Page 7

“JV, all three of ‘em,” Jake declared immediately, leaning back to snag his beer. “The rest... Shit, this is the part that just sucks,” he groaned as he curled back into a sitting position and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Troy sighed, once again muted by the tough choices they had to make. Ten more kids had to go. “I nominate Miller and Rodriguez to go,” he said quietly.

“Reasons?” Jake requested hopefully. Reasons meant easy decisions.

“They’re single position players, with only one strong point. All the others have multiple skills,” Troy answered. “Increases varsity flexibility.”

Jake mused over that point for a moment before nodding regretfully. “We’ll have to make sure they know to come back next year and try again,” he noted as he got up slowly and headed back to the whiteboard to cross them off. “Any problems with grades on any of these kids?” he asked.

Brandon checked the names still up there. Eight more had to go. “Gregory was just referred to tutoring because he’s dropped below a C average in Chemistry,” he offered.

“Actually, cut Manero and Slodamesh. If I catch those sons of bitches smoking in the bathroom again I’m gonna whip their asses,” Troy said. “They know well enough it’s against team rules.”

“Ooh,” Jake responded excitedly. “Fulk and Gilliam were busted for drinking over the winter,” he told them, knowing he’d meant to write that down. He crossed off the five names they’d mentioned and then cocked his head at the last two. “What do you think, Troy, can you take a crew of nineteen?” he asked.

“What the hell. If they get tired of riding the bench, they can be the JV cheerleaders,” the blond-haired coach drawled, earning a chorus of groans.

“Oh Jesus,” Jake murmured as he remembered the other cheerleaders they’d have to deal with. Sometimes he thought his life would be so much simpler if he’d just married that woman and made her miserable. “Okay,” he said after a moment of staring. “We have our teams,” he announced in a slightly surprised voice. It had happened so quickly. As if in celebration, the doorbell rang.

“Ooh, I got it,” Jonathan cried excitedly, practically climbing over Brandon to get off the couch.

Brandon grunted and gasped as he was for all intents and purposes kneed. “Goddamn, Jonathan, be careful!” he hissed, smacking the back of the younger man’s thigh as Jonathan trotted to the hall that led to the front door. He rolled his eyes and shifted, glaring at Troy, who was snickering. “Watch it, limey boy,” Brandon growled.

“What?” Troy asked in confusion, and the look on his face was enough to have Jake smirking as he walked out of the room back toward the kitchen for plates.

Sighing, Brandon leaned his head back onto the edge of the couch, pretty much sprawling out. He was tired enough to not care much for propriety at this point. And since it was certain that Troy wouldn’t even know propriety if it walked up and bit him on the ass, why should Brandon care? If it pissed Jake off, he wouldn’t hesitate to say something. “Blech,” he finally muttered, looking at the ceiling, thinking about the next day.

“We’ll post the teams on the main boards,” Jake responded to Brandon’s expression of distaste, taking it as a declaration of his thoughts on the cuts. “They’ll announce that they’re up in the morning report and we don’t have to watch the kids be crushed. Coward’s way out,” he admitted as Jonathan came back in with two large pizzas. Jake laid out a stack of plates and handed everyone a fresh beer.

Brandon eyed the beer, really tempted. But if he stayed here tonight—not that it was really that much longer, it was pushing 9 p.m. now—he’d have to get up that much earlier to drive home, change clothes, and drive back into town for tutoring before school. He sighed and set the bottle on the coffee table and pulled a few pieces of pizza onto his plate, sitting back and munching, listening to Troy and Jonathan chatter about plans for their teams.

Jake flopped onto the ground in front of the coffee table, grabbing a piece of pizza out of the box and eating without bothering with the plates. “You done drinking, man?” he asked Brandon with a glance at the untouched beer. “I’ve got four bedrooms and couches to spare,” he joked, half serious. Sometimes Troy slept on the floor just to feel like he was roughing it.

“I really need to drive home tonight,” Brandon said through a mouthful of sausage and pepperoni. “I’d have to get up a hell of a lot earlier if I stayed here, had to go home, and then turn around and come back into town.”

“Man, there’s no early that’s early enough to keep me from crashing here instead of home,” Troy declared with a sort of childish glee. “How long’s your drive?” he asked with a frown.

“It’s a little under 40 minutes to Mountain Park. Longer if it’s after dark, lots of deer,” Brandon answered, leaning forward to snag a piece of supreme. “If I stayed, I’d have to leave here about 3 a.m. to make school on time.”

“What?” Jonathan asked in horror.

“What time do you get to school every morning?” Jake asked, telling himself even as he questioned it that he didn’t want to know, it was none of his business, and stop staring at Brandon’s throat!

