Chapter 19
Dunk
“McCoy!” Rash Deluca roared.
Then a two-sixty brick of muscle slammed into Dunk’s side and hefted him up in the air, half tackle, half hug.
“Rash!” Dunk roared right back, grinning fit to split his face.
Rash dropped him back down and they slammed together again, slapping each other on the back with enough force to knock any normal person right over.
“Damn, it’s good to see you,” Rash boomed with one last back clap.
“There’s my bag,” Dunk said, loping forward to the luggage carousel at San Francisco International Airport to heft up his duffel bag.
“Still packing light, huh, dude?” Rash laughed. “You need to piss or grab some coffee or you ready to roll?”
“Let’s roll,” Dunk said, letting Rash lead the way to short-term parking.
Even in their early thirties, the two former college football players were both still in immaculate shape, their posture still straight and their bodies still wide and thick with muscles. Dunk hadn’t seen Rash in a few years, since he’d moved to San Francisco for a new job, but they’d kept in touch since college. Rash had been the only player, really, to stay friends with Dunk after his accident; for those guys, football had been life, and if Dunk couldn’t play, then they didn’t have shit to say to each other.
“Nice car,” Dunk laughed when Rash brought him to a lime green Honda Fit. He got in on his side, immediately adjusting the seat so it was as far back as it would go, then tossed his duffel in the back.
“Hey, I live in the city,” Rash protested. “It’s crazy to even have a car.”
“Whole lot different than driving around in Lexington,” Dunk said.
He’d been to some big cities—D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, and Austin— but this already felt totally different. It was more than the vague sense of ocean nearby, even before they crossed the bay, and the way he felt the high temperature cool as they traveled. It was more than the people, too; Austin had had plenty of hipsters, but San Francisco was on a higher level. Dunk felt himself gaping like a country boy who’d never seen girls with half their hair shaved off or guys with jeans as tight as football pants.
“So welcome to my neighborhood,” Rash said.
Dunk laughed at all of the Italian flags and asked, “Really, man? You moved to the Italian neighborhood? Are you treated like a prince here?”
“No,” Rash retorted with a snort, punching Dunk in the arm. “These days it’s just a cool neighborhood more than it’s really Italian. I picked it for the restaurants, yeah, but also the shitload of bars,” he explained, waving at the many bars they were going past.
He zipped around a tight curve into an alley, where he somehow wedged the Fit between two other tiny cars. They got out and Dunk stretched a little, stiff since he wasn’t used to being still for that long unless he was sleeping. Grabbing his stuff, he followed Rash up an exterior metal staircase and into an apartment. “Welcome to my palazzo,” Rash joked.
Dunk scanned the place, his eyes catching on the throw pillows on the couch and the framed pictures of the ocean, some forest, and a vineyard.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Dunk asked off-handedly.
“She’ll be home in a couple—damn it, McCoy! She wanted to surprise you,” Rash groaned, flopping onto the couch. “You have to fake it.”
“Why would your girlfriend want to surprise me?”
Rash flashed Dunk a smile he’d never seen on his old friend before, this cocky, smug, smitten thing that actually made Dunk really fucking jealous, damn it. “Because it’s Bessie George.”
“Coach’s daughter?” Dunk gasped, dropping onto the couch next to Rash, picturing their college football coach’s daughter. Last time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a Bachelorette sash… “I will absolutely pretend you didn’t ruin the surprise, because I need her to tell me everything.”
“Yeah,” Rash agreed. “Okay, you want to hang here for a while until it’s time to head out to dinner, then meet up with Bessie down the street?”
It was a solid plan, so they caught up, throwing old wild stories at each other to reminisce, until they went to get some truly amazing pizza. Once they’d massacred two giant pizzas weighed down with Italian sausage, they moved to one of the bars. The place was packed, the prices were ridiculous, and the women stared at him way more than he was used to.
The women checked out Rash too, but they moved on right away because he was pumping out that I’ve got someone perfect and I don’t even see you as a sexual being vibe. But with Dunk, they… well, they were leering.
