Jockblocked: A Novel (Gridiron Book 2) (8 page)

I didn’t say a word, just picked up my bike helmet. He followed me out and we biked for two hours around the city. I’ve never seen him cry again.

Ace and I, we’re tied together by our family history. It’s not pretty and, for a time there, the only people we had to lean on were each other. Besides my dad, Ace is the one steady thing in my life, so even though I find him exasperating and a little too arrogant nowadays, I still care for the big lug.

“How’s your dad?”

“Same old.” The two have a rocky relationship but at least they talk, unlike my mom and me. Ace claims the only reason his dad wants to connect now is because he thinks Ace is going to be a rich NFL player. I don’t think Ace is entirely wrong. “Had some interviews with the local Boston stations. Kind of a ‘hometown boy done good’ sort of thing.”

“You didn’t grow up in Boston,” I point out.

“Who cares? It was fun.”

He is really loving the post-win attention. “I got to give my NFL Super Bowl picks. We talked about the draft.”

“Was your dad there?”

“Yup. He was like a kid at Christmas.”

I bet. “Everything else going well? No one gave you any shit for missing a week of classes?”

“Lucy,” Ace chides. “I just won the National Championship. No one is giving me shit over anything.”

“Good. Because I need to take advantage of your good mood.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I’m getting kicked out of my apartment on Tuesday. Mind if I stay at your place? I can sleep on the sofa.”

“No problem.” His eyes warm up as he pulls out a small, wrapped gift. “Happy belated Christmas.”

“You already gave me a present,” I object. We exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve at my dad’s house. Dad and I went in together to get Ace a nice pair of sunglasses. He’d been complaining all fall that the ones he had were low rent and janky. The school supplies him with endless athletic gear, all the shoes he wants, and he got some sweet gifts for going to the bowl game the previous year, but not one pair of sunglasses.

Ace gave me a pair of gold hoop earrings. I think his mom picked them out, but they were nice. I wish I had worn them today.

“I didn’t pay for it, so it doesn’t really count.” Ace’s job is football, so he doesn’t have a lot of extra cash around, which makes me really curious about the gift. I slide a fingernail under the tape and pop it open, careful not to tear the paper.

“Come on, Lucy. It’s just newspaper,” he scolds.

“I can’t help it.” It’s some old newspaper but it’s still wrapping. As I lift off the paper, I gasp in surprise. It’s a pair of cordless headphones—a very expensive pair. I know this because it was a selection in a catalog of items that one of the bowl sponsors was allowed to gift the players as a thank you for playing in the bowl. “Ace, what is this?”

He grins. “I know you were saying how you hated wearing your headphones because the cords get tangled in your hair.”

“You should have picked something for yourself.” The generosity of this gift makes me uneasy. The echo of Sutton’s teasing voice tickles at the back of my brain.
Besides, Ace made that stupid pact up so he can keep you to himself.
I’d scoffed at her then, but I don’t feel so sure now.

“I did. I picked the same pair. The voucher was enough to get two pair.”

“I thought you were getting a television.” We actually discussed this. He showed me the brochure, pointed to the 42” flat screen, and said it would look great in his room. I agreed.

“There are plenty of guys with televisions in the house.” He shrugs. “It’s non-returnable, so don’t make a big deal out of it, yeah?”

I can see he’s uncomfortable, too, so I tuck the headphones away in my bag and lean over to kiss him on the cheek. Halfway there, I think better of it and reach over and squeeze his arm instead. “Thank you.”

Ace gives me a crooked grin as if he knows I changed my mind midflight, but thankfully he doesn’t ask me about it. He’s probably relieved. “So how’s mock trial going?”

I take the change of subject and run with it. “It’s not. We’re sucking right now. That new girl, Heather, is killing us. I thought for sure that she’d have picked up on some trial procedures from her dad, but it’s like she doesn’t even know he is a lawyer. I feel like I’ve made a bargain with the devil. I can’t handle her, and Randall is livid at nearly everything that comes out of her mouth.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“Send her over to the field house. We’ll whip her into shape. Although…” Ace trails off, looking momentarily troubled.

