The one thing I haven't mentioned, the one thing that my friends would probably have placed at the very top of the list of 'Reasons To Love Being At Football Player At Brooks' - was the women. Never before, or since, have I ever been around such a sheer number of beautiful women. To say that we took advantage would be an understatement. Well, it would be an understatement for everyone but me. I got away with it at first, telling my baffled teammates when they witnessed me, once again, turning down the obvious advances of some total hottie, that I was at college to work on my game, that I didn't have time for girls in my life. After awhile, though, it started to become odd. Even to me.
I thought Natasha Greeley would, with time and distance, fade from my mind. What actually happened was almost the exact opposite. The more women threw themselves at me - and some of them were incredibly persistent - the more the single thought grew in my mind with every new girl I met: she's not Tasha.
And it was true. None of them were Tasha. They were pretty, yes. Beautiful, even. But not as beautiful as Tasha. Not as smart or together as Tasha. Tasha would never have thrown herself at any man the way they threw themselves at me. She had too much self-respect. Too much dignity. And Tasha knew how to take care of herself. She was a grown-up and I was surrounded by oversized children - male and female. The girls at Brooks came from wealthy families. Their clear belief that the world was their oyster, that nothing bad was ever going to happen to them, was one I couldn't even scorn. They were probably right, after all. But the minute something went wrong, they fell apart. A bad grade was cause for tearful meetings with professors, phone calls from parents, make-up work. The guys, too. One of my teammates broke his ankle falling drunk down a flight of stairs and spent the next six weeks in a state of pure rage at the people responsible for building the stairs, Brooks itself for daring to have the stairs located where they were and the football coaches for reprimanding him. He was angry at everyone except the one person who was responsible for his drunk ass falling down in the first place: himself.
Tasha would never have acted like that. She knew shit happened and she dealt with it with the kind of inner strength that money and privilege could never buy.
But Tasha was gone. She was back in Little Falls, working her ass off to support herself and her family, probably dating. I couldn't even think about her dating other people without wanting to hunt them down and rip them apart, so I tried not to think of it.
But yeah, people noticed. The guys started giving me shit for it. Anytime they spotted a girl trying to flirt her way into my good graces (and that was often) one of them would come up to us and warn her off, tell her she was wasting her time because I didn't have room for girls in my life, I was too busy memorizing poems for Lit class and making myself kale shakes. It never worked, either. It just made the girl in question see me as even more of a challenge. And remember, these ladies were not used to hearing the word 'no.' The come-ons were pretty crazy. A few of them did things like cornering me in bathrooms at parties and dropping to their knees, smiling up at me and biting their lips as they reached for my zipper.
My sex drive wasn't dead. It just wasn't interested in any of those easy, vapid girls at Brooks. No matter how much I tried to exorcise Tasha's ghost from my heart, it always came back.
After a year or so of taking shit for my monk-like ways, I finally met a girl I could spend time with. Her name was Jess and she had long red hair and a friendly, outgoing manner. We were at a party when I ran into her in the kitchen, just taking a breather from the antics. I remember looking at her, waiting for the come-on. And then realizing she was doing the exact same thing - waiting for me to hit on her. When it didn't happen, she just giggled and apologized.
"Sorry, Kaden. You are Kaden Barlow, right?"
"Yep, that's me."
"Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, sorry about that. I guess I'm just so used to fending off frat boys that I don't know what to say when one of them doesn't immediately try to get into my pants."
"You might be surprised," I told her. "Being the quarterback kind of puts me in a similar position, believe it or not. The girls here put the girls in high school to shame when it comes to knowing what they want and going after it."
She leaned back against the kitchen island and offered me her hand. "I'm Jess, by the way. And I promise not to try and take advantage of you."
I laughed and asked her what she was studying and we ended up spending the rest of the night chatting to each other. At one point one of the other football players - a meathead named Troy - came in and widened his eyes at us.
"Damn!" He yelled, to no one in particular. "Barlow's finally going for it! You good, man? Do you know where to put it?"