6. Brotherhood
SIX
Brotherhood
CALEB
“Wait, are we saying ‘tits’ now?” Luke asked. “I thought we were supposed to say ‘boobs.’”
“It’s ‘breasts’ if you want to be a gentleman,” Eli said. “But I think you can say ‘tits’ if she says it first.”
Caleb glared through the camera at the identical faces of his twin brothers crowding the screen of his laptop. “She said it first.”
“‘Breasts’ will always sound like chicken breasts to me,” Luke said, oblivious to his brother’s snarl. “Man, I’m hungry.”
Eli elbowed him. “Could you maybe say ‘chicken tits’ and say something a little more respectful to girls you feel up?”
“Are you guys even listening? Shannon is the one who said ‘tits,’ so I guess it’s okay to say that when I talk about her tits. And I never will again.” Caleb scowled. “I’m fucking miserable, and you guys are hung up on tits and boobs. You’re the worst.”
He wriggled his computer against his right thigh and winced as he re-situated his left leg on his pillows. As if meeting Shannon wasn’t painful enough, his tumble in the weight room the morning after landed him first on his left ankle, then in the office of a team physician who diagnosed a navicular fracture and sent him to the athletic trainers.
Since it was the offseason, his trainer said, he was under strict orders to take his time healing and should not push through the pain to do anything beyond seated upper body work. Crutches for a week, then an air cast. Caleb Fields was a valuable commodity bought and paid for by the football program, and he was contractually obligated to comply.
The cryotherapy machine hummed almost inaudibly at his side as it circulated chilled water through the pads on his ankle. For the past week he’d leaned heavily—literally and figuratively—on his linebacker roommate who single-handedly un-bunked Caleb’s loft bed so he didn’t have to climb a ladder.
“I don’t understand why this ex of hers is such a big problem,” Eli continued. “So what if she went out with someone on the team? Everyone in our locker room has dated somebody’s ex, and quarterback groveling is so overrated. Cory Thatcher is just like everyone else here. He’ll be a top-ten pick, and no one thinks he’s a god.”
“Whoa.” Luke signaled a time out. “Your quarterback? Hamilton? The one whose guts Isaac hates with a rain of hellfire after that game last year?”
Their oldest brother was a fierce competitor on the football field and a golden retriever puppy off of it, and never let a loss break his stride. Hatred was not in Isaac’s nature, but Hayden pushed one too many buttons more than a year ago, and no one had forgotten.
“That’s him.” Caleb rolled his eyes skyward. “Look, I hate him, too. But?— ”
“That guy’s happiness is not our concern,” Eli resumed. “And Shannon’s drama with him doesn’t mean drama with you.”
“It really doesn’t matter who she dated,” Caleb said. “The point is what she did after she dumped him on winter break.”
“Are you going to tell us what she did? Or what that pigskin-hucker says she did?” Eli asked.
Caleb glanced between them and narrowed his eyes. “Hellfire aside, I think Isaac will be a little more objective,” he said. “You guys were good for the discussion of female body parts, but I’m pretty sure you don’t remember a thing I said before ‘tits.’”
“That’s unfair.” Luke pretended to pout, then sat up and began numbering on his fingers. “One. You saw your crush at a party, got all over her tits, and slept with her before you knew each other’s names. Two. You learned she’s your teammate’s ex and probably did something awful you won’t explain to the best brothers in the world. Three. She learned you’re her cousin’s ex and obviously knows some stuff from Missy.” He released a deep breath. “Does that about cover it?”
“You forgot the part where I die alone, surrounded by my Lombardi trophies and self-loathing.”
“God, you’re such a quitter,” Eli said. “I know things don’t look ideal right now, but why are you jumping to the worst-case scenario? If you really like the girl, hasn’t it occurred to you to look for a way to make it work instead of declaring everything impossible before you even try?”
“She faked a pregnancy scare right after she and Hayden broke up,” Caleb said, flattening his brows and trying not to grimace as a round of freezing water flushed the tepid drops from the tubes on his ankle and sent goosebumps up his leg. “ She faked it. She flat-out told him she faked the whole thing and never even thought she was pregnant, and did it just to mess with him. For an entire week, Christmas Eve to New Year’s.” He paused for effect. “We were in the Sunrise Bowl against Tennessee that week, and he completely choked.”
Luke’s mouth hung open as he searched for words, but Eli snapped his fingers. “That explains everything. She was a ringer,” he declared.
“A what?”
“I bet she had money on the bowl game. Has she made any extravagant purchases lately?”
Caleb stared. “Has she—what the hell is wrong with you?”
“What? It completely tracks.”
“She went out with him for months.”
“She plays the long game. I like her. You can clean up on bowl game bets, and I bet she did. He choked so hard, you guys didn’t even cover the point spread.”
“Yeah, we got our asses handed to us. If your stupid theory is correct, then she’s worse than I thought.”
“She sounds like someone we want on our side. Start groveling.”
Luke finally summoned a sentence. “Tell me you used protection.”
