Golden Boy Gets a Little Tarnished #2
I listened half-heartedly when my agent woke me up to say, “Don’t blow this off, Brent. Management is not happy with you. There’s a certain image they expect you to uphold, and you’re not doing that.”
God forbid I’m not the team’s “Golden Boy.” I’m “The Next One,” remember?
Bullshit, it’s all crap.
Coach Townsend called me shortly after I got off the phone with my agent. He had the same warning.
“You don’t want the team to take action. You’re not going to like what they have in store for you, Brent, if you keep up with this bad behavior.”
“Oh, come on,” I replied, laughing. “The Wolves can’t fire me. And what could be worse than that?”
Coach T chuckled like he knew something.
Hmm…
“I can’t worry about that shit today,” I said to him. “I’ll start cleaning up my act tomorrow.”
“Brent…” Coach T sounded doubtful.
“Really, I will,” I insisted.
That was a few hours ago. And I plan to make some changes. But maybe not quite yet.
“Before tomorrow gets here,” I justify to myself, “we still have the rest of today. And that means there’s time for one more party.”
I stride into the second-floor living room of my house, a spacious and angled space overlooking the huge lake on my property. Peering out at the crystal blue water, I announce to Benny and Nolan, “Listen up, boys. We’re having one final blowout tonight, a party to end all parties.”
There’s a murmur from Nolan, but nothing from Benny.
“We’re going to do this one right,” I go on. “We party tonight. But then, when tomorrow arrives, we’re done with messing around. We start training full-on.”
Yeah, right, a little voice in my head coughs out.
I look around since no one besides my guilty conscience seems to be chiming in.
It’s early afternoon and the sun is bathing the room—my favorite, by the way, with the way it juts out over the lake showcasing the floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides and a massive deck with a mile-long view on the other—in a warm summer glow.
Nolan, who is lounging on an easy chair with a beer in his hand, raises his bottle. “I’m in,” he says.
His words aren’t the least bit slurred, even though he’s been drinking straight through since last night’s bash.
“And then, yeah,” he continues, agreeing with me, “we’ll start getting ready for camp.”
Despite his ability to suck down alcohol like a fish, Nolan hasn’t veered too far off course.
Getting back on track won’t be hard for him.
He’s like Mr. Discipline. And he’s not fooling anyone, anyway.
I caught him working out in my basement gym a few days ago.
With the way he was pumping iron I suspect he’s been training consistently for a few weeks now.
There’s still not been a response from Benny, which is unusual. Dude’s always up for a party. He’s probably the worst of us when it comes to out-of-control antics.
And that’s saying a lot.
“Hey, where’s Benny?” I ask Nolan as I scan the shadows of the room.
He nods to a sofa that’s been pushed way-ass off to a far corner.
“Oh, I should’ve known.” I chuckle as I take in an eyeful.
Benny is sprawled out on a sofa in the shadows, sleeping like a baby. His massive chest is rising and falling in perfect rhythm with the ticking clock on the stone mantel above his head. Some puck bunny he was fucking around with last night is with him, passed out on top of him.
The sheet covering their naked bodies is hiked up just enough to afford a view of the girl’s creamy thigh, which is casually slung over my linemate’s muscular, hairy-as-hell leg, and positioned under his semi-exposed junk.
Chuckling at Benny’s total lack of modesty, I pick up a throw pillow and lob it at his head—the one that clearly controls all his thinking.
And he scores!
As the pillow makes contact—and how could it not with a pole like that marking my target?—the sheet falls off completely. I get a quick flash of perky tits and tiny ass. And then, shit—a big honking piece of man-meat assaults my eyes.
“Dude,” I snort, mock-offended. “You need to cover that shit before you blind us all.”
Benny stirs to life. Sitting up, he barks, “What the fuck, Oliver? I was having the best dream ever. That is till you started tossing shit at my balls. ”
Nolan lets out a low chuckle. “Only you, Benny, could find a way of using ‘tossing’ and ‘balls’ in the same sentence. But really”—he tilts his bottle to Benny’s dick—“you need to do what Brent said and cover that shit up.”
Throughout this entire brain-draining exchange, the girl wakes up. And damn, she looks young. Letting out a little squeak, not unlike a hamster, she gathers the sheet around her naked self and scurries off to where she seems to think the bathroom is.
