Quarterback's Baby: A Secret Baby Romance

by Roxeanne Rolling

  I suppose someone could have recorded him surreptitiously without his knowledge and then somehow Faleena and Shawna got their hands on it.

  I should go back to my dorm room. But I’m curious. For one thing, despite being mad as hell at Shane, I can’t seem to tear my eyes off his gorgeous body as he goes to town on himself. They have the volume turned up and I can hear Shane grunting as he strokes his cock furiously.

  “Look at his hips!” says Faleena, sounding breathless herself.

  “Faleena!” says Shawna, shock and surprise in her voice. “What are you doing?”

  I can see from my hidden vantage point that Faleena’s hand is moving suspiciously down near her crotch.

  “Nothing,” says Faleena, her voice quiet and embarrassed.

  “Well, if you’re doing that, I’m going to too.”

  Part of me wants to bust into the room and tell them not to masturbate themselves silly over my man. But… he’s definitely not my man.

  Instead, I leave as quietly as I can, making sure that my footsteps don’t make too much noise.

  I open the door to find Jane lounging around eating potato chips.

  “You get those from the vending machine?” I say.

  “You’re not going to let me ask how it was?” says Jane. “And yeah, they’re the best ones in the whole machine. Spicy banana flavor.”

  “Gross,” I say. “How are you feeling? Any after effects?”

  “I’m pretty much fine,” says Jane, but she sounds sleepy and tired. “I think the chips are helping.”

  “I’m sure they are,” I say sarcastically.

  “What do you have there?”

  She’s looking pointedly at the plastic bag I’m clutching in my hand. Shit. I forgot to even try to hide it.

  “Uh, nothing.”

  “I can see through the bag, you know.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Are you serious?” says Jane. “You might be pregnant?”

  “It’s just a precaution,” I say.

  Now I tell her what happened, how he didn’t use a condom and I’m not on birth control, which she already knows.

  “I can’t believe it,” says Jane. “You’re like definitely going to be pregnant.”

  “That’s a huge help,” I say.

  “I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  If I get pregnant, what am I going to do? It’s going to be screwed, that’s what. My parents aren’t going to help me out. They’re broke and they moved to Mexico last year. As far as they’re concerned, they’re done with raising me. That’s fine… but it could make things a little difficult if I have to raise a baby on my own while trying to get my PhD.

  10

  Shane - Two Years Later

  “Good work out there, Shane,” says the coach as I pass by him. He slaps me on the back in a congratulatory way.

  I move into the locker room, filled with huge sweaty muscular guys taking off their clothes, stripping down to nothing.

  It’s not uncommon to see my teammates walking around completely naked, their cocks hanging and dangling like it’s nothing.

  Not that it bothers me. I’m secure enough in myself. There are a couple guys who make great efforts to hide themselves behind their towels and stuff. I figure those are the guys who feel uncomfortable seeing other guys naked.

  Me? I just do whatever’s easier. And it’s easier not to use my towel.

  It takes a while to get off my pads and start stripping off the gear I wore for today’s practice.

  The season is starting soon, and this is one of our last summer training sessions of the year. I couldn’t be happier. I can’t wait to get onto the field and really destroy.

  It’s my second year in the league, my second year with the Red Panthers, a new and up and coming team.

  Well, up and coming is a loose term. It’s their third year in existence, and their first year was absolutely abominable, completely horrible. I came on in the second year, and helped bring the team up to a respectable standing. But we weren’t anywhere close to getting to the finals.

  But this year… this is the year when we’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones. I know I’m going to carry the team to victory. I want it, and I want it bad.

  I’ve cleaned up my act. Clean eating. Clean living. No partying. Just working out, hard, as often as I can.

  I’ve grown since college, getting even more muscular. That’s what a strict regimen will do to you when you’ve got the right body for it. And my body just seems to want to grow. Not that I’m huge like a linebacker, but my body’s getting hard. Hard and strong, just the way I want to be.

  I’m glad I got drafted by the Red Panthers. Nobody understood it at the time. They thought I’d wanted to go to a new team, one of the established brands, so to speak. But I saw an opportunity. I saw an opportunity to create something new, to do what no one else had done before, which is carrying a new team to victory. And I knew it wouldn’t happen in my first year. There was so much to learn. There were plays to study, there were connections to make. I had to bring the team together as a cohesive unit, rather than existing just as a group of individuals who were bummed about being on a brand new team rather than the one that always wins everything every year.

  This is the year. We’re going to make it.

  “Nice work, Shane,” says Bobby, a wide receiver.

  “Thanks, man,” I say.

  “You coming out with us tonight? We’re going to celebrate the start of the season.”

  “I don’t think so, man,” I say. “I’ve got a workout scheduled.”

  “A workout? Are you insane?”

  I laugh.

  “You just had a workout here. Isn’t that what we call it?”

  “This is just training,” I say, wiping the sweat from my brow. “Tonight’s when I actually work the muscles.”

  “You must be lifting some damn heavy weights,” he says, eying my massive muscular thighs.

