Chapter One
Simeon
“Bravo!”
On the television screen, a Fox News reporter chased after Adrián Bravo—the star linebacker of the New Jersey Predators—as he strutted out of his team’s training facility. He always walked with a strut, like he knew he was hot shit, and that was only one of the reasons I couldn’t stand him.
“Bravo, what do you think about your upcoming preseason game being against the Barons?”
Adrián came to an abrupt stop and wheeled around to face the reporter. He looked huge from the perspective of the cameraperson, and at six-four and two hundred and thirty pounds, he was. The camera had to pan up over the reporter’s head to get Adrián in the shot just in time for the world to see his twinkling brown eyes and cocky smirk.
“I think it’s gonna be a pretty sweet game.”
My eyes narrowed. He couldn’t be referring to . . .
The reporter took the bait so fast he’d have fell his ass off the side of the pier and into the river if he’d been fishing. “How do you think the recent controversy surrounding Brawley’s and Boudreaux’s sexualities will affect their performance?”
Adrián arched an eyebrow. “It won’t, unless Boudreaux thinks I won’t blitz his ass all over the field just because he’s out and proud. Balling is balling, man. But I’m pretty sure they’re both real on board with that.”
The reporter fell silent just long enough for Adrián to throw up the deuces, stare directly into the camera with his bright white smile, wink, and stroll away. With his book bag hanging off one shoulder and his sweatpants hanging off his ass, he was ridiculously fuckable. Too bad he was also over-the-top hateable.
“We need to fuck him up next week, Marcus,” I growled.
Marcus Hendricks, sitting on the carpet, looked up from his close examination of a jewelry catalog. He’d been scanning it all day without speaking, unless he was asking my opinion on a bracelet or a pair of earrings for his girl.
“Who? What are you talking about?”
I leapt off the couch and stabbed the remote control at the television. “Did you not just see that?”
“You know I don’t watch football coverage, Simeon. Especially on some bullshit Fox News. What were you thinking?”
The man had a point. Fox News was everything that was wrong with America, balled up in a single network that managed to be offensive as fuck when they weren’t being ignorant as fuck. And I ranted about this on the regular, but part of me liked to check it out from time to time. See how they were showing their asses this time. And they’d shown their entire asses, crack and all, ever since me and Gavin had flown the queer banner at the end of last season.
“I’ll rewind it for you.”
Marcus waved his hands at me. “No. I don’t want to see whatever you saw.”
“Yeah, you fucking do. Watch this shit. Just watch.”
I rewound the segment while shaking my head and muttering. Marcus sighed and shoved the catalog aside. I hadn’t even known Tiffany & Co. had a damn catalog. Whenever I thought of catalogs I pictured Fingerhut or whatever other mail-order stores my best friend’s mom used to scan when we were kids.
“Look,” I said, stalking over to the television until I was side by side with it. “Adrián’s sorry-ass talking mess.”
Marcus frowned at the screen for a long moment, watched the segment, and then shrugged. “He’s just being his usual dickheaded self. You name-drop him just as much as he name-drops you, so I dunno why you’re being all extra—”
“My dude. He made two gay jokes!”
“What? No, he didn’t.”
“Marcus! The game is gonna be pretty sweet? Me and Gavin know all about balling?”
Awareness dawned on Marcus’s face like the sunrise. “Ohhh. Oh shit. Man, what an asshole. And he did it so subtly you can’t really prove he did it.”
“See!” I paced the room, anger building the more I thought about it. “Fuck, man, how is that okay? Why does he get away with that shit even after all the goddamn sensitivity training the League has had us do in the past few years? I know they just did it to cover their own asses, but you’d think they would at least step up and make their players pretend to give a damn.”
“You need to relax, babe. That shit was live. No one has had time to respond.”
He was right. I knew he was right. But that didn’t stop me from pacing the room and working myself up into such a rage that I felt the urge to have a Brawley-esque meltdown. Usually I was one of the most easygoing guys in our crew. The one who let conflict roll off my back like water off a duck, and who tried to mediate problems within our own team. I was the one the media loved and the fans adored . . . even after I’d come out.
