Big Man on Campus: an Enemies to Lovers College Romance (Big Men on Campus Book 1)

by Stephanie Queen

  Then I’m done with all this shit. I can get off the tight wire I’ve been walking on, juggling my past reality with the image of my future. I’ll sign a multimillion-dollar deal when I get drafted in the top three picks, buy Mom a house in a new town where she can start fresh, and we’ll never look back.

  Except that Joni is here now. I need to deal with that sizzling fuse hard and fast. There’s no way to hide her even on a campus of over eight thousand undergrads. Because she’s grown up to be too fucking Sports Illustrated bathing suit cover model gorgeous.

  “How come I didn’t see this chick?” Tristan says. “I’d like to meet her.”

  I can’t meet his eyes because dread fills me knowing Tristan is sincere. Knowing that he might meet her if I see Joni again doesn’t sit well. I need to talk to her. On the sly.

  “She’s not your type.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? She’s too good for me?”

  “We’re too good for her,” I say, wanting to believe it, knowing it’s the opposite of real.

  “I thought she was a princess with a driver?” George says.

  “That’s what makes her not good enough,” I say. “None of them are.” Allowing a moment of sincerity feels good, but I’m not sure anyone gets it. Except maybe Tristan. He gives me one of his looks. The others nod. George frowns.

  “Get over it, Jack. Accept your circumstances, who you are. I’ve never met such an extreme reverse snob.” George says, confirming my suspicion.

  His words mock me. He thinks I’m one of the privileged, that I’m rebelling against it. Maybe because I’ve cultivated the misimpression. He has no idea who I am and the limbo I live in. Or how far I have to go before I can come close to real privilege. If ever.

  One more season. I can make it.

  Ten more football games and I can win the Heisman. My ticket to money, respect, and yes, true privilege. Then it won’t matter that I’m poor enough to have eaten throwaway food from the back alley of a local restaurant, or that my mom is a drunken slut who has no idea who my dad is. The only thing that will matter is who I’ve become. Someone. With money. Not a nobody from nowhere. Shallow? Sure. Says people who take normal parents and food on the regular for granted.

  Either way, my life will change. I won’t need to feel like I’m sucking rich people’s dicks for money, work a shady side gig to earn enough to keep the lights on for my mom. She’s shit for a mother, but she’s my mother. She’s always been my biggest fan, always knew I’d be a baller. Calls it a mother’s intuition. I figure it was the booze talking, but at least it was good talk.

  “I know who I am.” I give George a snide smile and have him backing away from me already. “I’m the guy that’s going to bust your ass.” I reach out faster than he can move from my grasp and slam him into the lockers. Then I move on, listening to him muttering a string of swears, damning me and my family to hell. Too late, buddy. Been living there all along.

  After I throw on my sneakers, I look for Tristan to ride with me back to BMOC house, but he’s already gone.

  George and I are close to the last to leave the locker room. In spite of the gnawing hunger, like small animals eating out the lining of my belly, I linger purposefully to hang with the remaining guys, chat up a couple of the freshmen to see who they are, help them feel part of the team. George lingers because he’s hot to give me shit. Nothing new there. I let him blow off his steam and cool off. We take my truck back to the BMOC House and he pumps me for info about the girl the entire ride.

  “Her name is Joni Dowd.”

  Scrolling through his phone while I drive, he finds a photo of her on the Internet.

  “This her?” He flashes his phone in front of my face as I pull into the driveway. Shoving his phone aside, I nod. She looks young, but it’s her.

  Our house is large and old with three floors. Above the front door the bold, black letters B-M-O-C hang in wooden blocks like a dark perverted version of Sesame Street teaching passersby a different kind of lesson. There are no curtains or blinds on the windows of the first floor. The front hall is formal and empty, the wood floors scuffed. When we walk inside, the smell of steak tempts me so I walk straight through the long narrow hall to the enormous kitchen at the back of the house. Tristan leans against the battered cabinets along one wall and nods to me.

  A giant fifty-something woman, who I’ve tried to convince on more than one occasion to go out for lineman on the football team, stands over the Jenn Air grill built into the commercial-size stove, a useful relic from the eighties we decided to clean up and keep.

