I drop the barbell with a clatter. “Will you shut up? I can’t lift 500 pounds with a hard-on.”
Hammer smirks. “Can’t have an orgasm by just breathing, huh?” I give him a one-fingered salute. “See, this is proof you need to have sex. That’s why you’re in college, dude. That’s why we play football. For the Grade-A pussy.”
I sigh. “Can we get back to the chick in Ace’s locker? Do you know her?”
Hammer is relieved to get away from the terror of dating and immediately answers. “She’s blond and hot. Do I need to know anything more about her?”’
“That’s all you got?”
“Her name is Lucy.”
I spin toward him, my mouth falling open. “What?”
It can’t be. I toss my towel into the bin and sprint out of the weight room. There’s a small group in the locker room but not enough to deter me. I arrow my way to Ace’s locker and shove his jersey aside. Sure enough, taped onto the back of his locker is a picture of Lucy, her arm thrown around Ace’s waist, looking into the camera and smiling as if she’s just had a good laugh. And Ace is gazing down at her like she just told him he’s going to play in the NFL.
Oh, this is so fucked up on so many levels I can’t even begin to count them.
9
Matty
Word of Ace’s situation spreads throughout the team like a nasty virus. Ace didn’t keep his voice down when he confronted Coach Lowe, and by noon, everyone knew the general gist of the problem because locker room gossip moves fast. The assistant coaches were dispatched to make sure each player understood that if one word leaked from this locker room about the quarterback situation, that player’s scholarship would be immediately pulled—no football, no college education, just a boot in the ass kicking you as far away from the Warriors as possible.
No assistant came to me. No, I received a special ass kicking from Coach Lowe for not handling my part of the deal with any kind of finesse.
“This is a surgical procedure, not a goddamned hatchet job,” he bellowed as he stood over me. Coach Lowe made sure that I was sitting so when his saliva-covered words rained out of his mouth, my head was in a good position to catch it all. He spent a good thirty minutes ranting on how inept I was and how I’d get the captaincy as soon as his ass turned green.
I bit back some stupid comeback about how his diet wouldn’t affect my play on the field, and just bent over and took whatever he had to give me. He’s my coach, after all. His word is law, and his verbal beat downs are the kind where you just lie down in an awkward position and hope he maybe feels weird as he fucks you.
After he wound down, he sent me out to reinforce the message from the assistant coaches—alone. No Hammer, Masters, Darryl. By myself, I tracked down and talked to every defensive player, all thirty-eight of them, even the walk-ons. It takes me five hours.
By the time I arrive home, I’m exhausted and pissed off and not in any kind of mood for Hammer to be sitting in my room. It used to be that I could go to Masters' apartment—he has a single at the top of the house—but now that he’s married, Ellie’s up there and the door is always locked because they’re fucking.
There’s no damn privacy in this house.
“What’s up?” I ask curtly, throwing myself into my desk chair.
“You need a beer.” He tosses me one.
I don’t break down at the sight of the cold booze, but it’s a close call. I twist open the cap and drain half the bottle. “Shit, that tastes good.”
“Where were you? We’ve been looking all over for you.”
I give him a “you’re shitting me” look. “Coach had me go to every defensive player to remind them to keep their yaps shut over this. Remember?” I spoke to Hammer first because he was loitering in the locker room waiting for me.
“You just got back?”
I nod and take another long draught. “Caught one dumbshit posting to a message board pretending to be an anonymous booster.”
“Ah hell. What did you do?”
“I told him that even when he isn’t on the field, he’s still a Warrior and a member of the team. We wouldn’t be on the opposing team sidelines telling them all our secrets during the game and we don’t after, either.”
Hammer pauses with his beer at his lips. “Shit, man, that’s good.”
“I also told him that if he screwed up again, we’d make him run suicides nude in the quad until he puked.”
“An appeal to his emotional connection to the team followed up with a threat of public humiliation. I like it.” Hammer tips his bottle toward mine. “While you were out doing Coach’s dirty work, Darryl, Masters and I compiled this.”
He hands me a folder. “More stuff on Mr. Texas?” I ask. I set down my bottle and flip open the folder. It contains a class schedule, a work schedule, and a couple notebook sheets with meticulously printed information. The handwritten notes had to come from Darryl, our engineering major.
“It’s everything you need to know about Lucy Watson. She works at the Brew House, takes sixteen hours, is a junior Public Policy major who enjoys spending her free time doing something called mock trial. She lives with two other girls—both babes—and weirdly has had no serious boyfriends since she’s been at Western.” Hammer reels off Lucy’s autobiography like he’s a narrator on the History Channel. “Ahmed said she broke up with her high school boyfriend before parents’ week her freshman year and that she’s had a series of hookups, mostly with a few fraternity guys her roommate Charity introduced her to, along with some classmates. There’s a list in there.” He nods his head toward the folder.