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Liam has his arm wrapped around a brunette with pasties on her nipples, while Shane has two girls, one on each of his thighs, and his face shoved between their breasts.
Shane reaches around the girl to his right and nudges me with his elbow. “You can smile when the other guys on the team aren’t around. It won’t kill you, Crawford.”
I glance over at Shane and laugh. “Easy for you to say.”
“We’ve all been there,” Liam says. “Don’t let Kane get under your skin. He’s like a child. If you keep feeding into his bullshit, he will keep fucking with you.”
“Does he do that with every rookie?”
Shane shrugs. “Just about. Don’t take it personally. It’s his way of breaking you in.”
I drink the amber liquid in my glass and lean forward to set it on the table. “He has a funny way of showing it.”
“Most of the guys go along with whatever Kane says. Ignore them. Play hard, continue showing up to practice on time, and keep your head down. If you do that for a few months and throw in a few points in the process, they’ll stop giving you a hard time.”
Liam nods in acknowledgment and downs a shot of whiskey.
The conversation with my teammates was a nice distraction from the girl on my lap. I pretend to be interested. Under different circumstances, I would have been in worse shape than Shane and Liam. Leaning my head back on the cushion, I close my eyes, thinking of Kat. All day, she consumes my thoughts.
Five more songs, I tell myself. Then, I need to get out of here and call Kat again before she goes to sleep.
A few songs quickly turned into three more hours. Somehow, Shane and Liam managed to convince me to stay. It wasn’t for my lack of trying. After I stagger out to my car and slip inside, I check the time on the dashboard and call Kat once more.
“Hello.” Her voice sounds distant, as if she’s half asleep. The sound of her voice puts me at ease.
“Did I wake you, Kitten?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay. I crashed after dinner. I’m up now. How was your day?”
“Busy. Weird. How about you?”
She laughs. “Mine was okay, nothing special. I worked on a press report for one of our big clients. That was about all the excitement I had today. Your day was weird. How so?”
“Full disclosure: I thought I was meeting Liam and Shane for a drink at a sports bar, and they took me to a strip club. Please don’t be mad at me.”
She sighs into the phone. “I’m not, D
ean. At least you told me instead of hiding it.”
“I miss you,” I say, clutching the steering wheel.
“I miss you, too, Dean. More than you know.”
“This is getting hard with us living in different cities. I wish you would consider my offer to come live with me. You would love my new condo. It has a view of the city and is close to all the restaurants you like.”
“I wish I could move there, but I have my internship and my whole life in Chicago.”
“You could do the same thing in Philly. I’m sure your dad knows someone in sports broadcasting or communications in the city.”
“We’ve had this conversation dozens of times, Dean. I want to finish my internship and see if they offer me a full-time position before I make any decisions about us. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, frustrated. “I need to see you. Just hearing your voice is making me hard. Fly out here for the weekend, or I can come to Chicago.”
“Are you hard?” She purrs the words into the phone.
I grab myself over my jeans. “Yeah, I wish you were here to take care of me.”
“Are you still at the strip club?”