“Little before six,” the science teacher murmured. His eyes sliding from side to side, he saw the other three men looking at him with varying degrees of horror. He was not going to say it, he wasn’t ... “What?” he blurted.

“Why?” Troy demanded in a slightly higher voice than usual. He sounded outraged for humanity.

Brandon swallowed his pizza. “I tutor,” he said shortly, shifting to pull a leg up under himself.

“On purpose?” Troy asked in the same disbelieving tone.

“Yes, on purpose,” Brandon said defensively, withdrawing a little at what he perceived to be an attack.

Jonathan was frowning. “Didn’t I read in the district memo that they hired somebody to do that full time?” Brandon shrugged awkwardly. He wasn’t about to tell them it was an unpaid position.

Jake watched the man closely and saw him begin to pull back into his shell a little. There was no reason for him to, and Jake wondered what he must think of all of them to be embarrassed over the fact that he helped kids study in the mornings. For some reason it irked him a little, but it worried him more that Brandon was uncomfortable. “Not much different than the weekends we were taking with the team last fall,” he pointed out to Troy softly.

“Well, yeah, but 6 a.m.?” Troy said. “That’s torture! At least we worked after high noon.”

Jonathan looked between Brandon and Troy, seeing the discomfort there. “Shut up, Troy. Brandon, are you still going to do this tutoring now that you’re coaching? That’s going to make for twelve, fourteen hour days, just on practice days. For games—away games, fuck—we don’t get home until 1 a.m. sometimes.”

Brandon looked up again to see them waiting for his answer. “The kids need me. For the tutoring, for the coaching, doesn’t matter. I’ll be there,” he said quietly. But his voice was firm.

Jake watched the man for a moment longer. He was still wavering between trying to decide whether he liked the guy. He liked him when they were alone, but the awkward way he clammed up when someone else was around—or hell, he’d even done it to Jake—Jake didn’t know how to take that. He was used to people being at ease with him when he wanted them to be. “If you start burning out, let us know. You can skip the away games,” Jake offered quietly as he opened a third beer and gave it a long pull. The pills and beer were hitting him now, just not quickly enough.

Although the thought of shirking his commitment like that really bothered him, Brandon was already concerned enough about it that he wasn’t going to argue. At least not right now. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “Thanks.”

Troy and Jonathan looked at each other significantly. Then the freshman coach piped up. “I can help grade papers,” he offered. Brandon glanced to him, a brow raised. Troy grumbled a little under his breath and wrinkled his nose. “I’ll help, too,” he muttered. Then he brightened. “I can show you the best way to sleep on a school bus seat.”

Brandon was so surprised that he didn’t know what to say. He hardly knew these guys, but here they were, extending offers of assistance. It was damn humbling, is what it was. Was this what that camaraderie among team members was like? How the team always said they would stick together? Brandon had never experienced it before.

“And the boys would probably do some work if you gave them a little extra credit or something,” Jake added as he reached for another piece of pizza, oblivious to Brandon’s shell-shock.

“Uh.” Brandon was at a loss for something to say. “I appreciate it,” he settled on.

Jonathan leaned over and butted shoulders with him. “You’re part of the team now, Brandon. We look out for each other.”

“Or we hang your underwear from the flag pole,” Troy added with a grin.

Jake rolled his eyes, remembering the day years ago when his own boxers had been strung up in celebration of a win over their rival. “We don’t do that anymore,” he assured the man. “Any sort of hazing these days gets you kicked off the team,” he added pointedly as Troy beamed at him.

“Does committing evil and unnatural acts upon my limes count as hazing?” Brandon asked mock-seriously, glaring at Troy. Jonathan snickered.

“Just toss ‘em out,” Jake said quickly, shaking his head as if to ward off the images. “You know, man, doing that often enough will get you a pretty seedy reputation,” he added to Troy.

“I’m secure in my manhood, Curly,” Troy chuckled in return, gulping down the last of his Corona with a grin.

Brandon had to laugh. “Curly?” He looked at Jake’s close-cropped hair.

Jake blushed mightily and lowered his eyes, practically waffling as he sat there. “If my hair gets any longer it starts curling,” he explained. “You remember school. Curly was the best of the names,” he shrugged with a glance up at Brandon as Troy and Jonathan laughed.

The science teacher tilted his head, a mischievous glint lighting his eyes, and he warbled lightly, “Thunder, thunder, thunder, Thundercat!”

Jake’s eyes shot up to stare at the man incredulously, surprised at the complete about-face in his demeanor, and Troy barked a laugh and pointed at him, giggling like a little boy. Brandon started laughing hard, almost falling over on the couch. “What?” he asked between snorts. “You don’t remember that one?”

“I thought I threatened anyone who remembered that one into amnesia,” Jake blurted as Troy held his side and wallowed on the couch, snorting and laughing uncontrollably.

