Chapter 9
Debrief. The word was cold and distant. He used it for post-game analysis, for dissecting a loss.
The only “debrief” I was interested in replaying was expounding on the moment Evan’s control finally broke, his fingers tangling in my hair as he came.
But that wasn’t the kind of data my father was searching for.
For the next eight hours, I kept drafting the conversation the way I drafted a piece—roughing in the broad shapes first, then refining.
Except every version was wrong once I held it up to the light.
The words were right, but the delivery wasn’t.
Or the delivery was right, but the words were too careful, too finished, and my father would read between the lines.
Everything with Evan went fine. Better than fine. Spectacularly, earth-shatteringly, I-swallowed-his-cum fine. And there was absolutely no version of reality where I could share that information with my father.
“In.”
Nothing had changed. The conference championship trophy gleamed from its corner. The binders stood in rigid, chronological order. Even the view of the field from the window was still a sight for sore eyes.
My father was exactly where I always found him—hunched forward, pencil in hand, the secret gel pad the only soft thing in the room.
I sat in the diamond-compressor and waited for him to finish whatever note he was writing.
“Florida,” he said.
“Florida,” I confirmed.
“How’d it go?”
A simple and direct question. And my brain, of course, picked that exact moment to replay the weekend in full sensory detail. My tongue became useless in my mouth. “Good,” I said. “Uneventful.”
Dad leaned back in his chair, folding his thick arms across his chest. “Uneventful?”
“Yeah. He stayed in the room, kept out of trouble, and showed up ready to play every game.” I ticked the points off on my fingers, delivering the report he wanted. “Mission accomplished.”
His eyes narrowed, and I was sure he could see it—the whole weekend laid out like a scouting report, every lie circled in red. “He give you any trouble?”
“No.”
He held my gaze a beat too long, then filed my answer under acceptable. “Did he say anything about the arrangement?”
“Just that he’s not thrilled,” I admitted with a shrug. “But he didn’t take it out on me.”
“What’d you two do in there all night?”
The question was so innocent, so logistical, that I almost believed it to be a trap. My father wanted to know if we’d watched game tape or stayed up playing video games. I had to dig my fingers into the chair’s armrests to anchor myself to his version of reality.
“Watched TV,” I said. “SportsCenter, mostly. He went to bed early. I sketched.”
All technically true. SportsCenter had been on.
Evan had gone to bed. I had brought a sketchbook.
I merely omitted the part where I kneeled between his spread thighs for an hour as I focused on a different part of Evan’s anatomy.
A part that my father had apparently seen in all its rock-hard glory once upon a time.
I wasn’t sure whether I should have been elated that we finally had something in common.
Dad grunted, satisfied. He pulled a sticky note from the pad on his desk and wrote something down. “Good. That’s what I needed to hear. UNC Wilmington is in two weeks. The arrangement will continue.”
“Got it.”
I should have stood up and walked out with the win. But I stayed, pinned to the chair by silence.
Just ask me if I’m okay.
“While I’ve got you here…the laundry room.”
A hot prickle crawled up my neck as my brain flashed back to the last time he’d cornered me about something private.
I was sixteen, holding a Hustler I’d found in his desk while my eyes were locked on the torn box of Magnum condoms and the half-empty bottle of Astroglide.
He’d promptly launched into a ninety-second clinical summary of sex that had left me with a swarm of unasked questions.
Questions about desire, about what it felt like to be touched.
About whether the ache in my chest whenever I saw the quarterback of the football team was part of this equation.
He’d handed me the stapler I’d been rummaging for and walked away.
“Dad—” I said, returning to the present, humiliated beyond belief.
He held up a hand. “I don’t need an explanation. I get it.”
I stared at him, trying to process words that didn’t compute. Richard Jenkins critiqued, corrected, and moved on. He’d never been one to simply understand.
“You’re a twenty-one-year-old kid on the road.
” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, his voice dropping into a register I’d never heard before—low, almost informal.
