Stadium of Lights: A Second Chance Sports Romance (15 page)

I
couldn’t believe
what a nightmare it was, getting back from summer break. Had I actually looked forward to being with my team again?

“Come on, fellas!” I could have strangled Zack for being such an obnoxious prick. He was barely tolerable the year before when we were juniors on our way to the national championship. Now that we were seniors and it was “all on the line,” he’d kicked it up a notch. I could tell from the looks on the other guys’ faces that I wasn’t the only one wishing I could punch him. But I knew it was impossible to get away with hitting University of Michigan’s star quarterback. They’d bring the burning torches and pitchforks to my room at the frat house.

“Zack, give us a break,” I muttered. When I glanced up from my position on the rowing machine, I saw Preston grinning at me. He was the only one who heard, or that was the way it looked.

I wasn’t the only one who took it easier than I should have over the break. I did my conditioning work and kept myself running and lifting weights. Still, I’d slacked off. It seemed like just about everybody had, except Zack and Max. It made sense. They were the two with the most hope in the upcoming draft, being the team’s best football players. I was a decent center, but not in their league. Besides, I’d had other things to keep me busy all summer.

The first hard workout after getting back to campus was painful. Zack wasn’t making it easier. I took off my soaked yellow Michigan Wolverines T-shirt to mop the sweat off of my face. The whole weight room reeked of pungent sweat and frustration as we worked off months of taking it easy.

“Uh-oh,” Zack laughed, pointing. “Jake’s showin’ off that six-pack again.”

“It’s an eight-pack, dick.” Everyone laughed, including Zack. At least he had a sense of humor—still, I worked hard on my body, just as hard as anybody else. He acted like he’d never taken his shirt off to impress chicks while we played a pick-up game on campus.

I tuned him out and put my heart into rowing, working the stiffness out of my muscular legs. I’d been playing center since I first learned to hold a football. It wasn’t the most glamorous position. I didn’t get all the easy tail Max did, being the top running back. But I gave full effort to everything I did. And I still got more than enough tail when I wasn’t playing or training.

“How was your vacation?” Preston asked. He was beside me, on another rowing machine. As a running back, working his legs was always a top priority. He was one of the fastest guys on the team and one of my closest friends. I spent most of my time with him and Brad Cramer, another running back.

“It was the usual. A culture shock, after being around you guys.” Playing ball with the rich kids sometimes made me forget the world I came from. I doubted any of my teammates knew how it felt to get nothing for Christmas, but that was my reality. Football was my only ticket out.

Preston laughed. “Yeah, I hear you.” No, he didn’t. His family was almost upper-middle-class and even had a pool in their lavish backyard. I had visited him over the summer and swum in it myself. I grew up in a run-down rowhome in what used to be a nicer part of Detroit but fell apart when the factories shut down long before I was born. I never even saw the “good old days.” If I wanted to cool off growing up, I had to turn on the fire hydrant with the other kids on the block.

“Ready to get fucked up tonight, Wolverines?” Brad shouted, walking past me. “Gonna be some fresh pussy there, fellas!” That was how he always talked about women. They were fresh meat to him. I wasn’t a hypocrite—I had my share of one-night stands. That was all I had, generally. I’d decided when I hit college after my only girlfriend had broken up with me, that I wouldn’t tie myself down. It had worked for me so far.

“Hell, yeah,” I said, rowing harder, pushing myself to the limit. “It’s been too long.”

“No girls where you come from, Charming?” Brad snickered, using the nickname the senior players gave me in freshman year thanks to my looks—“like Prince Charming,” they used to say. How they knew what the hell he looked like, I could never tell. I guessed he had blond hair and a strong jaw, like me. Max and Zack walked past, chuckling at Brad’s joke. I didn’t pay attention to them, or the sounds of grunting from my friends as they lifted weights and ran races on the treadmills. It all faded into the background.

“Yo, man. Where are you?” I jumped when Preston’s voice fought its way through my memories of Melissa, our relationship, and how she broke up with me shortly after high school graduation. I’d run into her family a few times over the summer. They were friendly people, and they’d told me Melissa was in Punta Cana with her med school boyfriend. She’d always wanted better than what we grew up with in Detroit. I couldn’t blame her.

