Quarterback's Secret Baby (Bad Boy Ballers) (15 page)

College was everything it had promised to be. Actually, it was better. Football players were gods on the Brooks campus and we were treated as such. Sure, it was unfair, but it would continue on long after I was gone so, as my reasoning went, why not enjoy it while I could?

Academics were an afterthought - a box to tick. And literally everyone around me made it clear that they would do everything possible to make sure I kept my grades up. Now, I was never a straight-A student, but I wasn't a straight-C student either. Solid B- seemed to be my territory. So it wasn't too much trouble to keep that average up, but it was also nice to know there was nice, big safety net waiting to catch me if I fell.

Outside of academics, it was all gravy. Constant parties - and not the kind of cheap beer in run-down apartments parties that a lot of my non-football playing peers went to but parties in beautiful houses stocked with expensive liquor and attended by the cream of the Brooks crop. Media attention just added to my reputation - even during my first freshman semester, there were sports reporters regularly showing up on campus or e-mailing me asking for interviews.

A few of my teammates and frat brothers went a little too far - too much drinking, too much sex, that sort of thing. But I'd been seized with a new purpose and although I definitely indulged I never went too far. Working with the team fitness coach had me in the best shape of my life.

The one thing I haven't mentioned, the one thing that my friends would probably have placed at the very top of the list of 'Reasons To Love Being At Football Player At Brooks' - was the women. Never before, or since, have I ever been around such a sheer number of beautiful women. To say that we took advantage would be an understatement. Well, it would be an understatement for everyone but me. I got away with it at first, telling my baffled teammates when they witnessed me, once again, turning down the obvious advances of some total hottie, that I was at college to work on my game, that I didn't have time for girls in my life. After awhile, though, it started to become odd. Even to me.

I thought Natasha Greeley would, with time and distance, fade from my mind. What actually happened was almost the exact opposite. The more women threw themselves at me - and some of them were incredibly persistent - the more the single thought grew in my mind with every new girl I met:
she's not Tasha.

And it was true. None of them were Tasha. They were pretty, yes. Beautiful, even. But not as beautiful as Tasha. Not as smart or together as Tasha. Tasha would never have thrown herself at any man the way they threw themselves at me. She had too much self-respect. Too much dignity. And Tasha knew how to take care of herself. She was a grown-up and I was surrounded by oversized children - male and female. The girls at Brooks came from wealthy families. Their clear belief that the world was their oyster, that nothing bad was ever going to happen to them, was one I couldn't even scorn. They were probably right, after all. But the minute something went wrong, they fell apart. A bad grade was cause for tearful meetings with professors, phone calls from parents, make-up work. The guys, too. One of my teammates broke his ankle falling drunk down a flight of stairs and spent the next six weeks in a state of pure rage at the people responsible for building the stairs, Brooks itself for daring to have the stairs located where they were and the football coaches for reprimanding him. He was angry at everyone except the one person who was responsible for his drunk ass falling down in the first place: himself.

Tasha would never have acted like that. She knew shit happened and she dealt with it with the kind of inner strength that money and privilege could never buy.

But Tasha was gone. She was back in Little Falls, working her ass off to support herself and her family, probably dating. I couldn't even think about her dating other people without wanting to hunt them down and rip them apart, so I tried not to think of it.

But yeah, people noticed. The guys started giving me shit for it. Anytime they spotted a girl trying to flirt her way into my good graces (and that was often) one of them would come up to us and warn her off, tell her she was wasting her time because I didn't have room for girls in my life, I was too busy memorizing poems for Lit class and making myself kale shakes. It never worked, either. It just made the girl in question see me as even more of a challenge. And remember, these ladies were not used to hearing the word 'no.' The come-ons were pretty crazy. A few of them did things like cornering me in bathrooms at parties and dropping to their knees, smiling up at me and biting their lips as they reached for my zipper.

My sex drive wasn't dead. It just wasn't interested in any of those easy, vapid girls at Brooks. No matter how much I tried to exorcise Tasha's ghost from my heart, it always came back.

After a year or so of taking shit for my monk-like ways, I finally met a girl I could spend time with. Her name was Jess and she had long red hair and a friendly, outgoing manner. We were at a party when I ran into her in the kitchen, just taking a breather from the antics. I remember looking at her, waiting for the come-on. And then realizing she was doing the exact same thing - waiting for me to hit on her. When it didn't happen, she just giggled and apologized.

"Sorry, Kaden. You are Kaden Barlow, right?"

"Yep, that's me."

"Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, sorry about that. I guess I'm just so used to fending off frat boys that I don't know what to say when one of them doesn't immediately try to get into my pants."

"You might be surprised," I told her. "Being the quarterback kind of puts me in a similar position, believe it or not. The girls here put the girls in high school to shame when it comes to knowing what they want and going after it."

She leaned back against the kitchen island and offered me her hand. "I'm Jess, by the way. And I promise not to try and take advantage of you."

I laughed and asked her what she was studying and we ended up spending the rest of the night chatting to each other. At one point one of the other football players - a meathead named Troy - came in and widened his eyes at us.

"Damn!" He yelled, to no one in particular. "Barlow's finally going for it! You good, man? Do you know where to put it?"

If he hadn't been so drunk he could hardly walk I would have told him to fuck off. As it was he soon lost interest and wandered off.

"Sorry about that," I said to Jess, who was watching the interaction with amusement. "Football players aren't well-socialized."

She laughed and shrugged. "Yeah, I kinda figured that out my first week here."