  “That’s the only way to do it.”

  “But come on, Shane. You can miss one workout. We’re heading over to Thompson’s place. He’s going to have women, man. Some group of Russian models or something. They’re tight as fuck.”

  “I’ll pass,” I say.

  “Whatever, man, give me a call if you want to stop by.”

  I nod at him and he heads into the showers.

  Half an hour later, I’ve finished changing and showering, and I’m heading to my car in the parking lot.

  “Shane!” calls out someone.

  I look over my shoulder.

  It’s coach, jogging slowly up to me.

  He’s an older guy, and he’s got a lot of extra weight around his middle. He used to be a hell of a quarterback, though, back in the day. I think he’s got a bit of a drinking problem now, though, which doesn’t help with the extra weight.

  “What’s up, coach?”

  “Just wanted to say you’re doing a hell of a job out there,” he says, panting slightly from the exertion of jogging up to me.

  “Thanks, coach.”

  He nods his head, still trying to catch his breath. “I just wanted to let you know… You know the guys really look up to you… and…”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I just wish they’d take it a little more seriously sometimes.”

  Coach chuckles. “They want to have their fun. They want to live it up while they can.”

  “I used to be the same way,” I say. “But some things are more important than having fun.”

  “Winning’s a hell of a thing,” says coach. “But it’s not everything.”

  “That doesn’t sound like it could possibly be coming from the coach that I know,” I say.

  Coach chuckles. “It’s a hell of a thing,” he says. “Like I said… but… sometimes I worry about you, Shane. It’s great to be working out and everything, but you’re never at any of the parties…”

  “You heard about that? What’s the big deal? I want to work out. So wh
at?”

  “I heard about it, yeah, but that’s not the point. There’s not much that goes on here that I don’t know about.”

  “What are you getting at, coach?” I say. “I don’t like all this beating around the bush.”

  Coach knows where he stands with me. He knows I speak my mind, and that I could knock him out in a second flat, a single punch. Not that I would do that. Well, unless things got really ugly.

  He may be the coach, but I do what I want. I’ve never been the type to follow orders.

  “It’s just I never see you with a woman, Shane,” says Coach. “It could help relax you… I know the women are just dying to be with you…”

  “I’ve got that sorted out, thanks,” I say, tersely.

  I turn away from him and walk to my car, a Jeep that doesn’t have any doors or a top on it right now. I like the feeling of the open air as I drive it. It feels like I’m out adventuring.

  I crank the Jeep and drive off, leaving coach standing in the parking lot.

  He’s right. It’s been a long time since there’s been anything like a girlfriend in my life.

  But that’s because of her.

  She haunts my dreams.

  I still think about her.

  I still think about that day in my dorm room back in college, when I came inside her twice. It was the best sex of my life. The most intense…

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had feelings for her. Real feelings that seemed to jump up out of nowhere. It sounds completely crazy to me, but it is what it is.

  As I’m driving home with the wind blowing through my long hair, I have a sense of momentarily freedom, the type of freedom that I normally only feel on the field.

  I’ve left a lot of my reputation behind me. Now I’m something of the serious team leader. The guys look up to me, but not for my crazy antics the way they did in college.

  I can’t believe it myself, but apparently I’ve matured. What a weird feeling to have. What a weird thing to do, to mature.

  I get onto the highway and for some reason my mind drifts back to her, to Lia. She called me once, but I was partying, drinking with my football buddies. It was the day of graduation, and I ignored her phone call. I was pissed at the way she had just run out of my room. I had a big ego, and maybe I still do. But I couldn’t believe that she had walked away from me like that. No one did that to me back then. There I was, giving her a second chance… I wanted to keep hooking up with her, and instead she got mad at me about the condom.

  I tried calling her back the next day, but it went straight to voicemail. I knew that she saw the call and ignored it, because it didn’t ring more than once. I was too cocky and full of myself to try calling again.

  Maybe I should have. Maybe she could have been the one.

  The highway exit looms up ahead. My house is only a short five minutes from the off ramp, far enough away that I don’t hear the noise of the traffic, and short enough that getting pretty much anywhere is an easy commute. The best of both worlds, I suppose.

  The house is too large for me. I bought it when I first got my contract. I was just balls-to-the-wall with excitement at having made it at having money. I didn’t really think things through. It’s not that I can’t afford it, but sometimes I wish I was just in a simple apartment that wouldn’t have all the complications of a huge house.

  I park the Jeep in the driveway, get out, and head right to the gym in my basement.

  The house is sparsely decorated. I have the rooms that I use, and then I have some that are completely empty. I found that it was simply too much work to bother decorating and furnishing all the rooms of this huge house.

  Back in the locker room, I changed into my workout clothes. I’m wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt.

  I’ve got free weights here. A lot of them. I’ve got it set up for Olympic style lifts as well as the traditional stuff. I prefer compound movements, like the squat, the deadlift. I pretty much keep it old school with my lifts. Once in a while I’ll use one of the fancy new machines if coach thinks I’ve got to work on a particular aspect of my stance or something. But, yeah, generally I like the feel of the steel, feeling the raw explosive power that my body needs to produce to move a weight. There’s nothing stabilizing it. Nothing keeping it in check except myself.