All that changed once I was face-to-face with any of the guys on my former team. There was something about the Predators that had been toxic for me from the very start. I’d been a third-round draft pick for them, and I’d jumped at the chance to be on a team known for being ruthless on the field. When I was a kid, that had been bomb to me. I’d looked at them like misunderstood warriors since the media often dwelled on the negative rumors surrounding their brand.
But then I’d spent my first year in their locker room, and it had been the most poisonous environment I’d experienced in all my years of playing ball. The kind of aggressive homophobia that had driven me out of my skin because I’d been so damn scared of any of them finding out that I was gay. Gay as fuck. I hadn’t been that terrified of being outed in high school or when I’d played at LSU. But the Predators? I’d regretted signing with the New Jersey team as soon as I’d done it, and had been halfway glad to have only gotten as far as their practice squad.
Adrián hadn’t been the worst. In fact, he’d been one of the few I’d felt safe around. But that had changed when the Barons signed me, started me after their original QB wound up injured, and we’d trounced the Predators at every game. Instead of seeing it as me bettering my career and making a smart business move, Adrián had accused me of handing over the Predators’ playbook to a longtime rival.
We’d hated each other ever since. Including an unfortunate scuffle in Ibiza.
“Should I tweet him?”
“Do not tweet him.”
Marcus and I glared at each other as I clutched my phone.
“More people will watch if they remember we hate each other.”
Marcus’s mouth twitched.
“I could tweet Fox News instead.”
He flopped backwards with a loud, despairing groan. With his long arms and legs splayed out, it looked like he was doing a huge snow angel on our pain-in-the-ass white carpet. If there was one thing I’d learned once we’d bought this giant mansion after signing with the Barons, it was that two dudes who liked to party and host wing-eating contests had zero need for a white carpet. His girlfriend, Jasmine, agreed.
“Do what you gotta do, Simeon, but don’t come crying to me when Gavin gets pissed that you broke your promise at the start of this season to keep it clean. The last thing we need is more drama after what happened last year.”
What happened last year was Gavin Brawley, our tight end, getting suspended for the entire season while under house arrest. He’d chased down and assaulted a Predators fan who’d recorded me hooking up in a club bathroom, and had threatened to out me. I still blamed myself for what had happened, even though I’d begged him not to get involved. I’d known Gavin for a long time, and it would have been hard not to predict where that confrontation was going. But he’d driven off in pursuit of the guy before I could stop him.
“Look, it’s just a tweet, sugar bear. Stop trying to be my daddy—”
“Nobody wants to be your daddy. Not even your own daddy.”
I choked on a laugh and looked around to find something to throw. After settling for the remote control, and smiling triumphantly at his pained grunt, I fired up Twitter. Commenting on social issues wasn’t exactly out of the norm for me—I did that and still posted funny cat memes or heckled my teammates. However, I didn’t usually comment on social issues relating to LGBT people. It was a whole new world for me, but I was about to go balls in for my million and a half followers.
Hey @FoxNews maybe tell your reporters not to bait folks into homophobic comments. How is that sports coverage? #YouHadOneJob
Fans care abt the athletic rivalry btwn @Barons and @Predators not ppl’s opinions on my sex life. @FoxNews is more like a gossip rag erryday
Beautiful. Who needed a press conference when I could drag someone with two hundred and eighty characters?
With my shoulders loosening and the throb in my head slowly easing up, I plopped back onto the couch. Looking at my notifications tended to be a mess, and this time was no different. A bevy of retweets and replies had my phone exploding—my fault for not turning them off—but it was one that caught my eye. From Adrián fucking Bravo.
Uh-oh . . . @SimeonBoudreaux is in his feelings again. I wasn’t talkin about your sex life, son. You fuckin wish.
I gripped the phone so hard I was surprised the screen didn’t shatter.
Marcus hopped to his feet and walked over to me. “Turn off your phone, man.”
“And let him get the last word?”
“Fuck the last word. I’ll respond. But you’re just gonna let him pull you into some pointless Twitter war that will amuse him and get you too aggravated to focus on anything else for days.” Marcus put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed them, fingers digging in hard. “He can say what he wants, but he knows his QB is an old-ass bastard with a weak arm, and his O-line is full of jokers who don’t know their right from their left.”
Okay, that was true. A tiny grin formed on my mouth, and Marcus smiled even broader in return.
