Good Guy Gabe (Wilmington Juggernauts #1)

Chapter 1

Gabe

“Seventeen,” I call out. “Sixteen. Fifteen,” clicking the button each time Blaise Sinclair reaches forward, grabs the ball in front of him, and slides his torso over it. The rules state his abdomen must be on the ball for it to count, and I’m a stickler for rules, so I make sure he’s already there before calling out the next number.

My entire life is rules and timing, every action occurring in a blink that has the world riding on it. I may look like a gigantic oaf, but my reflexes are every bit as sharp as Sinclair’s.

I’m mostly stationary, having started at the middle of the line so I wouldn’t need to work so hard to keep up. On the other side, Merrick Briggs is running to stay flush, watching not where he’s going but Blaise’s progress, but Merrick’s used to running in one direction while looking in another. On his head is a GoPro filming this. I studied the rules before we set this up. As long as it’s filmed and the angle makes it clear that Blaise isn’t touching the ground, it’s valid. To that end, I’m also strapped with a camera. We don’t want the committee claiming that Blaise’s left hand touched the ground.

Seriously, though, Blaise’s left hand is insured at one hundred million dollars. It’s not touching the ground.

“Eight!” I yell. “Seven! Six!” Excitement, the familiar, addictive buzz of adrenaline, has my heart pounding. I wasn’t initially into this, just doing what Blaise asked me to do because my life is all about protecting Blaise, and with a guy like Blaise, there’s no clocking out. But there’s that point where it becomes real, where this is anactualthing, he’s going to go down inactualrecord books,I’mgoing to be a part of this, and yeah. I’m excited.

“Four! Three—!”

A sudden explosion behind us. Gigantic rubber exercise balls go scattering all across the gymnasium, several of them flying through the air, one of them slamming so hard into a wall it gets skewered on a peg and deflates sadly.

Merrick trips over his own feet and falls on his ass. Blaise nearly dodges a similar fate — or worse, smashing that nine-figure hand under his exercise ball as he rolls off it — only because I dive down to catch him, hitting the floor hard, but it’s that recycled tire stuff. I get smashed by walls of flesh all day. This is fine.

Except I hear a rip as something on Blaise catches on my cooldown hoodie. It’s definitely a fabric rip, not a muscular one, but I frown. I love this hoodie. It’s really hard to find anything in this color in my size.

“What in the name of god and all that is holy are you dipshits doing?”

Some good news here: that’s not the voice of Head Coach Keenan or any of the other coaches or higher-ups on the corporate side of the Wilmington Juggernauts, the NFL’s most recent expansion team. It is, however, Lin Huang, the kicker, and he can be a bit of a dick. He duked it out with Blaise and Merrick a lot last year during our inaugural season, where we didn’t quite make it to playoffs but at least finished with a respectable 8-5. You can’t expect much more from a first-year expansion. But he’s also a dancer, showed his dick to an entire audience and they saw it as artistic. Last time Blaise tried that, I had to go down to the courthouse and bail his ass out. Only difference for Blaise was it was in a bar instead of a theater.

I’m mostly cool with Huang. His girl’s tight with the wife of Evan Allore, a good buddy of mine, so we hang out sometimes. But Blaise and Merrick hate him.

“Iwassetting a world record,” Blaise huffs as he jams the heel of his hand right into my sternum to lift himself off me, “until you ruined it.”

“You suck so much, Huang,” Merrick grumbles from a few feet away. I roll to my side to see if he’s okay — as the wide receiver, his ankles are worth nearly as much as Blaise’s hand — but he’s already popping back up.

I’m slower to rise. I’m the oldest of the three of us, only by a few years, but those years seem a lot longer with the extra hundred-plus pounds I’ve got on them. It doesn’t help that I’m also the one constantly running into men just as big as me to keep them off those two. And being the center, having no choice but to take that hit to my head and shoulders every single time because once that ball leaves my hand, the guy across from me is going to try to tear through me to get to Blaise?

Yeah, I’m already feeling the creaks at 29. It was a fucking miracle that the Colts picked me up at 27 and then transferred me alongside Blaise to the Juggernauts the following year. When this contract is up at the end of this season, I’m gonna be 30. There will be a batch of recruits a decade younger than me chomping at the bit to take my place, and experience only does so much to compensate for worn joints and growing concussion counts.

