Point Shot 02 - Game Misconduct (2 page)

I found Dan in our bathroom running a Q-tip around his right ear as water from his recent shower ran from his hair. He smiled at me, a special kind of light in his eyes. I stalled in the doorway, my summons wrinkled in my fist. The smile disappeared from his face as I stared blankly at him. He tossed the swab into the trash, which needed to be dumped, and turned to face me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. My gaze roamed over him clad in nothing but gray cargo shorts that hung off his hips. If not for the fact that my heart was beating so hard I was scared it would blow up, I would have gotten all over the man. He still torqued me up like no one else ever had. “Vic, what’s wrong?”

I handed him the wadded-up legal document. His gaze darted from my face to the crinkled papers then back to my face.

“I don’t know who the fuck this chick is, but she is playing me,” I managed to cough up. I looked around the room, trying to get the palpations under control. The walls had ugly flowered wallpaper on them. The counter was plain white. Two razors lay side by side next to the sink. Sometimes, like right then, I wanted nothing more than to grab my razor and my toothbrush and get the fuck out of Dodge. Just seeing Dan’s personal shit playing cozy-cozy with mine scared me to death. Most days when that urge to fuck this thing up overtook me, I swallowed it down like a bad oyster and forced myself to get past it. Today, then, there, that second, those two razors were about to push old Vic K. over the brink.

“Paternity test,” he whispered as the papers blew in a stiff summer wind. I couldn’t look away from those two disposables.

“Someone is playing me, Dan,” I grunted, then spun from the Schick love-fest occurring on the chipped white bathroom counter. I pounded out to the living room, my feet squelching in my wet sneakers.

“Well yeah, obviously this Heather chick is trying to pin this on you. Big-name sports star. It happens like daily, you know?”

I nodded as I paced the small but homey place where we spent most of our downtime, aside from the bedroom. I jammed my fist into my other hand and began grinding as I circled the sofa.

“Yeah, but why me and why now? Why not do this when I was pulling in the big bucks in Beantown?”

Dan dropped onto the couch and put his bare feet on the edge of the coffee table. As I paced, he flattened out the summons on his thick thighs and read. My gut was in turmoil. My head felt light. My heart still thundered in my ribs. A kid.
My
kid. I barely made it back to the bathroom. I threw up the fancy lunch that we had eaten at the golf club earlier. Dan didn’t come in, which was wise. I don’t like people fawning over me when I’m sick. Dear old Mom never did. I could handle myself. Been doing it since I was about five. I’d had a head cold the month before and nearly ripped Dan into bits one day for making me chicken noodle soup. Why that man was still with me, I do not know. I retched a few times, then slammed the lid and flushed. Over to the sink for a swig of mouthwash.
Do not look at the razors, Kalinski, or you will make a bigger twat out of yourself.

“You okay?” Dan called.

“Yeah, just some ptomaine from the clam chowder at lunch,” I replied, my throat and nose still burning. “I’m taking a shower.”

“Okay. I’ll read this over close while you wash.”

The shower didn’t last long enough, nor did it help one damn bit. Aside from having nuts that smelled like an Irish glen, I was still
this
close to hyperventilating. A kid. Holy fucking goat titties, I needed a drink.

“Hey, you need to call a lawyer in the morning,” Dan said when I shuffled into the living room in nothing but an old pair of cutoff jeans. “This paperwork is crazy legal, but according to what this Hillary—”

“Heather. Heather Pavlick. Who the
fuck
is Heather Pavlick?” I asked the kitchen table.

I jerked open the cupboard under the sink and reached for the bottle of Yukon Jack, one of three or four bottles of booze we had on hand for cocktails at night if the mood struck. Dan kind of liked Jack over ice. Did I want ice? Did I want a glass? Nah. The whiskey burned my raw throat like gasoline. I lowered the bottle, coughed, and ran the back of my hand across my tingling lips. I saw Dan appear in the doorway, papers still in his hand. He looked upset.

“I wish you’d use a glass,” he grumbled, then stalked around me to get two tumblers from the cupboard next to the fridge. I sucked in some air through my teeth in reply. His whole body twitched at the sound. “Two fingers, and stop making that fucking noise,” he said after he returned to my side. I glugged some Jack into both tumblers, my eyes on Dan’s. He handed me a glass. We both knocked the whiskey back then went out to the couch, him with my summons and me with the Jack.

