Chapter 39
JEREMIAH
"Bets are in, boys." Bart clapped his hands, rubbing them together gleefully. "There's no going back now. Your bad choices are cemented for all of eternity."
Shawn laughed and sipped his beer, leaning back on my couch and propping his feet up on the coffee table. "For all of eternity? Don’t you mean until next Sunday when we make new bets? You're getting dramatic in your old age."
"You're older than I am," Bart said, grabbing my universal remote to stream the e-sports tournament he'd gotten his start in a couple of years ago. "If there's ever been anything to get dramatic about, it's this. Whichever team wins tonight has a shot at the big leagues."
"Oh, you mean like the NFL or the World Series?" Tanner joined in, ambling from the bar to the living area with a bottle of imported beer he preferred hanging between his fingers.
Bart flipped him off and grinned maniacally as he went in for the kill. "Nope, we still make real money in our big leagues."
Tanner gripped his heart, feigning injury as he fell backward onto the couch. "Touché bro, touché."
I poured four shots of tequila and carried them over to where my friends were sitting in front of my TV, shoved Shawn's feet off my coffee table, and put my own there instead. "Some things never change."
"The more things change, the more they stay the same," Shawn said philosophically, nudging a plate of nachos out of the way with his toe to make space for his feet on the table again. "Well, unless you consider we haven't really been sticking to this tradition for the past few months."
I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, nodding. "I know, I know but you try telling dear old dad that football Sunday is more important than his golf game."
Bart shuddered and shook his head. "Jance and golf on one day. I think that's penance enough for skipping the last eight football and e-sport Sundays."
"I saw what you did there," Shawn said, getting Nacho crumbs all over his shirt as he shoveled them into his mouth between words. "Adding e-sport to football Sunday."
"We've been watching these tournaments before the football game for years. It's only fair it should be included in the name."
Bart and Shawn kept shooting the shit about changing the name of our tradition, which I happened to know none of them gave a shit about—the name, not the tradition. Tanner turned to me, eyeing my golf bag standing at the front door. "So what happened? Why aren't you out there in the sunshine with daddy dearest and Neil?"
"I fucking hate golf," I said, taking a long pull from my beer and slamming back one of the shots of tequila for good measure. "Jance and I got into it this morning. I told him he probably didn't want me at his game today, and he agreed."
Shawn and Bart had tuned into our conversation by now, and each drank of their own shots before Bart went to replenish them. Shawn looked at me sympathetically. While on any other guy I would have punched the look off his face, I let it go with Shawn because he had a similar relationship with his father as I had with mine.
"Unlike those of us who are still rebelling against what the parental units expect, you stepped up when Jack passed. What's his problem now?"
"I took my secretary to a fundraiser on Friday, and he found out. Let's just say he wasn't happy about it." I didn't feel like rehashing the argument we had, and luckily, my friends knew me well enough to leave it at that.
Tanner's eyes narrowed as he thought, then widened again when he snapped his fingers. "The hot secretary? The one you hired a couple of weeks ago. You're going out with her now?"
I shook my head. "Not unless by going out you mean I took her to the fundraiser first and then brought her back here later."
"You fucked her, didn't you?" Shawn asked matter-of-factly, chuckling as he took a sip of his beer. "Old habits die hard, I guess."
Bart nodded, a teasing grin pulling at the corners of his lips. "Once a player, always a player."
I glared at both of my obnoxious friends. "It wasn't like that."
"You didn't fuck her then?" Tanner asked disbelievingly and chucked a nacho at me. "That's sad, bro."
Scrubbing my hands over my face, the burn from my stubble that had grown in overnight reminded me of the slight redness on Stephanie's thighs yesterday morning. Everything I did seemed to remind me of her in one way or another. One night with her was never going to be enough.
"No, I did. I just… It's not like that with her. She's different."
They looked as surprised by my confession as I was by having made it. I got their full attention, and though the atmosphere in my living room was still relaxed, they dropped the teasing.
"My dad is being such a fucking ass to her. Makes me feel like shit even though I'm not in control of what he says," I said, figuring I might as well come clean now that I'd started talking. We’d all been friends for long enough that they would never let it go now if I didn’t.
"He really doesn't like her. I don't even want to know how many of the secretaries at the company he's slept with over the years. But then he fired Jannie on the spot for coming on to me, and now he keeps insinuating stuff about Stephanie."