  That’s the way I feel about my life sometimes. It’s hard to explain. But it all feels like it could come crashing down if I stop doing what I’m doing. That’s why I work so damn hard. That’s why I come home and workout after an intense practice.

  Before doing my warm up routine, I open up a laptop that I keep down here. I’ve got it connected to a nice sound system. I use it to blast some serious tunes when I’m working out. There’s nothing that encourages me to lift heavier and harder than some heavy metal blaring through a state of the art sound system.

  For some reason, a message pops up, telling me that I’ve got a new email.

  I didn’t even think I had this machine logged into my email.

  Oh, yeah, it’s the old laptop that I used in my last year of college. It’s still logged into my college email, the account that I haven’t used literally at all in the last two years.

  I click on the icon to bring the message up.

  It’s a weird looking email, from someone that I don’t recognize. The email is: LiaLeone2000—one that I’ve never seen before.

  The email doesn’t have any text except for a link.

  I click it, against my better judgment.

  It’s some kind of video hosting site, one that I’ve never seen before.

  The video surprises me more than any other video could.

  It’s a video of me, and I’m completely naked, jacking off in bed.

  What the hell?

  I never shot a video like this, and I certainly never knew it existed.

  This is really weird.

  I go back to the email and see that it’s actually a group email. It’s been sent to a lot of other people besides just me. But they’re all blind copied, so I can’t see who they are.

  Shit, this is weird.

  Is this some weird joke by one of my old college buddies?

  11

  Lia

  “You sure he’s doing all right?” I say.

  “He’s fine,” says Jane. “Don’t worry about anything. I know what I’m doing at this point.”

  I laugh a little nervously. After all, it is the welfare of my son we’re talking about. But I’ve gotten a little better. I no longer call every half hour to see how he’s doing.

  “Talk to you later,” I say. “I’ve got to go.”

  Jane says goodbye and I hang up the phone.

  I’m working my shift at a local restaurant, which is honestly sort of a dump. It’s called Old Jim’s, and it’s a small, antiquated looking restaurant whose patrons are mostly grumpy old locals who probably drink too much. There’s a bar in the restaurant, where most of the client hang out.

  There are all sorts of old knickknacks on the walls, which in many establishments might give a place character. But here, the knickknacks seem to have been chosen with absolutely no thoughts of style, and they just make the whole restaurant feel cluttered and cheap, even dirty. There are old license plates that hang on the walls, but it’s not one of those collections of interesting license plates. Instead, these are just essentially pieces of battered metal that happen to be stamped with the state colors and some random numbers and letters. They’re all local Pennsylvania plates, and likely they fell off unfortunate cars and were collected on the side of the road, in gutters, and in fields, all over Pennsylvania. How they got here, I have no idea, although I suspect that Old Jim himself has some kind of strange obsession with them.

  Old Jim works every night, unfortunately for me. He has some kind of sleeping condition, or perhaps he’s just stubborn, because he never gets up earlier than three in the afternoon and goes to bed around dawn. Many nights he’ll stay up late at the restaurant with a bunch of the local r
egulars, drinking beer with them behind the locked front door.

  Of course, that’s completely illegal, but the local police know him and for some reason like him, so they let it slide. It’s not a big deal in their eyes. They’ve got other things to worry about, like a rash of students taking tainted ecstasy pills. A bunch of them came into the restaurant last night, laughing and giggling, and trying to touch everything in sight. The only way I could get them to leave was by giving them an old license plate each. They cradled those license plates like they were the lost Ark of the Covenant.

  One of the girls seemed to recognize me, because she kept smiling at me like she knew me. Maybe it was just because she was on ecstasy, but I kept my head down and wiped the bar for an hour straight instead of looking at her. I think she was in one of my classes back in college. But I refused to be embarrassed about my situation—finishing college with top grades, making Dean’s list every semester, and then winding up working in a junky bar like this that masquerades as an even worse restaurant.

  Things aren’t exactly going the way that I’d hoped back when I was in college, back before I had Will.

  But that’s the way things are, and I can’t change them. Will is everything to me. He’s my baby, my precious little baby, and I wouldn’t give him up for a real career as a physical therapist. I wouldn’t give him up to be getting my PhD with my peers, to be going out and socializing at the bars with everyone. There isn’t a thing in the world that I’d trade him for.

  Thankfully, Jane and I are still really close. Neither one of us moved away after college. Jane works as a graphic designer, which is a field about as far removed from what she studied as you could get. But it turned out that her hobby of toying around with images on the computer, creating silly memes, turned into a real career that’s blossoming. She gets to work from home, communicating with her globally-based clients from the comfort of her armchair. Mostly, she makes book covers, and does a hell of a job of it. She loves Will, so she ends up looking after him quite a bit when I have my evening shifts at the restaurant.