Page 4 of The Way We Touch
“We never had an arrangement, and your new dick is waiting for you.”
The noise of cameras clicks all around us, and I have to get out of this spotlight.
The host meets me, and I follow him to the door, hurrying out to a waiting black Escalade. As soon as I’m inside, my phone is in my hand, and my thumbs fly over the screen.
Where are you? I’m hungry and I want to drink.
Garrett
Lightning! Get your ass to Blondie’s and get some wings. We’ve got a pool game going.
Garrett and I have been tight since he transferred to the team two years ago. He’s a giant of a man, six-foot-four and two hundred and sixty pounds of pure strength, and he’s the one person I can be completely myself around.
His family owns a pool bar and restaurant in his coastal hometown in Alabama, and that small-town, southern background is probably why we bonded right away.
He’s also the best offensive lineman on the team. Without Garrett, I wouldn’t be as close to the MVP trophy as I am.
Stop hustling the college kids.
Garrett
Don’t blow my cover, narc.
Exhaling a chuckle, I wrap it up with
On my way.
I tell the driver where to go, thinking how only Garrett could make me laugh after this evening.
It only took a few weeks of therapy to trace it all back to my dad, Kellan Murphy, billionaire CEO of MurKo Communications.
I don’t come from a family of jocks, but I knew the first time I caught a football, the first time I led a team to victory, this was the life for me.
I’d found a group of guys who cared about me, who noticed when I wasn’t okay and checked up on me. I had a real family.
My mother died before I was old enough to remember her, so growing up, it was just me and Kellan—and a string of housekeepers to cover the basics, a driver to take me to school until I was old enough to drive myself.
The only time I spent with my dad was at the formal dinners we shared every night in his sterile mansion in north Houston sitting at opposite ends of a long, polished oak table.
I would push the medium-rare steak around my plate wishing I could escape, and he’d try to think of questions to ask me.
How was your day?
Fine.
Did anything interesting happen?
No.
Silence.
Eventually, he’d give up, take his scotch, and leave, and I’d dash from the table, running down to the park where guys were always playing football. They didn’t care who I was or how much money I had. It was all about the game.
I’d strip off my jacket and get in the middle, calling plays and throwing passes. I wanted to be a quarterback, but when Kellan got involved, he changed my direction.
When I first told my dad I wanted to play football professionally, he’d frowned like I told him I wanted to be a professional wrestler.
Then I started making headlines when I was in college, and he started doing the math. He realized he could use my football career to benefit his broadcasting business—provided I continued to be the best.