False Start (Eastshore Tigers Book 2)

by Alison Hendricks

  I don’t like panicking. I guess nobody does, but for me it’s a sign that everything really is going to fall apart.

  “I’m not asking,” he says, and though his voice is soft—too soft to be heard by the other guys—it’s also firm.

  I snap my mouth closed, unbuckle my helmet, and yank it off. Every muscle in my body is tense as I walk toward the locker room. I don’t know how many of the guys are watching me; I can’t think about it right now.

  As soon as I get into the locker room—as soon as I’m not being watched by prying eyes—I slam my helmet against the wall. It’s stupid. So fucking stupid. The paint scrapes off and there’s a dent in it. I let it fall to the ground, then drop myself onto a bench and hold my head in my hands.

  I’ve fucked it up. One day in, and I’ve already fucked it up.

  5

  Mitch

  I’m used to being ignored or sneered at in that too-polite way. I’m not used to being completely despised.

  Aside from fucking up the play, I don’t know what I did to Mills. I guess it’s just that I’m his competition, and that put an abrupt end to the friendliness he showed me in the locker room. But the version of him I see on the field is something completely different from what I saw in the locker room.

  I don’t know what makes me go after him. I’m making a terrible first impression, just walking off the practice field like this. I don’t even clear it with Coach Bradford. I just trot off, into the tunnel and toward the locker room.

  Maybe I do know why I’m going after him, though. I want to apologize, true. Even if I’m not sure I was really in the wrong. But more than that, I don’t want to leave things as they were. I don’t want Mills to hate me.

  How pathetic is that. Eighteen years old, and I’m worrying about whether or not some guy likes me. Not even likes me, just… tolerates me.

  I guess it could be worse.

  I open up the locker room door, and my heart starts to beat a little harder. In the back of my mind, I can see Mills’ hard body, rivulets of water dripping down the planes of his chest, falling on his abdomen, and sliding down further.

  I bite back a groan. This guy hates me. I shouldn’t be thinking about him half-naked.

  Ducking my head around the rows of lockers, I find him stripping off his pads. His helmet’s off, discarded on the floor. He tears off his mesh jersey and for a second I swear I hear fabric rip.

  I should just turn right back around and leave. He’s obviously still pissed.

  But I’ve never been really good at doing what I should do.

  “Hey,” I say, because it’s as cautious a greeting as I can manage.

  “What do you want.”

  It isn’t a question. It’s pretty much a bold-faced statement telling me to get the fuck away from him. But again, I’m not good at doing what I should do.

  “I just wanted to say sorry about fucking up the play, man. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says gruffly.

  His locker door slams, and I wince. He’s got a towel in hand, and I know he’s going to hit the shower soon. A flush rises in my cheeks, even against my best efforts. Now is not the time to think about that.

  And because I apparently don’t know when to leave well enough alone, I reach out for him as he walks past. I grab his arm. He tenses underneath my grasp. Dark eyes level a death glare at me.

  “I’m not your enemy, Mills. I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just trying to do a good job for the team.”

  It sounds naïve and dripping with saccharine earnestness, even to my ears. I practically gag on it, and I can already tell it doesn’t go over well with Mills. Jesus. I thought I’d feel more relaxed around normal guys. But I don’t. I don’t know how to act around them. I don’t know what mask to wear here.

  It’s worse than I thought, though. Mills shrugs my hand off his arm, but he doesn’t pull away. He steps closer to me. So close I can feel the heat of his breath against my face. I can see his eyes, and determine every single fleck of color in them. Spots that seemed black from a distance are just a deep brown, and there are threads of a light, honey brown throughout.

  “I’m only gonna say this once, Erickson. You seem like a decent guy. But you don’t know this team. You don’t know where they’re strong and where they’re weak. You don’t know the plays they’re best at. You don’t know the kind of offense they shut down.”

  “Is there some kind of Cliffs Notes? A cheat sheet you guys are keeping from me?”

