WINGMAN
A BLACK SEQUINNED BOWS AND CHAMPAGNE NIGHTS PREQUEL NOVELLA
JUDE E. MCNAMARA
Contents
1. ~“If You Didn’t Get Dirty, You Didn’t Play”~
2. ~“As the Season Goes On, Teammates Go From Teammates to Friends, to Brothers”~
3. ~“Nod Your Head and Give the Signal to the Pitcher”~
4. ~“Behind Every Great Pitcher There is a Great Catcher”~
5. ~“A Friend is a Person Who Will Make a Great Scoop When You Happen to Throw One in the Dirt”~
6. ~ If You’re Looking for the Ball, the Catcher Has It~
A Word About The Author
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Copyright
WINGMAN
Wingman (0.5)
A prequel novella to the heartfelt multicultural romantic suspense novel Black Sequinned Bows And Champagne Nights.
By: Jude E. McNamara
Published by: Two Judes Publishing
Copyright ©2017 Jude E. McNamara
Cover by: Edited by: Evident Ink
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9972863-4-2
Created with Vellum
1
~“If You Didn’t Get Dirty, You Didn’t Play”~
Love and loyalty are powerful forces. Loyalty compelled my need to get into the game. Love beckoned me on a path to catch the curve ball headed my way. Truth is, when a curve ball is making a beeline your way, you have no clue as to where it might land. Unlike the fastball, a curve ball can be wildly unpredictable. You only have a few brief moments to adjust. A mere split of a second to adapt to changing conditions.
Me, I was accustomed to fastballs. In the game of life and love, I am the fastball king. I have spent my entire young adult existence living my life in the fast lane. Take your pick. Fast food. Fast planes. Fast cars. Even fast women. I’ve mastered them all.
Particularly fast women.
Hell, I even lost my head and married one. She’s definitely soon to be the ex Mrs. Noah Dunham. What I need now more than anything is a fast divorce. My heart and mind relish the day I can extract this gold ring from my finger. It feels like a golden noose rather than the symbolic infinity knot calling me to love, honor, and obey.
In hindsight, my decision to marry was a moment in my life when I exercised poor judgment. I had failed to heed the advice of my best friend Lucas Cook. If only I could turn back the hands of time. The last eighteen months I have been living in a hellhole called my marriage.
Lucas and I met six years ago at the United States Naval Academy—both of us presidential appointees to the Academy. Both of us came from well-to-do families with fathers who were career military. As dormitory roommates, we immediately hit it off. It was here we learned the importance of having responsibility for each other.
We grew to become best friends who cherished the benefits of having each other’s backs. Loyalty is a necessary element to the art of surviving military college. Consequently, Lucas and I kept each other’s confidences. We shared our past mistakes. We shared our future dreams. We boasted to anyone that got in our way that we were ‘brothers from another mother.’ If you messed with one of us, you messed with both of us.
We studied together. We protected each other. We relied on each other. It was second nature to respect each other’s advice.
Except for the one time I lost my mind in a mound of hot pussy, failing to heed his words. Words that looked and sounded like “don’t marry her.”A fine brown ass in the palm of my hands coupled with beautiful thick lips wrapped around my cock had momentarily seized my wits. She was a potent drug that had scrambled my brain in ways I couldn’t explain even to myself. I should have heeded Lucas’s advice to "just say no." But my lust meter for her had ridden off the charts. In the words of Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?” Absolutely nothing. Lust prevailed over love. And now I have spent the last eighteen months fucked twenty ways to Sunday, stuck in a marriage with a woman I can't stand.
Now I’m riding the rails of divorce. I can’t get off the marriage train fast enough. Regrettably, she is the fastball I had no business taking a swing at. But that’s another story for another day. Which brings me back to the matter of curveballs.
You see, the game of life is filled with many curveballs. Curveballs require you to adjust. They require you to adapt. They require you to move fast. They require you to change. There aren’t a lot of choices with curveballs. Your options are typically limited to a single choice. And once you see it coming—WHAM. You have to decide.
Today is the beginning of a journey wherein I would be faced with one of life’s curveballs. I didn’t give it a second thought, even knowing how unequipped and unprepared I was for the moment. There were no other logical choices. So I made the decision to swing. It didn’t matter because I was swinging in the name of love. I was swinging in the name of loyalty. I was swinging in the name of brotherhood.
Love. Loyalty. Brotherhood. A combination that made for a powerful curveball.
Lucas was the pitcher. I was the catcher. She was the batter.
The curveball coming my way had a name.
Riley Nelson.
2
~“As the Season Goes On, Teammates Go From Teammates to Friends, to Brothers”~
Lucas and I were the only two lieutenant commanders in the officer’s box this year. Both of us towered in the corner, him being six feet tall, and myself two inches taller. All the other officers were of a higher rank, and the fact that I was the only African American lieutenant commander in the box made the moment all the more a command performance for me.