“Okay, so this is obviously some sort of rip-off,” Dan said after we’d dropped our asses back to the sofa. Thankfully he’d left the boob tube off. I was
so
not in the mood to talk over his science shows. I poured myself another two fingers. Dan held up his glass, so I refreshed him. “Heather Pavlick. Is that the girl you were serious with?”

I shook my head as I swirled the Canadian whiskey around my glass. Mr. and Mrs. Rupert’s voices, as well as the smell of meat grilling, rolled in through the windows.

“No, her name was Gina. We were careful. I mean, we were obsessively careful every time we fucked to prevent any kind of kid-making.”
A kid.
I couldn’t get the glass of whiskey to my lips fast enough.
Ah, what a nice burn.

“This is why you should just identify as gay and be done with it. You don’t have to worry about knocking me up.”

“Yeah well, if I could just pick my sexual identity like I do my socks, I would. But I kind of like pussy once in a while. Stop badgering me, gay boy.”

“That’s just weird,” Dan muttered, and sipped his Jack.

I nodded. Yeah, to a gay dude, wanting pussy probably did seem weird. And while I didn’t crave it anymore because, yeah, Dan Arou, back in the day I’d taken some great delight in leaping from twat to cock with wild abandon.

“Maybe you can talk to someone in the team’s legal department. I mean, this will come out. They’ll want to know about it beforehand so they can handle the bad PR.”

“Fuck. My. Life.” I dumped more of the amber liquid into my glass. My stomach rolled and bucked as whiskey met empty gut. Whatever the landlord was cooking was making me queasy.

“This is just fucked,” Dan said after a long moment of silence punctuated only by my stomach speaking up. “See, this paper says ‘unborn child’, and that’s impossible. You and me have been tight since Thanksgiving of last year. That’s nine months, right? November to July is nine.”

“If you count November.”

Christ on a unicycle. Dan and I really been doing the monogamy thing for nine months. I mean, I knew that we had, but hearing him say it out loud drove the point home. No wonder those razors made me twitchy. That was fucking incredible. Even with Gina, I’d bailed at six months. That had been the most solid relationship I’d ever been in before Mr. Stumpy and I had hooked up.
Someone call Guinness. We got a new world record here.
I threw another two fingers of Yukon down. Dan made a noise about the speed of my ingestion, I assume, which I ignored.

A moment ticked by. Two. Three. Dan sipped and repeatedly read that summons, counting and recounting the months. This was major fuckery, because there had been no one but Dan since the first time I’d punched him in the face.

My gaze rested on the Xbox under the flat screen. Our games were scattered on the floor. I tipped my head to stare at the artwork on a World War I battle game that Dan and I liked. It showed a German zeppelin dropping bombs on some European city…

It hit me like a semi that had lost its brakes. Ms. Goodyear. That blonde with the incredible tits. I’d rolled her the night I’d tried to drink Dan away. Had her name been Heather? Had she said? Did it matter? Guess so.

“Ah, fuck,” I moaned, then closed my eyes.

“What? Did you figure out who this woman is?”

Shit. Just shit.
This was going to be bad. I inhaled through my nose, blew out the breath and started sucking on that Jack bottle like a hungry babe. Dan jerked it from my hand. Whiskey sloshed down my chest. I swallowed what was in my mouth, licked my lips and turned to find Dan looking at me with concern tinting his lapis eyes.

This was going to suck. “Dan, you need to know that it meant nothing to me.”

Brilliant opening gambit, Kalinski, you stupid asshole!

Why thank you, self. You think that was bad, just wait—it’ll get worse.

Dan stared at me dully. It took him a few seconds to process what I’d said. When the words made sense to him, I could see the shift of emotion in his eyes, on his face and in the way his neck stiffened.

“Wait. What? You mean you know this woman?” He shook the summons under my pointed nose. I tried not to look at the wrinkled mess. “Are you telling me that you fucked this Heather chick while you and I were together?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I fucked her but—”

His fist met my face before I could react. Half a bottle of Yukon Jack dulls a man slightly. My head kicked back as the pain of a split lip announced itself. I thought about retaliating but didn’t.
He owed me that.
In truth, he owed me a beating like only dear old Mom could hand out.