We kept talking and it was actually strange to be in that situation - alone, with a girl - and not feel like she was going to try and jump on me at any moment. It was Jess herself who brought it up, in a pause in our discussion of football players and football culture at Brooks.

"Just so you know," she said, "I'm not single. I'm not trying to be rude and it doesn't feel like you're hitting on me but if you are, I just wanted to let you know. You know, so you don't waste your night talking to a girl who's just going to turn you down at the end of it."

"Oh that's OK," I said. "I'm not single, either."

It was only a few seconds later that I realized what I'd said and tried, clumsily, to correct myself:

"I mean, I am single, but I'm not looking if you know what I mean? It's a huge relief to be able to talk to a woman and not have to worry about whether or not you're going to stick your tongue down my throat at the first opportunity."

Jess giggled at that. "It's funny, isn't it? You guys are like the alpha males of the place but in a weird way you have to worry about the things women worry about, don't you? Getting hit on all the time, stuff like that. Is it really that bad?"

I shrugged. "Yes. I guess the vast majority of us - the football players - just enjoy it, though. Like, it's not a bad thing if you're into it, you know?"

"Yeah, they've got a buffet of women in front of them and they're determined to sample every dish before we graduate."

I nodded. "Yeah, pretty much."

"So you're not single then? Or you are?" She asked, catching me in my own confusing statements.

"Uh," I said, thinking. "I'm single. Completely single. I guess. It's so weird to be talking about this, I don't tell anyone this - but the truth is I don't think I've gotten over my girlfriend back home. My ex-girlfriend, I should say."

"Ah," Jess nodded knowingly. "I understand. Was she your first?"

"Yes. I mean, no. I mean-"

"Wow, this girl really did a number on you, huh?"

Jess was joking, continuing the conversation in the light-hearted vein it had been started in, but I was starting to get annoyed at myself for being so flustered. What the fuck. I hadn't seen Tasha for well over a year, why was I getting all tongue-tied about her in the middle of a party?

"Nah, it's not that," I said, which was the exact opposite of the truth. "I just wasn't sure what you meant. She was the first girl I loved, yeah, but she wasn't the first girl I was with. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah. I mean, you were the quarterback in high school too, weren't you? I bet your bedpost is probably one big notch."

Part of me wanted to protest that. It made me sound like some sleazy player. But the truth of it was that I
was
a sleazy player - or I used to be. Before Tasha, anyway. And now I was in college surrounded by young, willing women throwing themselves at me, and none of them raised any interest in me at all.

"What about you?" I asked, eager to change the subject, feeling that I'd already revealed too much, and to a stranger at that. "You said you're with someone?"

Jess gave me a rueful little smile. "Yeah. It's sort of the same thing as you, though. He's back in our hometown, we're trying to make it work."

"And is it?"

"So far. I mean, it's not easy. And it makes me feel like kind of an outcast with all my friends dating around here at Brooks and me always on the sidelines. But it's only four years, right? I fly back to see him every holiday, we Skype almost every day. I miss him and we get into stupid fights a lot but we're doing our best."

I spent most of the night in the kitchen with Jess, just chatting about life. She was easy to talk to - probably because I knew she wasn't going to start ripping on me every time I admitted to having emotions, and she seemed relieved, as well, to have found someone who could maybe understand a little of what she was going through. At the end of the night we exchanged contact details and within a couple of weeks were firm friends.

When I had time we would meet up on campus. We tried it a few times in my dorm - our common area, the ex-ballroom, was perfect for hanging out - but she would just have to endure getting hit on by every single football player that walked into the room and that got old fast.

We learned a lot about each other's relationships - her current, mine former. Jess was full of questions about Tasha, about why we hadn't tried to make it work and all of that. Eventually, under her gentle but persistent questioning, the whole story came out.

"I don't know why she refused to even give it a chance," I said one day over some weird iced chai concoction Jess had insisted I try. "I mean, you're making it work, right? Sure it's not easy or perfect but you're doing it. I wish Tasha had just given it a chance."

"It sounds like she was scared to death," Jess replied, swirling the ice cubes around in her glass.

"What?" I asked, confused. "What would she be scared of?"

Jess took a sip of her drink and rolled her eyes. "Listen, Kaden," she said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but men can be really fucking dumb when it comes to women. Are you seriously asking me what she had to be scared of?"

I sat back, wracking my brain. Scared? Tasha? But we'd worked things out, hadn't we? At least about prom night and what happened there? "I don't know," I said, conceding the point. "I don't know. I explained the prom situation to her - eventually, I mean, when she would let me talk to her - I would never have done anything to hurt Tasha. I still wouldn't do anything to hurt her. I honestly don't see what she had to be afraid of."

"Yeah," Jess said, speaking a little slower. "You explained prom to her but did you ever look at the bigger picture? At the risk you were asking her to take?"

"What risk?!" I asked, hearing my own voice rising and feeling that same frustration I'd actually felt at the time with Tasha herself. "What the fuck?! I loved her, I didn't cheat on her and I was totally willing to go long-distance while I was away. You're acting just like her right now, Jess. You're telling me oooh, everything is scary etc. etc. but you're still not actually telling me
why
. Fuck!"

Jess looked at me over the table, raising a single, skeptical eyebrow and saying nothing.

"What?" I asked after a few moments had passed, still irritated by that cryptic female communication style I could never quite decipher.

"OK," she said, eying me. "I'll try and answer this on one condition."

"Sure. Yeah, anything."

"That you actually listen. I mean that you don't interrupt or argue, you just listen."

I was about to protest when Jess's words sank in. So I held my hands up and say back, saying nothing.