  “ETM in fifteen,” she says to me in her five-packs-of-Marlboros-a-day voice and the usual defiant look on her face. Estimated Time of Meat. I take her fleshy hand, ignore the valiant sweaty palm, and kiss the back of it, bending at the waist as if I’m singlehandedly attempting to resurrect chivalry.

  “Give me my fucking hand back, you unsanitary bastard. Keep your spit off me.” She attempts to smack my face, but I back out of her way, familiar with her moves.

  “You look gorgeous today, Majik. Do something different with your hair?” It’s pulled from her face in a sloppy, stubby, gray-streaked ponytail like it always is when she’s in the kitchen. Raising the hand with a fork in it, the house cook, Mrs. Majisky, lifts her middle finger, separating it from the fork in a lavish feat of flexibility, impressing me again with one of her many baffling talents.

  “Your mother called,” she says. That wipes the smirk from my face and I shush her with the expression in my eyes, a commanding plea. I didn’t give my mother my cell phone number for a reason.

  “How nice,” I say, keeping cool and turning back around, I catch the questioning look on Tristan’s face. George is right behind me. He walks through to the pantry door, swatting Majik on her impressive butt as he goes by. I watch for it and I’m not disappointed to see the sliver of a smile, a tight tic lifting the left side of her mouth.

  She keeps her attention on the steak, sprinkling it with salt and some magical shit to make it taste like a beefy orgasm, like it does every single time.

  George comes out of the pantry with a bag of Fritos. He’s addicted to them. Majik stocks them just for him. He’s her clear favorite, like a pet. They’re a very strange pair.

  “Check out this pic of Jack’s new girl.” George waves his phone into Tristan’s line of vision. Tristan flicks me a glance and raises a brow, but doesn’t say a word as he takes the phone from George, wiping the Frito salt from it on his shirt before studying it with way too much interest. Not that I’m concerned about Tristan going after Joni. He’s the last one who’d go after any girl another guy is remotely interested in. Not that I’m interested in her. Not in that way. My interest is that of an enemy concerned with a potential threat. No matter. Tristan takes loyalty and respect more seriously than anyone. Maybe it’s religious dedication. He’s so religious some of the guys want to kick him out of the house.

  But that ain’t happening while I’m here. Tristan is good, but he’s tough too, decent in a way I admire. He doesn’t judge. Except about my mother. I can feel his judgment creeping in about that subject. And if he ever knew about what I do for money, he’d be on my case about that too. So I don’t tell him.

  I hate all the secrets, the need to be two people at once. And sometimes I’m tempted to tell Tristan everything, to confess to him like he’s some kind of priest. But I don’t because that would be the first domino falling on the path to my destruction.

  Tristan hands the phone back to George and says to me, “She has a nice smile.”

  George sputters and says, “That’s all you see? What about those lips? I bet—”

  “Shut it, Sylvester.” I call him by his last name like some den mother when I’m annoyed with him, but it’s effective. He glares at me.

  “Fuck. You do have a thing for her.” George grins.

  Not up for a round with George on an empty stomach, I raise my middle finger at him and head for the stairs.

 
; He follows me up to my bedroom on the second floor. To say it’s an austere room doesn’t do it justice. A monk would feel a need to spruce it up. But I have what I need. A salvaged dresser, a desk with a wooden chair that looks like it came from a kid’s room because it probably did before it was left at the side of the road, a mini fridge which is my only splurge, and, straight from the seventies, a wood cable spool serving as a cocktail table. No posters on the walls. The only photo sits on my dresser. It’s of me in my Pop Warner football uniform with Grandpa when he was my coach. The best time of my life. Before I was aware of just how bad my life was. They’re right about ignorance being bliss.

  “When are you going to get a real bed?” George flops down onto the mattress sitting on the floor. No frame or foundation elevates it, and he grunts as he lands, no doubt feeling the hard floor through the less-than-thick padding of the cheap box-store bargain. I probably should invest in a better bed for my back’s sake, but I can’t. Not yet.