I only know this ’cause she’s muttering something about having to pee. But the poor girl has no idea where to go. Hamster-girl flies past me, heading down the wrong hallway, the one that leads to my bedroom.
As I rush to retrieve her, I can’t help but grumble, “Why in the hell do they always think the damn bathroom’s down my hall?”
I catch up to and redirect the girl, pointing her in the correct direction. “It’s that way, sweetheart,” I say in my kindest tone.
No need to be an asshole; the poor thing already looks shell-shocked. Though whether that’s due to waking up in a strange house or waking up next to that monstrous thing Benny calls a cock, I have no clue.
“Thanks, Mr. Oliver,” she replies.
And then she runs off.
“Mr. Oliver?” I shake my head. “What the fuck is up with that? If she thinks I’m old and I’m only twenty-two, then…”
Whoa, wait.
Hurrying back out to the living room and pointing an accusatory finger at Benny, I say, “That chick better be over eighteen, dude. We’re in enough trouble already with the team.”
Benjamin Perry is twenty-eight, but he likes younger girls. Nothing illegal, so don’t get your panties in a bunch. He just happens to favor babes who either look young, or are just old enough.
“She’s twenty-three,” he replies, sounding hurt by my accusation.
“What? Five years past eighteen?” Nolan peers over at me and smirks. “Hey, Oliver, you think Benny is working up to go cougar on us?”
Laughing, I reply, “Seeing as he’s on his way to fucking the full spectrum of girls in their twenties, I do indeed think he’s secretly working his way up to thirty.”
“Small steps,” Nolan says.
“Fuck you,” Benny interjects. “You’re both dickheads.”
I put up my hands. “Hey, don’t be pissed at me. Take it up with Nolan. He started with the jokes. I only brought up the chick’s age for your own protection. I’m always looking out for you, buddy.”
“Yeah, you usually are,” he concedes. “And thanks for that.” He shoots me an apologetic grin. “You really are a good kid at heart.”
I shrug, feeling a little self-conscious at being called a kid. But then I see what Benny is up to, preparing to bust my balls.
Sure enough, the next words out of his mouth are “You do know I mean kid in a good kind of way. Like maybe”—he smirks—“a golden boy sort of style.”
“Ha. Ha,” I retort. And since he’s enjoying yanking my chain far too much, I shoot him the bird. “Shut the fuck up, man.”
Benny may give me a hard time, but his underlying sentiment is genuine.
What he said about me being a good guy, like a decent person, is true.
Despite all the craziness of late, I want nothing but the best for my friends.
And just because I’ve been fucking up my own life lately doesn’t mean Benny’s and Nolan’s lives have to go down the shitter too.
Really, I probably should’ve never invited them to Minnesota. I should have come up to the lake house by myself. That would’ve been the smart thing to do, especially if my intention all along has been to piss away my career.
I don’t really want that, though, do I?
No.
I just need some help in getting back on track.
But where would I find something like that?
Ah, fuck it.
“So what do you say, Benny?” I ask, back to focusing on the party. “You in?”
He stretches, covering his dick with the pillow I threw at him. I make a mental note to have all my furniture and their decorative accents, especially the pillows, steam cleaned.
Running his hand through his shaggy, dark blond hair, he says, “Am I in for what?”
“Party tonight,” Nolan interjects in his usual no-nonsense tone. “One last blowout, and then Brent here says we’re stopping with the bad behavior.”
I have to laugh. Nolan is only three years older than me, but it’s like he’s twenty-five going on forty. He’s the voice of reason in our crew.
Well, most of the time.
Not today, though. No, today he agrees to go all-out.
With the party plans full steam ahead, we get on our phones, texting and calling everyone we know.
“Tonight we party hard,” I declare when we reconvene in the living room.
“Yeah,” Nolan says, holding up a freshly opened bottle of beer.
“You mean hell, yeah,” Benny corrects, raising the full shot glass in his hand.
“Hell, yeah,” I echo, a beer and a shot on the table in front of me. “And just so we’re clear,” I add. “Tomorrow we give up the booze and the women. Tomorrow we start training for real.”
The boys agree, and we drink to our plan.
Yeah, tomorrow we’ll do all those things…