Brandon tried to shrug, but he just laughed harder. “I guess you missed me, then. Lord. It was all over the school. Even on the walls in the bathrooms.” Jonathan and Troy started up with fresh peals of laughter.

Jake shifted uncomfortably. “Why?” he practically whined. That had been the one call at the football games that he had never understood. The cheerleaders had even taken it up for a few games.

Eyes widening in shock, Brandon just stared at him. “You don’t know why? Hell, I even know why. Remember the cartoon? ‘Thundercats’? The leader was this young guy who bellowed and led the rest of the team in the fights for victory. It was a compliment, man, when you were on the football field. Even if it is funny as hell, now.”

“Cartoon?” Jake echoed dubiously. He huffed and blushed even harder as he finished his beer.

“Geez. I’ll get it from Netflix for you,” Brandon said, shaking his head. “Just believe me, it was a compliment.” He smirked again before nudging Jake’s knee with one foot, stage whispering “Speedball.”

“Okay, enough reminiscing!” Jake cried as he waved his hands through the air and closed his eyes. “God,” he groaned. “It was embarrassing enough back then; the years just add to it.”

Jonathan and Troy were reduced to nearly crying snickers, and Brandon pressed his lips together, trying to put on a straight face and failing miserably. “Those are a hell of a lot better than anything I was ever called,” the science teacher pointed out reasonably.

“You can only compete if you had a bleacher load of people shouting it,” Jake challenged, reddening further at the memories of some of the games. It hadn’t been all that bad until the other team started laughing. Of course, usually they had only laughed until they were being beaten. “Man, even opposing players called me that.”

Troy snorted. “It just made you madder and then we beat the hell out of them.” Brandon remembered that Troy’d been Jake’s wide receiver. Jonathan, who’d been laughing the whole time, stood up, climbed over Brandon yet again, and sang ‘Thundercats’ on his way to the kitchen for more beer.

Jake growled dangerously and hunched his shoulders, still blushing heavily and glaring at them all. Brandon couldn’t help but titter again, then he took pity on Jake. “Sorry, man,” he murmured. But he was still smiling widely.

“Bastards,” Jake responded sulkily. God, it was embarrassing, having those memories dredged up. And he wasn’t quite sure why. He wondered if perhaps the fact that he’d been lusting over Brandon all fucking afternoon, that all the man remembered of him was these stupidass nicknames, and that he yelled had anything to do with it.

Jonathan came back with another three bottles and a Coke for Brandon, handing them around. “Now,” the freshman coach said. “Any other juicy gossip we need to know about?” he asked.

“Gossip? I’ve got some on Parkview, but do you know the staff?” Troy asked the middle school teacher. Jonathan just beamed. “Fine,” Troy said. He glanced around at the other guys. “I heard Renata caught Jason Beals and Tammy Parker in the art studio closet.”

“Hell, I’ve run them out of the locker rooms before,” Jake laughed with a shake of his head. “Ugh,” he added as he realized what he’d said. “I think I need to go duct tape my mouth closed now,” he groaned, standing up and grabbed his three empty beer bottles. “Pills have kicked in, boys.”

“I need to get going,” Brandon said regretfully. “You guys crashing here?” he asked Troy and Jonathan.

“I’ll take a ride back to the school, if you’re offering,” Troy nodded as he stood with an uncharacteristically worried frown, watching Jake walk into the kitchen.

“Me too,” Jonathan answered, beginning to gather up the pizza.

Brandon followed Troy’s eyes. He figured those two were pretty good friends, despite the blond’s constant ribbing. And if he looked worried... Brandon shook his head and shoved the book back into Jake’s duffle, gathering up empty bottles to take to the kitchen. Troy and Jonathan followed him, each carrying a pizza box and a few bottles. Jake was seated on his kitchen counter, legs swinging free and beer in his hand, and Troy chuckled as he placed the pizza on the counter.

“Man, how many nights did we do this after games?” the blond mused, suddenly serious again. He turned to Jonathan and Brandon and smiled. “After every Friday night game we’d come here. Nearly half the team. Everyone in school thought we all went out drinking and partying and shit. But we’d come to Campbell’s house, his mom would make us fried chicken, and we’d hang out in the back yard all night with a bonfire. I don’t even remember there being beer, man,” he said to Jake fondly.

“Hell no,” Jake huffed. “My dad would have skinned us all.” He laughed with a shake of his head. “Doritos and Gatorade, man. Food of the gods.”

Troy snorted and pointed at Jake, grinning widely. “You remember that night we were driving home from that tournament in Atlanta?” he asked with a laugh. Jake smiled and shook his head at the memory, glancing at Brandon and Jonathan apologetically for the reminiscing that was leaving them out. “We had driven there for this Saturday tournament,” Troy went on, telling them the story, “and on the way back it was us and two other guys in Jake’s car. We stopped at a gas station somewhere and got some snacks to hold us over, and when we got back in the car Jake just drank his drink from the bag as he drove.”