  “I like it raw,” I say. “I like to give my women the uncluttered experience of pure Jack Hunter pleasure in bed. Just me, my dick and my mattress.”

  He flips a pillow at me. “You’re so full of shit. There’s nothing pure about you.”

  Ducking the pillow, I tug on the tail of my shirt, giving him the finger as I lift it over my head.

  “Get out of here and let me change in peace.” My shirt smells like old socks from my gym bag. I wonder what it would feel like to have Joni Dowd do my laundry. I don’t know why my girlfriends like doing my laundry, even the most spoiled princesses have insisted on doing it in the past. Not that Joni’s girlfriend material. I need to steer clear of her, let her sink into the oblivion of the student body at large.

  “I want to hear about this new girl. It seems to me she’d be perfect for you, a good break from your predictable pattern. Plus, I’m fucking curious.”

  “Blow dick somewhere else.” I turn away and grab a clean shirt from my drawer. A Moreland Chevrolet dealership T-shirt. I don’t care. It fits and girls don’t seem to care what I use to cover my body if they can see the ripple of muscle under it.

  “How do you know her?”

  “High school.” Admitting out loud that someone from my past, from Moreland, is here at St. Paul U feels as if I’ve pushed through a protective wall like the brain blood barrier. It feels damn uncomfortable, disorienting, like two universes that don’t belong together have collided. And the collision is going to make something go up in a fiery explosion.

  Like my fucking life. My future. If all the secrets I’ve been hiding, about who I really am, where I come from, what I do to earn money, are exposed, the BMOC will be gone. The Heisman? Gone. Professional football? Maybe a late-round pick. League minimum contract. No contract at all.

  I need to do something to make sure my history remains a mystery. I can’t leave it to chance, leave it to faith that Joni won’t say anything. If I talk to her, give her the score, get her under control, I can convince her to keep my secrets.

  The secret of my poverty and how desperate I am for money only needs to stay hidden until I win the Heisman. Until the end of the season, one more semester. I’ll need to persuade Joni to keep our past in our past, make her promise not to talk about me, about the bullying, about my mother. Or about me being poor. The less said about my finances, the better.

  Surely she wouldn’t want me talking about her past, about her humiliation? About her mother. Though that secret is laughable compared to mine. People in town don’t know about Joni’s mother. The Dowd family has enough money to keep adultery a secret, to keep up the appearance of the perfect family.

  Mine? They laugh and openly deride my dear mother. Especially since Grampa passed.

  “Let’s see what else Google has to say about Joni Dowd.” He reaches for my computer. “See if there’s more photos—”

  I snatch the computer away from him and shove it inside my closet on a high shelf and close the door. No way I want him to get a look at what I was working on. One more secret. The worst one of all. The one about how I make my money these days, the money that keeps my mother afloat. The one secret no one knows—not even Joni. Thank fuck.

  “Go use your own fucking computer. Better yet, let’s eat.” Magic words.

  George bounces from the mattress as if it’s suddenly sprung some springs and beats me out the door.

  “I’m fucking starving,” he says, “but I’m not above talking while I’m chewing, so you’re not off the hook about this Joni chick. She’s fucking hot, man and you’re interested. I mean I thought you were going to explode when you saw her.” He jumps down the stairs missing every other step and we make our way into the dining room as Majik rings the bell. Half of us are already to the table, noisily pulling out sturdy wooden chairs.

  You’d think we were at a military school with the way we’re punctual to dinner, but there’s a reason her nickname stuck, Majik’s food is just that good. I’ve never in my life eaten so well since I hired her away from a local restaurant three years ago to be our official cook. She’s worth every damn penny, even though it’s more than what my scholarship allows for food. The full ride scholarship covers most of what I need during the school year, but it doesn’t cover summers or Mom’s bills, so I’m always scrimping.

  We scramble for our seats at the table with only two left empty of the twelve, and after my first satisfying bite of the succulent steak, I take the lead in the conversation as I have been since we moved into the house.

  “Who here is wearing a tux to the Trustees’ shindig Saturday night?”

  George raises his hand reluctantly. A few others follow.

  Ben Weaver, the hockey team’s stud scorer and captain asks, “Why? Does it matter?”

