Down by Contact (The Barons 2)

“Fuck the last word. I’ll respond. But you’re just gonna let him pull you into some pointless Twitter war that will amuse him and get you too aggravated to focus on anything else for days.” Marcus put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed them, fingers digging in hard. “He can say what he wants, but he knows his QB is an old-ass bastard with a weak arm, and his O-line is full of jokers who don’t know their right from their left.”

Okay, that was true. A tiny grin formed on my mouth, and Marcus smiled even broader in return.

“See? We got this, baby. We’ll show them on the field and leave it at that.”

* * *

We started out playing like trash.

Instead of the Predators’ O-line playing like garbage, it was our first team’s offense that fucked up. We managed to three-and-out three times and didn’t get a first down. Ricky Jordan, the O-line coach, looked like he wanted to beat the shit out of every single person on the field. The last time I saw a man turn that red, he’d come hands-free after letting me play with his prostate for an hour.

The good news was that our defense kept them from picking up more than ten yards. It was the slowest start to a preseason game I’d ever been part of, and it was frankly embarrassing. Our coaches reamed us all, Gavin looked ready to punch someone, and I wondered if Adrián was over there laughing his ass off.

Once we had possession of the ball again, things got more interesting. And by interesting, I mean they got brutal. If Gavin had a reputation for getting flags, the Predators’ entire team was known for it. As soon as the ball was in my hands, I passed it to Marcus, who took off running down the field like a bat out of hell. He rushed thirty yards before one of their tackles took him down by his face mask. Everyone waited for it to be called, but it wasn’t, and out of the corner of my eye I could see our head coach gearing up for a monumental explosion.

I shook it off and tried not to worry about the awful start to what would likely be an even worse game. In the next series, I faked a pass to Marcus, spun around, and sent it flying at Gavin. I saw just enough to know he caught it and let one of their tackles bounce off his large body as he ran towards the end zone before someone slammed into me. I oddly found myself laid out on the field.

Even with the stars dancing before my eyes, it made no fucking sense for me to have someone crushing me to the field a good second after I’d released the ball. Was this dude blind?

I pried my eyes open half a beat later to find myself staring up at Adrián’s grinning face. He spat out his mouth guard and said, “Guess you don’t know much about balling after all, motherfucker.”

My heart ratcheted up to match my rising blood pressure. I bumped my hips up against his, not giving one single damn that a ton of cameras were probably zeroed in on this moment.

“You wouldn’t say that shit if you got a taste, bitch.”

Adrián scrambled off me so fast you would have thought my crotch had set him on fire. I bounded to my own feet, grinning. The entire exchange hadn’t taken more than a couple of seconds, but considering the way our fans were going wild it was clear the team had made some headway down the field. I started to refocus on the game, but Adrián shoved me.

“Touch me like that again, and—”

“Is that an invitation?” I shouted over the roar of the crowd. “No thanks, sugar.”

He stood there panting and glaring, his tawny skin going bright red, right before he shoved me again. It was with enough force to hit the pissed-off mark on my kick-someone’s-ass meter, but I took a deep breath.

“Did it make you that nervous, sweetheart?”

I saw his eyes widen through his helmet, a definite sign of him losing his shit, right before he ran at me. He yanked my helmet off with one hand and grabbed my jersey with the other. My mind read the forward motion of his body as a head butt without any protection to my nose or teeth, and my self-preservation instincts reared up before I could stop them.

My cocked fist flew and caught him in the face, sending his helmet flying backwards. For a moment, he looked stunned. Like he hadn’t planned for any of this and now it was going further than he anticipated. That was probably why he gave a fuck-it shrug and came at me again.

For the second time in half a minute, I found myself on my back with Adrián Bravo on top of me. But this time, we were rolling around the field in a flail of arms and legs as the rest of our teams thundered across the field to separate us.