Why Is She Here?
Chapter 1: Admit It
Pairing: Ja’Marr Chase and Media Admin Alexandra.
Warnings: Angst, enemies to lovers… eventually.
Tag list: @xoxonobodyhome @heavyhitterheaux @honeydippedfiction @coffeebunnibee @savaneafricaine @mrs-delaney @babygirlburrow (who else wanna be apart of this?)
Alexandra had a way of entering a room like she already knew the ending.
At twenty-seven, she carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone who had worked too hard to apologize for existing. Five-foot-eight, all curves and presence, arm and leg tattoos peeking out from carefully styled outfits that somehow balanced corporate polish with personal edge. Her glasses framed hazel eyes that people swore shifted color—green when she was amused, honey-brown when focused, sharp blue when irritated, brown- green for other reasons. Alexandra insisted it was lighting. Everyone else knew better.
A Virgo through and through, she noticed everything. The misplaced comma in a caption. The uneven crop in a photo. The energy shift when someone walked into a space already expecting her to fail.
Which was funny, considering how good she was at her job.
As social media admin for the Cincinnati Bengals, Alexandra ran the team’s digital presence like a maestro. Game-day posts hit at the perfect second. Highlights went viral within minutes. Fan engagement spiked under her watch, pictures and videos were always ON POINT, and the analytics backed it up so thoroughly that even the most skeptical executives had stopped questioning her methods.
The players loved her.
Loved the way she hyped them up without being corny. Loved that she actually understood the game. Loved that she never crossed boundaries but still made them feel seen. She remembered birthdays, career milestones, inside jokes that never made it to the public feed. In the locker room hallways, she got nods, fist bumps, easy smiles.
All of them loved her.
All except one.
Ja’Marr Chase.
From the moment Alexandra stepped onto the practice field with her credential swinging from her neck and her phone already in her hand, Ja’Marr clocked her as a problem.
First of all—Kansas City Chiefs fan.
He’d spotted it on day one, clear as sin. A red phone case. A subtle Chiefs sticker on her laptop during orientation. She hadn’t even tried to hide it.
Second of all—her attitude. At least, that’s how he saw it.
She didn’t gush. Didn’t fawn. Didn’t laugh too loud or try too hard to fit in. She did her job, did it well, and moved like she belonged there. Like she hadn’t spent years clawing her way into a space that was never built with women like her in mind.
To Ja’Marr, it read as stuck-up.
So they clashed.
Not dramatically. Not loudly. It was worse than that—sharp comments dropped in passing.
“You done filming yet?” he’d ask, tone clipped, eyes already dismissing her.
“Almost. Try catching that one next time, yeah?” she’d reply without looking up from her screen.
Mean mugs across the field. Prolonged eye contact that felt like a challenge. Ja’Marr would scowl when he noticed her filming a drill, and Alexandra would raise an eyebrow like she dared him to say something.
He couldn’t believe she’d even gotten hired.
A Chiefs fan. Running Bengals social media.
It annoyed him more than he wanted to admit.
Meanwhile, Alexandra was fully aware of his dislike. She’d clocked it the second time he rolled his eyes when she walked by. Virgo instincts never missed a thing. She found him talented, undeniably so, but arrogance grated on her nerves—especially when it came wrapped in assumptions about who she was.
She wasn’t stuck-up.
She was careful.
She wasn’t impressed easily.
And she definitely wasn’t here to make him comfortable.
One afternoon, after practice ran long and the Ohio sun dipped low, Alexandra lingered near the sidelines, uploading a perfectly timed clip that would have fans losing their minds within the hour. Ja’Marr jogged past, stopped, and glanced at her phone screen.
“That clip better not be trash,” he muttered.
She finally looked up at him then, hazel eyes flashing green with something like amusement.
“Relax,” she said calmly. “If it were trash, you’d already be trending for the wrong reasons.”
A few nearby players laughed. Ja’Marr clenched his jaw, shook his head, and walked off.
But later that night, scrolling through his phone, he saw it.
The clip.
Clean edit. Perfect angle. Caption that went hard without doing too much. Comments flooded with fire emojis and praise—his name everywhere.
Ja’Marr stared at the screen longer than he meant to.
Still annoying.
Still a Chiefs fan.
But… damn.
She was good.
And somewhere between the mean mugs and the words exchanged across the field, something else had started to simmer—unspoken, unresolved, and very much not over.
That was the part Ja’Marr really couldn’t stand.
Not just that Alexandra was a Kansas City Chiefs fan—that alone already felt like a personal offense—but who her favorite player was.