“Of course I did,” Caleb said, frowning in an effort to fight back the flush creeping up his neck when he thought of his friend Rashid Jaggers giving him free rein over his room and the drawers of his nightstand.
Eli tried again. “You played Tennessee in the Sunrise Bowl. Where’s she from?”
“Stop.” Caleb jabbed a finger at the screen. “Yes, the bowl game part is bad, but only because we all wanted him to light it up so he’d feel good enough to draft and leave. Hayden is an annoying prick and I can’t stand him, but there is something sick and wrong about using a pregnancy scare as ammunition like that. The principle of the whole thing is just cruel. You don’t get your life back if you sleep with someone who you wouldn’t want to raise a kid with and one day, boom. This is exactly why I never slept with Missy. Exactly why.”
“Well, you obviously got over yourself, because you slept with Shannon.” Luke waited for Caleb to respond, then cleared his throat to break the quiet. “Twice.”
Caleb clenched his teeth. He’d asked himself ‘why’ over and over, and the only answer that didn’t sound entirely off-the-wall was simply: I wanted to. Why? Because her eyes were the eyes of a woman with an idea, a girl who’d been hurt, and a child who couldn’t sleep. Because she tasted like sweet lemonade, and the brush of her fingertips shocked his nerves awake and stirred an ache in him that ran deeper than muscle and bone.
Asking why he made himself vulnerable enough opened a vortex.
Every daydream about the ways he yearned to make her squeak and sigh and moan again was a nightmare. He was sick—obsessed with someone despicable, and ready to hide in his dorm until training camp.
Luke waved a hand in front of the camera. “Hey. You in there? What did you mean about why you didn’t sleep with Missy? And why did everyone think you did?”
Caleb shook his head to clear the fog. “Missy had some sick aspirations for a sixteen-year-old with all her ‘goals!’ hashtags on the teen mom social media sites. I ended it when my buddy gave me the heads-up about that and her whispering with some of her friends about how it wouldn’t be so bad if I knocked her up because my reputation was trashed by then anyway, just like yours. I had the decency not to repeat a word of that to anyone but her when I broke it off. People said what they said. Whatever.”
Luke couldn’t remember the last time his little brother threw a jaw-dropping bomb into a conversation, and in the last thirty minutes he lost track of the number of times he had to manually close his mouth. “You never told us that,” he mumbled after a short silence.
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“You should have told us,” Eli said. “We don’t keep stuff like that from each other.”
“I handled it myself,” Caleb said stubbornly. “We had enough going on.”
Caleb’s sophomore year in high school, home life began to unravel, and he and his brothers closed ranks against their father. When Isaac left for South Bend, Indiana, for college, matters decayed further. On the roughest days, Caleb and the twins kissed their mother and thanked her for dinner, then exiled themselves to the rec room to eat rather than dine with him.
Polite silence greeted their father the first half-dozen times he attempted to join them in the rec room, and then he stopped trying. They clung to their facade of a perfect family, and no one suspected a rift.
With the twins off to Ann Arbor the following year, Caleb returned to the dining room. He addressed his father with respect and common courtesies in banal conversations he might have with a teacher or a friend’s parent. He sat next to his mother, offered help with anything she needed, and pushed his hair out of his face when he thanked her profusely for every meal. Normally reticent, he plastered on an insincere smile and talked about everything happening in his life just to make her happy again.
Then he left for Columbus, and he didn’t know what home life was left for his parents. Shannon’s eyes were his first view of home in three years.
“All right,” Eli said. “You and Missy broke up. You handled it fine, and there was no drama. We’ll leave that in the rearview where it belongs.”
“But do you see what I mean with all this?” Caleb asked. “Eli. Could you be with Courtney if you knew she faked a pregnancy scare just to screw with someone?”
The twins looked at each other. Eli’s mouth twitched into a frown while Luke’s hinted at a smile, then they swapped expressions. Luke shrugged, Eli tipped his head, Luke pointed his finger, and Eli nodded. No one spoke.
“Forget it,” Caleb said, watching their silent exchange. “You guys are useless. I’m calling Isaac tomorrow. I have to see Shannon in my lit seminar in the morning, so I’ll have a fresh perspective on how pissed I am. I haven’t been to that class since I busted my ankle. Maybe she thinks I dropped it. Maybe she dropped it, and I’ll never have to see her again.”
“Is that what you want?” Eli asked. “Think fast. ”
“No.” Caleb reacted as quickly as he always did when ‘think fast’ was accompanied by a football whizzing toward his nose.
His brothers sighed.
“But I notice you stopped the rah-rah speeches after I told you what she did to Hayden,” Caleb said drily. “What do you think?”
Eli dragged both hands through his hair, causing it to stick up in odd tufts as he contemplated the ceiling for a moment. “People change. People can move past big mistakes. We are all about forgiveness here,” he said when he looked back at the screen.
“All about it,” Luke rejoined.
“But this was only two months ago, and that stuff takes a while,” Eli said. “And it takes some humility. I think she was playing the long game with Hamilton and the Sunrise Bowl?—”
“Jesus fucking Christ, man, let it go.”
Luke snickered. “You didn’t beat the spread this time, either.”