Table of Contents
The Penalty For Holding
Book Details
Dedication
Part I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part II
Seventeen
Eighteen
Part III
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Part IV
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
About the Author
The
Penalty
For
Holding
GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
When the quarterback of the hapless New York Templars is injured, backup QB Quinn Novak takes the team to the playoffs. There he attracts the attention of two other quarterbacks who’ve been rivals since high school—Mal Ryan of the Philadelphia Quakers and Tam Tarquin of the San Francisco Miners. Quinn begins a volatile relationship with the narcissistic Mal and a loving one with the open-hearted Tam, keeping each secret from the other.
What he doesn’t know is that the two have a complex sexual history of their own. Quinn will have to overcome a thorny present as well as a troubled past if he hopes to have a promising future.
The Penalty for Holding
The Games Men Play Series
By Georgette Gouveia
Published by Less Than Three Press LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.
Edited by Michelle Kelley
Cover designed by Natasha Snow
Amazing
Words and Music by Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel
Copyright (c) 2007 Perfect Songs Ltd.
All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Extract taken from Four Quartets (c) Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber
This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.
First Edition May 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Georgette Gouveia
Printed in the United States of America
Digital ISBN 9781684310166
Print ISBN 9781684310173
For my sisters
A solitary craft, writing is also always some form of collaboration.
“The Penalty for Holding” was born of my sisters’ love of adventure and was nurtured through workshops at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and the New York Pitch Conference, which I attended with my friend and fellow novelist Barbara Nachman, who offered support, advice, and inspiration.
My thanks to Westfair Communications Inc., led by publisher Dee DelBello. There Dan Viteri, associate creative director, provided promotional designs, while administrative manager Robin Costello offered technical expertise and calming wisdom.
Last but certainly not least, my thanks to the goddess who has been my right-hand woman in administering my blog and promoting my book series. I cannot thank her enough for taking this literary journey with me.
Part I
One
His name was Quinton Day Novak, and as he stood in the dizzying heat that enveloped the New York Templars' summer training camp high above the Hudson—thick, glossy black curls clinging to his neck beneath his helmet—he wasn't sure where he was going or even where he had been.
He knew where he was immediately headed—or at least where the balls he was drilling were immediately headed—downfield into the sinewy arms of wide receiver Greg Moll. But whether the ability to send missiles arcing into the air would ultimately translate into the starting quarterback's job was anybody's guess. The signs from head coach Pat Smalley weren't good.
"Well, boy," he had said, "let's see what you can do."
He knew Smalley shouldn't call him, or any man for that matter, "boy." That was pure gesture politics, and the gesture said, You're not my guy and you never will be.
But Quinn—who had already known many Smalleys in his young life—chose instead to focus on the task at hand, sending the football spiraling twenty, forty, eighty yards into various teammates' fanning hands. When Smalley tried to pull a fast one, Quinn was ready. As defenseman Carl Knowlton came up on his right while he prepared to throw, Quinn anticipated the move and, having feigned right, broke left. He charged down the field with the ball, dodging teammates first left, then right as he ran into the end zone, reveling once more not only in a touchdown but in the sheer joy of running, nothing but the wind at his back as he broke free, heading for the goal line, heading for home. He took a knee then and quickly crossed himself, touching his fingers to his lips.
As he rose, he saw Smalley chatting and laughing with starting quarterback Lance Reinhart at midfield.
"Well, that was real impressive, Quinnie," Lance said with a smirk. "I can see why you won the Heisman as a Stanford sophomore and why Mark was so high on you."
"Was" being the operative word. As the Temps' general manager, Mark Seidelberg had signed him. Mark had believed that he could challenge for the starting QB job. And Mark was gone—another whim of owner Jimmy Jones Jefferson. So far, Quinn had encountered him just once, after an initial phone conversation that went something like, "Triple J here, Quinn. Heard great things about you and expect great things from you," blah, blah, blah. It occurred to him then that Triple J—a distant relative of the third U.S. president—was more mercurial Caesar than steadfast Founding Father.
"Thanks, sir. I intend to do everything I can to help the Temps become Super Bowl champs," was all Quinn had to say. He knew he could be cut from the roster tomorrow. Best to stick to the program—and not get your hopes up.
As he entered the locker room after practice, Quinn thought he was right to be wary. His teammates, long tethered to the starting QB, certainly were, keeping to themselves and their cliques. And that QB himself, the aforementioned Lancelot Reinhart, was in turn tied to a glamorous New York lifestyle. They weren't about to upset that carefully piled Big Apple cart for a newbie—Stanford, Heisman and Rose Bowl champion be damned.