This might be my last year.

“What are you doing?” Huang repeats as Blaise and Merrick each take one of my hands to drag my three-hundred-pound ass off the floor.

“Clearly I was attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the greatest number of exercise balls ridden across without touching the ground,” Blaise snaps back, and yeah, when he says it like that, it does sound pretty dumb. Still, I stand tall, crossing my arms over my chest, defending my QB against injury, ridicule, and his own stupidity. That’s my job, and I’m one of the few guys who’s done well at it. There was a reason Blaise and I were a combo pack. Blaisecould bea Super Bowl worthy-quarterback, but he’s a loose cannon.

And kind of an idiot.

Huang drops his head back to stare up at the cosmic beyond. “You are the starting quarterback for the sixteenth-ranked team. As much as I die on the inside admitting this, you are an incredible quarterback who could be legendary if you got your shit together. You could be breaking actual, important, memorable records that would land your ass in Canton if you grew the fuck up, and instead you stole all the exercise balls from the studio to ride them like some drunk frat boy?”

Listen. Huang and I have had some good moments. I know he has his own inner demons, that he’s plagued by his father, who still doesn’t fully accept his choices even though, to turn his words back around, he’s the kicker for the sixteenth-ranked NFL team. That’s dead center but also dead center of a pool of only thirty-two men of the thousands who dreamed of this since their peewee football days.

But I’ve met his father. I know that when Huang yells at us like this, he picks up his father’s accent, like this is how he learned to chew people out. And that’s sad but just a little funny.

I snort.

Just a little.

But I’m a big guy. I’m not loud, but my sounds carry.

He glares at me, and I hang my head.

“Youknow better,” he says, and he’s definitely talking to me.

I firm up my lips and nod sharply. I do know better, but it’s easier rolling with Blaise’s shenanigans than trying to reason with him. And it’s not like Merrick is going to stop Blaise. They come together like sulfur and oxygen. I wish I could be a fire extinguisher, but I’m just the farmer mowing over his field to keep the brushfire from spreading.

“We’re done,” I assure Huang. “Just a stupid thing to try. We’ll clean it up before we head out.”

I expect him to be mollified by that, but instead he says, “Not you. Emily Hess wants to see you.”

“Ooh,” Blaise and Merrick sing out in unison as though I’ve just been called down to the principal’s office.

I glare at them, but I have to look over my shoulders to do that. Of course they’re using me as a meat wall. Blaise is shaking out the twists he just had done, his preferred hairstyle during football season so he can bring the afro back out from February to July. Merrick winks one blue eye and blows me a kiss.

“Who’s Emily Hess?” I ask them, nervous. This is the final season of my current contract. I can’t be messing up now.

“She’s in PR,” Blaise says.

“You’re in trouble, dude,” Merrick adds.

Huang has to shout, “She’s the director of events!” over another chorus ofoohs, saving me additional stress. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten chewed out by PR about some social media nonsense that wasn’t my fault.

It’s almost always Blaise’s fault. When it’s not, it’s Merrick’s.

“What does the director of events need me for?” I mutter as I head out of the gym. Huang barks orders out behind me, and I’d fully expect a fistfight to break out if it wasn’t mid-August, with only one more pre-season game before the second season of the Wilmington Juggernauts officially starts.

Emily Hess, Director of Events, has an office that is simultaneously spacious and cluttered. The offensive line could fit in here comfortably, but right now, there’s barely enough room for just me because of the stacks of crates, all labeled KICK-OFF GALA, plus an entire team’s worth of life-sized pop-up replicas of us. I come face-to-face with myself, and even cardboard me took twice the materials of Merrick standing nearby. Merrick’s looking all sleek and suave and dangerous in that way that gets his fangirls dropping panties. Cardboard me is red-faced and jolly and tubby, Santa Claus working his part-time gig.

Yeah, I got fangirls, and yeah, I mostly get cookies from them. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the cookies. But I wouldn’t say no to some panties.

I frown when I notice this photo must have been from this past summer, before I noticed the patch of silver sprouting at the edge of the ginger and started using a shampoo that makes it less a beacon pointing to my advanced years. I meander over to the desk and open the top drawer to see if there’s a Sharpie or red pen or dark nail polish, anything to color in that spot. Only then do I hear a hissing sound and realize I’m not alone.

