“Good work out there, Shane,” says the coach as I pass by him. He slaps me on the back in a congratulatory way.

I move into the locker room, filled with huge sweaty muscular guys taking off their clothes, stripping down to nothing.

It’s not uncommon to see my teammates walking around completely naked, their cocks hanging and dangling like it’s nothing.

Not that it bothers me. I’m secure enough in myself. There are a couple guys who make great efforts to hide themselves behind their towels and stuff. I figure those are the guys who feel uncomfortable seeing other guys naked.

Me? I just do whatever’s easier. And it’s easier not to use my towel.

It takes a while to get off my pads and start stripping off the gear I wore for today’s practice.

The season is starting soon, and this is one of our last summer training sessions of the year. I couldn’t be happier. I can’t wait to get onto the field and really destroy.

It’s my second year in the league, my second year with the Red Panthers, a new and up and coming team.

Well, up and coming is a loose term. It’s their third year in existence, and their first year was absolutely abominable, completely horrible. I came on in the second year, and helped bring the team up to a respectable standing. But we weren’t anywhere close to getting to the finals.

But this year… this is the year when we’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones. I know I’m going to carry the team to victory. I want it, and I want it bad.

I’ve cleaned up my act. Clean eating. Clean living. No partying. Just working out, hard, as often as I can.

I’ve grown since college, getting even more muscular. That’s what a strict regimen will do to you when you’ve got the right body for it. And my body just seems to want to grow. Not that I’m huge like a linebacker, but my body’s getting hard. Hard and strong, just the way I want to be.

I’m glad I got drafted by the Red Panthers. Nobody understood it at the time. They thought I’d wanted to go to a new team, one of the established brands, so to speak. But I saw an opportunity. I saw an opportunity to create something new, to do what no one else had done before, which is carrying a new team to victory. And I knew it wouldn’t happen in my first year. There was so much to learn. There were plays to study, there were connections to make. I had to bring the team together as a cohesive unit, rather than existing just as a group of individuals who were bummed about being on a brand new team rather than the one that always wins everything every year.

This is the year. We’re going to make it.

“Nice work, Shane,” says Bobby, a wide receiver.

“Thanks, man,” I say.

“You coming out with us tonight? We’re going to celebrate the start of the season.”

“I don’t think so, man,” I say. “I’ve got a workout scheduled.”

“A workout? Are you insane?”

I laugh.

“You just had a workout here. Isn’t that what we call it?”

“This is just training,” I say, wiping the sweat from my brow. “Tonight’s when I actually work the muscles.”

“You must be lifting some damn heavy weights,” he says, eying my massive muscular thighs.

“That’s the only way to do it.”

“But come on, Shane. You can miss one workout. We’re heading over to Thompson’s place. He’s going to have women, man. Some group of Russian models or something. They’re tight as fuck.”

“I’ll pass,” I say.

“Whatever, man, give me a call if you want to stop by.”

I nod at him and he heads into the showers.

Half an hour later, I’ve finished changing and showering, and I’m heading to my car in the parking lot.

“Shane!” calls out someone.

I look over my shoulder.

It’s coach, jogging slowly up to me.

He’s an older guy, and he’s got a lot of extra weight around his middle. He used to be a hell of a quarterback, though, back in the day. I think he’s got a bit of a drinking problem now, though, which doesn’t help with the extra weight.

“What’s up, coach?”

“Just wanted to say you’re doing a hell of a job out there,” he says, panting slightly from the exertion of jogging up to me.

“Thanks, coach.”

He nods his head, still trying to catch his breath. “I just wanted to let you know… You know the guys really look up to you… and…”

“Yeah,” I say. “I just wish they’d take it a little more seriously sometimes.”

Coach chuckles. “They want to have their fun. They want to live it up while they can.”

“I used to be the same way,” I say. “But some things are more important than having fun.”

“Winning’s a hell of a thing,” says coach. “But it’s not everything.”

“That doesn’t sound like it could possibly be coming from the coach that I know,” I say.

Coach chuckles. “It’s a hell of a thing,” he says. “Like I said… but… sometimes I worry about you, Shane. It’s great to be working out and everything, but you’re never at any of the parties…”

“You heard about that? What’s the big deal? I want to work out. So what?”

“I heard about it, yeah, but that’s not the point. There’s not much that goes on here that I don’t know about.”

“What are you getting at, coach?” I say. “I don’t like all this beating around the bush.”

Coach knows where he stands with me. He knows I speak my mind, and that I could knock him out in a second flat, a single punch. Not that I would do that. Well, unless things got really ugly.