  It’s a stupid joke. I always make stupid jokes when I’m nervous. Mills just ignores me.

  “Don’t get in my way again.”

  That gets to me. I’m reminded suddenly of my father, standing over me, telling me the way of things. Telling me I absolutely would go to Yale after I got done “fooling around” at Eastshore. That I would work for his company. That I would come to my senses and marry an acceptable girl and expand the Erickson lineage.

  I came here to get away from that life. I’m not going to take that from Mills.

  “If I see a play, I’m going to make it,” I snap. And then, because I really can’t leave well enough alone—because I can’t stand the idea of Mills not liking me—I reach out to him again. “I’m not your enemy.”

  He grabs my hand so fast I don’t even register that he has it until suddenly he’s pushing me back. The force of his body is too much for me to stop. I can’t plant my feet and fight back; not quickly enough. He shoves me, and my back hits the lockers. Metal clatters behind me, the breath is knocked from my lungs, and I look, bewildered, into the eyes of my teammate; my new competition, apparently.

  I don’t see anger, though. I see desperation. It flickers there for just a second, before vanishing just as quickly. It’s enough to catch me off guard; to distract me from my initial reaction, which would probably be to shove him back.

  Mills must have expected that from me, too, because he’s still so close. I want to be pissed at him. I want to shove him off me, tell him not to fucking touch me. But he’s so close that my brain short-circuits, and all I can think about is the feel of his body against mine. All that hard muscle pressing against me.

  A flush spreads through my whole body, and a familiar tightness hits my groin.

  Oh, fuck. Not now. Not now.

  “Don’t touch me again,” he says, his voice low and threatening.

  It doesn’t match his eyes, and it does nothing to deter my traitorous body. My arms don’t work. I can’t seem to push him away, and his gaze turns suddenly to surprise. I swallow hard again. There’s no way he didn’t feel my erection against him.

  He lets go of me and steps back. I expect disgust. I expect the word “fag” to be thrown out and used as a weapon to slice me open. I expect him to tell all the other guys.

  But when I meet his gaze, he looks… flustered. He can’t meet my eyes. He steps back, but it’s as if he doesn’t know where to go. And when the locker room door opens, he doesn’t walk over to the nearest guy and start talking about the team homo who got a hard-on during a fight.

  My cheeks are red. Shame washes over me, thick and cold. I turn away from him to adjust myself. But Mills doesn’t say anything to anyone. When I turn around again, after my cock finally decides to join the rest of me in feeling absolutely mortified, I see him retreating to the showers.

  6

  Dante

  I’m not a coward. I wasn’t raised to be one.

  But the second day of practice, I slip out as quickly as the first.

  I have a valid excuse this time. Sort of. Tuesdays and Thursdays I volunteer at the community center, coaching a youth basketball team. But football practice ends around one, and I don’t have to be at the community center until three. Plenty of time to hang around and shoot the shit with the guys like I always do.

  But I can’t. I’m too busy avoiding Mitchell Erickson.

  What I did to him… it wasn’t cool. I knew it as I was doing it. I kept tel
ling myself to stop. Kept telling myself that none of this was his fault.

  But when he tried to touch me, I flipped.

  Every time I think about what I did, my stomach rolls. I feel unsteady; like whatever support I’ve been leaning on is about to be kicked out from under me.

  And it wasn’t even good sense that got me to let him go.

  I hadn’t realized what it was at first. I figured the flush in his skin was anger, and the quickened breathing was the panic of a guy being cornered. I thought the way his pupils dilated, the way his nostrils flared just meant that we were about to get into one hell of a fistfight.

  I hadn’t thought…

  Even now I can’t really even think about it. Some guys get a hard-on when a stiff wind brushes the front of their pants. It doesn’t mean anything.

  I’m not a coward, but I can’t go to him and apologize, because I’m afraid I’ll feel that weird little shiver that passed through me when I realized what was going on.

