“Big win, boys!Dinner’s on me tonight!” Dane yelled over the sound of hissing water.
“Hell yeah!”his teammates cheered.
“Where should we go?”
“I want steak!”
“Steak it is,” Dane said as he ran a bar of soap over his body. “How about Nick & Sam’s?”
“Oh hell yeah!”
***
Dane loved to soak in a hot shower after a win. One by one, his teammates headed back to the locker room to dry off and get dressed, until Dane was the last one still showering.
Oddly, the nonstop laughing and horsing around in the locker room slowly died down until it reached an eerie silence.
What’s going on out there?he wondered.
He shut off his water, toweled off, and headed back to the locker room. There, he saw his teammates huddled around a video they watched on someone’s phone.
“What are you guys watching?” Dane asked.
His teammates looked up at him, their faces pale and expressionless.
Reavo spoke first. “You’re probably going to want to see this, D.”
Dane craned his neck to see the phone. The video was paused, but he could see it was his interview onDate with a Devil.
“What happened?” Dane asked.
“I’m sorry, Big D,” Mikey said. “I swear, if I thought she was gonna do that to you, I wouldn’t have encouraged you to do it.”
“Yeah, D, I’m sorry, too,” Brayden interjected.
“I can’t believe she did that,” Parisi snarled in his French-Canadian accent, his voice going comically high. “She did you dirty, D.”
“Alright, everyone shut up already,” Dane snapped. “Let me watch the damn video first.”
He snatched the phone and took it to his stall to watch. He started the video from the beginning. The intro played, and then Austen’s voice came on to narrate.
“Tonight, onDate with a Devil, I went out on a date with the Dallas Devils captain, Dane DeHardt! Could he possibly be as rude and awful as he seems?”
The video showed Dane climbing into the back of the car.
Austen’s voice narrated, “Unfortunately, as I learned, therealDane DeHardt is even worse than you’d think.”
“What’s up, ya scumbags?”Dane said on video.
Dane’s eyes narrowed. The editing made it look like he’d greeted Austen by calling her a scumbag. In the back of the car, Austen explained to Dane that they were going bowling.
“Last time I went bowling was back in my Junior days,”Dane said on video, seemingly unprompted.“Long story short, we all had a few too many, and my girlfriend ended up breaking up with me in front of everybody at the bowling alley.”
Dane then appeared to say—thanks to convenient editing—that his ideal first date was to take a girl swimming, to see her in a bikini and without her makeup on.
The interview then cut to the bowling alley, where Dane bragged on video about being good at everything. That was right before he bowled a gutter ball. Dane then promised Austen that he only needed to calibrate—but the ensuing montage showed him rolling one gutter ball after another.
Austen narrated again,“Danesaidhe was good at everything. But as it turns out, he’s about as good at bowling as he is at leading the Dallas Devils. After watching him roll all those gutter balls, I started to understand why his girlfriend broke up with him at the bowling alley.”
