Grab your copy ofNo More Sidelines(Solomon Pro Athletes Book One)
Available December 22nd, 2022
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EXCERPT
Chapter 1
Marcus Kingston sidestepped the joyous clamor of victory spilling from his team’s locker room and strode down the hallway.
It had been a close game, one the Portland Rogues went into as unambiguous underdogs. None of the pundits had given them any chance. A season-ender, they had called it. The death knell for any playoff hopes still lingering in the minds of the fan base. And yet here they were, coming off the field with the win, the team’s collective roar drowning out all other sounds and bouncing off the walls of the building until it felt alive.
They would have to celebrate without their quarterback.
Marcus barely heard their chants; they sounded distant and muted, like they were coming from a radio turned all the way down. His rage had been simmering all game long, and now it bubbled up, taking over his senses.
While his teammates celebrated a win and shed mud-soaked uniforms into the locker room’s equipment hampers, Marcus stayed in full dress: helmet, pads, compression shirt—none of it his original gear.
He charged past equipment rooms, media rooms, and workout rooms, down a long, carpeted hallway, until he reached a glass-walled conference room at the epicenter of the staff facilities. Behind the partition’s gold-frosted Rogue mascot, his audience had already assembled for their congratulatory executive ass-slaps: coaches, team owner and his trophy wife, general manager, shareholders, board members—all gathered to pretend they had more skin in the game than money.
Marcus shoved his way inside.
Clusters of conversations gradually died as the room’s occupants shifted their attention to him.
Aware that he carried the stench of sixty minutes of rainy gameplay and more than his share of the stadium’s natural turf embedded in his facemask and cleats, he spit out his mouth guard and dumped his equipment onto the polished oak table, one item at a time.
Helmet.
“Last three minutes of the game—constant buzzing in my ear.”
Shoulder pads, not bothering to extract them from his jersey.
“First quarter—blinding orange warning light in my helmet to let me know I’m sweating in my torso region.”
Marcus waited for the ridiculousness of that nugget to settle in, but the Botox-paralyzed faces simply looked upon him as if he had committed the egregious act of pairing a cabernet with fish.
“Of course I was sweating. It’sfuckingfootball.”
At the curse bomb, the owner awakened from his privileged coma.
“Marcus, we all want to congratulate you, but this is hardly the…”
Marcus’s cleats hit the table, effectively cutting offthatresponse. The stench was strong enough to curl Coach Banaszewski’s wife’s ten thousand–dollar hair extensions. A few of the ladies present pressed delicate fingers beneath their nostrils.
“At halftime, I’m handed a printout from someone on the equipment staff that says I’m placing sixty-three percent more pressure on my arch supports than normal, which results in a two-percent slowdown of my overall running speed, and ‘could I please try to run normally.’”
Marcus reached for the lace ups on his pants.
A swell of protests sounded.
His gaze leveled on the one person in the room most responsible for stripping the game of its sanctity: Claire Something. Caltech hotshot. Secret weapon for professional athletes and the front office. Newest team darling, if the slew of nicknames she had already accrued were anything to go by: Clairevoyant, Coldplay, E-clair, Claire-de-lune…
Marcus wanted nothing more than to drop his pants, if only to see the inscrutable mask slip from her face. But his hands stalled at the laces, losing his train of thought for a moment. It was her attire, he decided, that had thrown him off. If he didn’t already know she was a scientist, he would have had trouble guessing it. She was dressed in a fluffy, unabashedly feminine blouse dotted with what appeared to be tiny little birds. It was tucked into a high-waisted pleated skirt that seemed to run all the way to the floor. Yet it was her face that drew the eye—heavy eyeliner around oval eyes, winged at the edges, and when she blinked, eyelids laden with dark eyeshadow. It was a statement, all right. She was cosplaying in a room full of Republicans, and it was distracting as hell.
“And in the third quarter—mid-play, mind you—the pads at my thighs detect a leg cramp and swell like a goddamned life vest on a plane crashing into the ocean—which is the perfect metaphor for how that play ended, by the way.”