  Good question. I shrug. “Not really, now that you mention it.”

  “You’re not wearing a tux?” He totally sees through my ass and is not afraid to call me on it. I cut another piece off my steak paying attention to the red juices bubbling from the meat, identifying far too closely.

  “Nope.”

  He nods. Conversation resumes among some of the guys on the merits of defying Dean Lassiter’s mandate for tuxes. I half listen. The University President, Reverend Church, will back me. Coach will make me do gassers for an hour. All part of the cost of being too poor and way prouder than I ought to be. Especially now that Joni is here.

  But the secret of my financial status isn’t important so much for pride or shame as it is about keeping clean per the NCAA rules about how we student athletes earn our money. I need to keep under their radar, especially now that they’re scrutinizing SPU for any irregularities, any rule-bending. If they thought my overpaid summer job was a problem, they would like what I’m doing now to earn money far, far less. I need to play football this season and win the Heisman. Then I’m home free.

  Finishing my meal, I leave the table with my plate. Pulling kitchen duty tonight, I end up in the kitchen with Cook after dinner. It’s closing in on nine p.m. and I haven’t started my reading assignments yet. But hell, I’m a marketing major, so how hard can it be?

  If I wasn’t playing football I’d be premed. But there’s no money and no time for medical school, so I’m taking classes that might benefit my football career instead. Putting the last of the dishes into the cabinet, I shut the door and lean against the counter to watch Majik scour the stove like it’s about to compete in a beauty pageant.

  “Do I need to bail Mom out of jail for drunk driving again?” I ask in a quiet voice. Because no way would she call me here on the house phone again unless there was a damn emergency the likes of her puny life falling apart.

  “No. You’ll need to call her back to find out why.” Majik doesn’t look up from her stove, doesn’t judge, not completely, since her own family life is more than sketchy. She’s the only one who knows about the sorry condition of my mom and only because when mom tracked me down last year—for the drunk driving bail—she let things spill. But Majik’s mouth is like a v
ault. She’s as trustworthy as she is solid.

  She told me once she once had a husband and son. She never said what happened to them and I never asked. Respect for her privacy, the same as she has for mine, stops me, not lack of curiosity. I can tell she used to drink, and sometimes I want to ask her how she stopped, want to know if it’s possible for my mom to stop. But hell, at least Mom’s off the coke, right? Can’t be too greedy with the hope for reform.

  “I’ll call her.” It’s not a lie, but I don’t know when. I only know it won’t be tonight.

  Chapter 4

  Joni

  “Who’s expecting a limo?” one of the girls shouts up the staircase. “Someone’s DILF just got out and he’s headed inside with a box.”

  Shit. DILF? Could that be my father? I’m expecting him, so I head downstairs to meet him in the lounge.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He hands me a box by way of greeting.

  My first reaction is to hand it back to him, but it’s not his fault. Mom called me at the last second—not an hour ago. One lousy hour—to tell me I have to do my Dowd duty and take her place at the SPU Trustee reception tonight. “It’s only fitting that you go. You’re a student there and you’ll be an alumna and it’s never too soon to start networking. And heaven knows I have all the contacts I’ll ever need.” She uses the ironclad logic of her social-climbing universe to persuade me. But in truth, I don’t have it in me to defy her, or my dad. They’re paying for college and I’m not an ungrateful spoiled bitch, unlike what some people may think of me. Some people named Jack Hunter.

  “A dress and shoes for tonight,” he says. “Your mother says you have a handbag.”

  “Thanks.”

  I have fifty handbags, but who’s counting? Everyone has a vice, don’t they? I’m afraid to see what’s in the box. Leaving my Dad to sit in the dorm’s lounge, I take the box and go up to my room.

  So, on my first Saturday night at St. Paul University, I’ve agreed to go to a party where everyone there is likely to be two to three times my age, half of them with most of their hair spiking from their eyebrows or noses and dancing with their walkers. Not that I have anything against old people, since I’m no more a party animal than the average ninety-year old anyway. It’s just that it’s a waste of my time when I could be writing. Or being romanced by some poet.