“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 * 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 *.”
“Not with that attitude you won’t.”