Isiah. Damn. Pacheco.
He found out by accident.
It was a Thursday afternoon, content meetings running long, the kind where everyone was half-listening and waiting to escape. Alexandra sat at the far end of the table, glasses on, laptop open, fingers flying as she adjusted a game-day rollout. One of the younger assistants joked about fantasy football, asked her casually:
“So, Alex, if you had to pick one non-Bengals player you ride for, who is it?”
She didn’t hesitate.
“Pacheco.”
Ja’Marr’s head snapped up before he could stop himself.
“Of course,” he muttered under his breath.
Alexandra heard him anyway. Virgo ears.
She looked over the rim of her glasses, unimpressed. “Problem?”
“Yeah,” Ja’Marr said, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed. “That dude runs angry for no reason.”
She smiled then—not sweet, not polite. Proud.
“He runs like somebody told him he didn’t belong,” she said evenly. “I respect that.”
Someone else laughed awkwardly. The room shifted.
“And,” she added, eyes steady on Ja’Marr now, “he’s Puerto Rican. That’s basically cousins with the Dominican So yeah. That’s my guy.”
That did it.
Ja’Marr didn’t even have a comeback ready. The words landed heavier than he expected. It wasn’t just fandom. It wasn’t bandwagon behavior or chasing wins.
It was identity.
Culture.
Representation.
And somehow that made it worse.
Because now every time Ja’Marr saw her—standing on the sideline in Bengals black and orange, tattoos catching the light, hair pulled back, phone in hand—he knew under all that professionalism was a woman who probably yelled at her TV on Sundays in red and gold, cheering for a running back who reminded her of home.
Just like her.
He hated how grounded she was in it. How unapologetic.
She didn’t downplay it either.
Her Chiefs fandom showed up in quiet ways: a playlist she played while editing late nights, a coffee mug she swore was just red “by coincidence,” the way her eyes lit up whenever Pacheco bulldozed through a defense on highlight day. Green flecks sparked in her hazel eyes then—pride, recognition.
Ja’Marr noticed.
He noticed too much.
“You know you work for the Bengals, right?” he shot at her once after catching a glimpse of her watching a Chiefs clip during downtime.
She didn’t miss a beat. “And you know I do my job better than most people here, right?”
That shut him up.
Because it was true.
She never let bias bleed into her work. If anything, she went harder for the Bengals, overcompensated with excellence. Her captions hyped him up, too—him especially. Clean edits, elite angles, nothing but respect.
Which made his irritation twist into something uncomfortable.
Why did she have to be that good?
Why did she have to be brilliant and confident and a Chiefs fan who loved a player for reasons deeper than stats?
Why did she get under his skin like that?
Across the field, their eyes met again—another mean mug exchange. But this one lingered.
Alexandra tilted her head slightly, eyes shifting toward that sharp blue that meant don’t test me.
Ja’Marr looked away first.
He told himself it was because she was annoying.
He didn’t tell himself the truth.
That the real problem wasn’t that she loved Pacheco.
It was that she stood so firmly in who she was—and didn’t care one bit whether Ja’Marr Chase approved.
The locker room was loud in that easy, post-practice way—music thumping, cleats hitting the floor, somebody yelling about food. Ja’Marr sat at his locker scrolling through his phone, jaw tight like usual.
Joe leaned against the neighboring locker, arms crossed, smirk already loading.
“Bro,” Joe said casually, nodding toward the field outside, “she is so cool. You hate her for no reason.”
Ja’Marr didn’t look up. “I don’t hate her.”
Tee laughed from across the room, towel slung over his shoulder. “That’s cap. You act like she personally stole something from you.”
Ja’Marr groaned, finally locking his phone and dropping it onto the bench. “Y’all don’t get it.”
“Oh, we get it,” Tee said, grinning wider. “You know you only act like that ’cause you wanna fuck.”
Joe burst out laughing.
Ja’Marr leaned back hard against the locker, head tipping up toward the ceiling. “Man, shut up,” he muttered, rubbing his face with both hands.
Joe shook his head, amused. “Damn, bro. You wanna hit? Better be nice to her.”
“I am nice,” Ja’Marr shot back.
Tee raised an eyebrow. “Mean mugging her across the field is nice now?”
“That’s just my face,” Ja’Marr argued.
Joe snorted. “Funny how your face only does that with her.”
Ja’Marr didn’t answer. Because the truth—the annoying, inconvenient truth—was that Alexandra got under his skin in ways he didn’t understand. Not loud ways. Not obvious ways. Quiet ones. The way she never tried to impress him. The way she clapped back without raising her voice. The way she stood there on the sideline, all confidence and focus, like his opinion barely registered.
