Recovering The Quarterbacks Fumble

This story is a work of fiction. As always, any resemblance of a character in the story to a person living or dead is purely coincidental.

Any person described as engaging in sexual activities in the story is over the age of 18.

I welcome constructive comments and criticisms. Enjoy.

RECOVERING THE QUARTERBACK'S FUMBLE

I was standing in the kitchen, cleaning up breakfast dishes when I heard my cell phone ding, reporting that I had an incoming email. I'd just returned home from dropping my three year old son, David, off at his preschool, having earlier shepherded my seven year old son, CJ (Caleb Junior), and his five year old sister, Amanda, onto the bus for the school day. The email was from Bobby MacDougal, my husband Caleb's best friend and the starting left offensive guard on the Portland Sea Lions, the NFL team for which my husband had been the starting quarterback for nearly ten years.

Bobby was not the most technologically sophisticated player on the team by any stretch of anyone's imagination. He regularly failed to distinguish between my email address and Caleb's, so I was quite familiar with the need to forward his messages to Caleb. This one was entitled "Another One for Your Memories Album." Since Caleb, Bobby and two of their friends were off on their annual ten day post season golf outing in Arizona, I assumed this would be either a collection of errant golf shot videos (Caleb was an enthusiastic but terrible golfer) or something else equally embarrassing. In my wildest dreams, I never expected to see what I found when I opened the attached video.

As Caleb rarely golfed with me, I decided to see how his game was faring and opened the video attachment. What I saw shattered my fairy tale life and my fairy tale marriage to pieces like a Waterford crystal goblet hitting a ceramic tile floor.

The video was of Caleb, Bobby and two of their teammates, along with two young women. All were naked and engaging in sexual acts in combinations I thought occurred only in porn films. I watched a few moments, horrified, then turned and threw up in the sink. Then I collapsed to the floor and began crying hysterically. My husband, the man I'd been girlfriend and then wife to since we were in ninth grade, was cheating on me. And he was doing it with multiple partners, none of whom were using any kind of protection.

When I finally composed myself, I realized that I was not just heartbroken, I was mad as hell. I walked into the room Caleb used as an office and turned on his computer. As I well knew, his latest password was on a sticky in his desk drawer. I opened his files and began searching for the "Memories Album." What I found caused me to run to the nearest bathroom, where I vomited repeatedly into the toilet.

The "Memories Album" had over two dozen videos, all similar to the one Bobby had emailed. I looked at the dates they were saved and discovered that the earliest went back to when I was pregnant with Amanda. Caleb had been doing this for years and I'd never had even the slightest suspicion.

Realizing that my marriage was over, I forwarded a copy of the entire album to my email, checking to confirm that it had come through, then erased the email forwarding it to myself on Caleb's machine. Then I placed a call to my lawyer, telling him I wanted him to prepare a divorce petition and get it served on Caleb as soon as he got home. I sent him a copy of the album after warning him that it was definitely not safe for work. And I told him that I expected him to be ruthless in enforcing the prenuptial agreement Caleb and I had signed when we got married. Then I headed off to a clinic for an STD test series to ensure Caleb hadn't brought anything home from his sessions and shared it with me. (The results came back clean, thankfully.)

That accomplished, I began packing. The kids and I were going home to Illinois, where my parents still lived. Once I had packed for myself and the kids, I called a moving company and arranged to have them come out before Caleb returned from his golf outing. I offered a substantial premium to their usual fee so that everything I wanted was out of the house and in storage before my cheating husband and his friends returned to Portland. Then I called my parents and told them I was bringing the kids for a visit. I'd be driving. They should expect me in about a week, which gave me time to have the movers pack what I wanted packed and stored and to drive from Portland to Chicago.

The movers arrived two days later and were done within about six hours. I wanted the kids' things, but little of my own besides the kitchen utensils and my clothing. The interior decorator's selections for furniture and art had never been to my taste, so that was left for Caleb. He'd have places to sit and sleep, even if he'd have to order take-out until he restocked the kitchen with cooking utensils and figured out how to cook.

I first met Caleb Jackson in our ninth grade homeroom. The teacher arranged the homeroom seating by alphabetical order, so Carol James sat directly behind Caleb Jackson. Caleb's father was one of those sports fathers who lives vicariously through his son. A Division III player in his youth, Caleb's dad wanted his son to rise to another level altogether. Caleb's parents had moved into the district over the summer specifically for the purpose of having Caleb play for our high school's football program. The coach had an excellent reputation for providing a pipeline to Division I schools for his players and Caleb was already on his radar screen as a potential quarterback, based upon his junior high school and youth travel program performance. Caleb was as close to being a stud as a fifteen year old can be. I, on the other hand, was a runner and had the typical runner's body - no boobs, slim hips, long legs and virtually no excess weight.