“You fucking asshole,” Dan snarled, then shot up from the couch. He whipped the summons at my head. I swallowed blood, then more whiskey. Dan rounded on me, slapping the bottle from my hand. It hit the far wall with a dull thud. I sat there, staring at the puddle forming on the worn carpeting, my tongue moving over the gash in my lower lip. Prodding, making it hurt and bleed more, seemed right. Bring on the pain. “You stupid fucking asshole!” Dan was bellowing now. I sat forward and buried my face in my palms. “Why would you do that to me? I fucking love you, Vic! Why would you cheat on me?”

“It was just a chick,” I said as my hands fell from my face. Fucking A, but my lip hurt. I nipped at the gash with my teeth and hissed in pain. “She meant nothing. I was drunk. You were in Boston. My head was fucked up.”

“Yeah, no kidding your head is fucked up! Fuck, I hate this. I hate that I trusted you so much.” He pounded the wall by the front door with his fist. I watched the plaster bits falling into the puddle of whiskey.

“Dan, it was just a chick. It’s not like it was another dude. She meant nothing. It was just a warm hole.”

The man came unglued then. “What is
wrong
with you? It don’t matter if it’s a woman or a man, you still fucked someone else when we were together.”

“No, we weren’t together. You were in Boston. I was here. You fucking left me,” I snapped, wondering where that shit had come from. It had been me pushing Dan to leave. Now I was flinging that back at him? What was wrong with me? I wasn’t making sense even to myself now.

“You told me to! You practically threw me out of that miserable cold hotel room you were living in.” Dan threw his battered hand into the air. I noted the bloody knuckles he sported. Coldcocking a dude then pummeling a wall will do that to you. “Did you make me leave so you could be with that Heather woman?”

“Of course not, you stupid bastard,” I retaliated. “Why the fuck would I do that? Chicks are a dime a dozen. Women mean nothing to me.”

“Bullshit!” he shouted at me. I worked on standing but opted to remain seated. My tongue poked my split lip. “You said you and that Gina had something real. So don’t tell me that women don’t mean nothing to you. Do you even love me? Or am I just some hole to you as well?”

“Dan, please, do not pull out the estrogen shit now, okay?”

“Fuck you!” he roared, blue eyes sparking with misery and anger. “Fuck you! I will pull out whatever I want. I’ll say what I want. You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t say to you about this. You fucker! You cocksucking miserable fucker. You rip out my heart and then tell me not be a chick about it? Get the fuck out of my space.”

He flung the front door open. There on the other side stood Mr. Rupert. His tiny eyes looked wide through his bifocals. He blinked at me, at Dan, at the wall beside the door and the whiskey puddle on the carpet.

“You boys okay up here?” the old man asked.

No. No sir, we are not okay.
We were about as far from okay as two men could ever be.

“Just a fight,” I said as I pushed to my feet.

The booze was making me slightly wobbly but that was okay. If the gods were kind—and we all know they ain’t, but maybe they’d give me a break just this once—I’d stumble in front of a cement truck or trip going down the stairs and break my neck.

That would end my misery, but Dan would still be broken into bits.
Fuck. Me.
Guess Mom was right about my worthless shitstain status.

“I’m walking,” I said as I made my way to the door. Dan gave me his heaving back. “We’ll pay for damages,” I told the worried old man with the skinny legs sticking out from his checkered shorts. I picked up my keys and wallet from the round dish on the secondhand table by the front door and made like a tree.

The driver’s seat met my ass. I rolled the sparkly clean Caddy’s engine over, just then realizing that I had never turned off the water to the hose. I glanced at the lawn and didn’t see it snaked across the grass. Must be Mr. Rupert had tidied up after me. He was a good man even if he did smell like old chicken nuggets. I lurched out of the driveway, my wet sneaker sliding off the gas pedal. The Escalade carried me away from Dan, who now hated me. I looked up the street. Where was a cement truck when you needed one?

I drove for a long time. So long that sunset came and went. I found myself by Seneca Lake. I pulled in to a parking lot for a high-class touristy hotel. Guessed I would grab a room there for the night. As soon as I exited my ride, the smell of the lake enveloped me. I gasped as if someone had rammed a dagger into my liver. The memory of going there with Dan to celebrate one of our monthly anniversaries—he celebrated them all for some reason—almost buckled me. We had taken a dinner cruise around the lake, careful to look like just a couple dudes having a meal. No touching, because God forbid someone might see us and know we were lovers. My stomach rolled over threateningly.