“What is going on with these girls?” Dunk finally asked.
“We don’t get many men like you in here,” someone purred, a hand hooking over the top of his shoulder and practically groping it.
Dunk backed out of the touch and turned, ready to politely get his space back, but wound up with a face full of black waves as Bess George hugged him half to death. “McCoy! You’re here!” she shrieked.
He didn’t need to help her steady herself after she stepped back to know she was already well on her way to drunk. “Okay there?”
“Happy hour after work with the girls!” she shrieked, aiming her thumb towards one of the groups of women. Rash chuckled and curled one hand carefully around her waist to pull her against his body. “And since this hulking giant moved into the neighborhood, you’re the biggest man these girls have seen in San Francisco!”
Dunk choked on his beer. “What!”
“She means tall, dude,” Rash reassured him with a snicker.
“There are so many skinny guys here that a big guy like you or Rash draws a lot of attention. These girls convinced themselves that skinny hipsters with big beards are the best. But as soon as a country boy or a farm boy shows up, they start to drool. You’re going to clean up!”
“Huh,” was all Dunk could come up with to say.
Back in the day, that would’ve made him grin like an idiot and high-five Bess about twenty times. He would’ve practically swaggered over to meet her friends, lavishing them with his big smile and his dumb one-liners and his charm. He knew that that was what Bess and Rash were expecting him to do right now. But he wasn’t about carefree, painless nights of casual fun anymore.
“I’d love to meet your friends,” he finally said, after he realized that Bess was staring up at him with slightly glazed, expectant eyes.
Rash ducked his face and snorted so hard, Bess’s hair shook.
“You’d love to meet them?” Bess repeated in confusion.
“Someone got your dick and balls on lockdown back in Maybelle, McCoy?” Rash drawled.
Shaking his head, Dunk smiled broadly, maybe a little too broadly, to cover up the flash of regret. “Nah, I’m a free agent. But I’m not twenty-two anymore, Bess. I don’t just walk around hitting on every damn woman.”
“But… but you’re Dunk McCoy!” she sputtered, flapping her hands.
Rash studied Dunk from behind her.
“You love all women, and we all love you! You’re so sweet and funny, and you’re real hot. You… you help old ladies cross the street and you kick ass at frisbee golf and you give a lady almost any damn thing she asks for!”
“How the hell would you know that?” Rash demanded, eyes flashing.
Dunk’s hands whipped up placatingly. “Whoa, man, I never—”
“Girls talk, Rash, unlike men,” Bess said with a roll of her eyes, then she twisted to lock eyes with him and added, “Anyway, you know you’re the first player I ever slept with.”
“Aww, that’s so cute, you two,” Dunk told them, showing off that classic shit-eating grin for Rash. “So nice you found each other, now that your love isn’t forbidden by Bess’s daddy anymore.”
“Thank you,” Bess said, then slipped out of Rash’s hold. “I’m going to get back to my girls. Dunk, you let Rash grill you and then come join us. You better show these poor deprived California girls your smile and charm.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dunk agreed graciously. He’d never flirted for the express purpose of getting a woman into bed, so even though he wasn’t into carefree anymore, it didn’t mean he hated flirting now, for God’s sake.
Bess tripped over to her friends, Rash keeping a sharp eye on her until one of her friends had seen her safely sat on a high stool.
Then he crossed his arms and prompted, “So?”
“So, what?” Dunk asked, playing dumb, feeling mulish. He’d come to San Francisco so that he and Chase could have a fucking awesome week-long road trip together to bring her car to Maybelle at last. Dunk had flown out a couple of days before her just to see Rash. He didn’t want to spend that time bemoaning his every romantic misstep with Daisy.
“So what happened, dude?” Rash explained.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Dunk muttered, tossing his hands up. “The usual, man. I met a girl, I was crazy about her, and she had a lot of shit going on in her life and I wasn’t getting enough time with her, so we split up.”