  “Stop hogging the ball!” An angry voice pulls me away from my thoughts. And thank fuck for that.

  “You never take a shot when I pass to you,” another voice says, just as angry.

  “I do, too!”

  “You never take a good shot.”

  The boys arguing now—and they definitely are boys, just eight and nine years old—are always at each other’s throats. They’re two of the best players on the team, and they know it. The sports offered at the community center are casual, but these two could probably play high school ball when they’re old enough. Maybe even college. The problem is their attitude.

  Neither of them are team players, and they don’t like giving up the ball for anything. It’s not a perfect comparison. It’s not. But as one boy shoves the other, I can’t help thinking the universe is laughing its ass off at me.

  I blow my whistle, the shrill sound slicing through the gym. “What’d I say about fighting?”

  The boy who was shoved first, Cam, has his small fist raised. “He started it!”

  “Hey,” I say more firmly, putting myself in between them. “I don’t care. You fight, you don’t play. End of story.”

  Cam looks up at me, and I can see defiance in his eyes. But he lowers his fist. I bend to talk to him on the level.

  “You gotta stop letting him get you angry, okay?”

  “But he won’t ever pass,” Cam says, his voice sounding more like a whine than anything else.

  “You let me worry about that.”

  His arms fold over his chest, and I can tell he’s on the verge of a tantrum. His bottom lip sticks out far enough that he could trip on the damn thing, but he finally nods.

  I let out a breath, send him to do laps, then turn to Jamal, the kid who started this whole mess. The one who always starts it.

  “You gotta cool it with this shit,” I say.

  I don’t really mince words with these kids. They wouldn’t take me seriously if I did.

  “He shouldn’t even be on the team,” Jamal says.

  Cam is shorter than the other kids. He panics when he’s being covered. He can’t score in the paint to save his life. But he’s really good at stripping the ball, and when he’s open for three, he sinks it every time.

  “He has as much right to be here as you do. You need to worry less about him, and more about yourself.”

  It’d be nice if I could follow my own advice.

  Jamal doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t look at me, but I’m not the type of coach who’s going to bark at him until he does.

  “If you do this again, you’re getting benched. Got it?”

  His jaw clenches.

  “Got it?”

  “Yeah,” he finally says.

  I’m also not the type of coach who makes his players say ‘yes, sir’ or something stupid like that. But it does still annoy me when they cop an attitude.

  “Ten laps. Keep away from Cam while you’re doing them, too.”

  He rolls his eyes, and I choose to ignore it. He at least follows my directions, and I turn my attention to the rest of the team, running them through lay-up drills.

  I mentally calculate the time it should take Cam and Jamal to finish, and look for them when that time’s up. They’re almost done, but something else catches my eye.

  The stands in the community center’s gym are usually pretty sparse. Today’s no exception, but there is one person sitting right up front. A big guy with sandy blond hair that’s tied back, dressed in what’s probably a designer polo and jeans.

  If he realizes how out of place he looks, he doesn’t show it.

  I try to ignore him. Not forever—unless he decides to get up and leave, which I secretly hope for—just until the practice is over. But I hear Cam’s voice over the sound of basketballs hitting the smooth gym floor.

  “Do you play basketball?”

  Shit. How am I supposed to ignore him if Cam’s talking to him?

  “Not very well,” I hear him say, and I can imagine his cheeks rounding in that way they do. “I do play football.”

  “Oh,” Cam says, clearly disappointed.

  I swear under my breath. “Five more shots each. That means you guys, too.”

  Cam comes back over to the half-court and grabs a ball. Jamal finishes his laps and joins the rest of the team, leaving me a few minutes with Erickson.

  I don’t want them, but I’m not going to be a coward. Leaving the locker room right after practice is one thing. Ignoring him here is something else.

  “Trent told me you volunteer here,” he says, standing from the bleachers.