“See? We got this, baby. We’ll show them on the field and leave it at that.”
* * *
We started out playing like trash.
Instead of the Predators’ O-line playing like garbage, it was our first team’s offense that fucked up. We managed to three-and-out three times and didn’t get a first down. Ricky Jordan, the O-line coach, looked like he wanted to beat the shit out of every single person on the field. The last time I saw a man turn that red, he’d come hands-free after letting me play with his prostate for an hour.
The good news was that our defense kept them from picking up more than ten yards. It was the slowest start to a preseason game I’d ever been part of, and it was frankly embarrassing. Our coaches reamed us all, Gavin looked ready to punch someone, and I wondered if Adrián was over there laughing his ass off.
Once we had possession of the ball again, things got more interesting. And by interesting, I mean they got brutal. If Gavin had a reputation for getting flags, the Predators’ entire team was known for it. As soon as the ball was in my hands, I passed it to Marcus, who took off running down the field like a bat out of hell. He rushed thirty yards before one of their tackles took him down by his face mask. Everyone waited for it to be called, but it wasn’t, and out of the corner of my eye I could see our head coach gearing up for a monumental explosion.
I shook it off and tried not to worry about the awful start to what would likely be an even worse game. In the next series, I faked a pass to Marcus, spun around, and sent it flying at Gavin. I saw just enough to know he caught it and let one of their tackles bounce off his large body as he ran towards the end zone before someone slammed into me. I oddly found myself laid out on the field.
Even with the stars dancing before my eyes, it made no fucking sense for me to have someone crushing me to the field a good second after I’d released the ball. Was this dude blind?
I pried my eyes open half a beat later to find myself staring up at Adrián’s grinning face. He spat out his mouth guard and said, “Guess you don’t know much about balling after all, motherfucker.”
My heart ratcheted up to match my rising blood pressure. I bumped my hips up against his, not giving one single damn that a ton of cameras were probably zeroed in on this moment.
“You wouldn’t say that shit if you got a taste, bitch.”
Adrián scrambled off me so fast you would have thought my crotch had set him on fire. I bounded to my own feet, grinning. The entire exchange hadn’t taken more than a couple of seconds, but considering the way our fans were going wild it was clear the team had made some headway down the field. I started to refocus on the game, but Adrián shoved me.
“Touch me like that again, and—”
“Is that an invitation?” I shouted over the roar of the crowd. “No thanks, sugar.”
He stood there panting and glaring, his tawny skin going bright red, right before he shoved me again. It was with enough force to hit the pissed-off mark on my kick-someone’s-ass meter, but I took a deep breath.
“Did it make you that nervous, sweetheart?”
I saw his eyes widen through his helmet, a definite sign of him losing his shit, right before he ran at me. He yanked my helmet off with one hand and grabbed my jersey with the other. My mind read the forward motion of his body as a head butt without any protection to my nose or teeth, and my self-preservation instincts reared up before I could stop them.
My cocked fist flew and caught him in the face, sending his helmet flying backwards. For a moment, he looked stunned. Like he hadn’t planned for any of this and now it was going further than he anticipated. That was probably why he gave a fuck-it shrug and came at me again.
For the second time in half a minute, I found myself on my back with Adrián Bravo on top of me. But this time, we were rolling around the field in a flail of arms and legs as the rest of our teams thundered across the field to separate us.
Well, the Barons tried to separate us. The Predators dogpiled me until I was being stomped out by at least three giant dudes. Pain exploded in my side and, terrifyingly, in my arm.
“Shit!” I screamed.
Adrián, who was still crammed on top of me by the rest of his stupid team, seemed to come into focus at my pained cry. He went from flailing to covering my body with his own and whispered in my ear, “My fucking bad, man.”
“Screw you, Bravo!”
The officials ripped us apart as flags were thrown. I was finally dragged to my feet, but not without pain slamming into me from multiple points. Adrián put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged him off.
My dignity was somewhere down in my cleats, and that feeling worsened once I looked around. Both Marcus and Gavin had their helmets off as they snarled at Predators, and even worse . . . everyone from our teams was on the field. Even fans were fighting in the stands.
We’d turned the preseason game into a disaster.