“What?”

“I asked if you wanted to come on a beer run with me later on. It’s my turn to pick it up.”

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, count me in.” I was glad he interrupted my thoughts since I was starting to go down a dark road.

I took a shower after my vigorous workout, washing off the smell of the weight room. Even after months of emptiness, we managed to quickly stink up the weight room again. It was a scent I’d always associate with football, the sweat, and discipline that went into it.

While I washed, I told myself to chill out. I was back at the university, with my team. Life was good. It was where I belonged. By the time I dried and dressed, I was whistling to myself and looking forward to a night of partying and probably getting laid for the first time in weeks. I had a lot of excess energy to burn off—there was nobody back home worth sticking my dick in unless I felt like losing it.

* * *

I
was
in a good mood until Coach called me into his office when he saw me walking by.

A lot of things changed with time, but our coach’s black ball cap and navy polo never would. I was pretty sure he wore them to bed. “Sup, Coach? I just got done working out. How was your break?”

“Good, good. Have a seat, Jake.” I took a seat, surrounded by plaques and trophies. For a tiny room, he managed to fit a lot of hardware inside. I folded my six-foot-four sturdy frame into one of the molded plastic chairs in front of his desk.

“What’s up, Coach?”

He pointed to a manila file folder on his crowded desk. “Know whose file this is?”

I didn’t like what I heard in his voice. The only time he ever sounded like that was when he got ready to tell us bad news. He took off his hat, running a hand over his gray buzz cut. That was another thing that would never change.

“I’m going to guess it’s mine?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Good guess. What do you think is in it? I mean, why am I calling you in my office to talk about it?”

I sighed and shifted under his stare. “It’s because I didn’t do well last semester.”

“That’s an understatement, Jennings, and you know it.”

I winced when he called me by my last name. Everybody on the team knew when he did that, it meant trouble.

“Listen, Coach. I could have done better. But you know better than anybody else how hard we worked last year. You don’t win the championship by burying your head in textbooks. Come on.”

“Excuse me, Jennings? Then explain how my second-string quarterback maintained straight A’s? Or when last year’s starter pulled a three-point-four GPA? Don’t give me that shit.”

I winced again. “But I’m not like them. I need more work to get good grades.”

“You’ve got smarts too, Jake. You and I both know this. Don’t tell me you don’t have it in you to pull down the grades and perform on the field. I’ve been coaching here at University of Michigan for a long time—I can tell the idiots from the rest. You’re not one of them.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He smirked, and his sun-wrinkled faced became even more lined. “You’re welcome, smartass.”

“I’m still over a two-point-O, so I’m in good shape for this season.” I never let myself dip below the base average for football players on scholarship.

“You’re just making it, Jake. I’m only hard on you because I don’t want to take any chances this year.”

“Coach, you don’t have to worry,” I insisted. “Look at the rest of my transcripts. The proof’s right there. I always end up pulling through.”

“You’re right. But like I said, I don’t feel like taking any chances. We’ll be coming off a championship this year, so you know the rest of the conference will be on us. I need my best players out there. Besides,” Coach added, eyeing me up, “the last thing you need is to sit out your final season. You saw the scouts running around after the guys last year. That’ll be you, this season. You can’t fuck it up. We’re the Michigan Wolverines!”

“Okay! I got you, Coach. I won’t,” I said, standing.

“Damn right, you won’t. So, that’s why I’m assigning you a tutor, who’s going to keep up with all your classes and report your grades directly to me. Every paper, every exam. Everything.”

“Whoa! What?” Stunned, I had to sit back down. “You can’t be serious. I’m telling you, I’m not playing around. I got this!”

“I’m not playing around, either. If I had it my way, you’d move out of that frat house and into your own apartment. I’d lock your ass up every night so you could focus and study. I hear about the stories that go on in that house. Girls, partying, and drinking. Just straight foolishness.”

“Coach,” I interrupted.

“Since I can’t do that, this is the next best thing. A tutor, Jennings.”

Speechless, I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Don’t act like I’m cutting your balls off. You’ll see it’s for the best by the end of the semester when you’re pulling better grades. Then you don’t have to worry about finals making or breaking you.”