“Although what?” I prompt.

“Coach is acting kind of weird. I went in there to do a few sets before class and ran into him. He kind of mumbled hello into his hand and took off.”

I make a sympathetic noise. Ace has always complained that his relationship with Coach wasn’t what he wished it could be. I told him that maybe he shouldn’t sleep with Stella Lowe, the coach’s daughter. Ace brushed me off, saying that no one knew.

Given how many times
I
saw them together, and I don’t even hang out at the Gas Station or where Ace lives, I figured he was wrong, but Ace is so darned hard-headed. You can’t get him to change his mind once he’s convinced he’s right about something. Even if you shove all the facts in the world into his face, he’ll still believe what he wants to believe.

“Coach
probably doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he can’t yell at you guys to do push-ups.”

“Is that what you think we do at practice?” he teases. “Endless amounts of push-ups?”

“Who knows? I ask you what you’re doing during the season and the answer is always ‘working out’ or ‘lifting.’”

“Fair enough,” he grins. “What’s been going on with you besides hating mock trial? You know, you are allowed to quit things you don’t enjoy.”

“You hate football sometimes, and I don’t see you quitting.”

Ace raises an eyebrow. “I’ve never hated football.”

“Yeah, well I don’t hate mock trial either. I love it.” I love putting the pieces of the puzzle together and drafting up the arguments and questions and answers. It’s the extemporaneous speaking part I struggle with. “Even if I didn’t love it, my scholarship depends on me being part of the team. And if I’m going to be part of the team, we’re going to be good.”

Ace nods. One thing we both enjoy is winning, which is why the last couple of years have been kind of a downer for me. Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in Matt Iverson.

He’s fun to be around and when I’m with him, I don’t dwell on how crappy my mock trial is going or how I have to shoot myself up with insulin twice a day because my body doesn’t make it or how I was forced to spend Christmas with my mother and her current boyfriend. He was the third guy she’d dated this year. I didn’t realize how many over-forty single men there are out there. Although, my mother doesn’t limit herself to single men. That’d be too silly.

So it isn’t a great surprise that I find myself asking Ace about Matt even though I know the topic will bring out a great deal of scowls and lectures. But his phone number is burning a hole in my head, and I’m afraid if I don’t use it, I might suffer some permanent head trauma. “I ran into one of your teammates the other day. He was in here. You spreading the word about our great coffee?”

“Hell no. I keep this place a secret.” Ace looks almost serious, almost…pissed off that one of the Warrior football players has dared step foot into the Brew House. “Which one?”

As nonchalantly as possible, I say, “Matt Iverson.”

Saying his name out loud conjures up all the shivery feelings he roused in me. He was so much fun to talk with, and his offer to show me risks, to take all the risks so I could just go along for the ride…God, I want to test out his verbal skills. I hope I’m not blushing.

“That hound? I hope he didn’t say anything to you. Ives can’t walk by a vagina without wanting to test it out,” Ace says crudely. It takes me a second to realize he calls Matt by the nickname of Ives. These boys and their constant nicknames. What’s wrong with their given names?

“He did ask me out,” I admit.

“And you turned him down, of course.” He smiles. “I shouldn’t worry. I know you can take care of yourself.”

I ignore the compliment and latch on to the
of course.
“Of course? Why, of course?”

First Sutton and Charity and now Ace? Am I that predictable? Actually, yes, I am that predictable. And that used to be okay. Why does it bother me now?

“Because there are rules, Lucy. There’s a locker room rule of no dating girlfriends or sisters.”

“But I’m not either your girlfriend or your sister,” I object.

“Close enough.” He waves his hand as if semantics aren’t important here, and I suppose Ace and I have been friends for so long we are as close as brother and sister. “Besides, even if there wasn’t a locker room rule, which there is, we made a deal.”

