Page 150 of Studs Up
It was time to find the blackmailer and end it. Maybe Nolan was right. I needed to take control. The secret was out now, and the only thing that we had control over was revealing Nolan. How we’d tell the team was about us would have to be well thought out and timed.
I blinked, lost in my thoughts, and forgot we were celebrating something else.
“Monroe!” Coach Santos pointed to me, and I felt every pair of eyes on me, and instead of diminishing, I shined. My world wasn’t perfect, but I would right it when this night was over. “A fucking beast out there! I don’t know how you took on Reed like that.” Cheers, claps on my back, and knowing Nolan was waiting made it all worth the pain. I didn’t deserve him, and I knew that. But I was going to take what I could get.
“Thank god for Marcel,” someone shouted. Poor Marcel. His loss was our win.
Coach moved on.
“Prince, you are worth your weight in gold!”
“I weigh one eighty-two, calculate my new contract accordingly,” he laughed.
Charlemagne stood next to the stereo, carefully turning up the music a notch each time Coach spoke. He kept waving a hand at Charlemagne to wait, but he didn’t. Wilkins was already twisting the wire off a giant bottle of champagne, and Rafa was passing around more beer. No one was going to wait for Coach to finish.
“Tonight, we celebrate our win, but tomorrow we get ready to beat New York and take home that fucking cup!”
I took a regular bottle of soon to be wasted sparkling wine and started twisting the wire. I have never wanted to celebrate something so much in my whole life. Equally, I wanted to find Nolan. Charlemagne turned the music up a little more and started to dance.
“Fine!” Coach bellowed and relented just as Rafa popped the cork on the giant bottle and Charlemagne turned the music all the way up.
I couldn’t dance like Rafa and Charlemagne, so I steered clear of that, but the rest was like lifting a thousand elephants' weight off my chest. I could breathe. As soon as I could get out of here, I was running to Nolan.
Reporters and our PR team recorded and tried to do interviews while everyone danced and drank champagne from the trophy.
They tried to ask me a few questions, but my brain was so clouded with the win and my lover it was hard for me to answer anything, and they moved on.
There was singing and dancing. I watched and mentally calculated how long I had to stay before I could slip away and find him. I pulled my phone out of my cubby and turned it on.
When I unblocked Nolan, the most recent text popped up.
Email.I smiled.
But before I could check my email, the door burst open, and Marcel pushed through all of the bodies. He was bright red and furious, eyes wild and fists clenching.
It took a second after the music was cut for all the alcohol to come crashing to the ground.
He scanned the crowd, looking for something. For a second, the shock and surprise of him showing up at our celebration had frozen everything.
And then his eyes landed on me.
“I told you,” he seethed. His nostrils flared like an angry bull. He charged and grabbed fistfuls of my jersey, and shook me. I was so stunned I didn’t move. No one did. “That I would tell the whole fucking world what you were doing. But that wasn’t enough, was it? You thought you could hide it? You thought-”
He didn’t get to finish that sentence because just as quickly as he grabbed me, he was gone, flying through the locker room, and Nolan slammed him into the wall.
“If you ever touch him again, I will rip your fucking head off.”
Silence. There wasn’t a drip of beer or the rustle of plastic. Complete and total silence.
I was frozen because what just happened could not have actually, possibly happened.
“What the fuck is going on?” Alex spoke first. The door opened again, and the entire Guardian locker room pushed their way in.
An eruption of shouts and accusations intermixed with an explosion of movement. Suddenly, everything was happening simultaneously, and I was the only one not in motion. They all moved around me as though I wasn’t there.
What was happening? Why did Marcel burst into the locker room to yell at me about my breakup? The cogs in my brain weren’t quite clicking the way they should.
It was all interrupted by four little words that silenced the entire room again.