I was as much a nerd as Caleb was an athlete and I found myself assigned to help him in virtually every class we had together. Football was a priority at our high school and keeping the best players academically eligible was the primary focus of the coaching staff and much of the faculty.

Despite our academic and athletic differences, Caleb and I hit it off and we first became friends, then, by the Christmas break that year, girlfriend and boyfriend. By halfway through his sophomore season, Caleb was the starting quarterback, having beaten out both a senior and a junior. His academics might be shaky, but his football IQ was Mensa level.

Once Caleb became the man on the football team, I expected him to drop me to pursue the more socially elite and physically attractive girls at the school. But Caleb seemed to be quite satisfied to be my boyfriend. He was humble, a bit bashful, and always ready to credit his teammates for the team's success. And he seemed to genuinely be in love with me, or at least as much in love as a sixteen or seventeen year old can be.

We dated all through high school, although most of our dates from the beginning to the end of football season focused on breaking down film of the next team on the schedule. I actually became quite good at analyzing defenses and discovering their weaknesses, even to the point of occasionally noticing something Caleb missed.

We gave each other our virginities after our senior prom and both of us enrolled at State U the following fall. Caleb was going on a full football scholarship. I was going on an academic one. But we both went off to the U together.

State U was one of those schools that appears as the first or second game of the schedule for the football programs that hope to compete for a national championship. Their role was to show up, take their beating, collect their share of the gate from the game and go away for another year.

Unfortunately for Caleb, he'd stopped growing at five feet eleven inches and weighed only about one hundred eighty pounds. His skills let him play as if he were taller and heavier, but size would keep him from the top tier D-1 programs. He was still a football genius, but even with those skills, the best schools couldn't look past his lack of physical size. Despite this apparent deficiency, State U had recruited him heavily and seemed overjoyed to land him. Since they had a good senior quarterback and a good junior quarterback, Caleb redshirted his freshman year.

Caleb's sophomore year found him playing behind the now senior quarterback who had been a junior when Caleb began attending the U. That quickly ended. During the first game of the season, an away game at Michigan State where the Spartans were a four touchdown favorite, the starting quarterback went down early in the second quarter with a knee injury. The U was actually staying close in the first half, down only by ten, mostly because the U's defense was playing way above its head. No one expected what happened next.

Caleb and I had been studying film all summer for this game. Since this was both teams' first game, we could only look at what the Spartans had done the preceding season. Caleb and I both noticed some weaknesses in the secondary and the first quarter and a half of play had confirmed that the defensive backs were inclined to cheat, creeping toward the line of scrimmage on most passing situations. Caleb took that information and began to pick the defense apart with quick outs, picking up four or five yards per play and keeping the ball moving. Having gotten the defense accustomed to the short game, he sent his best wide receiver long and dropped the ball right into his outstretched hands at full speed. Touchdown!

The U's defense, energized by the score, stopped the Spartans and Caleb again lured their defense into the short pass defense before dropping another bomb. The U went into halftime leading by four.

The second half was a repeat of the first. By the time the game was over, the U was up by seventeen and the students watching the game in the student center poured out into the U's quad to celebrate. From then on, Caleb was the starting quarterback.

The following season saw a repeat, this time against the Iowa Hawkeyes. The U, a seven point underdog, won by twelve. The next year the game was against Iowa State. Again a seven point underdog, the U won by fifteen. Caleb's final year was his best ever, with the U going undefeated, including a nail biter against Penn State, where the U won on a last second field goal from forty yards out. Caleb had gotten the attention of scouts at the next level and was being touted as a possible third or fourth round pick by an NFL team needing a backup quarterback.

As Caleb's reputation as a player grew, our relationship deepened. We were spending enormous amounts of time together whenever he was free from workouts or practices. I still was helping him with his academics and with film studies. I'd graduated the preceding fall and enrolled in an MBA program in finance at the U. Caleb was on track to graduate at the end of the winter quarter.