“Would it really be a big deal if I broke it?” I don’t know why I ask because I have no intention of using Matt’s number, no matter how many times I’ve punched it into the keypad only to erase it. “Not that I want to,” I say, not sure if my words are meant to reassure Ace or myself. “I’m just asking out of curiosity.”

“Absolutely,” he says firmly with a frown on his face. “Because if you dated one of them, I’d have to kill them.

“Why? You always say you’d take a bullet for your teammates.”

“Yeah, I would. But if one of them broke my best friend’s heart? I’d be the one pulling the trigger.” He leans forward. “How many times have I told you? The guys on the team are no good.”

“They can’t be all bad.”

My lack of agreement only makes Ace frown harder. “You’re a nice girl. You don’t hang out at the Gas Station and you’re not a jersey chaser. You’re not built for the one-night stands that these girls are looking for.”

“There’s nothing wrong with one-night stands. Nice girls do plenty of one-night stands,” I object. “I’ve had them and they aren’t any better or worse than sex in a long-term relationship.”

Ace winces. “Can we not talk about your sex life?”

If possible, his frown lines become even more prominent, which makes me laugh. “I love how you suddenly turn prudish when the subject is me having sex. I’m not a virgin.”

“If you say so.” He glowers, making me chuckle even more. “Look, Lucy, just because the guys are good teammates doesn’t make them good boyfriends. These guys get offered so much pussy that they don’t know how to treat a girl right. They don’t have to. They just need to whip their dick out and the girls are fighting to be the one to jump on it.”

Now I’m wincing because that’s an ugly picture of both the guys and the girls involved. But somehow I get the sense that Ace is speaking from actual experience, so I feel even grodier. The thing is, Matt didn’t come off that way. As he pointed out, he didn’t play the football card when he so easily could have, when it had such good results in the past.

“Iverson didn’t seem like a dog. He was kind of nice.”

Ace snorts. “Yeah, he’s real nice. Here, let me show you how nice he is to girls.”

My heart lurches, because I don’t like the disgust in Ace’s eyes. And I’m worried when he pulls out his phone. He scrolls through a #WarriorsWin hashtag, and while there are pictures of the players celebrating a touchdown, there are also plenty of pictures showing Matt Iverson kissing many, many, many girls. So many different ones I start to get dizzy. #WarriorsWin clearly has more than one meaning to the Warrior faithful.

“He’s fully clothed,” I point out, but it’s a weak attempt to make what I’m seeing less...sleazy, I guess. But damn it, I didn’t get a sleazy vibe from him at all. He didn’t look at other girls in the restaurant even once. The waitress practically tried to rub her tits into his nose, but his attention was focused solely on me.

The picture of Matt constructed from my interaction with him is entirely different than the one that Ace has painted, but truthfully, didn’t I really believe, deep down, that Matt’s interest in me was shallow and would last no longer than one night, maybe two? That’s why he’s got so many checkmarks in the risk column. I add another one there, just to be on the safe side.

Ace tugs on a hank of my hair. “Stay away from Iverson, Lucy. Promise me that. I don’t want to spend the off-season worrying about you.”

“I will.” The words sound unconvincing to me, but Ace looks pacified.

Inwardly, I worry that I’ll be breaking promises all over the place. To Ace, and most importantly, to myself.

T
he weekend is shot
to shit. I have no interest in smoking weed, drinking myself into a coma, or getting laid, and end up taking long walks around campus. I find myself outside the Brew House several times and looking up at different apartment complexes wondering if Lucy’s inside.

For some reason, I failed to get her number. For some reason, I still want it. I’ve never pursued a girl in my life, and I don’t even know if this is the time to start, particularly with all the team shit going down.

What do I even know of this girl, other than that she eats tofu, works at a coffee shop, and has puppy dog eyes I keep seeing when I close mine. And she’s risk averse.