Last year's Super Bowl was playing on a big screen. The Philadelphia Quakers were once again pitted against the San Francisco Miners and just as inevitably were their respective quarterbacks. Rumor was they hated each other as much as their teams did. It was understandable. As far as Quinn could see, the quarterbacks had nothing in common except that each was, in his own way, brilliant—and beautiful.
Quinn felt a stirring in his groin, blushed and, looking around quickly to make sure none of his preoccupied teammates noticed, forced himself to concentrate on the one thing that was certain to dampen any ardor—Smalley's banal words.
"Listen up, people. See this here video."
"We're streaming it, Coach," Greg Moll said.
"Hey, maggot, whatever," Smalley went on. "This here video is one we're going to study the rest of the year. And you know why? 'Cause at the
end of the coming season, it's gonna be us in the video, us everyone's talking about and studying. Now hit the showers."
"Question is," Greg whispered to tight end Derrick Muldavey, "are we the Quakers or the Miners, the winners or the losers?"
Derrick laughed. Quinn couldn't help but laugh, too. What would they do without what passed for wit in the Temps' locker room?
"Novak, a word in my office," Smalley said. "Close the door and take a seat."
Quinn clenched and unclenched his left hand. He wondered why coaches' offices always resembled cinder-block bunkers and why people who seemed so perfectly average—round features, crimson coloring, incipient beer gut—could be so spectacularly mean.
"It says here that you had a 4.0 average at Stanford, majoring in classics. You lettered in baseball and football and speak several languages, including—"
Here Smalley stumbled.
"Bahasa," Quinn said.
"What is that?"
"It's the official language of Indonesia. I grew up there."
"Your family is with one of them big corporations, right?"
"Something like that."
"Well, well. Looks like I got myself a regular Renaissance man here."
Don't, Quinn thought, the color rising in his burnished cheeks. Don't.
"I prefer to think of myself as a man of many interests," he said. Here he paused before adding, "Coach."
He was trying, really he was. But Christ, you didn't have to be a classics major—indeed you didn't have to know Homer from Homer Simpson—to see what was going on. But if you were and you did, Smalley was Agamemnon, the boss from Hell, and he himself was Achilles, not the type to knuckle under to a bad boss. What for? It was the same old, same old—starting out as eager to please as a newborn pup, only to be dropped from a tenth-story window, your brains dashed against the pavement by someone's capricious detachment or out-and-out hostility. It was Jakarta 2.0 and he couldn't go back there—wouldn't go back there—not when he had put that Pandora's box so carefully on a shelf.
"You think you're smart, don't you?" Smalley was saying. "Well, then, understand this, boy”–-and here his broad, gap-tooth grin turned icy—“you ain't ever going to be starting quarterback of the New York Templars."
Quinn met that grin with one of his own. "Guess we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"
He kept that smile tightly in place as he emerged from Smalley's office, but it was no use. His stomach plunged as his heart rose. His mind raced, a jumble of emotions led by those well-traveled twins, rage and fear.
I am who I say I am, he thought. But he knew that wasn't true, not entirely; knew the Smalleys of the world still had the power to hurt him, because he let them—which made whatever indignity he suffered that much worse.
Alone in the shower room, he turned on the faucet and, leaning against the cool tile, pounded it with his left fist. As he let out an animal cry, the water caressed the creamy dunes of his muscular back like a warm Jakarta rain.
Two
Jakarta, twelve years earlier
Running: It had been his earliest memory. Running from someone. Running toward something yet unknown. Running past the smiling Nemin, with the curved, blue laundry basket always at one graceful hip and her youngest trailing close by the other; past Sumarti, polishing, always polishing the black SUV with the company plates; past Gde, who clipped the hardy, nubby grasses and had the equally unenviable task each morning of gathering the fragrant frangipani blossoms that carpeted the lawn overnight as if by magic, their pink-tinged petals seemingly touched by a fairy's kiss.
Like all budding athletes, he had his rituals to observe before bounding out the door to the city beyond and freedom. The New York Yankees cap—symbol of a team and a city he had never seen but that loomed large in his dreams—tilted slightly to the left, just so. The yellow-green shirt—a salute to one of Jakarta's greatest baseball teams—worn loose over the long, skinny navy denim shorts, matched by the yellow-green socks and navy sneakers, also just so. But most important of all, the moment of tribute to the blue, white and yellow painting of his mother and her two equally fair-haired sisters, his aunts, who lived in America and whom distance had made all the more intriguing.
His family called it The Three Graces though the figures were less antique than Victorian, grouped as they were after those in John Singer Sargent's The Wyndham Sisters. Quinnie knew nothing of Sargent and the Sisters, and his knowledge of the ancient Greeks did not extend beyond his mythology class. But something compelled him to touch the thickly applied, swirling paints just above the red signature of the artist, John Kalen, in the lower right-hand corner—furtively, of course, lest his mother's wrath pour down on him.
