Quarterback Bait (3 page)

Chapter Four

Ash

Carson, with her nose like a bloodhound, picked up a long
pink caftan and held it up to the dusty thrift shop light. The fabric looked to
me like something a piano teacher in Santa Fe might find “fetching,” but in
another moment, my sister had draped the thing around her like a scarf.
“Picture this decked out with like, little glass baubles on the ends,” she
said. I dutifully imagined. “It'd beat
all.
”

I rolled my eyes, and pushed a hand through my sweaty hair.
Everywhere was so
sweaty
in Austin. This city had nothing on Denver.

“I didn't notice the red,” Carson said, dropping her muumuu
to pick up a limp lock of my hair. “Very Riot grrrl.”

“I'm trying a bunch of colors until I find the one that's
just right.”

“So you're like Goldilocks of Love?”

“
Exactamundo
.”

We continued to paw through the cavernous brown bins lining
the self-proclaimed “best thrift shop on Baylor Street,” but Carson's mind
seemed to have hopscotched away with the discovery of her...garment. Back on
the sidewalk, in the city's humid embrace, I leaned against the steaming bricks
and sighed dramatically.

“Okay, kid. Give it up.” Carson drew a pack of Virginia
Slims from a corner of her clutch (made from a license plate) and furrowed her
brow. Wrinkles were forming on my half-sister—which wasn't so crazy, given that
she was twelve years my senior. But perhaps because I'd always felt better kicking
it with Carson and her slightly mad bohemian friends, I didn't like to concede
the age difference.

In fact, I
never
liked to concede the age difference.

“Is it a boy?” she puffed, sending an elegant plume of smoke
in the direction of the setting sun. “Because you know I'm not great at that
kind of advice.”

“It's not a boy.”
It's a man,
I didn't say. Well,
more like I barely prevented myself from saying. As hard as it was to keep
secrets from Carson, I'd had to get good at secret-keeping years
before—sometime after stepfather number three.

The women in my family were good at few things, and
self-preservation above all things was one of them. We were the
flee-in-the-night type. We could dodge bill collectors, and all manner of
responsibilities. If men we loved were cruel to us, we could forget them. Ditto
to the cities.

My mother was also a master at the art of selective
memory—not in part because she'd spent half of Carson's childhood failing to
kick a heroin addiction. Anya Bennett was what some called a “high functioning
addict.” It had taken her co-workers at
several
State Farms across the
Bible Belt
years
to realize that they were sharing a break room with a
dope fiend. This was because my mother was likable, in spite of everything. It
was easier to believe that Anya was sleepy, that Anya was depressed, that Anya
was in an abusive relationship—than the fact that Anya had brought doom
entirely to herself. And to her two kids, of course.

Carson, reading my face, scrunched up her mouth in a
decidedly kid-like way.

“Is it Anya?” she asked, her voice already tired. Which was
fair. I'd gotten the best of our mother. She'd muscled into sobriety when I was
nine, with the help of her since deceased Aunt Shelly. Carson, however, had
endured years of absentee and downright abusive parenting. She and Mom only
spoke when it was unavoidable.

“Can I rant to you for like three minutes? Pretty please?”
Carson stubbed out her cigarette, and tuned her attention to the caftan in its pale
plastic bag. She held up three fingers, then nodded once.

“She's started going to one of those creepy storefront
churches. You know? The kind off the highway?”

“Ash, religion's a whole part of the steps. Some people get
more into it than others. Most of the time, you have to embrace a higher power
to get clean.”

“But this isn't like any of the churches Aunt Shelly took us
to,” I protested, finally lighting my own cigarette. The sun continued its
stumpy drift behind the limited skyscrapers, and for a second there was a cool
breeze. “It's like a cult-y situation. She says the Pastor there has
'discovered extra books in the Bible.'”

Carson choked on an inhale.

“Don't laugh!”

“I'm sorry! It's just—even
Anya
? A cult? Jesus
Christ.”

“I'm just worried she's going to come home with like white
Nikes or something.”

My sister cocked her head. “You're pretty young for a
Heaven's Gate reference, tyke.”