Dunk was expecting a grilling like Bess had warned him, but Rash just clapped him on the back. “Tough break, dude. It’s hard when you love a lady and she’s your top priority, but you’re not her top priority. Not cool.”
“I—” Dunk started and then stopped talking right away. “That’s not it.”
“It’s not just some bullshit about how you’re the star and you expected to be her star too, is it?” Rash fired at him. Here was the grilling, then. “It’s not some immature butt-hurt about how she cares about her job or her friends or her hobbies or whatever as much as she cares about you?”
“No, my mama raised me better than—”
“And you gave her as much time as she told you she needed to figure out how to rebalance her life once you became a big part of it, right?”
Dunk shoved Rash.
Not a first-move-in-a-bar-fight kind of shove, but a hard enough shove that Rash had to take a step back. Only one, though.
“What do you know about it?” he muttered.
“Listen, dude, have you ever tried to keep a girl before?”
Dunk jerked back from his big stride away from Rash towards Bess and her girlfriends. In all the times his friends back home had probed into what had happened with Daisy, no one had asked him that before.
“No,” he admitted petulantly.
“It ain’t the same game as getting her, McCoy,” Rash told him. “Sports players, competitive guys, we love that chase, dude. We love it so much we call sex scoring. You tell the boys you coach that they got to earn the win, right? That it’s not just flashy touchdowns and crowd-pleasing hits, right? You tell them it’s the two-a-day practices when it’s a hundred and five in the shade, it’s maintaining good grades so they can stay on the team. This girl… McCoy, the right girl, you want her to be your co-captain, you feel me? What she’s dealing with, her choices and her decisions, they’re every bit as important as yours. You got to back her up without question every time, even if it means you get sacked a couple times.”
Dunk growled in frustration. “Why does every person on the fucking planet think that I don’t know that?” he roared, unable to hold it in anymore. “Why do my best friends assume it’s me who fucked up? Why won’t anyone even consider the possibility that all of what you just said is great, but only if Daisy Rhys believes the same thing? You think it was easy for me to tell her that she wasn’t giving me what I need emotionally? You think I didn’t feel stupid and desperate and whiny? But I’m allowed to want too. I get to make demands just like she can. And she’s supposed to take a few hits for me too, you know? And she didn’t, or wouldn’t, or couldn’t, whatever it was. I’m a good guy, a team player, and I loved her, man, but that girl doesn’t know what being on a team means.”
“Wait—”
“I’m going to meet Bess’s girlfriends,” Dunk said, shaking his head sharply. “I don’t want to fight about this. Thanks for the advice, but I know exactly what part of the stuff with Daisy was my fault and what was hers.”
Striding off, Dunk went past Bess’s friends and outside, pacing up and down the block, weaving around the smokers and packs of people out.
Bad enough that the women in Maybelle had gotten a tiny bit reserved with him after he and Daisy broke up, as if they couldn’t figure out whose fault it was so they couldn’t one hundred percent love him anymore. Bad enough that Daisy, Jesse, Leda, and Chase were like four peas in a very tight pod these days, so that a fraction of the loyalty that had always been for him was gone because now they were loyal to Daisy, too.
Bad enough everyone thought he was so dumb, he didn’t understand love or relationships, or what balance and sacrifice and needs were.
“Dunk?” Bess called, almost tentatively.
“Yeah, Bess,” he said, turning around and forcing his shoulders to relax so that he didn’t look menacing in the shadowy street. “I’m okay.”
“We don’t think you’re dumb,” Bess burst out then bit her lip. “Rash and me, we don’t think you’re dumb. And I’m sure your friends at home don’t, either. I’m sorry if people’s advice has been… condescending. I’m sure it’s just because we know you don’t have much experience with girlfriends, instead of your easy non-things.”
Dunk slumped against the wall behind him and ran his hands through his hair. “It’s a fair guess. That I’m dumb about relationships.”
Bess winced, but then she whacked her hands on his biceps and said in her imitation of her dad’s pre-game pep talks, “Ain’t no guessing in love, boy! You’re on the field or you’re in the stands. If you’re on the field, then you’re playing your heart out! If you’re losing, it ain’t always cause you’re a bad team or a bad player! Regret is for people who never even tried out!”
