not scared so much as shocked with raw, masculine energy, an energy that my soul responds to. My own breathing picks up and now it's me who can't look away. I kneel upright, bringing my chest near his shaft, letting him look at my delicate hands wrapped around his glistening white dick. Korean hands, soft and silky.

I can see that awareness in his eyes. Asian. Korean. Silk. He lusts for me.

His eyes glaze as he looks down. They refocus when I rub his cock against the soft inside of one breast, then against my sternum, and then against my other breast.

I can't help but lick my lips.

He sees the expression of helpless longing on my face, an expression displayed on every screen in the stadium, silencing our audience, holding them in our spell.

Even the announcer's cinnamon voice is silenced momentarily.

Part of me just wants to say "fuck it" and dive on him. That's the beast, a tiger inside me that gnaws at my willpower. Can I keep it in check a little longer?

He strains, looks down at me with pure, physical need, and I can't help but feel it too. His face scrunches into a grimace when I wrap my fingers and palm around the base of his slippery shaft. His mouth opens with a smack and an intake of breath only I can hear when I pull my hand up to the tip, wrap the other one around the base, and repeat, squeezing every inch along the way.

Jeff's hands find my breasts, cupping and kneading them. It's tough to think about anything other than how much I want to go back down on him. My mouth yearns for his cock. His face says he's going through the same thing.

"You want me because I'm Asian," I whisper in his ear, moving up from my knees to straddle him while still stroking his dick, making sure my fingers hit all the sensitive spots that I've already committed to memory. As I stand, my loose brown sack of a dress slips down over my hips to fall to the floor, pooling around my feet.

My oriental body stands naked, save for a pair of black thong panties.

"Do you like Korean girls?" I lick his ear. "Do you want your first Korean girl?"

My face is next to his and, when I glance at the big screen, I can see that the cameraman has focused on me from behind. Jeff looks up at the screen, too, watching the smooth, yoga-toned muscles of my golden-skinned back flex and relax, an exquisite color contrast to his white chest and arms. None of it's an act. This isn't about winning.

"I want you because you're white," I breathe.

I smile, my lips brushing his as his hands move to my toned, tight butt. "I want your big White Cock. You know, don't you?"

I feel his hands roaming my hips, my waist, and my back. My legs tighten.

His hands return to my waist, slide up my sides to my breasts again. Small taut firm breasts. Asian-girl breasts. He tries to kiss my neck but I pull away. He tries again and I pull away again. Irritation flashes across his face but I wet my lips with my tongue, riveting his attention where I want it.

There are only five minutes now and I'm taking a chance. I smile, hoping he smiles back, and he does. I squeeze the tip of his dick a few times, twisting my hand over the slippery head and making him grip the sides of the chair. "You want to see an Asian face on the end of this big, strong, White Cock, don't you? You deserve it, right?"

His grin says it all. I have him wrapped around my fingers.

An idea flashes through my mind. An audacious one. If it works, I can at least hold my head up. If it doesn't... well, we were gonna lose anyway.

My lips move close enough to his ear that I can feel my own hot breath reflected against my face, filling my nose with the scent of his dick. The fire inside me flares. I swallow, tasting him. "Tell me what it needs, and I'll be its slave."

I don't give him a chance to answer.

"Oooh," I moan, shaping my mouth into a perfect O for the cameras as well as for him. I lean back and slide my hips reluctantly off his lap, making a show of how good it feels to rub myself against his big, solid thigh muscle. The clock says just over four minutes left. This is the last chance I'm going to have to look at it.

"Oh, my god, I need you to suck me again. I'll say whatever you want." The microphones catch his words, and they echo through the stadium. He doesn't notice or care.

"Tell me what your cock finds sexy," I say, before diving back down on him, taking him in my mouth, my tongue circling the head of his thick cock, tonguing his glans, feeling him throb inside my mouth. He's close, and I know I have him. He can't hold himself back now. Three minutes on the clock.

"Ungh... oh... your eyes. They're like... unh... I want to get lost in them." I expected something like that, and I love hearing it, every time. It turns me on so much and my body reacts, heating up. A bead of sweat runs down my spine. I move my mouth faster, plunging my lips down his shaft, sucking and licking as I lift my head.

Shit. I'm losing it. My beast is clawing at me from within, bashing itself against the failing bars of my will. I can't... I can't hold on.

Just make it through the next few seconds, Hyunna, and we'll deal with the following seconds if we get to them.

"Your shoulders are the sexiest thing I've ever seen, and your skin makes my mouth dry. Oh my god, your skin's so smooth. Like silk. Oh, god, I only want your yellow skin to touch me from now on," he says. "So... beautiful... so sexy. I fucking love your Korean skin and your hot Korean mouth."

Fuckfuckfuck.

I'm shocked and elated at what Jeff has just said, but it's too much for me.

The beast escapes. And now it doesn't matter what my plans were.

I work every inch of him with my mouth and hands. There's no dignity anymore. No shame. Nothing but dirty, slutty, horny, sticky white cock sucking.

This is who I am, and I'm not afraid of that.

I suck his desperately hard white dick as if I crave it, and I do, don't care about anything else. Fuck the clock. Fuck the season. Fuck the team. Fuck the spectators. Fuck that I'm being watched live on half the displays in North America. Fuck that my parents are probably proudly watching their daughter suck big white cock like she was born to it. I hear myself slurping like a horny slut. I have no idea how long I'm down there and I don't give one single, solitary, flying...

"Fuck!" he yells. "Make me cum, make me cum, make me cum, make me cum."