“You know, I'm so tired of people telling me I'm too young.”
The words fell out of me in my whiniest voice, which I realized did little for
my case. “I've done crazier things than so many older people. I've given our
mother a bath during a relapse. I've paid the bills and balanced the checkbook
since I was fifteen. I've worked since I was fourteen. I've even been taking
college classes, did you know that? English Lit and American History. I'm going
to UT a whole year early! This fall!”

Carson's eyes had glazed over again, but this time I didn't
care. I was on a roll.

“I've been having sex—safe, consensual, adult sex—since I
was thirteen! And I drive, and...”

“Okay, Ash. You know actual adults don't have to
prove
they're adults.”
“Only because no one ever asks them to,” I pouted. Carson shrugged. We lapsed
into the kind of silence that soothes.

Soon, the city would become the color it had been when I
regarded it from a roof top, at a crazy frat party in May. Perhaps even sooner,
that crazy frat party in May would take on the sepia quality of a distant
memory. It would be like I'd never kissed him, Mr. Tall Drink of Water. I still
kept swearing to myself that that night had been different. I'd done plenty of
crazy things in my life, but was still reluctant to categorize the chance
meeting with the perfect stranger as just another one of Ash's “life stories.”

“You
are
thinking about a boy,” Carson said, grasping
my hand and gently tugging me in the direction of the apartment she shared with
three other singer-songwriters and one “paranormal psychology” student. “I can
tell. Spill the beans, missy.”
“It's nothing. Just some stupid hook-up at a party.”

“That's how Tex and I met,” Carson muttered, wistfully.
Then, she pointed a long, bony finger in the direction of the early moon,
hanging high in the afternoon sky. “I believe in magic. Don't you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with—if your world was rocked, your world was
rocked. Don't downplay. Let it be a
magical
thing.”

By then, we'd reached my sister's house—an old clapboard
painted bright blue, with two bedrooms on each floor. An algae-glazed pool held
dominion in the backyard. I peered over the fence at the green water and
remembered the delicious feel of those ice cubes gliding down my back. That
single dramatic act had done something to my whole body. Whoever he was, he'd
woken me up. I laughed darkly, to myself.

“What's his name, lady?” Carson muscled her tan shoulder
against the sticky screen door. Even for half-sisters, we didn't look alike.
Carson had never known her father, but Anya maintained that he'd been a member
of the Choctaw nation. We had no real proof but my sister's dark, thick,
straight hair, the texture of a horse's mane—and of course the dollop of extra
melanin in her skin. Meanwhile, I could burn from walking around the city with
shoulders uncovered for an hour.

“Wait,” she said, turning. Her paint-splattered overalls had
already begun to catch early beams of moonlight. “Do you not know his
name,
Miss
Thing?

I slapped my sister on her denim-clad ass, enjoying the peal
of giggles this inspired.

“You little S-L-U-T!”

“It's not like that!” I shrieked, as she continued to taunt
me. “We made a pact to
not
exchange names.”

“Why would you do that?”

My tongue suddenly felt dry in my mouth. The reasons why—the
whole freaky map of possible reasons why—had actually never occurred to me
before. Or perhaps, I'd never allowed them to occur to me.

“Because... he's probably a serial killer, and I'm an
idiot.”

“Oh, Ash! Don't be so dramatic! I'm
sure
that's not
it.” Yet Carson didn't sound fully convinced. And when she finally eked the
door open, flooding the porch with warm light and the sounds and smells of her
groovy roommates existing in their kitchen, she turned to deliver a pitying
smile.

“Do you want to stay for dinner? Gonzo's making
eggplant...something.” I caught the whiff of something sweet at the same time
that I read the subtext in my sister's eyes. I was nobody's pity date. Ramen
with Anya for the third night in a row would do fine for me, at least until the
day I could finally escape that house.

“I'm good, babe,” I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss my
sister on her rough cheek. Carson closed her eyes at the contact.

