Chapter 13
“Rook was a little slow today, but faster than yesterday,” Marty said knowingly, tilting his head towards where Cam had just wrapped up his jog around the edge of the field with Joey.
Dawson looked up from where he was stretching. Tried not to flush.
Yesterday, after practice Nate had noticed the marks littering Cam’s torso and had made a few joking comments and then Mo had joined in.
Aidan had shot both of them a look, but the damage had been done, and everyone in the room—and then probably everyone in the building—knew that the rookie had been hooking up. Not with Dawson necessarily, but anyone who had been paying any kind of attention probably knew it was him.
And Marty was too observant, and had been doing this for way too long, to not guess the truth.
Dawson had assumed that he might’ve dodged the inevitable yesterday, but now Marty was giving him the kind of look that spoke volumes about how he hadn’t escaped at all.
“Are you gonna lecture me about this like Aidan did?” Dawson wondered.
Marty’s eyebrow skidded upwards. “Aidan lectured you?”
“Warned me? Lectured me?” Dawson shrugged. “I’m not gonna fuck the rookie up.”
“Never thought you would,” Marty said.
“I guess it was you who wanted me and Cam to get closer.”
“Oh, it’s ’cause of what I said now?” Marty chuckled. “I told you to hang out with him. That’s all.” But he didn’t look upset or disappointed. He actually looked . . .well, if Dawson was going to call it anything, he would say Marty looked absolutely not surprised.
“Yeah, yeah. You probably guessed this was gonna happen.” Marty probably had. Cam’s crush had been visible from space.
But he wasn’t sure how Marty had known that Dawson, when he finally started seeing the rookie, would figure out that once he started noticing him, he wouldn’t be able to stop.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. But I thought you two would find some kind of common ground,” Marty admitted. “Glad to see you did.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dawson said, but he was glad.
He liked to think that even without Marty’s prompting, he’d have noticed Cam eventually, but he was glad it hadn’t taken him that long.
Because it not only felt great to be having regular sex again, but he hadn’t even realized how much he’d missed having someone around he really liked.
Someone to make laugh. Someone’s space to share.
Someone to text when his apartment was feeling particularly empty.
“Let’s kick some balls,” Marty said. “Actually—let’s do the ladder.”
“Ugh, the ladder.” Dawson made a face.
The ladder was a particularly nefarious invention of Marty’s where Dawson had to kick three field goals each at graduated intervals, starting at twenty-five yards and moving back five yards every time. Each time he missed, he had to do twenty pushups.
It wasn’t so bad from twenty-five yards to the fifty or so. But after? The last time that Dawson had done the ladder, by the time he’d gotten to the sixty-five-yard field goal, his arms had felt like they were gonna fall off.
And then, Marty always wanted him to work back the other way.
“The ladder’s good for you. You’re gonna appreciate it, later. And I’m sure the rookie will too.”
“Ugh, I regret you finding out about that.”
Marty grinned. “If you’ve got time to sex up the rookie, you’ve got time to put in the work on the field, Hall.”
“I hate you,” Dawson said. But he grabbed a ball and a tee from the bin by the bench and headed out onto the field. They were working on the smaller field today, away from the rest of the team.
Set up his first field goal. Hit those three. One after another after another.
Moved back another five feet. Hit another three, right through the center of the uprights.
Thirty-five yards. Same thing. Forty, and it was still easy.
He misjudged one of the three on the forty-five-yard length but it still barely sneaked inside the left upright.
Fifty, still money.
Marty made some noise about how it was only going to get harder from here, and Dawson already knew that.
Still, he was deep in the zone, totally locked in, and nailed the three fifty-five-yard field goals. Barely heard Marty as he clapped when the third one went in.
Dawson set up for the first sixty-yard attempt. Took a big breath and then another. This was a long field goal, even for him. He’d only made one sixty-yarder in a game. Could make them more easily in practice, especially kicking off a tee, but that didn’t mean they were easy.
It was a long way, and with the longer distance he had to put a lot more force into the kick, and with that additional force came a stronger chance that his aim wouldn’t be as solid.
Dawson eyed the uprights, sixty yards away, and did his mental calculations. Felt pretty good about them, but despite his best efforts, his first attempt went slightly wonky, clanking against the right upright, and flying off, making it his first miss.
