AllFreeNovel
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The mania around Gavin Brawley is still going strong, and everyone still wants to see DatBrawleySmile. Including me. Don’t fuck it up now. And don’t go back to ignoring your appointments and bills! You don’t need anyone taking care of you, Gavin. You made it all of this time without football, and you didn’t think you could. It’s time to start trusting yourself.
Love,
Noah
Chapter Eighteen
Gavin
The new year started with an explosion of bullshit.
Both Max and the frat daddy who’d threatened to out Simeon teamed up and went to the media with their tales. Two weeks until my house arrest ended, and the Super Bowl, and some shitty tabloid called The Mirror called me with a heads-up that they were running the story.
“What the fuck we gonna do?” Simeon paced my living room, towering over me as I remained slouched on the sofa, and brushing past Mel and Joe with every step. “Man, we’re so screwed. I hate myself. I swear to God, I hate myself.”
Frowning, I grabbed at the back of his shirt to try to stop him charging around the room. He didn’t even pause.
“I shoulda never messed with guys. Woulda been easier to pretend I’m into girls. Or fuck,” he said, ripping his hands through his hair. “Or stay celibate and make up girlfriends like Manti Te’o.”
“Simeon,” Mel said sharply.
“How hard can it be to get it up for a woman? Women are beautiful. Maybe I should have tried.”
When Mel grabbed his arm and hauled him to a stop, Simeon finally stopped pacing. He looked from her to me with wild eyes. The same guy who stayed calm and kept his smile even after a furious blitz by men twice his size was unraveling. Sweat dampened his auburn hair, and his hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.
“Simeon,” Mel said again, calmer this time. “We’re not going to entertain ideas about self-inflicted conversion therapy.”
“Then what do we do?” he demanded.
“We have two options.” Joe stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mel. “We could try to bury the story or . . .”
“Or what?” Simeon shouted.
Joe’s attention shifted to me. It seemed like he was waiting for a reaction, or a cue, but I had nothing for him. It was the first time we’d been in the same room since Thanksgiving, and I had a hard time looking at him. The only reason he was still getting paid was because of Noah vouching for him, and because . . . I’d floundered when left to my own devices. Buried my head in the sand for weeks. Until Noah’s email had snapped me out of it and prompted me to start handling my own business, my own fan mail, and my own damn cooking. But I hadn’t replied, because it had felt too much like an email from a platonic friend. My brain had more trouble coping with that reality than this new debacle.
Right now, panic should have been spreading through me like an uncontrollable blaze, but I felt nothing. Just numbness that Noah and me had ended things, and this was happening anyway. I’d lost him . . . for no reason.
Joe turned to Simeon again. “Or you can come out yourself, in your own way, before the story runs at the end of the week.”
“What?” Simeon cried at the same time I muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I waited for Mel’s input, given the grim expression on her face. She spread her hands, but I didn’t know if it was in helplessness or frustration. Or both. There had been very few times in her career when her hands had been tied, but two of her most well-known clients having identical scandals was likely enough to make her hair turn white. How would she make money off us if there was no one willing to pick us up after our contracts ended?
It was a cutthroat way to look at it, but this was a cutthroat business. Half the time a football player got a big break was after someone more famous got injured or aged out. We made our livelihoods on the backs of other people’s misfortune. This was just one of the rare times when my existence was a misfortune, and it was screwing Mel over too.
“Listen,” she said when the silence in the room became too much. “We can fight this. Ignore it. Threaten to sue anyone who publishes it. The rumor will still be there and people will still wonder and question, and maybe your own teammates won’t let you live it down, but we can do our best to silence it.”
“And will doing our best stop it?” Simeon asked. “Can we kill the story before it goes live?”
“We can try,” she said again.
“Trying isn’t good enough! They’ll just go to someone else. Or put it on social media.” Simeon started pacing again, this time while shaking his head and muttering under his breath. With each word, his accent grew thicker. “I knew that damn fool still had the video on his cloud. Fucking knew it.”