And that Chiefs nonsense.
And Pacheco.
And the fact that she was fine as hell without acting like she knew it.
Later, as they walked out toward the parking lot, they spotted her near the tunnel, glasses off now, contacts in, hazel eyes catching the late light as she laughed at something one of the staffers said. Her eyes flicked toward them for half a second—green today, Joe noticed—and then she turned back to her phone.
Joe nudged Ja’Marr with his elbow. “See? Cool. Mind her business. Talented.”
Tee added, “And she don’t even be pressed about you like that. That’s the wild part.”
Ja’Marr watched her a beat too long.
“Whatever,” he said finally, shoving his hands into his pockets. “She still annoying.”
But his tone didn’t convince anyone.
Especially not Joe, who just smiled to himself.
Because he knew that look.
And Ja’Marr Chase was cooked.
Ja’Marr woke up that morning with a plan.
A dumb plan. A petty plan. But a plan nonetheless.
If Alexandra wanted to get under his skin with that calm, unbothered energy, he was going to return the favor. And if she took pride in her culture—if Spanish rolled off her tongue like second nature—then fine.
He’d meet her there.
He spent an embarrassing amount of time the night before on Duolingo, whispering phrases to himself like they were audibles. Pronunciation shaky. Confidence unearned. But by the time he walked into the facility the next day, he felt ready.
Alexandra stood near the sideline, camera rig balanced on her shoulder, hair pulled back, tattoos visible as she adjusted a lens. Contacts in today—her hazel eyes sharp, focused, unreadable.
Ja’Marr slowed as he passed her.
Didn’t even look at her.
Just dropped it casually, under his breath, like it was nothing.
“chica molesta.”
Annoying ass girl.
He kept walking.
Two steps.
Three.
Then—silence.
The kind that made him stop without meaning to.
Behind him, Alexandra paused. Slowly. Deliberately.
She turned her head just enough to look at him over her shoulder, one eyebrow lifting. Her eyes shifted—gray now, cool and cutting.
“receptor abierto de mierda,” she said calmly.
Trash-ass wide receiver.
Clean pronunciation. Effortless. Deadly.
Ja’Marr stiffened.
Didn’t say a word.
Just kept walking—jaw tight, ears hot, pride bruised in about five different places.
Behind him, Tee and Joe had witnessed the whole exchange.
Tee bent over laughing, hands on his knees. “Bro… did you really get on Duolingo to learn Spanish JUST to annoy her?”
Joe was already laughing too, shaking his head. “Nah, that’s crazy work.”
Ja’Marr stopped and turned on them. “She didn’t have to go that hard.”
Joe wiped his eyes. “What did she just say back to you?”
Ja’Marr hesitated.
“…She called me a trash ass wide receiver.”
Tee lost it.
“Oh nah,” Tee wheezed. “In fluent Spanish too? Yeah, you took an L.”
Ja’Marr groaned, dragging a hand down his face. “Man, whatever.”
Joe grinned. “You started it.”
“And she finished it,” Tee added. “Effortlessly.”
Across the field, Alexandra went right back to work like nothing had happened—uploading clips, adjusting angles, completely unbothered. Didn’t look his way again.
Which somehow pissed Ja’Marr off even more.
Because not only had she cooked him in another language—
She’d done it without raising her voice.
Without breaking focus.
Without caring whether he was mad or not.
Ja’Marr Chase had set out to annoy Alexandra.
Instead, he’d just proven one thing:
She could out-talk him, out-play him verbally—
and she was still winning without even trying.
“Ayo go tell her ‘te amo’ cus ain’t no way you don’t like her and you out here using Duolingo Premium to annoy her. ” Tee teases hunching over to laugh.
“Man fuck yall.” Ja’Marr says irritated.
“Asombrado amigo estás rompiendo mi corazón” Joe says fake pouting and holding his chest.
Ja’Marr just stares at him irritated.
“I’m finna go ask them for a trade. I hate y’all.”
Tee is practically screaming at this point.
“They gon send you to the Chiefs so you can be besties with Pacheco.”
“She’ll like his ass then.” Joe says hollering.
“Release me.” Ja’Marr says lying back.
“Oh shit he using her lingo!” Tee yells.
Ja’Marr sighs. ‘I wanna go home’
The next day Ja’Marr should’ve known something was wrong the moment his phone started vibrating nonstop before he even finished stretching.
Not one buzz.
Not two.
A flood.
He grabbed it from the bench and frowned.
Bengals Instagram — New Post.