We were at the annual Army-Navy game at Lincoln Financial Field. The Army-Navy game, steeped in tradition, marked the end of the regular college football season. It was also the third and final game of the season’s Commander-in-Chief Trophy series. It was a long-standing tradition that Lucas and I attended whenever we were lucky enough to be stateside. We each had a standing invitation to today’s game. We were anointed the next generation of the Navy’s senior officers who were being fast-tracked for the admiral ranks. Both of us expected to make captain in a few years.
Fast track. There it is again. Back to fast. The single thing that had turned my life upside down these last eighteen months. Life in the fucking fast lane.
“I begged you not to marry her, man. I specifically said ‘only date her, Noah.’ I did not say go the hell off and fucking marry the woman.”
“As far as I’m concerned Lucas, you’re to blame. You introduced us. I’m not going to cry over spilled milk. I simply want out.
“Don’t think for one minute you’re going to lay this at my feet. Oh hell, no. You only have yourself to blame for not listening to me.” Lucas was shaking his head, looking half-amused, half like he might be about to punch me.
I was hardly surprised. Lucas was not going to let me off the hook or let me shift the blame. He was right. I did this to myself. And now I was paying for my own mistake.
“You and I’ve been arguing my mistake for a year. Give up the ghost, dude. I fucked up. Can you please stop rubbing salt in the wound?” I spread my hands wide in surrender.
This was our regular routine whenever we got together. I bitched about my marriage; he blamed me for not taking his advice. I expressed my deep regrets; he reminded me to have hope in better days ahead. Rinse and repeat.
> I knew my failed marriage was causing Lucas some level of emotional pain. He hated watching me be so miserable. He had no roadmap for how to handle my personal setback. He was used to me being the one to dole out sound advice. I was typically the life of the party. And these days even I knew I was no fun.
“Thank God we won’t be arguing over this five years from now. I can’t keep locking you up in my home every week filling your glass with Stoli, talking you down off the ledge. You owe me this time, Noah. If it weren’t for me, those JAG Corp boys might have you in their clutches by now for killing your wife,” Lucas laughed, breaking the tension.
I knew he was joking. Neither of us were violent men. We rescued women. We didn't harm them. We were Navy pilots. We were also black belts. Which meant we could be mean blue killing machines when faced head-on against the enemy. The Navy had invested well over a million dollars in our training. We were stellar in the air and your worst nightmare on the ground. Alpha dogs. With women, we liked to think of ourselves as love machines. But you couldn’t tell it by my behavior these days. The last several months I had leaned hard on Lucas just to get through my days. There was nothing about me that resembled a love machine.
“I’m a naval officer. I hate dirty. I need precision. I had to hire a housekeeper so I can live in my own damn house. Casey’s a couch potato on steroids. All she does is watch reality television or soap operas all day. Oh yeah, except for when she takes time out for fucking.”
“Which is exactly why I said the words out loud and clear. Date, yes. Marry, no. What part of the memo did you not get? Do I look like the jackass whisperer to you, Noah?”
I glanced down on the football field taking note of the quarterback sneak that was in play. I shrugged my shoulders, temporarily feigning ignorance and looked up to the ceiling as if to be pondering the ways of the world in deep thought, my index finger placed on the side of my cheek. “Yup. You do.”
Lucas looked at me with frustration. He closed his eyes, shaking his head. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself. Hell I very much felt like a certified jackass. The shoe fit, so I was gonna wear it.
We both started laughing, Lucas raising his hand to give me a high five. That was how we rolled. We made light of bad situations. Lucas was laughing, his attempt at trying to cheer me up. And I was laughing to keep from crying.
The good news was my divorce was practically imminent. My future as a free man was the single thing I relished most. That, and my friendship with Lucas. It was because of him that I was able to put one foot in front of the other each day. He gave me stability, confidence and a reason to wake each morning. Lucas, the eternal optimist, reminded me often of that old cliché that ‘misery does not last always.’
“Can you believe we’re losing this game?” he sighed, glancing through the glass box window, his eyes fixed on the scoreboard. Navy was down two touchdowns.
I peered out the window overlooking the stadium filled with thousands of fans. It looked like a sea of blue, white, gold, and green. Half the uniformed fans were men and women dressed in Navy whites. The other half were dressed in Army green. You could sense the electric energy emanating off the field was being felt by the fans in the stands. A pang of nostalgia swept over me. The atmosphere was much more lively with the college kids in the stands than up here in this glass sardine can otherwise known as the officer and gentlemen box. Those were the good old days.
“Fucking Army,” Lucas grunted. “We’re behind fourteen points.”
“It’s only the first half, Lucas. Chill, man. We’ll pull out a win before it’s over. Keep the faith.”
“I don’t know Mico. Are you paying attention? Army’s quarterback is on fire. He’s firing that sheepskin like it's a missile.”
The fact that Lucas had called me by my academy nickname “Mico” only reminded me how much we operated like family. Besides Lucas, only a handful of folks—mostly my family—called me Mico. It was a nickname given to me by grandmother. I was christened Noah Michael Dunham. My grandfather was also named Noah, so Grandma called me Mico for short. It was her way of distinguishing me from her husband, but not many people were privy to that little fun fact besides me
“You stress too much, Lucas. Need I remind you that for the last six years Navy has won?”