  “Yeah. Tuesday and Thursday.”

  He nods, and starts to fidget. He makes a point of not looking away from me, like he’s trying really hard to avoid doing it. But everything else says he’s nervous as hell.

  A part of me is curious if he’ll bring it up, or if he’ll hope I just didn’t notice. A stronger part of me doesn’t want to find out; doesn’t want to be faced with acknowledging the fact that I did notice.

  I decide to cut him off before he can even mention it.

  “I know I was out of line yesterday. I’m…” Under a lot of stress? Dealing with a lot of shit? Trying to keep everything from falling apart? “I guess I just got kinda blind-sided.”

  “I get it, man,” he says, and I can hear the relief in his voice. “I really wasn’t trying to get in your way. And I shouldn’t have… pushed the issue.”

  By ‘pushed the issue,’ I’m guessing he means when he followed me into the locker room. Time to steer the conversation far away from that.

  “Have any of the others guys told you about The Top yet?”

  From the look on his face, I’m guessing that’s a no. He shakes his head to confirm.

  “A lot of Eastshore players hang out there. It’s downtown, a couple blocks from the old theater. Why don’t you come by tonight; I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Like a drink’s going to erase the fact that I shoved him against a wall like some roided out psycho. He looks at me warily, and a part of me wants to just take it back and say I was joking. I’m not going to be that much of a coward, though.

  “Ah, well. I would, but I don’t really drink.”

  Right. I’d forgotten how young he is. Probably nineteen at the most. Not that that’s ever stopped a college guy from drinking before, but he doesn’t really look like the type to push boundaries.

  “Then I’ll buy you a soda or something.”

  I shrug, feeling like I’m floundering. In the language of jocks, ‘buy you a drink’ is pretty much ‘hey, no hard feelings, bro’ and I almost feel like he’s the one who should be doing it. He has more to forgive than I do.

  But he’s just trying to play well. I would’ve done the same thing in his shoes. It’s not like he bribed somebody to let him on the team.

  And so what if he popped a boner in the locker room? Not like every guy on the planet hasn’t had a fluke boner before.

  Even if it wasn’t a fluke, who the fuc
k cares?

  Jesus. I need to stop thinking about this.

  “Sounds good. What time should I get there?”

  Oh, thank fuck. Good. He’ll show up tonight, I’ll buy him a Coke, and then I can stop fucking thinking about this.

  “Usually starts to pick up around 9.” I look back to my boys, and see Jamal show-boating at the top of the key. Christ. “Sorry, I gotta get back.”

  “See you tonight,” he says warmly, and I try to ignore the weird little feeling that creeps through me when he does.

  7

  Mitch

  It doesn’t take much effort to find the bar Mills mentioned.

  I pulled up directions the second I left the community center. Anticipation thrummed through me, winding in a coil from that moment up until the moment I parked my car in the garage and walked out onto the downtown strip.

  Eastshore isn’t what I’m used to. It’s got the odd clash of old and new like a lot of places in Connecticut, but because of the college, the new skews toward really new. There are a handful of sports bars, tattoo shops, local restaurants that serve hangover food, an “authentic Irish pub,” a head shop, and a handful of other businesses that sharply contrast the historic street less than a mile away.

  The oddity is enough to take my attention off what’s about to happen, even if it doesn’t calm my nerves.

  I know I shouldn’t feel this way. It’s just a drink. But the idea of being around the guys, doing normal things, just fills me with a spark of hope.

  Growing up, I never found that sense of camaraderie. There was always something separating me from my peers. I went to private school, but I wasn’t exactly what anyone would have pegged as the typical trust-fund kid. I played sports, but I wasn’t the typical jock. I didn’t live in the suburbs; my mom definitely didn’t own an SUV.

  Here, I’m just Erickson. Not Erickson, destined to build a legacy that revolves around my father. But Erickson, the new linebacker who’s giving his all to the team.