Page 4 of Playing the Field
At that thought, I jump nervously away, afraid he can read my thoughts.
On my way to the gate, I feel the first hint of excitement over the new job that may be my future for a while. Having a hot guy flirt with me while eating potato skins? Maybe LA has something to offer after all.
I swipe open my phone to get my boarding pass and land on a social media app, where Footiefangirl68 has already posted her selfie and tagged Hunter Reyes. Of course she has. She knows a playboy soccer player when she sees one.
I’m just the dope who thought he liked me for my reading list.
CHAPTER 2
Hunter
One MonthLater
The last fewreps hurt the most, but not because my muscles are giving out. Quite the opposite. It’s the feeling of knowing I’m done with my workout that makes every synapse cry the blues. My mind is only calm when I’m in motion.
Fortunately, I make a living moving around a soccer pitch and training my body to perform within an inch of its very existence. That’s when all the outside noise quiets, and I feel at peace with the world.
“Nineteen,” I grunt, pushing several hundred pounds of metal with my legs. They shake as I bring the weight back down, visibly shuddering at the load. “Twenty.” It’s all I have, at least for tonight. Tomorrow is another day.
“Good set.” Jimmy, the team trainer, is the only one in thegym, mainly because it’s after eight and most of the guys have gone home to their wives or girlfriends. I have neither, and I like it that way.
No complications, no distractions.
I grunt, knowing Jimmy doesn’t need more acknowledgment than that. “You wanna get a beer?”
He looks at me warily, no doubt remembering what happened over a year ago when he okayed a trip to a Hollywood bar. Before we’d even ordered, three women had draped their arms around me, posing for selfies. Two drinks in, I had one of them on my lap and was making out with her friend. Not a good look, according to the team's publicist.
“Better not. Natalie will choke the life out of me if I let you near more empty carbs.” Oh. Right. There’s also that mandate from the team nutritionist. Clean diet: high on protein, low on scandal-causing carbs. Check. It’s the reminder my body needs because my brain wants to be numb.
I nod. “Okay.”
Jimmy smooths his mustache with his thumb and forefinger before fiddling with the string on his gray hoodie. He’s lean and a couple of inches taller than me, which makes it impossible for me to intimidate him at my mere six-three. His basketball career ended before it began with an Achilles’ tendon tear in high school, but he’s still an athlete in his mindset. It’s why he works us all to the bone but stops just shy of injury. He’s careful, thoughtful, and a mean son of a bitch when he needs to be.
I sometimes forget that he’s the team trainer and not my friend. Thus, no Hollywood bar.
At this point, my friends on the team are few and far between. I know I’ve alienated a lot of people with my aggressive playing style. Some of my teammates forgive it when it gets results, but there are a few—Jamie Plank, our starting center midfielder, to name one—who’d like to see me get canned.
It makes his job harder each time I get a red card because weplay one man down for the remainder of the game. And depending on the penalty, I might be required to sit out a game.
None of that is good for continuity, not to mention that it’s harder to win when we’re down a player. But the fans love it. A little drama on the field gets them revved up, and that energy helps the team too.
I’m not about to argue that unnecessary slide tackling is smart, but it’s how I’ve always played. A fierce rage triggers when I’m on the field, a reaction to something my unhappy drunk of a father said a decade ago. “You succeed as an athlete because your temper drives you. You’d fail anywhere else. That’s how life works—it gives you one asset to compensate for all the deficits.”
At the time, I was in the heart of my push to get recruited to a professional team, so I leaned way in. And once he died, I clung to those words because they were all I had left of him.
It doesn’t matter that I have a calmer side. When I’m challenged—either on the soccer pitch or in the face of some asshole who pushes my buttons—I see red. I might as well be a bull unleashed from a holding pen. It’s all power, unrestrained energy, and killer instinct.
It’s everything wrapped up in a will to succeed, and anger at my dad for not being a better man. A perfect storm that drove me to career stardom.
And now, it will probably get me traded.
We walk back to the lockers, where I shove my zippered warm-up jacket into my bag and grab a fresh towel from a stack in the corner. Mopping the sweat from my brow, I gather the rest of my shit to go home.
“You still have that meal prep place delivering to you?” Jimmy asks, raising an eyebrow. He always pretends to be jealous of my bougie lifestyle, but his wife is a trained chef, and I know he’s going home to something a helluva lot better than my box of pre-measured proteins and greens.
“Yeah. Tonight’s either fish or fish.”
He laughs. “And then?”
