Page 56 of The Defender

A shrill whistle pierced the air.

Confused shouts rang out from the stands as the match stumbled to a halt. The referee jogged toward where Manchester’s striker lay on the ground, clutching his knee.

My heart thundered as I ran toward the commotion. It was such an obvious dive. There was nofuckingway the ref would give Manchester a free kick for that.

“Come on, ref!” I heard Asher yell when I got within earshot. “I barely touched him!”

The other striker groaned dramatically as if he’d been shot. Motherfucker.

“I saw the whole thing. He fell by himself,” I argued, backing Asher up. “Look at him! There’s no way he’s really hurt.”

The official was unmoved. He awarded the other team a free kick, and I watched, my pulse hammering, as the Manchester player took his shot.

The ball sailed toward the net. Noah knocked it back out to a chorus of jeers, but his save wasn’t enough.

The “foul” cost us our momentum, and when the final whistle blew less than a minute later, my chest had already caved in with disappointment. The stadium’s celebratory cheers dulled into a roar as I stared at the final scoreboard.

Three-two.

We’d lost.

To cheer us up, Adil insisted we attend a “consolation celebration” later that night, which was how the entire team ended up packed into his hotel room after dinner.

We weren’t returning to London until the morning, and normally, we’d have a night out after an away game, but the mood had been glum all evening. Although today’s match had been a regular Premier League match that didn’t count toward the UCL, it never felt good to lose.

Adil’s solution to that? Dinosaur erotica. The craziest part was, it seemed to be working.

“I now call this meeting of the Blackcastle Book Club to order.” Adil banged his mini gavel against the table. “I hope you all had a chance to look over the discussion questions I emailed?—”

“Oy, Chakir, get on with it already,” Gallagher called out. His injury was minor, but he was still grumpy about getting subbed out. “We’ve suffered enough today, yeah? Don’t need a whole song and dance when we already know how this goes.”

Adil glowered at him. “Obviously you don’t because the book club rulesclearlystate that whoever holds the gavel has the floor. For that, I use the power vested in me as the president of this club to strip you of your book-choosing privileges next month.”

“What? That’s not fair!” Gallagher spluttered. “It was my turn to choose!”

“You should’ve thought of that before you broke the rules. Now, as I was saying…”

I tuned out the rest of Adil’s introduction. I wasn’t surprised that he’d consider a book club meeting a consolation prize or that he’d hunted down copies of our monthly pick at a local bookshop. Our meeting was originally scheduled for Friday, so we’d left our books at home.

I was more surprised by how comforting this felt. We’d started the Blackcastle Book Club in the spring at Adil’s insistence, but it’d turned into a general team bonding experience. Every month, we gathered at one of our houses to discuss our latest pick. We usually only spent ten or fifteen minutes on the actual book discussion. The rest of the hour was spent chatting or, if a guy was on the outs with his girl, providing unlicensed therapy.

This month, our pick wasFucking My Theropod Therapistby Wilma Pebbles.If you guessed the book was about a human woman who falls in lust with her dinosaur therapist, you’d be right.

I didn’t want to know how Adil was able to get that many copies on such short notice.

“Let’s start with question number one.” He read from his phone. “Do you think it’s ethical for a therapist to sleep with their patient, even if they’re fictional?”

“It’s interspecies fucking, which is technically bestiality. We’ve passed the boundaries of ethics,” Samson said.

“That doesn’t count,” Stevens argued. “Interspecies fucking is theentire premiseof the genre. We have to overlook it the way we have to overlook how everyone has, like, ten orgasms at a time in these books even though that’s physically impossible.”

“Impossible for you, maybe,” Samson said. “Don’t project your inadequacies on the rest of us.”

“Personally, I’m more interested in the demographics of this world.” Gallagher frowned. “Were there no human therapists? Why did she go to a dinosaur? I feel like a human therapist would’ve been much better equipped to help her deal with her problems.”

“Yeah, but would a human be able to rail her like Big T? No. That’s what makes this book absolutely bonkers!” Stevens slapped his paperback against his thigh. “This is dino erotica, people! You can’t have dino erotica without the dino!”

The book discussion devolved into a mess of shouting, arguments, and futile attempts by Adil to restore order.