I need some of her analyzation skills right now. We could make a pro/con assessment of Ace moving or me sticking my nose into the whole mess as Coach ordered me to. And then, after I’ve worked it out on paper, we could release some tension between the sheets.

I’ve got a lot of built-up tension. Coach and me exchanged terse words about my conditioning on Saturday, which is complete and utter bullshit because I work harder in the weight room than anyone on defense. I’m there every day of the week, even during the off-season, for frickin’ sake. Coach Benson, the linebacker coach, had to come over and drag me away before I said anything stupid.

Coach’s words had zero to do with my lifting and everything to do with the fact that I haven’t persuaded Ace to move to safety. Shit, it’s been less than a week. I know that National Signing Day, the day that all the top recruits announce their college choices, is only a few weeks away, but give a guy a moment to breathe.

I went to the Gas Station with Hammer on Friday and Saturday nights, just to settle him down and so I can report back to Coach that I at least carried out part one of his directives. Arms folded, I stood in the middle of the bar and glared at all my teammates.

Hammer told me to pick a girl and leave because I was bringing everyone down. But being the heavy hand was the point.

And no one did anything stupid under my watch that night. No bathroom sex. No under-the-table hand action. No shot-drinking challenges. The team ended up going home early, taking the party—and the women—with them.

I went, too, but alone, because there wasn’t one girl in the place who made my dick move. Apparently my dick likes rejection because it gets hard when I think about Lucy, when I stand outside of the Brew House, but not when hot babes wearing down-to-fuck dresses are batting their eyelashes at me.

I swear to God, the scent of coffee Hammer was brewing this morning had me mooning about her. Jacking off to a girl I exchanged a few words with at a coffee shop is a new one for me.

The only thing to do is talk to her again. I can admit when I’m hung up on something. After all, I have no problem admitting I love football, and I really don’t have a problem with being drawn to one particular girl. The only issue is that she views me as a bad risk.

So how am I overcoming that?

My sour mood follows me all the way to the weight room and then plummets into my feet when I spot Ace working out.

There are only a few people even up this early on a Sunday. Some are at church, but most of them are hung over or even still drunk from last night’s revelries. I like that we’re keeping it close to home, so it didn’t bother me to wade through a mess of bodies, beer cans, and pizza boxes. No cop is going to bust us for drinking in our own place, and there are going to be a lot fewer guys who think they’ll prove their manhood by picking a fight with a Western player. We made the girls drop their phones in a bucket on their way in, solving the whole picture problem.

In all, keeping the guys in line was one task that wasn’t particularly onerous. It’s the Ace issue that gnaws at my belly like a dog with a bone.

I grunt a hello to Ace and Jack Cameron, the junior college transfer with hands like glue and a bad academic problem. Hopefully he gets that sorted this year. We’ll need him to be at the top of his game. He’s one of the guys who Ace throws to on a consistent basis, and from what I saw last year, they’re developing good chemistry.

I pause just inside the door and watch the two heckle each other. A new quarterback may not have the same relationship with the O-line or the receivers, so no matter how good he is on film, it could be a huge mistake to stick him into the starting lineup. I don’t get why Coach doesn’t let Mr. Texas watch the game for a year. That’s what I did, and it paid off big time.

Over by the mats at the end of the room, Masters is doing army crawls. He’s the argument for the flip side. A physical freak of nature, Masters walked onto the field as an eighteen-year-old and dominated men who were three and sometimes four years older than him. He’s declared early for the draft and is now training for the combine—a workout session at the end of February where the pro teams assemble 335 college players and run them through different tests, like how fast can you run the forty-yard dash, how high is your vertical leap, how much can you bench press. Dude wants to break records when he tries out for the pro teams, and I have no doubt he will.

I head for a free weight bench. Nice thing about being one of the early birds is that the place doesn’t stink of sour sweat and unshaved pits. Someone else will be breathing my stink today.

