I’d convinced myself at some point, maybe senior year of high school or maybe my first year at Western, that going without sex made me a better player. That belief had held me in good stead for years. Whenever I felt like wavering, I reminded myself that the pursuit of my dreams was more important than screwing some girl I wouldn’t remember after I’d moved on. So it surprises me a little that while I can’t get the brunette from the stadium out of my head, I’m sharper than ever.
This morning’s scrimmage feels like I’m playing Madden on easy mode. I see everything JR “Ace” Anderson, our quarterback, will do before he does it. I’m reading the shifts in the offensive line as if I was in their huddle. Coach takes me out after the tenth series.
“Save some of that for the game,” he orders. “Besides, you’re killing Ace’s confidence. Go do the ladder. You can work on your footwork and get rid of some of that goddamned energy without demoralizing half your team.”
“Yes, Coach.” I give him a cocky salute and go off to run through the string ladder set up between the twenty and third yard lines opposite the line of scrimmage. There I do multiple sets of agility exercises—the centipede, the Icky Shuffle, the Riverdance—and the whole time I have brown eyes in my head watching me, clapping for me to go faster and harder.
It’s another sign.
I didn’t get her name or her phone number, but I’m not worried. A girl who puts on her running shoes before dawn cracks the sky has to know where the gym is. I’ll find her. I have zero doubt of that.
After our two-hour morning practice, Coach spends twenty minutes telling us the ways we can get suspended in the weekend before our opening kickoff. Too much boozing, missing curfew. If we want a goddamned lobster tail for dinner, he’d prefer we called him instead of sneaking one out of Kroger’s under our workout gear.
“Don’t disappoint me, men,” he ends, and then waves us off.
Despite the size, the newly laid carpet, and the fresh veneer on the mahogany lockers, the locker room still stinks of sweaty balls and swamp ass. The smell of home. I grin to myself.
“You’re in a good mood.” Harry “Hammer” Wright drops onto the wooden seat and starts stripping off his gear. Hammer’s a good natured southern boy, with a torso covered in ink and a quick smile for everyone.
I lean to the side to avoid being hit with his jersey. He has no sense of personal space. “We had a good workout.”
Hammer is a prime example of why I always thought being single while chasing my NFL goals made a whole lot of sense. I’d watched other guys play shitiful games because their personal life was a mess. Their girlfriend cheated on them or maybe he got caught with his pants down.
Hammer is single because his last girlfriend caught him with some out-of-town babe. After a night game, we’d drank with a few of the locals and Hammer decided one of them needed consoling—with his dick. His girlfriend drove up and surprised him at the team hotel. She succeeded with her surprise, but it ended with a lot of screaming, a little hair pulling, and a call to security to get to the two girls escorted from the premises.
Hammer got a lecture from Coach and me about keeping it in his pants on away games.
“Easy for you to say, Masters,” Hammer whined at the time. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re missing.”
“Get your nutsack under control or your hammer time will be on the bench,” I told him.
“You’re not human,” he called as I walked away. “It ain’t right for you to be denying yourself like that.”
Hammer’s about the only one who gets away with talking to me like that. We roomed together during our freshman year and I spent a hell of a lot of time listening to him lay pipe in his bed. Nothing about Hammer’s casual sexual encounters made me believe I missed anything. Sometimes they didn’t take more than fifteen minutes before he hustled them out the door so he could play a round of Madden.
Then some guys got kicked off the team after they’d videotaped themselves getting a blowjob race. It had all been consensual and the football team weren’t the only Western athletes represented in the six-person video, but it’d looked bad. Real bad.
And the guys had seemed more interested in showing off for the camera than the fact that someone sucked their dicks. I’ve taken more satisfying dumps than the blowjobs those fuckups got.
Nothing had convinced me that my decision to save my athletic skills for the field was wrong…until now.
“Hey, Masters. I know the dinner’s supposed to be team only, but my sister just moved in and I haven’t seen her in two months since two-a-days started. Do you mind if she comes to dinner?” Jack Campbell stops by my locker. He’s a newbie—a transfer from a top tier juco—and by the effort he’s put forth this summer, a potential difference maker. As a bonus, he’s not an asshole.