Page 1 of Good Guy Gabe

Chapter 1

Gabe

“SEVENTEEN,”ICALL OUT.“Sixteen. Fifteen,” clicking the button each time Blaise Sinclair reaches forward, grabs the ball in front of him, and slides his torso over it. The rules state his abdomen must be on the ball for it to count, and I’m a stickler for rules, so I make sure he’s already there before calling out the next number.

My entire life is rules and timing, every action occurring in a blink that has the world riding on it. I may look like a gigantic oaf, but my reflexes are every bit as sharp as Sinclair’s.

I’m mostly stationary, having started at the middle of the line so I wouldn’t need to work so hard to keep up. On the other side, Merrick Briggs is running to stay flush, watching not where he’s going but Blaise’s progress, but Merrick’s used to running in one direction while looking in another. On his head is a GoPro filming this. I studied the rules before we set this up. As long as it’s filmed and the angle makes it clear that Blaise isn’t touching the ground, it’s valid. To that end, I’m also strapped with a camera. We don’t want the committee claiming that Blaise’s left hand touched the ground.

Seriously, though, Blaise’s left hand is insured at one hundred million dollars. It’s not touching the ground.

“Eight!” I yell. “Seven! Six!” Excitement, the familiar, addictive buzz of adrenaline, has my heart pounding. I wasn’t initially into this, just doing what Blaise asked me to do becausemy life is all about protecting Blaise, and with a guy like Blaise, there’s no clocking out. But there’s that point where it becomes real, where this is anactualthing, he’s going to go down inactualrecord books,I’mgoing to be a part of this, and yeah. I’m excited.

“Four! Three—!”

A sudden explosion behind us. Gigantic rubber exercise balls go scattering all across the gymnasium, several of them flying through the air, one of them slamming so hard into a wall it gets skewered on a peg and deflates sadly.

Merrick trips over his own feet and falls on his ass. Blaise nearly dodges a similar fate — or worse, smashing that nine-figure hand under his exercise ball as he rolls off it — only because I dive down to catch him, hitting the floor hard, but it’s that recycled tire stuff. I get smashed by walls of flesh all day. This is fine.

Except I hear a rip as something on Blaise catches on my cooldown hoodie. It’s definitely a fabric rip, not a muscular one, but I frown. I love this hoodie. It’s really hard to find anything in this color in my size.

“What in the name of god and all that is holy are you dipshits doing?”

Some good news here: that’s not the voice of Head Coach Keenan or any of the other coaches or higher-ups on the corporate side of the Wilmington Juggernauts, the NFL’s most recent expansion team. It is, however, Lin Huang, the kicker, and he can be a bit of a dick. He duked it out with Blaise and Merrick a lot last year during our inaugural season, where we didn’t quite make it to playoffs but at least finished with a respectable 8-5. You can’t expect much more from a first-year expansion. But he’s also a dancer, showed his dick to an entireaudience and they saw it as artistic. Last time Blaise tried that, I had to go down to the courthouse and bail his ass out. Only difference for Blaise was it was in a bar instead of a theater.

I’m mostly cool with Huang. His girl’s tight with the wife of Evan Allore, a good buddy of mine, so we hang out sometimes. But Blaise and Merrick hate him.

“Iwassetting a world record,” Blaise huffs as he jams the heel of his hand right into my sternum to lift himself off me, “until you ruined it.”

“You suck so much, Huang,” Merrick grumbles from a few feet away. I roll to my side to see if he’s okay — as the wide receiver, his ankles are worth nearly as much as Blaise’s hand — but he’s already popping back up.

I’m slower to rise. I’m the oldest of the three of us, only by a few years, but those years seem a lot longer with the extra hundred-plus pounds I’ve got on them. It doesn’t help that I’m also the one constantly running into men just as big as me to keep them off those two. And being the center, having no choice but to take that hit to my head and shoulders every single time because once that ball leaves my hand, the guy across from me is going to try to tear through me to get to Blaise?

Yeah, I’m already feeling the creaks at 29. It was a fucking miracle that the Colts picked me up at 27 and then transferred me alongside Blaise to the Juggernauts the following year. When this contract is up at the end of this season, I’m gonna be 30. There will be a batch of recruits a decade younger than me chomping at the bit to take my place, and experience only does so much to compensate for worn joints and growing concussion counts.

This might be my last year.

“What are you doing?” Huang repeats as Blaise and Merrick each take one of my hands to drag my three-hundred-pound ass off the floor.

“Clearly I was attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the greatest number of exercise balls ridden across without touching the ground,” Blaise snaps back, and yeah, when he says it like that, it does sound pretty dumb. Still, I stand tall, crossing my arms over my chest, defending my QB against injury, ridicule, and his own stupidity. That’s my job, and I’m one of the few guys who’s done well at it. There was a reason Blaise and I were a combo pack. Blaisecould bea Super Bowl worthy-quarterback, but he’s a loose cannon.

And kind of an idiot.

Huang drops his head back to stare up at the cosmic beyond. “You are the starting quarterback for the sixteenth-ranked team. As much as I die on the inside admitting this, you are an incredible quarterback who could be legendary if you got your shit together. You could be breaking actual, important, memorable records that would land your ass in Canton if you grew the fuck up, and instead you stole all the exercise balls from the studio to ride them like some drunk frat boy?”

Listen. Huang and I have had some good moments. I know he has his own inner demons, that he’s plagued by his father, who still doesn’t fully accept his choices even though, to turn his words back around, he’s the kicker for the sixteenth-ranked NFL team. That’s dead center but also dead center of a pool of only thirty-two men of the thousands who dreamed of this since their peewee football days.

But I’ve met his father. I know that when Huang yells at us like this, he picks up his father’s accent, like this is how he learned to chew people out. And that’s sad but just a little funny.

I snort.

Just a little.

But I’m a big guy. I’m not loud, but my sounds carry.

He glares at me, and I hang my head.

“Youknow better,” he says, and he’s definitely talking to me.

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