“Yeah, well all things change Mico.”
“Don’t jinx this game, dude,” I said casually, both of us half bored with the game. We were losing. Lucas and I were winners. Neither of us handled losing well. Not in sports. Not in life.
My eyes tracked the cute blond server headed our way with a tray filled with chilled vodka martinis. The officer’s box does have its perks. Vodka and beauty combined together. Just in time. A welcome addition to this room full of crotchety old naval brass.
Being able to rest my eyes on pretty was a sweet change of pace from these old-timers sucking up the oxygen in the room, regurgitating stories about missions of long ago.
My eyes raked over the pretty blonde again. She was wearing a crisp white shirt unbuttoned down to the crevice of her boobs. Her black pencil skirt hugged her ass so tight I had an urge to show her what real lead feels like. It took everything I had not to whip out my old playa card and back that ass up into the nearest storage closet.
Lucas grabbed two more vodka martinis off blond Barbie’s round tray. He handed one of them to me, giving her a wink all in the same pass. He raised his eyebrows at me, reading my dirty mind. I stretched my spine, my six-foot-two frame towering over Blondie.
She blinked her eyelashes, her red lips pressing together, smiling politely at Lucas. She turned her head my direction, her eyes sweeping down to my crotch, then back up again, giving me a second once over. A warm smile spread across her face. A look that got my adrenaline pumping.
“Thank you. My friend here needs this drink to get through this game,” Lucas grinned.
“That’s what I’m here for, Commander. You know, to help you enjoy the game.”
Lucas flashed his million-dollar smile at her. That sounded like a double entendre to me.
“Really now?” I spoke, her forwardness catching me off guard. "How sweet is this?"She blushed, her face turning a bright red. She looked as if she hardly knew whether to engage with Lucas first or me. Her mouth parted, but no words came out. She turned her head towards me. I slid my left hand bearing my ring finger into my pocket.
“He’s married,” Lucas grinned, noticing my sloppy attempt at hiding my marital status.
He slapped me on my back, a display of brotherly camaraderie.
No doubt, as soon as my divorce is final, I was going to reactivate my playa card for however long it took for me to forget Casey’s name. Lucas wouldn't get this chance to cock block me in the future. Though I was happy to know I hadn't lost all my skill at catching a pretty woman, I still considered myself a man of honor who wouldn't touch one until his divorce was final. I would sure as hell work the eyeballs, though. I wasn’t dead yet.
The waitress turned her attention back to Lucas, waiting for a signal. He ran his fingers through his blond hair, his eyes wandering across her body. I knew that move. That was Lucas’s tell. He was contemplating his next move. I could practically hear the wheels in his brain turning.
“So is he,” I added with a straight face. “Married.” I decided I’d blow his game up too. Turnaround cock blocking was fair play wasn’t it?
Blondie huffed, darting away from the both of us at lightening speed.
“What kind of fucking wingman are you exactly?” Lucas groaned. “Dude, you know I’m not married. I don’t even have a girlfriend. What the fuck, Mico?”
“Misery loves company, brother. One for all and all for one, wingman."
"I should have flashed my tattoo at her. Then made you show her yours," I teased back at him while taking a huge swig of my vodka.
"God, no. Then she might have wanted to take us both on at one time," Lucas said. "Brothers in arms. Get it?"
"You actually said th
at with a straight face, motherfucker," I chuckled.
My mind drifted back to the time Lucas and I were on leave together. We had gone on a bender. The bender lasted several days, and ended in matching tattoos, which were a nod to a ritual we had created for ourselves. Whenever we flew on squadron drills or crucial missions, our ritual was to bump fists. I would shout “Rock-out, Wingman!" and Lucas would answer back "Rock-in, Wingman.” It was our way of wishing the other safe travels. Our good luck mantra. At the end of this particular bender, Lucas and I had our mantra branded on our upper arms as a permanent reminder of our brotherhood.
“Thank God your wife didn’t extinguish all the dog in you. I was beginning to believe she’d cut your balls off, too.”
“I’m not a dog, Lucas.”
“No?”
“No. I paused for effect. Then I answered, "I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
We both laughed so loud, we turned a few curious heads in the room.
"You know, Mico, I never wanted her for your wife. You were only supposed to hit it and quit it.”
“Well I hit it. Now we're quitting it.”
“Thank God.”
“I know, right?”
“Don’t mind me for giving you a hard time, Mico. I only want you to be happy. No one knows better than me that you’re not one to walk away from challenges.”
A moment of silence passed between us. Lucas took another big swig of the chilled vodka, this time sliding an olive-filled toothpick between his lips. He wiped the corner of his lip with the edge of the blue and gold cocktail napkin, his sharp blue eyes meeting mine. A grin suddenly stretched wildly across his face, his hand sweeping his blond hair across his brow.
“God bless the quitters, man.”
I grinned back at him. "Man, you are so full of shit." I raised my hand to high five him. We clinked our glasses.
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