Lurking between Dom Morales, second-string QB, and Micah Oliver, running back, is a very petite, very angry middle-aged woman. She has one very angry finger pointed at me, another pointed at the headset in her ear, I guess to indicate she’s on a call. She’s got one of those haircuts that tells me she’s complained to the manager so many times she’sbecomemanagement.

I ease the drawer closed and sheepishly lower myself into her seat, but the creak it makes has me shooting back up. I fold my arms in and keep my head hung in acknowledgment of her eye daggers as I wait for her to finish her call.

When she talks, it’s pleasant, upbeat, go-getter platitudes, assuring whomever is on the other end of the call that everything is right on schedule and the Kick-Off Gala is going to go off without a hitch. They’ve even added extra security in case any disruptive elements need to be removed.

That’s the team. We’re the disruptive elements. We’ve already been told that we will be served exactly two alcoholic drinks aside from the champagne toast, to not even try to bribe the bartenders because there will be cameras, and that we’re all going to be sent through metal detectors and manually searched upon entry.

When her call is over, her voice jumps an octave as she gestures for me to leave, like I wasn’t told to come here by the least likely Jug to prank me. “You, the Quilted Flower, now.”

I pat myself down, wondering if I’ve somehow picked up some fabric brooch of hers or something. Nope, just my usual athletic shorts and my baby pink Party Animal hoodie with the screen print of a DJ cat in Deal-With-It sunglasses.

And a giant rip on the side.

“Go to. The Quilted Flower. Right now. The quilt we’re auctioning for the Kick-Off fundraiser is coming from there, and I haven’t been able to get in touch with the quilter in four days.”

“The quilter?” I repeat. The only quilter I’ve ever known was my great-gram, who passed a couple years back at the ripe old age of 92. Even died with a quilt in her lap, halfway through a stitch. Grams tried to pass it off to my sisters, but they all agreed the thing was cursed. I don’t know what ever happened to it.

“Yes, the quilter. The person who makes quilts. They’re called quilters.”

“Well, right, but what if she’s . . .” I lean in and whisper, “. . . dead? I don’t want to find a dead body.”

“She’s not dead!” Emily screeches, punching cardboard Kai Bodley right in the face, triggering a domino effect that knocks over half the team. “Her name’s Jocelyn Page. She’s very much alive, she’s just not returning my calls. Now go!”

I shouldn’t push my luck, but I have to ask, “Why me? I’m supposed to be packing for Cleveland.”

I’ve seen defensive tackles driven to the brink of madness by Blaise’s taunts, to the point of five-yard penalties for offsides, who look less like raging bulls than this woman. She breathes several times. I’m not sure if she’s calming herself or stoking an internal fire. Finally, she says, “The store is in Camden. You live in Camden. It’s on your way home.”

“I mean, Sinclair and Briggs live there too. Plus Bodley and Jennings and Vedder.” I grumble as I head back out of the office, but even I know that’s a bad line. They’d terrorize the poor granny.

I pull out my phone and search for The Quilted Flower. The picture taken from the street is an old farmhouse with weathered clapboard siding and a wraparound porch that has several quilts draped over the railing. Some look like the ones Great-Gran Bernie made, washed-out pastels and antique tones in fussy patterns, but others are bright and sophisticated murals more like what I’d expect at a modern art gallery. One of the quilts looks like a clean fade from baby pink to a nightmarish neon melon, but when I zoom in, what looked like bad camera pixels is actually intricate designs stitched together from tangerine- and dragonfruit-colored fabric.

I haven’t had a ton of girlfriends, no wives to speak of, but I do have four sisters. If I didn’t know my colors, I’d never have survived the emergency nail polish runs to CVS in high school.

The shop is a block away from the Camden Square pizza place I like. I’m genuinely surprised I’ve never noticed it before. There’s no way that quilt wouldn’t have caught my eye.

I flip over to my text messages, needing to let Merrick know he has to get a ride home with Blaise. I don’t get a single word typed before Emily yells from down the hall, “And Shaunessy?”

“Ma’am?” I call back.

“You got a date for the gala, right?”

Crud. That was something else they’ve told us at least three times now. Dates are required so no one’s trying to pick up any senators again this year.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say as sweetly as possible.

“You’re lying to me, Shaunessy. Find yourself a date.”

Like it’s that easy.