Then and only then could he singsong "Good day, Gde," making a rhyming game of his name as he scooped up a frangipani blossom and, inhaling its sweet scent, skip past the heavy metal gate, past the guards and the baying Dobermans, laughing, always laughing.
"Good day, young master," Gde would say. "You be in big trouble."
And in truth, he would be, but Quinnie didn't care. He had escaped a Yankee Doodle oasis of tennis courts, swimming pools, barking dogs, barbed-wire fences and barbecues to another world, the real one where marble mansions, sleek hotels and onion-domed mosques collided with the tin shanties that lined brackish canals. There were no sidewalks save for the raised lanes along which lumbered battered buses, fat and red, so he dodged the ubiquitous Blue Bird taxis and the mopeds and motorcycles on which modern young women in too-short skirts clung to the waists of their boyfriends. Years later, whenever reporters asked how he became a running quarterback, he would flash on his twelve-year-old self darting through traffic as if it were an obstacle course and grin at the memory.
At the Youth Monument—which to Quinnie resembled Prometheus in his mythology textbook, holding a flaming disc aloft—he would pause reverently, admiring what he imagined to be the Titan who defied the gods to bring fire to Earth and thus free mankind. He felt a ripple of pleasure as he thought of him and his powerful physique. But on the brink of young manhood, he understood that such thoughts and feelings were best kept to himself—especially as his mother, Sydney, and a reluctant Nemin, would sometimes affront his newfound manly dignity by checking him for ticks and ensuring that he was scrubbing himself in the big, claw-foot tub, while he, ashamed, would keep his knees pressed tightly up against his chest.
"Filthy, always filthy," his mother would say as she'd grab the loofah to scour his still-tender flesh, "after these excursions to God knows where. I swear you'll be the death of me."
He'd be in for quite the scrub-a-dub-dub today, he thought, as he wandered through the courtyard of the National Museum, with its elephant gods and curvaceous goddesses. He felt enormous pride in its Doric columns as well as sympathy as the museum struggled to remodel and become something greater than itself.
In a sense, he was like the museum—not yet what he would be, still becoming—and that was exciting enough.
Today, he decided to forgo communing with the warrior gods and serene goddesses for a different kind of temple—one to sport rather than art. He pressed his nose against the chain-link fence surrounding a baseball diamond as he watched teenage boys in yellow, green and white uniforms, the ball arcing in the air from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove or back from the hitter's bat, setting the fielders in motion. The muffled, hollow sound of the ball hitting the catcher's glove alternated with the crisp crack of bat on ball. Quinnie was slender enough to slip through a break in the fence and take a seat behind home plate. As he watched the players veer continually between stillness and motion, he remembered the book that his oldest aunt—Selena, called Lena—had sent him, describing baseball as "America's pastime." That made him chuckle. Football, he knew from scouring the Internet, was really America's game, whereas baseball, as if to compensate for being eclipsed in its own country, belonged to the world and to youths like these who gathered in the early morning mist to play for a few hours b
efore succumbing to the heat of the day.
He longed to join them now and risked much to watch them with no other thought than someday they would let him pitch. It was one of the things he really loved to do—throw a ball straight, curving, or spiraling. It was his gift—that and running.
The players must've sensed as much, for he heard them talk about letting him play in the bottom of the inning. It was highly irregular. But Quinnie didn't care, leaping from the bench.
"What position?" asked the pitcher, who also seemed to be the team manager.
"Yours but I also play a little infield," Quinnie responded in perfect Bahasa. He could see the others were unsure of what to make of him, he who had their coloring and some of their features but whose emerald eyes and height—at twelve, he was already as tall as they were—suggested he was a foreigner. His command of their language did nothing to ease their uncertainty even as it garnered their admiration.
The pitcher motioned him to the mound. Though the batter was a few years older and heavier than he, Quinnie refused to be intimidated. "Have courage," Aunt Lena would write in closing her regular emails to him, "and life will meet you halfway." He visualized the prism of the strike zone, extending from the slightly crouching hitter's chest to his knees, kicked his right leg high in the air and, reaching back, propelled the ball forward with his left arm, sending it over the heart of the plate as his right leg drove to the ground in a lunge.
Strike one.
Clearly, this was not what the team had expected. They had expected to humor a mascot, a pet, who would follow them like one of the mangy dogs that roamed the city. The players' coolly indulgent demeanor told Quinnie that they doubted he could do it again.
So again, he squinted toward the plate, imagining the strike zone and the sweet spot he would try to hit, but this time he took a little something off his fastball and it broke sharply.
Strike two.
Now the players leaned in, putting their collective weight behind the hitter, who stepped out of the batter's box, took a few swings and stepped back in, glaring at Quinnie as he cocked his bat. Quinnie's heart was beating so fast and so loud that he heard nothing else.
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