Page 4 of Poke the Bear

I also couldn’t look cocky.

“You think you’re in with a chance?” a journalist asked as he came closer, microphone out.

“Like every bloke here,” I replied, “I’d like to think I might be.” I shrugged then. “But we won’t know until the draw’s done.”

The journalist sucked in a breath to ask another question but I just shook my head.

“In with a chance of getting your dick sucked,” Darryl muttered, smiling and waving at the cameras as we walked past. “The girls get a little hungry on medal night.”

Weren’t they always? I had no problems with a woman going out and getting what she wanted. The days of a girl being expected to sit around and wait for the right bloke to come to her were long gone and good riddance to that. But the problem was, some didn’t like to take no for an answer.

And I always said no.

People talked, at games, in the locker room, online, and I’d been linked to plenty of beautiful girls in the past by the media.

But I’d never touched a single one of them.

Because I wasn’t just a kid that was good with his hands and could move fast down the footy field. We were all regularly tested for performance enhancing drugs, but there was something in me that made me a head above the rest.

The bear.

He hated this shit. The noise, the people, the flashing light and the fucking bullshit. He wanted three things, food, a nice place to sleep and… I swallowed hard, continuing to nod and smile at other players and the media scrum.

And her.

One woman would have my body, my soul, my whole fucking heart, so burying my dick in groupies didn’t make sense. People could have all the consensual sex they wanted, but I’d only have it with her.

My mate.

But I was twenty-two years old. People told me I had a bright future ahead of me, but it didn’t seem like it without her, because it was all like this.

Nathan Lyons was one of the other front runners for the medal. He was a fucking prick, played hard and dirty, when the refs weren’t looking, and liked to see himself as some kind of alpha dog. He talked a big game on the field. I’d heard what he wanted to do to my sister (didn’t have one), my mother (good fucking go. Mum would smash him to pieces) and every other possible female friend or family member to try and rile me up while we were playing.

Trouble was, I didn’t have a girl for him to piss me off about.

He tried starting shit with me about Jack, the PR person for our team, but I’d just laughed in his face. I made clear she’d eat me for breakfast and him too, then Jack would turn to her girlfriend and ask about the weather.

Speaking of which, here she came.

“Boys.”

Darryl smirked. There was something of the school mistress about Jack and with good reason. She was too bloody smart for this job. Having to try and whip a whole bunch of blokes with too much testosterone into a publicly acceptable team persona. Kids came to our games, as did mums and dads, so none of the bullshit that went on behind the scenes could get out.

Like the fact that Nathan fucking Lyons had his mistress set up in a place almost as fancy as the family home. That even with two women on the go, he was still feeling around for any groupies who might be keen to go around with him. That apparently he caught some kind of STI from not wrapping it before he had sex.

And he found out because his wife caught it.

But right now he was beaming at the cameras, Mrs Lyons and the Lyons juniors all clustered around him.

“Your family is here,” Jack said in a low voice then steered me towards them.

And that’s when it all got better.

The smiles on my family’s faces, it was the thing that I carried with me every fucking day. Mum was looking beautiful in a dress I’d made my dads buy for her. Yeah, dads. Like all bear shifters, I had multiple. I didn’t give a shit about the cost, I just wanted her to feel amazing. Her eyelashes batted way too fast, warning me she was about to cry, while my dads were all clustered around her. We’d passed my multiple fathers off as uncles to the press. Jack hadn’t freaked that my parents lived a polyamorous lifestyle, but she’d asked me very earnestly if I wanted to expose that to the world.

I didn’t.

I felt like I needed to protect them from everything, the whole three ring circus that went on off the field.

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