“Don't think I've forgotten that someone's got a big
birthday coming up soon!” she hollered to my retreating back. I pretended to
hunch with shame inside my needless black hoodie, and heard Carson laugh as her
screen door slammed. If anything, the sounds of her beautiful home seemed to
grow louder as soon as they were closed to me. I pictured her roommates
dancing, ashing their cigarettes along the linoleum, playing games, making
crafts. Carson had told me—many times before—that being an adult was in fact no
picnic. But she sure had a way of making it look fun. A lot more fun, at least,
than the miserable purgatory of one's junior year of high school, in a brand new
town.

I picked my way through the city streets, following a Google
Map until I reached the one part of the city I'd come to recognize as mine.
Even though I'd been visiting Carson in Austin on short trips as soon as I was
old enough to ride a bus alone (eleven, in my mother's estimate), this town had
yet to feel like a cozy place to me. Besides, our mother couldn't be left alone
for too long. All my life, I'd had to focus most of my energy on knowing where
she was. And if she was feeding herself, and working, and going to the
bathroom, etc.

As I walked the few blocks to our condo in Coppertree, more
party sounds seemed to peek out from behind fences. Whole worlds, each of them
locked to the outsider. It made me mad. It
all
made me mad. I was a
tough fucking cookie, and Mr. Mystery was just some cagey college jock who
couldn't handle an edge...why was I still giving him real estate in my brain?
What had I even been doing, following him to that gas station in the middle of
the night? So what to his brown eyes and rugged hands, that freaky speech.
Though it could still make me wet, just hearing the words in my head:
I will
suck you dry...

I wasn't about to admit that I was lonely. But then, there
was no one to admit this to.

Chapter Five

Landon

June 2
^nd

“Yes!” she cried, caramel skin and curves twisting up my
sheets. The previous requests to keep it down had been useless. At this rate,
Yvette was sure to wake Coach Wells, but all that mattered to me in the moment
was that this evening's lady love ride the wave until it crashed on the beach.
I slammed against her shapely thighs harder, watching my cock plunge in and out
of the beautiful girl. Yvette grinned at me coquettishly, over one perfectly
freckled shoulder. She winked, and I squeezed my eyes tight.

We were bunked up two to a cabin at training camp, and
across the room, Denny snored through our fucking, unfazed. I tried to
concentrate again on the task at hand. Beautiful Yvette. She was the waitress
at Dee's, the diner that had quickly become a team favorite after five days of
training camp. Dee served burgers as big as my hand, and wouldn't judge a
football player for requesting a PBR before noon on a break day. With the
schedule Coach had us on, all of us were eating thousands of calories for bulk
anyways—so we were bound to spend a lot of time at the trough. Two guys had
already passed out, doing wind-sprints during the morning work-out.

Denny had drawn my attention to Yvette, after
not-so-patiently indulging yet another one of my Zora spiels. The girl had been
blowing up my phone since we landed, demanding second and third opinions on
fabric and song selection despite the fact that I very clearly didn't give a
rat's ass about a sixteen year old girl's
deb ball.
Zora's sister Betsy
had mousy brown hair, and she reminded me of the girls in my high school who
liked to kick around with the stage crew kids. The planning of her big day was
about as unsexy a subject as I could think of. But the whole text assault had
made me wonder, secretly, who Doll hung out with at her high school. What kind
of girl was she? Who were her friends? This was filed away under: questions I
wasn't supposed to be asking.

With a practiced swoop of her left leg (for Yvette had
informed the whole team that she hoped to be a dancer someday, if she could
ever get the fuck out of Dodge), my conquest rolled over on her back again,
affording me vantage of her neat, round tits as they shook on her thick frame.
She was a pretty girl. A kind girl. Denny had basically ruined her with his
eyes after our first lunch at the diner, before leaning across the table to
halt my rant and say, “Dude. Forget Zora. Somebody needs to tear that up, and
I'm already hunting the Southwest flight attendant.”

