“Goodnight Davey.” said Matt, and I chuckled at the childish nickname. If anyone else had said it, I would have found it annoying, but coming from him it was just cute, especially since he was so shy.
“Night Matt, sleep tight.” I responded as I turned out the light, and rolled over to go to sleep. I kept thinking about Matt, and how he looked when we first met. Remembering the little tattoo on his abdomen, I realized I was aroused, but did everything I could to ignore my growing erection. After all, I wasn’t gay, and I didn’t find things like that attractive. It was probably the energy drink.
The next morning, I woke up at five thirty and got in the shower. After drying off, I dressed in sweatpants and a tee shirt in order to jog to the athletic field for soccer practice. The air was cold and the barely risen sun gave the sky a pale white hue as I stretched on the front steps of Fiske Hall before embarking on the trail through the woods that led to the field. When I reached the field, I found a few of my team mates from last year doing warm-ups and being supervised by a stockily built man in his fifties with a grey buzz cut and a windbreaker. This was Coach Conrad, the head soccer coach and Athletic director. When he saw me he blew his whistle and greeted me.
“Good morning, Gill, we’re just getting warmed up. Five laps around the field then back here for indian sprints.” He blew his whistle again as I nodded and jogged away and started my laps. I completed my laps and went to go wait by the coach until the others finished theirs. Soccer is the big sport at the Merry, and because of that, we were state champions for the past eight years. The last of the tardy members finished their laps and we started indian sprints.
At the end of practice, everybody was exhausted as they started to trudge back towards the school. We were lucky it was a Saturday and that we wouldn’t have class for two more days. I was one of the last ones to leave the field when Coach Conrad called my name.
“Gill, come here.” He said, while holding two large net bags full of soccer balls. “Carry one of these back to my office, I want to talk to you about something.” We walked in silence, simply enjoying the morning air as we walked. Arriving at his office, we put the bags down right outside the door and went inside. Coach Conrad sat down at his desk and motioned for me to sit across from him.
“Gill, I’m just going to cut to the chase; I’m afraid I have some bad news.” he said, looking uncomfortable.
“What would that be?” I asked worriedly. The coach was usually optimistic to a fault, so anything that he considered bad news must be terrible, and the fact that I was seeing him so uncomfortable only strengthened this suspicion. Coach Conrad responded.
“To be quite frank, I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut you from the soccer team.” I was floored, surely this had to be a joke.
“What? Why?” I was still in shock. Soccer was what gave me focus while I was at school. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself if it turned out he wasn’t kidding.
“We’ve been under pressure from the administration to admit a certain quota of freshmen onto the team, and in order to do that, we have to cut some of the upperclassmen. Unfortunately, your name got the short straw.” Shit. It looked like he wasn’t kidding. “Look David, I’m really sorry about this. I did everything I could to keep you on the team, but we used a lottery system, and you got drawn fair and square.”
“It’s okay.” I mumbled at Coach Conrad. I got up and left his office as fast as I could. I realized I was suddenly very angry at him and didn’t want to lash out. I went for a run on my way back to my dorm to clear my head. I needed to think.