“Here you go.” Peters grinned and looked over at my bag. “Do you want to go? We can go. Let me call a cab.” He pulled out his phone.
“No. Jack and Allison are probably doing the deed still. I really want to give him his space.”
He’d looked up at me with a cracked smile, which I now recognized as Gray Peters’s liar face.
“I’m good here. Let’s dance some more.” I grabbed his phone from his sweating hands. “Here, let me keep your phone in my bag. Lots of kleptomaniacs roaming around here. A girl just ran out of here crying about her diamond earring being ripped off her ear while she was dancing. That’s a gusty thief. Don’t want to take any chances.”
He hopped around looking back in the dancing mob and then glanced back at me. “Are you sure you want to stay? It’s really getting late.”
“You have something to do tomorrow?” I ran my hand down his chest, and he trembled under my touch. “‘Cause you can leave if you want, but I want to stay.”
I couldn’t have timed this better, but a creepy man walked by and mumbled, “Hey, sugar,” sending me a wink through his Mexican wrestler mask.
Peters paused, watching the man walk by. “Ummm… nothing. I have nothing tomorrow, or I guess this morning now.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “Here put this in there too.”
I handed him my twenty. “Here. Go get us another drink.”
I pointed to the zombie in the corner, nodding off into her book. “I have to get her attention so she can put away my bag. I’ll meet you right here in five.”
“Promise?” He pushed his chest into my hand. “You’re not going to cut and run on me, are you?”
I shook my head. “I would have been long gone by now, Peters. You know that.”
He laughed and headed back to the bar.
Peters: You owe me $276, you talentless pickpocket.
Ouch. Ha-ha. Little did Peters know I didn’t swipe his credit card in the cab. I did it right there when he turned his back to get us drinks. And I managed to scroll through his phone, and something caught my eye. My phone number was in his contact list under “Bitch.”
Syd: Is that all? By my calculation it’s $574.
Yup, $574. I was a celebrity when I waltzed back from the bar after getting us another round of drinks. Peters had waved at me from across the dance floor, where he was stumbling around like a baby trying to walk for the first time. I’d just walked up to the gear-faced bartender and slapped his card down, yelling, “A round of drinks for the next fifty customers.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Get up, Peters.” Coach’s voice came from the shadows of the pit. “Punishment’s over.”
“I have another three minutes, and I’m not sure I can move.” I sent him a glare but wiped it clean when he sat on the bench across from me. “You might have to play Hammill this weekend because you’ve destroyed your starting QB.”
I was in the physical therapy room, also known as the pit, soaking in an ice bath in just my shorts. It was a worthless attempt to pull the soreness from my traumatized muscles. Coach had been attached to my hip like a Siamese twin all week—double-drills, morning workouts, piss tests, coffee runs—yes, he enjoyed the occasional non-fat soy latte.
“You’re playing this weekend,” he said coolly.
He was sitting under the lone light bulb in the room. Despite zero airflow in the pit, it swung above his head on its chain. Probably the ghosts. No one came down to the pit, even Coach. Rumor had it this was where athletes came to die, and I think there was some truth to that.
I studied Coach, looking for an axe or a pistol, or maybe he’d hired someone to come behind me in the tub and pull a wire over my throat so he could watch the life flee from my gorgeous eyes.
Instead, he laid his hands on his lap and pulled his elbows to his knees, cradling his head in his palms. “That girl sure has a mouth on her.” Coach laughed into his palms, shaking his head.
I’d never heard Coach laugh. It was like seeing Bigfoot cross your path. Strange and eerie, and you spend the entirety of your life searching for it again because you can’t believe your eyes.
“Girl?”
“Sydney Porter,” he snapped back as if I should’ve known all along. “She requested a formal meeting with me earlier this week.”
Shifting in the water, I dumped ice over the edge of the tub and shook my head. “What? I didn’t even know you could do that.”
Part of me was irritated she’d approached Coach, but I had to admit I would have loved to have seen this. She probably stomped in there, paced his office, and made several unrealistic demands. Coach probably laughed and told her to piss off.
“Me neither.” Coach chuckled under his breath, and it ended in a long, drawn-out sigh. It was a sigh I was all too familiar with by now. She was exhausting. “When she came in today, I told her to get lost, and she slapped the Northern faculty guide down on my desk, pointing to something called Subsection G.”
He hesitated like he didn’t want to tell me the rest, but then he said, “And then, in her words, she said, ‘Subsection G, Student Rights and Faculty Responsibilities, shit for brains. Don’t any of you mongrels in the athletic department know how to read?’”
He laughed again, and my head was about to explode.
“She said what?”
“Yes, she called me shit for brains, Peters. Repeat that and I’ll end your career.” His tone fell back to serious. “She’s worried about her brother. Porter’s been acting weird. The team is shunning him, which I know is your fault.”
“How is that my fault?” I rose up out of the tub and grabbed a towel. “With all respect, Coach, the kid needs to grow a pair. He’s not going to get far if he allows himself to be pushed around all the time.”
“It’s your fault because you like her… or love her… I don’t know,” he growled. “I just know she gets under your skin like I’ve never seen, and you take it out on Porter.”
Whipping the towel around me, I stepped out of the tub and laughed. “Sydney Porter is horrible. She’s the devil. I don’t love her. I want to throw her off a cliff every time someone says her name.”
“You can’t stand her, yet you’ll interrupt her date with Sharbus to take her clubbing until 6:00 AM?” Coach snapped, standing up from the bench.
My eyes grew as wide as Fernando’s waistband, which is enormous by the way. I was speechless. Sydney told Coach about Sharbus?
“Yes, Peters, she told me the whole story. Didn’t paint you in the best light, but once I heard Nick’s name, I knew you’d done the right thing.”
“That was for Jack,” I hissed, grabbing my bag from the floor.
“If it was for Jack, then don’t punish him, Peters. Morale is important. He’s been droopy on the field this week, and if he doesn’t pick up soon, I’m coming after you.” He moved toward the pit door. “Remember, you toss to that kid. If he looks bad, you look bad.”
As I stumbled with the grace of Frankenstein’s monster toward my front porch, I noticed Fernando sitting in the moonlight, sipping on a Frappuccino. He looked absurd. A three hundred-pound beast of a man, rocking in a wicker chair, drinking something covered in whipped cream.
“Did what you wanted,” he said quietly, shifting his eyes from side to side. “Is it safe to talk here?” He lifted his head and perked up his ears, listening for noise.
“Yes, idiot.”
I’d sent Fernando to the library to do some recon on the Freudian Sluts orgy situation. My plan was to go myself, but Coach was on my ass and I couldn’t make it in time. Of course, I didn’t tell Fernando what he was actually looking for. I told him there was a secret alumni group (I called them the alumminati) who meet in the study room to discuss the football game concession food. He wasn’t interested at first, but when I told him the rocket dogs (our famous Northern bratwursts) were in danger of extinction, he started hyperventilating, and I had to rub his back as he wept.