The next thing I know, his whole body tenses like an archer's bowstring. I feel it in my mouth, throbbing, pulsing. One final plunge of my lips, down, down until the tip of his cock is deep in my Korean throat. My nose is buried in curly brown hair and I'm everything I know I can be. It twitches and I whimper.

"Listen to Hyunna Song," the commentator almost purrs. "That cock isn't small and she's all the way down it. Can she hold it long enough?"

I know I can. I've trained for this. Trained hard. Time stops and the universe holds its breath, then bursts forth like a welcome rain on a humid spring day.

Jet after jet of his beast swirls down my throat, feeding mine, giving mine the only thing it craves. I gulp him down, suck him down, my tongue and my mouth milking him for every last drop.

Nothing exists in the world but these deep, deep, deep parts of our beings touching for this one moment outside of time and space. I don't know if he shouts, or grunts, or says nothing. I don't know what the stadium is doing, or the announcers, or my teammates on the bench.

I don't care.

Each throbbing pulse scrapes the stress, tension, and cum out of his body. I match him, drinking him down. Gulping. Swallowing. Draining him. I ease my lips and tongue, giving him space to twitch in my mouth as the time between his spasmodic convulsions lengthens, until at last there are no more.

Jeff slumps back in the chair, eyes closed, arms hanging limply at his sides. He exhales once and falls silent.

There's still forty-five seconds left on the clock, and I'm going to let the judges, the crowd, and the audience reflect for a moment.

Normally leaving space at the end of a set feels awkward and hurts the score, but I made my point. I want the audience to feel the tranquil silence that Jeff is feeling, let it sink into their bones and give them a moment to think about... nothing.

Sometimes breaking a rule with intent is more powerful than following it.

Gently, I press my palm against the underside of his shaft and rub in small, tight circles, massaging his relaxing White Cock. My tongue licks him clean and I swallow, tasting him, letting my mouth swim in its musky, salty presence. On the display my eyelids lower, relaxed and content.

Jeff moans and shifts his legs, his back arching a little as I delicately kiss the tip of his cock. A farewell kiss. He looks down at me, eyes wide. His cock throbs, he groans on last time, and to my surprise and enjoyment, a final eruption emerges. As if by instinct, my mouth opens wide.

The cameraman is an expert at his job. Our audience sees him spurt into my wide open mouth, they see me swallow, they see my tongue as I open my mouth wide again, collecting the remnants of his cum from where it coats my lips, chewing, tasting, swallowing as Jeff subsides again. Even if we'd rehearsed it, it couldn't have been better planned.

The ringing in my ears fades. I wasn't aware of it until now, but it had been blocking out all other sounds while I was absorbed in my craft. But still, the room is silent. Nothing and nobody is moving, not a word is uttered, and the silence is louder than the ringing was.

At ten seconds, I stand up. Still, no one is talking. If my hands weren't slick with cum and saliva, I'd chew my nails down to my fingertips. The microphone picks up the sound of my zipper as I fasten the front of my dress, and then the sounds of rustling cloth as I pull a small white hotel hand towel out of a subtle pocket near the bottom of my dress.

It's still quiet and I'm not sure why.

I wipe my hands off, drop the towel on the side of the stage, and walk back to the bench where my teammates sit, speechless. Did I totally ruin this?

The clock continues to count down.

Finally, with only five seconds left on the clock, the silence breaks.

"Can someone, uh, check on that dude?" Guy Rogan asks.

My teammates leap off the bench and tackle me, dragging me into a group hug. A roar goes up from the crowd. I hear my name chanted and tears well up in my eyes. Not because of the cheer, and not because of my teammates, but because for that one perfect moment, Jeff embraced a part of me that only someone like him could.

"That's... wow... that's not a strategy I've seen before, Guy, but the crowd seemed to like it. It remains to be seen what the judges think. What... what do you make of it?" the cinnamon-voiced announcer asks.

"If I had to guess, I'd say that looked totally improvised. All season, Hyunna's outfits have matched her set. But today, when it was all on the line, it didn't. That tells me she had something different in mind. Maybe she saw something, maybe something threw her off balance and she scrambled to recover. We won't know until we ask her," Guy says. "But, can that be in like... three minutes?"

The big screen that had been showing Guy's podcast studio goes black and silent. After a second, it switches to an old face, still handsome and lean, with a tight grey haircut. The man looks surprised for a moment and then recovers, saying in a cinnamon voice, "As a reminder, today's broadcast is brought to you by Miisssster Softee. Grab your favorite, uh,... I think we could all cool off with some ice cream."

After a few seconds of corporate sponsorship, the screen switches to the judges.

All four stand up and hold up blank white cards. Stillness blankets the stadium like an eclipse. It all comes down to this.

The first judge turns his card around. Ten.

Damn. At least I'm going to go down swinging.

The second judge turns his card around. Ten.

We might have a chance to tie. Maybe even...

The third judge turns his card around. It's another ten. It's upside down, but it's still a ten and he quickly rights it when he sees his mistake on the screen.

What? Could we win this? We could go on to nationals! Have I scored as well as, no, better than Jenna Thompkins? It's down to the last judge, and my heart thumps.

The last judge turns his card around... Ten! Oh my god! A perfect score!

A cheer erupts from half the audience. They travelled here to support us and I wave, so thankful that they believed in us.

"And there we have it, folks, a peerrrrfect ten for an unusual but inspired performance by Hyunna Song! For the first time, the Iguthu Lake team is going to nationals!"