He clicked.
It was a cold photo. Too cold.
Black-and-white. Sharp contrast. Ja’Marr mid-route, jaw clenched, defender a step behind him. Cinematic. Clean. The kind of photo that usually came with a hard caption. Respectful. Hype.
Instead, the caption read:
“Consistency is everything. Back to work.”
That was it.
No fire emojis.
No nickname.
No stats.
No glaze.
Just… that.
Ja’Marr stared at the screen.
Then he scrolled.
Comments were already cooking him alive.
“Oh that caption shady as hell 😭”
“Why this feel like a subtweet?”
“Admin woke up mad today”
“Damn who pissed her off?”
“Not ‘back to work’ 💀”
His jaw tightened.
“Oh nah,” he muttered.
Tee slid next to him, already laughing. “Brooooo,” he said, holding up his phone. “What you do to the admin?”
Joe leaned over Tee’s shoulder, took one look, and whistled. “That is… surgical.”
Ja’Marr locked his phone and stood up. “She’s petty.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “You earned that.”
“I did not.”
Tee grinned. “You definitely did. That caption basically said ‘do better’ without saying ‘do better.’”
Ja’Marr scanned the field.
And there she was.
Alexandra stood by the sideline, sunglasses on today, hair down, Bengals jacket zipped halfway. Tattoos visible. Phone in hand. Completely relaxed. Hazel eyes hidden, but he could feel the calm menace from where he stood.
She didn’t look at him.
Not once.
He marched over.
“Really?” he said, stopping a few feet from her.
She glanced up slowly, sliding her sunglasses down just enough to meet his eyes. They were green today. Too green. Too innocent.
“Yes?” she said.
“That caption,” he said. “You knew what you were doing.”
She tilted her head slightly. Virgo patience. “Did I lie?”
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
She continued, tone smooth. “It’s a good photo. Clean. And consistency is important. Especially in this league.”
Joe and Tee were watching from a distance like it was live TV.
Ja’Marr scoffed. “You being funny.”
She smiled—small, controlled. “I’m being professional.”
Then she added, real quiet, just for him:
“Maybe worry less about Duolingo and more about your routes.”
He stared at her.
She slid her sunglasses back up, turned away, and walked off like she hadn’t just ended his whole morning.
From across the field, Tee yelled, “DAMN.”
Joe shook his head. “She’s different.”
Ja’Marr stood there, pissed, embarrassed, and—worst of all—impressed.
He checked his phone again.
The post had already hit six figures.
Engagement through the roof.
Alexandra had done her job.
And somehow, without raising her voice, without breaking policy, without crossing a single line—
She’d won again.
A little later, Alexandra circled back toward the sideline, phone in hand, already in work mode.
“Hey,” she called out, voice clear and professional. “I’m gonna need action shots—routes, drills, whatever you’ve got. Give me something dynamic.”
A few of the guys nodded and followed her without question.
Ja’Marr did too.
He didn’t realize he was staring at first.
Didn’t clock it until she turned and started walking toward the middle of the field, leggings hugging her in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with football and everything to do with bad timing. Confident stride. Head high. Completely unbothered.
Ja’Marr’s eyes followed.
Too long.
Tee slowed down just enough to fall back beside him, smirk already forming. “You staring hard as fuck at her ass.”
Ja’Marr blinked like he’d just been caught zoning out in class. “I am not.”
Joe, walking on the other side, glanced between Ja’Marr and Alexandra up ahead, then chuckled. “Admit you like her.”
Ja’Marr scoffed immediately. “Never.”
Tee laughed. “You been mad at her all week, learned Spanish, got cooked in two languages, got shaded on Instagram, and now you ‘not staring.’ Aight.”
Joe added, calm but deadly, “You don’t argue with people you don’t care about.”
Ja’Marr didn’t answer.
Because Alexandra had stopped in the middle of the field and turned back toward them, raising her phone.
“Alright,” she said, businesslike. “On my count.”
Her hazel eyes flicked up for half a second.
They met his.
Something unreadable passed between them—challenge, awareness, maybe amusement. Her eyes shifted, just slightly, toward that sharp gray.
Ja’Marr looked away first.
Again.
“Three,” she said. “Two—”
Tee leaned in one last time, whispering, “You in denial, bro.”
“Shut up,” Ja’Marr muttered.
But as Alexandra dropped her hand and the drill started, he ran his route just a little sharper than usual.
And somewhere deep down—beneath the annoyance, the rivalry, the pride—
He hated how much he hoped she was watching him.
A/n: new series for the Ja’Marr girlies 😘😘