Did it bother me that my best friend had a way of talking
about women like they were actual pieces of meat, swinging in a butcher shop
window? Sure it did. But I realized this opinion made me the minority in a sea
of testosterone-charged linebackers on a sanctioned spring break. We got
released from training around 4pm each afternoon, and if one could rally after
a nap, there was plenty of fun to be found in Galveston. It hadn't taken three
days before most of the team had imprinted themselves on a “scene.” The whole
matter reminded me of a New York tradition called “Fleet Week” that Zora had
told me about, during one of our many, unfortunate
Sex and the City
marathons.
Fleet Week's apparently when all the Navy sailors on shore leave hit the town
to get their D's wet. Walking around in our practice jerseys and basketball
shorts, I felt of this kind of mass. Better put: women in Galveston seemed
especially interested in “getting to know” the UT football team.

But Yvette wasn't quite like the others, which was why I dug
her so much. She had a big curly coiled mess of hair, and after hooking me up
with a milkshake one slow night, she took off her apron and kept me company
till the end of her shift. She was a runaway, I'd been informed then. Didn't
like to say why. But she seemed awful proud of the life she'd begun to carve
out for herself, speaking confidently about the money she'd managed to squirrel
away, and the five year plan that would lead her to Birmingham. “They've got a
great ballet in Birmingham,” she'd said sweetly, drawing me in with a passionate
flicker in her greenish eyes. “People don't know, but they do.” Can you sue a
quarterback for wanting to see what a
dancer
could teach him?

This was our second fuck. The first had been fast and
desperate, in the bed of her pick-up truck behind Dee's. “Don't go falling in
love now,” she'd said, while scrolling the condom across my tip with her
tongue. “That's not at all part of this cowgirl's five year plan.”

We were on the same page there.

“Look at me when you come!” Yvette was saying now, sweat
collecting in the hollows of her lovely dancer bones. I gripped her shoulders.
I rammed into her supple cave, reveling in the smile that kept unfurling across
her face with each thrust, like a flag rippling in the wind. I leaned back and
put a discreet thumb on the mound of her clit, enjoying the view of her lovely
naked body. Her big green eyes widened, and she reached up to grab my
shoulders. Pulling me towards her and straining upward simultaneously, her
mouth rounded, and her breath came harder. I rubbed her in circles, faster and
faster. She let out a soft cry and her muscular legs tensed around me, creating
a pulse around my cock. Her eyelids fluttered, and she collapsed sweetly
against the pillows.

“
You
, my friend...” she began, but didn't bother to
finish the sentence. She just let out a callow kind of laugh. I took the
opportunity to ease out.

“Come back here, Larkin,” she said through a yawn. I smiled,
but didn't bother to correct the name fumble. “I
never
leave a man with
blue balls. I'm a polite ambassador of my city.”

“Get some sleep. I don't believe in blue balls. I was
brought up well enough to know that the lady comes first.” She opened her
pretty eyes and cocked her head, extending a finger to nestle in the hollow of my
chin. Girls say they're crazy for what they call my “superhero chin,” but it's
always made me a little self-conscious, truth be told. I'm convinced that the
little dimple looks like a butt. Just an extra butt, hanging out on my face.

“They sure don't make 'em like you anymore,” Yvette smiled.
Her teeth were white and rounded—slightly babyish. I bent low to kiss her on
the forehead, then wrapped her up in the threadbare quilt I'd brought from
home. She laughed her hard laugh again, and in a manner of seconds seemed to be
as asleep as Denny in the next bunk.

I eased myself slowly out of the bed, and took pains to
prevent my feet from creaking along the ancient wooden slats of our cabin. It
wasn't
strictly
true about the blue balls. While I'd never experienced
the
physical
pain that some men seemed to encounter when deprived of a
happy ending, whenever I fucked and didn't come I'd get this weird wave of
sadness. It entered every pore and clung to me until I fell asleep, usually. I
took ecstasy one time (with Zora, at a rave), and the next day's come-down was
like an amplified version of my blue balls. It's like it's hard to remember
what's good in the world, for a few crucial seconds. I know that sounds poncy,
but it's the truth.

I took a heavy seat on the porch, drawing the string tight
around my loose sweat pants. Galveston was humid as hell. From the fog of the
surrounding cabins, through a haze of buzzing mosquitoes and fluorescent
lanterns, I thought I could hear a few other couples going at it. That, or some
of my teammates were trying to pack in extra reps before dawn's practice. It
struck me that this whole tiny corner of America must smell like dude. Even
Zora's uppity perfume that cost two hundred dollars a bottle was better than
this air.