I shook my head. “Is there any other way? I don’t have time to meet with a tutor. We have practice, games, and workouts—”

“Make the time. Besides, you should be making time to study, anyway. This way, you won’t be alone. You’ll be held accountable.” He winked. “It could be fun.”

“Man, fuck this,” I mumbled.

I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit jokes. The way I felt, it was a challenge not to take his latest trophy off his cluttered desk and throw it against the wall.

I couldn’t look him in the eye as I picked up my black gym bag and left the office. I walked down the long corridor, listening to the sounds of my friends’ laughter still coming from the weight room. I was glad none of them had seen or heard what went down just then. Zack, of all people, would never let me live it down.

I reached the empty parking lot of the Athletics building and got behind the wheel of my shining, freshly-washed red SUV. Of course, it looked like it might rain at any minute, so the car wash before heading to campus had been a waste of time. It was the way my luck was starting to run.

I heard Coach’s words echoing in my head. He would find the perfect tutor for me before Monday morning, and we’d meet each other then. Knowing him, I’d end up with some geek reject that had nothing better to do than study their life away.

I revved my engine before peeling out of the parking lot, cranking up the volume on my stereo as I did. Def Leppard poured out of the speakers, and it matched the mood I was in. Fucking grades. Fucking Coach. I wished he were standing in front of me so I could run him down. Maybe I would back up and go over him again.

“
I
swear
, Claire, you’re the only person I know who looks forward to getting back to school every semester.”

I turned away from the dresser to frown at my roommate. “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She rolled her blue eyes as she worked on her makeup. “I’m just saying that you’re so uptight. You’re always trying to get a jump on the semester.”

“What’s so bad about that? Besides, you’re here, too. You didn’t have to come until tomorrow.”

“Not true. I have a meeting with my department head tomorrow morning, first thing. It was either this or make the drive before dawn. But you didn’t have any reason to.”

“Whatever.” I liked Jess enough to renew our roommate arrangement for a fifth semester, but she knew how to push my buttons. “I like to have everything in order before classes start. You know I have OCD when it comes to organization and getting everything ready.”

“I already know,” she chuckled. “So, are you meeting up with your friends tonight?”

I knew who she meant, and I couldn’t miss the teasing in her voice. She wasn’t making fun, per se, but she was having fun with me. I knew she thought my friends were total losers. I wondered what she would think if she knew they felt the same way about her.

“I don’t know. It depends on how many of your friends are around.” I smirked. “Looking for something to do?”

“Hang out with the mouth breathers you call friends? Uh no, thanks.”

I couldn’t help but take offense. “Once again, only Thomas is a mouth breather, and it’s because of his asthma.”

“It’s because of his asthma and because he’s around a hundred pounds overweight.”

“Really, Jess?”

“Just kidding. You know I’m just joking.” She grinned, finishing up her makeup.

Jess, since I’ve known her, has always kept herself slim to ensure she kept getting cast in leading roles. She wasn’t a character actress, she’d told me once, so she couldn’t afford to blow up.

I turned away, feeling self-conscious about my curves as always. Jess had a way of making me feel like a cow without meaning to. I knew she thought I looked good—she was always trying to get me to hang out with her friends so she could hook me up with one of them. If she’d thought I was unattractive, she wouldn’t bother. That was what I told myself.

I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror sitting on top of my dresser. Poker-straight, thin brown hair hung in front of my face as I bent over my drawers to put away fresh laundry. I wasn’t overweight—far from it. But I didn’t fit the ideal, either, and every time I saw Jess running around in her tiny tank tops and short shorts, I felt that much more insecure.

Yet, hanging with my friends was the only time I felt confident with myself. They accepted me for who I was. In fact, the sort of thing that got me tormented in high school, my brains, earned respect in my circle. We even competed to see who could do the best each semester. That was my definition of fun.

I looked over at my desk, where my new law books sat in a stack. My wallet had wept tears of blood when I paid for them earlier that day.

Jess saw them, too. Missing them was hard. “I don’t know how you do it,” she announced, flopping back on her tiny twin bed—which was common to those of us who lived in the dorms. Just like the painted cinderblock walls, the gray tile floors, overhead fluorescent lights. Jess and I did our best to make the place homier with flowered curtains, floor lamps—we never turned on the overhead light if we could help it—a pink throw rug that covered most of the floor between our beds. Girls who visited generally commented on how much nicer our room was than theirs.