“You’ve got needs. Every guy does. I was your age once, believe it or not.
Playing for state, guys crammed into hotel rooms that smelled like feet and Icy Hot.
You think I didn’t have to figure out how to handle that? ”
I was going to combust in this chair and leave nothing but a scorch mark and a pair of Converse. My father was talking about masturbation.
“But, Thomas”—his eyes sharpened—“stay out of the laundry room at an opposing school. That’s a locked door you can’t guarantee stays locked. Someone else’s facility. A liability.”
“I understand.”
“If you need to crank one out”—God help me—“go into a restroom stall, take all the time you need, and move on.” He ticked the options off on his thick fingers.
“Or you wait until you’re back at the hotel.
Tell Brock you’re taking a shit. He doesn’t need to know what you’re really doing, and he won’t ask.
Or you wait until you’re home and have fun on your own time. ”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Feeling pain right now was preferable to humiliation. “It was a moment of weakness. It won’t happen again.”
He studied me for a beat, then gave me a single, definitive dip of his chin.
“Good. Now, one more thing. If there ever comes a time when you’re pent-up and Brock’s in the bathroom taking a long shower or whatever”—he cleared his throat—“my room’s always right down the hall.
Petrie likes to use the hotel gym for a good two hours. I’ll join him and give you the room.”
The silence that followed was excruciating. My father had just offered me his hotel room as an officially sanctioned masturbation station. I was seriously contemplating throwing myself through the window like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
“I don’t want to get a call from campus police because my son got picked up for public indecency. That’s a headline I don’t need, and a conversation with the athletic director I’m not willing to have.”
And there it was—brand protection. The Richard Jenkins School of Parenting, where love was expressed through logistical contingency planning.
But underneath the layers of risk management, my father had thought about me as a person with needs. The offer was a bridge built of spare parts and pragmatism, sure, but it was also a fragile, real connection.
“Thanks, Dad.” The words scraped out of me, rough but genuine. “I appreciate that.”
He grunted. “Don’t make it weird, Thomas.”
I had to smother a laugh. We’d passed weird five minutes ago. “Are we done?”
“We’re done. Remember, UNC Wilmington in two weeks.”
I stood, my face radiating enough heat to warm the entire athletic complex. I made it to the door, put my hand on the frame—
“Thomas.” I turned. My father was staring openly at me now, his expression unreadable except for the faintest crease between his brows. “Three wins this weekend. Brock hit .450 for the series. Whatever the arrangement is doing, it’s working. Just…keep it professional.”
Professional. The word was a joke. His star first baseman’s .450 average was directly correlated to the memory of my mouth on his cock. The arrangement was working all right.
I forced a nod. “Will do.”
The heavy door clicked shut, the sound as final as a gavel ending the strangest hearing of my life.
Me: You’re never going to believe what just happened.
Hunter: Try me.
Me: My dad offered me his hotel room to jerk off in.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Hunter: I’m going to need you to be a bit more forthcoming, bro.
I leaned my head back against the cool cinder block, the tension leaving my shoulders in a single shuddering breath. My thumbs hovered over the screen, my gut a knot of gratitude for the offer and a strange, hollow shame that I’d needed it.
Me: He said he “gets it.” That he was my age once, and men have needs on the road.
Hunter: Oh my God. Your dad jerked off in a laundry room too??
Me: I didn’t ask, and I never will.
Hunter: This is the greatest day of my life.
Me: YOUR life? I’m the one who just sat through the world’s most businesslike masturbation logistics meeting with my father.
Hunter: Did he make a PowerPoint?
Me: I hate you.
Hunter: Come over. Roomie’s out and I have questions about UNC Wilmington.
I locked my phone, shoved it in my back pocket, and headed for the stairwell.
For years, the gallery of ghosts felt like judges. A wall of expectations I could never meet. But tonight, they were young guys in bad uniforms, caught mid-play, a thousand miles away from having to figure out what kind of men they were going to be.