I was limp in my pants by then, bound up in reflection—when
she came ambling through my mind. With her ratty Amy Winehouse hair, and her
even stare. Seventeen. I'd been afraid of girls altogether when I was
seventeen, and I'd been Homecoming King and Class President. I'd been mean to
the kids you were supposed to be mean to, which I thought about now with a
shameful heart. If I'd met Doll when I was in high school, there was no doubt
about it—I wouldn't have been able to handle that much woman.

In my recurring dream, she wears a dress. It’s pinkish red,
and it suits her curves. She laughs at me, throws her head back to giggle. I
hunt for her behind trees. When I find her, she laughs some more. I hold her up
and spin her around, and our mouths collide in the air, and then a rain of ice
cubes start to fall out of the sky, slipping down her dress and my shirt. We
get all cold and shivery. We cling to one another. Sometimes she'd grin and
suddenly transform into Zora or Yvette, naked and splayed and lovely—but wrong,
somehow. She'd beg me to look at her when I came.

When I looked down, the hard-on was back. With a vengeance.

“Landon Sterling!” hollered the special teams coach, his
voice bellowing across the green. “Landon Sterling, we've got a call for you,
son!”

No sooner had I heard the words than Denny's blonde crew cut
bobbed across my field of vision, and I tumbled over my pal and onto the
ground. Lord knew what new drill this was supposed to be—I sure hadn't been
paying attention to the play call. I'd been ruthlessly distracted all week, and
wasn't exactly setting a shining example for a championship Longhorn season.

Coach Yeardley moved his hands back and forth above his head
from the sidelines, like he was signaling at an airplane. As a result, Coach
Wells blew his whistle, then came up behind his assistant and clocked him on
the back of the head with a clipboard.

“Better go. It's probs your fiancée,” Denny grunted in my
ear, extending a hand so I could peel myself off the green.

“Fuck you, asshole.”

“You're taking
her
last name, right? Like someone
who's really pussy-whipped?” Clay Hoskins—massive fullback, exemplary bio student—jogged
up to our little time-out, as the coaches conferred on the sidelines. His
dreadlocks looked especially heavy in this muggy Texas air.

“Leave Landy alone, Dee. Jay-Z took Beyonce's name.”

“That's the kind of thing only a pussy-whipped brother knows.”

Denny ducked, expecting a slug to the face, but Clay just
rolled his eyes and thumped me on the back. It was common knowledge that Clay
had long been engaged to one of the hottest girls at UT—Victoria Jenkins,
formerly known as Miss Texas 2013. We could make fun of that dude all we
wanted, but the fact was that he'd always have the supreme upper hand in the
lady department. Didn't hurt that he was a decent guy. Wouldn't hurt a fly, off
the football field.

I saluted Clay, then trudged off in the direction of the
sidelines. Wells gave me the stink-eye (rightly so, given the day's
performance), while Yeardley turned to guide me toward the locker room. When we
reached the door to his office, he gestured at a dangling pay phone in the
corridor.

“Hope it's not an emergency, kid.”

“Thanks, Coach.”
“I'm serious. Emergency would be one more reason for you to keep your head up
your ass, as 'posed to on the ball.”

I smiled tensely, then pulled my practice padding over my
head. I watched the phone swing back and forth on its ancient cord for a
second, mind racing with possibilities. There was only one person I could think
of who wouldn't know to contact me on my cell phone.

“Landon? That you?” croaked a voice. Pop's question
immediately replaced itself with a coughing fit. I held the phone away from my
ear.

“Pop, is everything okay?”

“Oh, sure, son. Everything's peachy.”

I pushed my hair back from my face, irritated by its falling
into my eyes. I never knew how Clay could play the game with all that hair
weighing him down—didn't it make it harder to run? From the doorway to his
office, Yeardley was indiscreetly peering at me over the lip of a playbook. His
eyes were narrowed with curiosity. He no doubt suspected a rat.