Or even my heart’s pathetic fucking fluttering for her.
It’s an overwhelming need to protect her.
Now that I’ve kissed her, she’s fucking mine, and there’s not anything she or I could say or do to change that fact. So we’d best start accepting it.
Step one will be starting to solve this mystery.
Step two will be fucking her brains out.
Step three will be winning the Superbowl and celebrating with my teammates and then with her.
I know that step twenty-seven or so ends up with her and I having a bunch of babies. And I’m not too concerned with the logicistics for any of the steps in the middle, other than the one in which the mystery of who Stacy’s attacker is actually gets solved.
I look at the door to the locker room, wondering how he had even gotten in here.
Just then, above the archway, I see the security camera.
That’s it.
It’s what I came here for, risking punishment so close to the Superbowl.
That’s what I have to get.
But how?
I hadn’t exactly figured that part out yet.
I consider climbing up the door frame so that I can reach the camera and move it. Or throwing a rock up there to knock it down to where I can pick it up.
But I know that all of these ideas are fucking stupid.
I’d only ruin the footage I so desperately need to see.
Let’s face it – I’m no crime scene investigator.
But I might know someone who is.
Just then, I hear a deep, familiar voice clear his throat behind me and say, “Elias. You so eager to win the game that you’re showing up to practice when I explicitly told you to stay home?”
Fuck.
What the hell is Coach Kramer doing here?
But I had a plan for this. Just in case.
It just means there’s no way I can get this security footage now, even if I could figure out a way to do it.
Leave it to Coach K to come foil my plans.
“Hey, Coach,” I say, nodding at him as if I’m not shocked and pissed to see him here, which I most certainly am. “I’d never disobey your orders. I just left something in my locker, is all.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks. “That’s funny, because so did I. What’d you leave?”
“A book,” I tell him, without hesitation but with a very straight face, and he smirks.
“A book? Elias. You’re a jock. You don’t read.”
“Sometimes I do,” I tell him, shrugging again. “How about you? What’d you forget?”
“My running shoes.”
I’m pretty sure it’s a flimsy pretense he invented so that he could see whether his players were heeding his instructions or whether any of us would be here trying to get in some last-minute extra practice. But it’s not like I’m one to talk, when it comes to inventing flimsy pretenses to be somewhere I’m not supposed to be.
After we both head into the locker room, the coach goes to his office and I go to my locker. I hurry to send a text while the problem of the video footage is fresh on my mind. Then Coach Kramer walks out carrying his running shoes, just in time to see me retrieve the book I had mentioned from my locker.
365 Meditations for Athletes.
“I never knew you to be a particularly zen-like man,” he says, when he sees it. “You’ve always seemed a bit high strung for that eastern religious stuff.”
“All the more reason I need it, right?” I tell him. “Have a good night, Coach.”
“You too, Elias.”
As I walk back out to the parking lot, I can’t help but smile.
I’m not sure I can get the information I came for. I’ll feel a lot better when I know that I can. But for now, I’m still feeling buoyant, thinking about how good it’ll feel when I take Stacy on a date and also take her virginity.
I just know she’s a virgin.
The way she looks at me.
That shy smile.
The way she walks.
As if she’s trying to act more confident than she is.
The way she kisses me.
Like she wants me to take her in that way that no one has ever had her.
It’ll be my pleasure.
As soon as I can shake the coach off my trail.
I notice that he’s looking at me as he heads to his car.
I get into my own car and open up my book, which isn’t part of some elaborate scheme I’d planned out in advance, other than the fact that I’d told myself to say I’d forgotten that, if anyone walked in.
I really do like the book. It’s just that I usually read it before practice or games and keep it in my locker – taking it home is the part I don’t usually do, but I can always bring it back.
I might be a jock, but even jocks get nervous before big events – usually, I’d be referring to the Superbowl, but right now, I’m referring to my date with Stacy – and meditation calms the nerves.