Our offensive players don’t hit the other team with near as much of a bang as I do when the other team crosses my line. I’ve got magic feet, magic hands, and I’m a lot more... elegant than I look. No one expects fancy footwork from a man with a six and a half foot frame and two-hundred and fifty pounds of muscle. But I deliver every goddamn time.
“You listen to me, Mack.” Skinny-ass old Wingate walks up to me and snatches the remote from my hand, his neatly parted blond hair coming undone with anger. “Eddie told me he’s about done with putting up with your behavior. Coach tells him every time you show up late for practice, every time there’s some angry girl coming around insisting that you’re the reason her entire life is ruined, and every damn time you get the whole team drunk at one of your stupid parties. That’s right, Mack. Coach has started tattling on you—and Eddie, the freaking owner of the team, has noticed too—”
“Don’t say freaking, Wingate. You’re not twelve. And your mama’s not in the next room listening to us fight.” I look away from Wingate’s icy blue stare. He’s about twelve inches from my face, and his own face is so red it looks like steam’s about to erupt from his nostrils like in the cartoons. Wingate’s tall like I am—but he’s wiry as shit, looks like he hasn’t eaten a sandwich in ten years. Even though he’d blow over in a stiff wind, Wingate is one of the only men in either Carolina that makes me nervous. Those stiff-ass muscles—and the stick up his butt—are like steel, and that sonofabitch could get me in a headlock like none other despite the fact that I could lie down on him and crush him in his sleep.
“You listen to me, cuzzo.” Wingate aims the remote at the TV without looking away from my eyes, turning it off with one click. He then flings the remote on my coffee table, and I cringe as it clatters against the antique wood. If either the remote or my coffee table is damaged, I might have to test out Wingate’s headlock for the first time since I was twelve. My neck hurts just thinking about it.
“Hey—” I start. But Wingate has one finger pointed firmly at my chest. “It’s all been downhill since you graduated from college. Everyone in the country sees you as this great hero of football, the man who dances across the field and distracts every offensive line he comes in contact with, blocks every move, has his defensive linemen perfectly coordinated. But I know better. I know you’re more.” Slowly, Wingate’s finger comes down against my sternum. I bat his hand away, and he blocks me. I half expect him to slap me in the face like he used to when we were kids, and I instinctively flinch away from him. But he just laughs.
“You’re a dickhead, Wingate. No wonder you can’t get a date, even on Grindr.” I look pointedly at him, and he rolls his eyes. Usually that sticks in his craw pretty bad, but he’s determined as balls to get me to listen to him. And that makes me not want to listen to him at all.
“All the beer and the parties and the women...” Wingate starts on one of his tirades, and I groan, leaning the recliner back so it knocks him in the knees. He kicks at me and then sits down on the opposite end of the sectional, throwing his hands up in what looks like resignation. “There’s more to you than this. I saw you go out there on the field hungover twice last season, and more than once, there’s been some woman in the crowd shouting at you. With every game, you go downhill a little more. You’re the most talented linebacker in the league, and each game, you get very slightly worse. It doesn’t look good. And pretty soon someone’s going to notice.”
I wave my hand at him and stare sullenly at the remote Wingate put down on the coffee table. “I’m doing just as well as I always did. And furthermore, I don’t give a shit about what looks good and what doesn’t look good. It’s 2016, and I can act how I want, date who I want, and throw parties that celebrate my team. Ain’t that what America’s about?”
Wingate snorts. “That has nothing to do with anything. Don’t get me embroiled in a political discussion this early in the day.”
I shrug. Bringing up the election usually works to keep Wingate ranting for at least an hour and a half, particularly when there’s a mention of Governor McCrory and his medieval bathroom garbage. Sometimes I’ll even pretend like I sympathize with our dear idiotic governor or like I’m considering not voting Democrat to get Wingate to leave the room with his fists clenched, shouting about civil rights and the degradation of the American political climate. Embroiled. He always uses fifty-cent words when a one-cent word will do just fine. I snicker. “Let’s just put this discussion up on a shelf. It’s the offseason. I have a party tomorrow, and I’m not in the mood for you to talk to me like I’m six years old and you’re the big grown-up who knows more than I do. I know plenty about football, plenty about my career, and plenty about where I’m going with my life.”