Reluctantly, he got down on the ground. The first twenty pushups weren’t so bad. But even if his arms weren’t aching now, he knew just how much they’d be aching by the time Dawson was done with this hellish exercise.
Thankfully, he made the next two field goals, even at sixty, and then he moved on to sixty-five. He nailed the first, and then missed the next two, and by the time he was done with those pushups, he was mentally flogging Marty for ever having been born.
He hadn’t even noticed that Cam had wandered over, but after he finished the second set of sixty-yarders (missed one, got two—the second one barely cleared the bottom bar, but even though Marty made noise about it, Dawson decided he could fuck right off), he was startled when he heard Cam’s voice behind him.
“Looking good,” Cam said.
Dawson flicked his glance behind him and made a face. “If you’re here to say anything about my pushup form . . .”
“Oh, I’m not,” Cam said. He pulled even with Dawson, like he’d decided it was okay to occupy Dawson’s space bubble.
Normally, when he did this, Dawson didn’t want anybody in his space. God knew he’d complained to Marty enough times at the beginning of the season about Cam approaching him on the sideline.
But somehow, when Dawson hadn’t been paying attention, Cam had become the exception to the rule. Maybe not on the sideline, but here at practice? It almost felt right to have Cam’s attention on him.
“How’s it going?” Cam asked.
“Marty’s a sadist, that’s how it’s going,” Dawson complained.
“Only caught a few misses.” Cam hummed under his breath. “But then, I don’t know if the stick is the best way to motivate you.”
“What, you wanna be the carrot?” Dawson said it as a joke, but his pulse jumped anyway.
Cam shrugged, but the smile he shot him was full of mischief. “Why not?”
“Daws!” Marty called out. “Stop taking a break. Your arms aren’t gonna fall off.” He hesitated. “Probably!”
Cam tilted his head in closer. Murmured, “How about for every one you make over fifty yards, I’ll give you a blowjob?”
Dawson knew what was coming, but he still choked on air. “I’ve got six more field goals over fifty yards.”
But Cam just batted his eyelashes innocently. “Yeah? Well, you’d better get to it.”
He wasn’t even sure Cam was wrong—a blowjob for a successful field goal might be better motivation than pushups for a miss—but he should have expected how his pulse raced, his mind already drifting to how it might happen.
How it might feel. Cam’s mouth, tight and hot and wet and so fucking perfect, around him.
Predictably, even though he gave himself a long moment to regain his focus, a few deep breaths to try to even his breathing out, on the first fifty-five-yarder, the ball sailed right past the left upright.
“Damn,” Dawson muttered under his breath. He dropped down and counted to twenty as his arms shook through another set of pushups.
When he lifted himself back up, he caught a flash of a knowing smile on Cam’s face. But that wasn’t what made his whole body heat. It was the subtle five fingers Cam flashed him.
Okay. He was going to focus in. There was no way he was going to give Cam a reason to give him a four next. He had this.
He was so locked in, body falling back on the mechanics he’d been drilling into it for the last fifteen years, he barely noticed when he finished fifty-five and went on to fifty.
Cam might’ve made some kind of approving noise as the first of his fifty-yarders went between the uprights. Marty definitely said something, but Dawson couldn’t be fucked to figure out what it was. He was getting this shit done.
He’d known, because the way they were with each other made it obvious, that the sex with Cam was going to continue. It was too good to quit, and even if it hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have wanted to stop. But the fact that Cam was making these kinds of promises—
No. He cut that thought off hard and fast. He had one more to get. More than that, of course, because he still had to work his way back down to twenty-five yards, but one more that counted. One more that Cam had promised him a reward for.
Dawson lined up, but the focused zone he’d dropped into before was hard to find, and he thought he got close, but still, with his body growing tired from the strain of so many long kicks, it just barely missed.
“Shit.” Dawson exhaled sharply. He looked over at Cam, but his grin hadn’t dimmed, and sure enough, he flashed him four fingers.
Four wasn’t six, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at either, and the thought of it, all that pleasure, got him through the next set of pushups.
Dawson couldn’t say the thoughts of Cam going to his knees again—four more times, even—completely eliminated the exhausted shake of his arms as he finished the last pushup of the set and stood, but they didn’t hurt, either.
“Come on, Hall, finish up strong,” Marty called out encouragingly.
It wasn’t easy, but Dawson pulled the remainder of his focus tight around him, and even though his whole body was tired, finished the rest of the ladder with no more misses.