That made Dunk’s bad mood disappear and he hauled Bess up into a bear hug, then tugged her back into the bar and over to her friends.
He slung an arm around her neck and grinned his biggest grin while Bess introduced him and the women to each other. When he winked at them, they giggled. He drawled, “It’s good to meet y’all. Now, do y’all know about the time Bess streaked across campus after she lost a bet to me?”
“McCoy!” Bess gasped in outrage.
“What, are you not wild anymore?” he asked innocently.
“How about you hold onto this beer instead of my girlfriend?” Rash grumbled good-naturedly as he joined the group.
Dunk let go of Bess dutifully and accepted the beer.
“So,” one of the women asked, “are you going to tell us about Bess’s wild streaking bet?”
“McCoy,” Rash groaned.
“Don’t get annoyed just because I got her out of her clothes before you did,” Dunk joked, winking at Bess while her friends giggled. “So there we were in Lexington, Kentucky. It was the first practice of Rash’s and my sophomore year and like any underage idiots, we’d had a party the night before to celebrate. It was like ninety-five degrees, so humid our sweat was sweating. We did a billion suicides and Coach George tells us to take a lap. I get a quarter mile in and just when I think I’m about to puke—”
“I puked!” Bess interrupted gleefully. “Right over the railing of the first row of the bleachers, right onto McCoy!”
Rash died, clutching his stomach in one hand and Bess in the other, while the women laughed and patted Bess sympathetically.
Dunk took a drink and went on, “Well, she puked on my helmet and my jersey, my cleats. I was so shocked and grossed out, I forgot I had been about to puke myself. I went over to the water table and dumped an entire thing of water over myself. Man, it felt so good, all that ice water.”
“Coach George was so pissed he made Dunk strip down to his jockstrap and run like ten extra laps,” Bess said, snickering helplessly.
“Were the cheerleaders around?” one of the women asked.
“Oh yeah,” Rash confirmed.
“Poor Dunk!” another woman exclaimed, wide-eyed in horror.
“Don’t feel bad, darlin’,” Dunk began, using the endearment out of reflex, but then acid filled his mouth because he hadn’t used that since Daisy, when he’d meant it, meant it so much.
While he fumbled to recover his composure, Rash barked out a laugh. “If Coach wanted to embarrass McCoy, it backfired.”
Bess nodded earnestly. “Those cheerleaders saw him running—the cup protecting anything from flopping—and he’s almost naked… Y’all ever seen a college-level athlete naked? Or shirtless, like working out?”
The women shook their heads, eyes glued to Dunk’s torso.
Bess obliged, tugging up Dunk’s shirt to show off his vee and abs.
He reached reflexively for her wrist, which of course bunched up every muscle in his torso, showing off his dedication and strength.
The women bit back sighs and moans.
Dunk pushed Bess’s hand away and his shirt slid down over his belt.
“Looks like if you ever get sick of coaching and teaching, you could have a very lucrative future in stripping,” Rash teased.
“Oh my God, you’re a coach and a teacher now?” one of the women moaned. “That’s like, totally unfair. And you don’t live here?”
“I told you,” Bess smirked at him.
“I’m here visiting Rash, and then I’m going on a road trip with my friend to drive her car from San Jose to Virginia, where we live.”
The conversation shifted easily to road trips—how many they’d done, who they’d gone with, where they’d stopped, the crazy things they’d done and the amazing things they’d eaten. Dunk had traveled for football, camped in the Smokies, and driven to the Virginia coast to fish, but he hadn’t done any of that in probably five years. And driving eight hours with six people to go fishing in Newport Beach was very different than this upcoming road trip from San Francisco to Maybelle with Chase.
They stayed for a few more hours, Dunk and Rash moving to sit at the bar after a while to leave the girls to themselves. By the time it was midnight, Dunk was exhausted since he was still on east coast time, and they went back to Rash’s to crash.