I looked at her, shaking her head at my course load. “I don’t know how you do, either,” I admitted.

“Do what?”

“You work hard in a different way. You shop hours for class credits and rehearsals. Working on sets at the last minute to make sure they’re ready. Putting costumes together. Don’t get me started on how you memorize lines for a show.” What I couldn’t say, but sat in the front of my mind, was the way she put herself out there during auditions. I didn’t know how she lived with rejection, either—then again she wasn’t rejected all that often. If she had my curves, my average medium height, or my total lack of style when it came to clothes or makeup or hair, she wouldn’t be so lucky.

Once I finished straightening up my side of our dorm room, I texted my friends to see who was around to have dinner together at the campus cafeteria. “You sure you don’t want to join us?” I teased Jess.

She wrinkled her nose. “Cafeteria food is so disgusting. How can you eat that crap?” Jess usually went for takeout with her theater friends.

“Well, it’s cheap. So it works.” I shrugged then waved before leaving. I wished I could afford to throw money around on takeout. Who would pick cafeteria food if they had a choice of something better? My job at the campus bookstore barely kept my head above water as it was.

* * *

B
y the time
I got to the cafeteria, Thomas, Marcie, and Adam were already there. The campus was still quiet, and most tables were empty.

“How was summer?” Marcie gave me a warm, inviting hug. She’d traveled across Europe and Asia with her family throughout the break, so we hadn’t kept in touch. I sometimes wondered what it would be like to have college professors for parents, always studying new places and cultures. It seemed so exotic and exciting.

“Same old. Mom trying to feed me, Dad watching too much baseball.”

Thomas rolled his eyes when he overheard. “Same here. It’s Dad’s religion. He made me sit through a game with him—I think we were supposed to be bonding.”

“I guess it didn’t go well,” I joked, choosing a cup of chicken noodle soup and fresh salad. I’d eaten way too much junk over break thanks to my mom’s insistence on spending her time feeding me, and the slight tightness around my waistband told the grim truth.

“You could say that. My dad got pissed when I didn’t understand the game any better when it was over than I did before it started.”

“You could just pretend, you know. It’s really not that difficult of a game to follow.”

“Why would I do that? He knows I don’t care about sports.” Yes, and that lack of interest drove his father crazy. He’d always wanted a son who would follow in his athletic footsteps. Thomas cared too much about physics, food, and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

I turned to Adam. “You’re the only person I know who could look stressed out two days before classes even start.”

“You try studying for the MCAT,” he said. He sounded exhausted.

“Did you take any time to relax over break?”

“Yes, Mom.” He grinned.

I couldn’t help blushing—he was the only guy in my circle of friends who I was ever vaguely interested in. His hazel eyes gleamed above dark circles.

“You don’t look it. You look like you haven’t been sleeping at all.”

Marcie nudged me under the table, and I kicked her. She was telling me to chill.

“I do what I can.”

I left it at that before she opened her big mouth.

When the boys got up to get dessert, Marcie turned to me. “Why don’t you just make the move and get it over with? I see how you look at him.”

“Oh, please,” I said, waving dismissively. “Adam is not interested in me.”

“I think you need to give him a chance.”

“He looks at me like a sister.”

“Then he and his sister have some gross
Game of Thrones
-level stuff going on because I know my brother never looked at me like that.”

I glanced across the cafeteria at where the boys stood at the soft serve machine. Adam was cute in a goofy kind of way. He always seemed a little too tall, a little too clumsy. It was like he hadn’t grown into his body yet.

“Nah.” I shook my head. “And I’m not going to lead myself into believing he likes me.”

Marcie sighed. When she shook her head too, bright red curls bounced around her shoulders. “Do me a favor, Claire.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t talk yourself out of what could be good for you, okay?” She managed to get her advice in just under the wire, as the boys sat down a moment later. My cheeks burned warm—did he like me, really? It didn’t matter that I felt tongue-tied since a distraction entered the cafeteria.

“Oh, here we go,” Thomas muttered. “Here come the meatheads, y’all.”

