“You don’t regret not swimming with your friends? Because it kind of sounds like you do. That was a wistful note when you said the water looked so good.” He leans toward me again. “How about this. I’ll take all the risks and you just come along for the ride.”
“Matt, dating isn’t the risk. You’re the risk.” I lay down a few bills for my meal. “I’m not unhappy with how I live now. There’s nothing wrong with making measured decisions and weighing the risks versus the benefits.”
He watches me while I pull on my coat. “You’re right that there’s nothing wrong with how you’re living. I’m not judging that. I’m just saying maybe your life could be happier. And that sometimes taking a risk gives you big rewards.”
“And you’re that big reward?”
He smiles wide. “You won’t know unless you give me a try.”
6
Matty
“What crawled up your shorts and died?” Hammer bursts into my room the next morning. Hammer isn’t happy I’ve skipped going out with him.
I swivel in my desk chair, hoping my head blocks the computer monitor behind me. “Are you missing me when you go out to the bars? Is it difficult to pick up chicks when I’m not around? I told you that you got to stop using the line about being an advice columnist. That shit isn’t attractive.”
“Are you studying?” he asks incredulously, ignoring my insults. It’s three in the afternoon, and I can smell the booze on him even though he’s ten feet away. Granted, it’s Friday, and off-season Fridays are meant to be days spent drunk and lazy. “Is this because of the girl that turned you down?”
“Nope. Just trying to keep my head down,” I lie. Geez. I’m lying to randoms and to my best friends. The only person I’m being completely honest with is Lucy, and she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.
But I did take away something other than rejection from dinner last night. Lucy’s approach to risk-taking is crazy as all get out—who makes an extensive pros and cons list about shampoo?—but one thing she’d said had stuck in my mind.
I look at it from all angles. Every. Single. Angle.
Me, I’m a one angle kind of guy. As in, the easiest option available to me. The path of least resistance.
This particular issue needs more finesse. Coach wants me to persuade Ace to give up the quarterback position, for fuck’s sake. And to persuade the guys—including the offense, who are rabidly loyal to their QB—to support this course of action. They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, but in this case, I’m smashing the entire frickin’ carton. There’s no way to do this without pissing off some, if not all, of my teammates.
And seriously, when did I become the omelet chef in this scenario? I’m not sure I even want to be captain, dammit. Responsibility makes the back of my neck itch. I’d much rather be one of the happy, oblivious sheep than the stressed-out shepherd who has to guide them.
Except…the thing is, I can’t say no, not when it comes to football. This sport is in my blood. I live and breathe it. I’m good at it. And, corny as it sounds, I think I was meant for it.
I wasn’t ever supposed to play football. I’d been born prematurely, with a weak heart, having been nourished for the last twenty or so weeks in the womb by only a tiny bit of placenta. The rest had detached from the uterine wall. I was lucky to be alive.
My mom coddled me, and my dad watched me with worried eyes. I didn’t look like I could run a mile, let alone deliver a hard hit, until I was fifteen.
Somewhere along the line, I shot up like an unchecked weed. Filled out. Starting lifting and took to football as if I were weaned on Gatorade and leather.
One reason I’m so good on the football field is my uncanny instinct to know exactly which weakness I can exploit in the easiest, most economical way, ensuring that my hits at the end of the game are as hard as the ones at the beginning. Part of it comes from hours of film study, which helps me to immediately recognize what play is going to be run based on the position of the offensive players. The other part is God-given talent.
I operate the same way off the field. I don’t have to analyze or overthink the dilemma but just pick the solution that makes the problem go away the fastest. There’s no film study for life. Or if there is, I haven’t found it.
This is why, for the last four hours, I’ve been watching videos of Mr. Texas. The captain’s patch is currently burning a hole in my desk drawer, but I don’t want the captaincy bad enough to dick over my quarterback. I might not always love what Ace does on the field. There’ve been a few games when the offense couldn’t generate more than thirteen points and made the load on the defense fucking hard. And even though we won those games, a few of us grumbled under our breath. But thinking you’d like to kick your quarterback in the ass is one thing; doing it is entirely different.
Hammer studies me and comes to some inebriated conclusion that requires him to drag my reading chair from by the window over to the desk.
He folds his hands and gives me a serious look. “Do you have a fucking test or something? You can’t be failing any classes yet. The semester just started two weeks ago.”
“I’m not failing anything. You smell like you took a bath in a tub of vodka, Hammer.” I wave a hand in front of my nose. “Where were you?”
He lifts his shirt and sniffs. “Fuck, I can’t smell anything. Do I really stink, because I got a girl coming over in”—he checks his phone—“ninety minutes.”