He may be the coach, but I do what I want. I’ve never been the type to follow orders.

“It’s just I never see you with a woman, Shane,” says Coach. “It could help relax you… I know the women are just dying to be with you…”

“I’ve got that sorted out, thanks,” I say, tersely.

I turn away from him and walk to my car, a Jeep that doesn’t have any doors or a top on it right now. I like the feeling of the open air as I drive it. It feels like I’m out adventuring.

I crank the Jeep and drive off, leaving coach standing in the parking lot.

He’s right. It’s been a long time since there’s been anything like a girlfriend in my life.

But that’s because of her.

She haunts my dreams.

I still think about her.

I still think about that day in my dorm room back in college, when I came inside her twice. It was the best sex of my life. The most intense…

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had feelings for her. Real feelings that seemed to jump up out of nowhere. It sounds completely crazy to me, but it is what it is.

As I’m driving home with the wind blowing through my long hair, I have a sense of momentarily freedom, the type of freedom that I normally only feel on the field.

I’ve left a lot of my reputation behind me. Now I’m something of the serious team leader. The guys look up to me, but not for my crazy antics the way they did in college.

I can’t believe it myself, but apparently I’ve matured. What a weird feeling to have. What a weird thing to do, to mature.

I get onto the highway and for some reason my mind drifts back to her, to Lia. She called me once, but I was partying, drinking with my football buddies. It was the day of graduation, and I ignored her phone call. I was pissed at the way she had just run out of my room. I had a big ego, and maybe I still do. But I couldn’t believe that she had walked away from me like that. No one did that to me back then. There I was, giving her a second chance… I wanted to keep hooking up with her, and instead she got mad at me about the condom.

I tried calling her back the next day, but it went straight to voicemail. I knew that she saw the call and ignored it, because it didn’t ring more than once. I was too cocky and full of myself to try calling again.

Maybe I should have. Maybe she could have been the one.

The highway exit looms up ahead. My house is only a short five minutes from the off ramp, far enough away that I don’t hear the noise of the traffic, and short enough that getting pretty much anywhere is an easy commute. The best of both worlds, I suppose.

The house is too large for me. I bought it when I first got my contract. I was just balls-to-the-wall with excitement at having made it at having money. I didn’t really think things through. It’s not that I can’t afford it, but sometimes I wish I was just in a simple apartment that wouldn’t have all the complications of a huge house.

I park the Jeep in the driveway, get out, and head right to the gym in my basement.

The house is sparsely decorated. I have the rooms that I use, and then I have some that are completely empty. I found that it was simply too much work to bother decorating and furnishing all the rooms of this huge house.

Back in the locker room, I changed into my workout clothes. I’m wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt.

I’ve got free weights here. A lot of them. I’ve got it set up for Olympic style lifts as well as the traditional stuff. I prefer compound movements, like the squat, the deadlift. I pretty much keep it old school with my lifts. Once in a while I’ll use one of the fancy new machines if coach thinks I’ve got to work on a particular aspect of my stance or something. But, yeah, generally I like the feel of the steel, feeling the raw explosive power that my body needs to produce to move a weight. There’s nothing stabilizing it. Nothing keeping it in check except myself.

That’s the way I feel about my life sometimes. It’s hard to explain. But it all feels like it could come crashing down if I stop doing what I’m doing. That’s why I work so damn hard. That’s why I come home and workout after an intense practice.

Before doing my warm up routine, I open up a laptop that I keep down here. I’ve got it connected to a nice sound system. I use it to blast some serious tunes when I’m working out. There’s nothing that encourages me to lift heavier and harder than some heavy metal blaring through a state of the art sound system.

For some reason, a message pops up, telling me that I’ve got a new email.

I didn’t even think I had this machine logged into my email.

Oh, yeah, it’s the old laptop that I used in my last year of college. It’s still logged into my college email, the account that I haven’t used literally at all in the last two years.

I click on the icon to bring the message up.

It’s a weird looking email, from someone that I don’t recognize. The email is: LiaLeone2000—one that I’ve never seen before.

The email doesn’t have any text except for a link.

I click it, against my better judgment.

It’s some kind of video hosting site, one that I’ve never seen before.

The video surprises me more than any other video could.

It’s a video of me, and I’m completely naked, jacking off in bed.

What the hell?

I never shot a video like this, and I certainly never knew it existed.

This is really weird.

I go back to the email and see that it’s actually a group email. It’s been sent to a lot of other people besides just me. But they’re all blind copied, so I can’t see who they are.

Shit, this is weird.

Is this some weird joke by one of my old college buddies?