I half-way turned in my seat in time to see four jocks walk in. They each took two trays, which they proceeded to load with food. Sandwiches, Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pasta, fruit, milk, and even cereal. My stomach turned at the thought of eating all that food at once.

“Greedy assholes. I can’t stand those fuckers,” Thomas remarked as he took a heaping spoonful of ice cream. “They think just because they can hit a ball or carry a ball or whatever, the world stops and starts around them like they’re celebrities on campus.”

“If they’re in training, they need the calories,” Adam said distractedly. “Especially if they’re wrestlers, which I think they are, judging from the shape they’re in.”

“So all they do is grapple and sweat. Big deal.”

If I were a psych major, I could write a graduate dissertation on Thomas. He was obviously jealous of anybody with a shred of athletic ability—the one thing his father wished he had.

“And they probably take remedial reading,” I added.

“They’re only eating all that food so they’ll have the energy to rape a girl later on.”

Marcie and I winced, glaring at Thomas.

He averted his eyes. “Too much?”

“Uh, yeah, dumbass!” I scowled. Fun was fun, but he took it too far. “You really need to fix your relationship with your dad.”

“My relationship with my dad is fine.”

“Which is why you see red whenever you’re around sports players? Yeah, okay,” I added.

“Whatever,” he mumbled, continuing to eat his ice cream.

“You got issues kid,” Marcie replied as we cleaned up our trays. “Anyway, is Jess still dating that basketball player?”

“I don’t think so. Jess hasn’t mentioned him in a long time. I believe she decided to stick to theater guys. They’re in a class of their own. Nobody else understands their schedule.”

“Please,” Adam muttered. “What do they do? Play pretend all day?”

I bristled, knowing how hard my roommate worked on every show. “Hardly,” I snapped. “We can’t all be pre-med, Adam.” That quickly killed our conversation, and we left the cafeteria in awkward silence. Marcie turned right, toward her dorm room. Thomas walked straight ahead to his. I went left, while Adam lived in an off-campus apartment.

“Hey, Claire! Can I walk you to your room?” Adam shouted.

Usually, I would have liked the idea, but I was still irritated with him. “That’s okay. It’s not far.” I put on a fake smile to avoid a fight.

His shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry for what I said about your friend. I didn’t know it would piss you off like that. We were all making fun.”

I frowned, hating my hypocrisy. “Yeah, I know. I said some things, too. I don’t know why it made me mad. I guess because I know Jess, and I know what she does isn’t as easy as just playing pretend all day.”

“You’re right. I mean, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a school play before.”

“Wait. You didn’t take Intro to Theatre?”

We grinned at each other. Intro to Theatre was a “dumb” elective for people looking for an easy A. One of the requirements was seeing all plays in a single semester and writing a paper on them. The sort of class a jock took to sail through.

“I must have missed it.”

We both chuckled then silence fell between us. I wondered again whether Marcie was right about him liking me. I didn’t dare to get my hopes up.

“Well, I’m going to head back to my room. I have my first shift at the bookstore bright and early. I can only imagine what the rush will be like.” Most people waited until the day before class started to get their textbooks since they didn’t typically arrive on campus until then. Others waited until the end of the week, in case they decided to drop a class—everybody knew you got the merest fraction of the cost back when you returned a book. For people in majors like Adam’s and mine, though, there was no dropping courses.

“Sure, I’ll see you later, then. Have a good night, Claire.” There was the slightest hesitation on his part as he turned to leave, and I felt the same. Maybe Marcie was right, and I had been missing something so obvious for so long. After all, Adam lived off-campus. He didn’t have to eat at the cafeteria with us, as busy as he was.
Could it be…?

I was smiling to myself with a racing heart as I returned to my dorm room. Jess was on her way out. “Hey, Claire! The Wi-Fi is
finally
working,” she mentioned. “I was able to get access to my email a little while ago.”

“Okay, great.” I sat down at my tidy desk, hoping to find Marcie on Skype so we could analyze the awkward moment with Adam. Before I could look for her, an email from the financial aid office caught my eye.

“What?” I shrieked.

Jess rushed to my side. “What happened?”

“It says my work-study has been reassigned because they accidentally overstaffed the fucking bookstore!”