I get fifteen minutes into my routine and I’m working up a good fucking sweat. Ordinarily I’d be riding that endorphin wave, but any good feeling is negated by Ace’s presence in the room. I run a scratchy towel over my face as Ace goes through yet another shoulder exercise.

There are a total of four guys in here working their tails off on a day that doesn’t count, and one of them is Ace. I can’t do this to him. I can’t go behind his back and foment some kind of insurrection against him. The defense would follow my lead. I know they would, but what kind of teammate would that make me?

I slam my towel on the bench and get up. Masters just happens to be taking a break, and I jerk my head toward Cameron. He needs to go. Masters nods.

“Hey, Jack, I was thinking about buying Ellie this jacket. Would you mind taking a look at it?”

Jack is Masters' brother-in-law.

“Sure, what’ve you got?” Jack rises from the leg press and walks over to Masters.

“It’s out in my bag.”

I wait until the door closes behind Masters and Cameron before turning to Ace. “Got a minute?”

He lifts his chin in acknowledgment, and I wait as he finishes his set.

“What’s up, Ives?” he asks, dropping his weights to the ground.

I rub my chin. “There’s no easy way to say this but Mr. Texas is signing with the Warriors.”

Ace looks unimpressed. “So? I figured he would. I was part of the recruiting team, and I know that kid didn’t have a better time at any other campus than this one.”

Recruiting trips are legend at Western. Coach Lowe picks up every kid personally from the airport. They get a police escort to school. Once you arrive on campus, the cheer squad is there to greet you and your parental units. The adults are squired around. They get a first-class dinner on campus and a tour of the athletic facility, which is plusher than some pro teams’ with its mahogany lockers, carpeted floors, individual showers, training rooms, saunas, hot tubs, and a weight room reserved for just the football team.

After dinner, the potential player is introduced to a select few teammates, usually those who play the same position, which is weird if you think about it. The existing players are there to persuade the potential player to come to Western. But if that trip is successful, the same kid you showed the time of his life to might take your position.

And that’s exactly what happened here. Ace and our other quarterbacks and probably Ahmed took this kid out, got him lit and laid. Mr. Texas decided that between the first-rate education, the top-notch athletic facility, the number of times we’re on national television, and the smoking hot babes who willingly and eagerly service every whim, Western was the school for him.

“Maybe you showed him too good of a time,” I reply. “Thing is that Coach Lowe has it in his head that Mr. Texas is going to start.”

Ace laughs at this. Just flat out opens his mouth and guffaws, long and loud until he realizes I’m not smiling at all. “What the fuck, Ives?”

“He’d like you to move to safety.”

“You’re serious?” Ace stares at me with wide-eyed incredulity.

“I would never joke about shit like this.”

The look on Ace’s face? I don’t ever want to see that kind of devastation again. He stumbles, and we both pretend I don’t see that. Steadying himself with one hand on a nearby weight rack, Ace manages to choke out, “How do you know this? Is it out yet?”

Meaning does anyone outside of our organization know about it. Are the blogs on it? Is it on Twitter? Is he going to start getting phone calls and emails asking him how he feels about being replaced? My throat tightens up in sympathy.

“Coach Lowe told me, and no, it’s not out.” The news cycle is focused on the playoffs for the pros. Super Bowl talk is heating up, and our college championship is yesterday’s news. Right now, that’s a really good thing. We do not need to be in the spotlight while we’re working through this issue.

“How far away is Signing Day?” Ace finally asks.

“Four weeks or so.” Four weeks until all the high school seniors have to declare what school they’re attending.

Ace straightens. “So I have around thirty days to convince Coach Lowe that I deserve to start next year. He wants four years out of this freshman, then he can redshirt him.” He slaps his wet, sweaty towel in my chest and storms out. I take the towel to the laundry return chute and resume my routine. Hopefully Coach realizes that this thing needs to be worked out with Ace before the rest of the team gets involved.

I don’t get more than two reps of my deadlifts in when Hammer bursts through the door.