“We had Doritos and Dr. Pepper,” Jake interjected.

“So this cop sees him driving and drinking from this brown paper bag, right? And he pulls us over,” Troy went on, laughing as he spoke. “And he must have had something against sports, man, ‘cause he was all over us. We were all still in uniform and everything, and he makes Jake get out of the car to walk a line, right? Like he’s drunk! And he gets all up in Jake’s face and says, ‘Let me smell your breath, boy.’ So by this time the rest of us are just dying in the car, because Jake was like a foot taller than this cop anyway, and the guy’s all puffed up, and Jake’s been eating Doritos for like the entire day. And Jake goes, ‘I really don’t think you want me to do that.’” Troy was laughing so hard now he could barely keep up the story, pointing at Jake, who was grinning in amusement. “And the cop gets even more puffy,” Troy went on, snickering, “and Jake just shrugs and gives him a big ol’ whiff of Dorito breath,” Troy cackled. “God, it was funny,” he chuckled fondly.

Brandon’s eyes were wide. “So is that where the rumor that you got arrested came from?” he asked Jake.

“Maybe,” Jake drawled with a small smile. “No matter what I said, no one believed it had never happened.”

Brandon just shook his head, looked at the clock, and winced. 9:15. “I gotta go. C’mon, guys. Bus is leaving.” He headed back to the living room for his pack.

Jake was silent, pondering the sinking feeling in his chest. He could not be doing this. He could not be lusting after this guy, not Brandon Bartlett, not right now, not ever. He kept admiring the man, then reminding himself who Brandon was, and then either beating himself up for doing it or beating himself up for admiring Brandon in the first place. It was frustrating, to say the least.

Troy clapped Jake on the shoulder before following Brandon as Jonathan called out a pit stop on the way. Brandon leaned over to dig in his pack for his keys and slung his jersey over his arm. “Hey, Jake, you want me to wash this T-shirt and bring it back?” he called out as he stuffed the Under Armour in the back pack.

“Nah, just whatever works,” Jake murmured with a slight shiver.

Brandon nodded slowly, looking over to the man standing in the door. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

“Have a good night,” Jake offered, watching Brandon oddly. He started violently when Troy cleared his throat, ducked his head, and flushed slightly. “I’m going to bed,” he added in an embarrassed tone.

Troy looked at him sideways and nodded. “Night,” he said, following the other two men out to the car, leaving the head coach standing in the doorway to see them off.

“How many of those pills is he taking now?” Jonathan asked in a murmur as he walked with Troy.

“They’re just Tylenol Arthritis,” Troy answered with a shrug. “Whatever’s making him weird, it ain’t chemical.”

“Tylenol Arthritis out of a prescription bottle?” Brandon asked quietly as they climbed into the car.

Troy was silent for a moment, pondering. “I don’t ask about those bottles,” he finally answered.

They all fell silent until the stoplight, when Brandon remembered something odd Jonathan had asked about. “What was that about locker room duty, Jonathan?”

“Ah,” Jonathan murmured in response, obviously glad to change the subject. “Well, we usually make the rounds before games, sort of to keep things in line when the boys are all worked up.”

“Meaning?” Brandon prodded, wanting to know what to expect.

“Meaning the guys get a little riled up, both before a game and after a win, understandably. Just got to make sure they don’t get out of hand with the jokes, pranks, slap and tickle,” Troy said.

“Slap and tickle?” Brandon asked, astounded. In the high school locker room?

Troy simply shrugged and neither he nor Jonathan seemed to find it at all unusual. “Usually all you have to do is be in the locker room,” Jonathan added. “Just your presence keeps them calmer.”

Brandon swallowed the questions that popped to mind as he pulled the Jetta into the parking lot and stopped at Jonathan’s car. “I’ll see you tomorrow, guys,” he murmured.

“Thanks for the lift,” Jonathan returned as he slid out of the back seat.

Troy sat there in the front for a moment, his hand on the door handle and his eyes watching Jonathan stroll to his car. “The prescriptions,” he finally said slowly, “are better than what he could be doing.”

He looked more serious than Brandon had ever seen him. “You know him pretty well, right?” the science teacher asked.

“Yes,” Troy answered as he jerked his head a little and his jaw tightened.

Brandon nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said softly. He wouldn’t pursue it. Not as long as Troy knew what was going on.

Troy waited for a moment, seeming to want to say more, but finally he tugged the handle on the door and pushed it open slowly. “Thanks for the ride,” he said softly before exiting the car and walking to the golf cart parked in the grass.

Brandon thought about that look on Troy’s face a lot on the way home.