Page 32 of Out of Bounds
Tossing the basket over my arm, I roll up the bottom of my pants and try to avoid being pecked as I move through the clucking chaos to the enormous hen house.
“I don’t have food,” I tell the pesky things.
Inside, there are some lonely eggs in nests but many hens looking like they’re protecting their little bundles of protein.
I take the easy wins, then attempt to shoo the chickens off their wares.
Not working, so I try sweet talking.
“Come now, birds, let’s be having those eggs from you.”
They don’t budge.
So I nudge one off her egg. She flaps and clucks and gets angry as hell in my face, like a woman who didn’t believe me when I told her this was a one-time thing. The clucking bird drives me away faster than the biggest defensive lineman I’ve played against.
I stagger backward into the waiting wrath of a heap more chickens. Then I slip on their shit, mixed with last night’s rain, and the basket of eggs Ihavecollected is unstable as I wobble.
I attempt to save the eggs, or myself, who the hell knows. Whatever, I slip backward and reach out to the fence to save myself but there’s no chicken wire in the world strong enough to hold up a professional tight end.
When I land on the fence, I pull the thing down, and I’m lying in the dirt with chickens escaping all around me.
Then comes the distinct sound of a deep belly chuckle.
Leaning my head back, I see an upside-down Annie laughing at my plight.
“Tanner Pace, you big stud,” she says breathlessly. “There’s nothing finer than a man who can handle a hen.”
“Annie Quinn, if you keep laughing at me, I’ll?—”
“What will you do? Set your hens on me? Coz it looks like they can’t get away from you fast enough, hunny.”
I push up to sit, hands in the filth, and see that she’s right. The hens have seen their freedom and made a run for it.
Annie and I spend half an hour shooing chickens and counting them back inside.
Sonny has the good grace not to laugh for too long when we get back to the house but Nelson scrunches his nose at the way I smell.
What is it with my visits here ending up with me covered in animal crap?
Annie offers me some of Colton’s clothes but I opt for a towel to drape over the seat of my car instead and eventually, we’re on our way, one of us absolutely stinking, to San Antonio University.
When we pull up outside the campus café, we draw the attention of onlookers – I guess it’s the car but I don’t like the way people are fixing on Annie. I know she doesn’t enjoy the attention that comes her way by virtue of Colton and now Auston.
I kill the engine, intending to escort her for horchata, when she leans back down through the passenger window and tells me, “Stay put, stud, my reputation can’t handle another pro baller, especially one that smells of poultry excrement.”
I’m shaking my head, irritated that I’m in the situation I’m in, yet smirking at her sass, when she taps the roof of my Lexus.
I watch her go inside, thinking I’ve been punished hard enough for ogling, so I might as well enjoy the way she moves in those stonewash jeans that are practically painted onto her ass, her long hair swishing against the hourglass of her back as she goes.
A bunch of the guys are in the players’ lounge when I get to the training facility, despite it being our day off. The lounge is state of the art, with a gym that’s stacked with the highest quality equipment, a barbers’ station – where Jad and Terry are currently both getting new looks – a shuffleboard, a pool table, table tennis, large screens for watching and even larger screens for gaming.
There’s food and drinks available twenty-four seven and for a lot of us, staying ahead means coming into the facility on our day off – mostly for physical therapy for me these days – because the game is our lives and when you don’t have someone to go home to or family living close by, you might as well be hanging out with your brothers here or on the golf course.
“Jesus, Pace, what happened to you? You look like you’ve bathed in a sty, and what the fuck is that smell?” Omar asks.
He and Lamar pause their computer game, noses scrunched from their positions lounging on the sofas in front of the big screens.
I reach into the refrigerator and take a can of club soda. Cracking the ring pull, I tell them, “The smell is chicken shit.”