“Look at this!” He waves his phone excitedly.

“I can’t see a damn thing unless you stop swinging your arm,” I growl and reach up to rip the phone from his hand, but Hammer’s my size and weighs about ten pounds more than me. Plus, I’m sitting, so I have no leverage. He holds the phone out of my reach.

“I see you woke up on the asshole side of your bed.”

No. I woke up on the good side of my bed with the taste of a dream Lucy still in my mouth. I woke up pretty damn happy with a sizeable morning chub that I rubbed out in the shower before I came here. None of which I tell Hammer. “Just give me the damn phone,” I growl.

“You’re going to have to buy me dinner tonight to make up for your bad attitude.” He hands me the phone.

I ignore him and try to zoom in on the image, which appears to be a tall, brown-haired guy standing next to a girl with blond hair. For a second, I wonder if that’s Lucy, followed quickly by the desire to rip the guy’s arm away, or even off his body if he doesn’t step aside. I give myself a mental head slap for that kind of stupidity and zoom in, but I can’t make out a thing. “Did you take this picture with your phone or a potato?”

“Ah, shit.” He takes the phone back. “It’s dark in there, and I could hear people coming.”

“And ‘there’ is…” I gesture for him to fill in the blank.

He shoves the phone into his pocket. “Ace has two photos in his locker. One is with his parents, but the other is Ace and this girl.”

“Ace has a girl?” Ace isn’t known for taking up every available jersey chaser’s offer, but he doesn’t spend many nights alone. Although during last year’s season, it was a pretty open secret that he was banging Stella Lowe.

“He must, right? Because you don’t hang a picture of a slam piece in your locker. That’s serious girlfriend and wives shit.”

“Okay, but what does Ace having a girlfriend have to do with anything? Given that you didn’t recognize her, she’s his girlfriend from high school or goes to some other college. Is she coming here and going bunny-killing crazy when she finds out that Ace is being…” I pause to choose some other word that means demoted. “…moved to safety.”

Hammer waves his finger in my face. “I never said I didn’t recognize her. This girl goes to Western. I’ve seen her. I think she works at a restaurant. Or a bakery or something like that. I remember her and coffee, which is why you wouldn’t know her, what with your dislike of the nectar of the gods.”

“You’re essentially drinking the sweat of coffee beans, so no thanks.” Why can’t people get their caffeine fix from Red Bull and/or pop?

The pieces finally add up for me. Well, not all of the pieces, but Hammer must think we should cozy up to this girl and enlist her help in convincing Ace that quarterback isn’t his natural position.

“I’m telling you for the thousandth time, it’s not sweat,” Hammer insists.

“The beans are ground up, soaked in heated water, and then you drink the bean-flavored moisture. That’s sweat of the bean, dude.”

Hammer looks frustrated. “The way you talk about coffee is not natural. You know what else is not natural?” I bend over to pick up the weighted barbell and resume my deadlifts, but Hammer continues anyway. “Going two weeks without sex. You’re going to forget what pussy feels like, and that would be a fucking tragedy.”

“The tragedy is that you’re both keeping track of my sex life and writing for that women’s magazine. Yet here you are, two articles in and the world still hasn’t stopped spinning.” Last year Hammer got it into his head that he should be an advice columnist, offering his shady advice about males to women. He submitted a couple of articles and they were published online. Now he thinks he’s Emily fucking Post or some similar shit.

“I was doing research for my next article. It’s on Tantric sex. You heard of that?” He also has the attention span of a gnat.

“No. Regular sex is good for me.”

Hammer continues as if I haven’t said a word. “According to these Tantric sex gurus, you can make a girl come just by breathing on her.”

I raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Breathing? I don’t think any woman is having an orgasm even if I gusted tornado winds into her pussy.”

“Not with that attitude you won’t.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Ever since he’s started writing for
Monologue
, he’s reached new levels of strangeness. I blame it on the so-called research he’s doing for these articles.