Despite all of his success on the football field, Caleb had consistently turned down every girl who approached him trying to get him to drop me and date her. We'd now been together eight years. That year, before leaving for the U's bowl game, Caleb proposed to me and I accepted. Our plan was to get married the following summer and, if he were fortunate enough to be drafted, live wherever his NFL team was located. If he weren't drafted, Caleb would pursue a coaching career and I'd work on finding a job in finance.

Caleb's father had identified an agent for him as soon as the talk about possibly being drafted had surfaced. Danny O'Brien wasn't the agent of the top tier of NFL players, but he had a solid reputation and seemed well respected by owners in the league. He had about fifteen players in his stable of clients, all of whom spoke very well of him when Caleb and I interviewed them. My father, an attorney by trade, also did some digging with the law firms that represented the teams for which Danny's clients played and Danny got a hearty endorsement from each of those firms.

Danny made clear to both of us from the beginning that he was representing Caleb, not the two of us. He'd recently had a player go through an acrimonious and expensive divorce after his wife had cheated on him with a teammate. The property settlement had been quite unfavorable to his client, as the wife had never worked and she had developed a taste for the extravagant lifestyle available to NFL players. Rather than allow that to happen again, Danny demanded that Caleb and I enter into a prenuptial agreement specifying what happened if we decided to end our impending marriage at some future point.

Danny wanted a heavy penalty if I strayed. I was willing. After all, Caleb was the love of my life and we'd been together for almost a decade. My father, ever the lawyer, agreed, provided that there was a similar heavy penalty if Caleb strayed. We finally settled on an asset split of sixty/forty in Caleb's favor if there was a divorce for reasons other than infidelity. If I were unfaithful, the split would be eighty-five/fifteen in Caleb's favor. If he were unfaithful, the split would be seventy/thirty in my favor. The split would include the full value of any contracts signed during the marriage, regardless of when they expired, and any replacements to those contracts if they were renegotiated during their original term. Neither Caleb nor I foresaw ever needing to enforce the prenup. We were in this relationship for life.

Caleb managed to graduate at the end of his senior football season, having finished in four and one-half years, including some summer courses. I was on track to finish my MBA by May of my fifth year, so we scheduled our wedding for the third Saturday in June. Neither of us had any great expectations from the NFL draft. Danny's estimate of late in the third or early in the fourth rounds was consistent with every prognosticator who bothered to go that far down. There were several teams that needed a backup quarterback and Caleb would fill the position nicely for many of those teams, with his primary role being the "opposition" quarterback during the week leading up to a game.

Even though Danny thought Caleb wouldn't go before day two of the draft, he got us seats for day one. We were well in the back, a blip on virtually no one's radar screen.

The Portland Sea Lions were the NFL's latest expansion team. They'd entered the league four years before this draft and, to put it politely, had performed abysmally. After four years of play, they had not won in total a season's worth of games. Their wins had been against the other dregs in the league or the last game of the season against a playoff bound team that was resting its starters. They were on their third starting quarterback and their second head coach. His head was on the block if the team didn't improve significantly in the coming season.

Portland had been one of the teams that had expressed some interest in Caleb. They'd actually brought him out to perform individually at their stadium for their coaching staff. Since they had two third round picks and three fourth round picks, we had some idea that they might use one of those picks on Caleb. At worst, if he made the team, we'd have a couple of years of backup quarterback duties and pay, lending us a nice economic base to use at the start of our marriage. We had no idea what was about to happen.

In spite of having finished last in the league again the preceding season, the Sea Lions had the seventh first round pick this year, a result of a prior year's trade for an aging starting quarterback who had massively under performed. As their time to announce their selection ran out, the commissioner stepped to the podium, opened the slip announcing their pick and hesitated, looking at the Sea Lions' owner with some level of surprise. Seeing the owner nod his confirmation, the commissioner announced, "With the seventh pick in the first round, the Sea Lions select quarterback Caleb Jackson, from State U." To say the crowd was stunned at the announcement is to grossly understate the reaction. Caleb and I just sat there, goggle-eyed. Danny finally pushed Caleb up and out into the aisle of the auditorium, then led him to the stage, where the Sea Lions jersey was placed over his suit and he was led off the stage to the side.

Not surprisingly, those who make their living prognosticating about professional football panned the selection. This was, in their minds, another in a series of terrible choices by the worst team in football.

What were they thinking?

Caleb immediately threw himself into training for the Sea Lions pre-season workouts and camps. We did manage to marry in June, but cut our honeymoon short so Caleb could spend time with the Sea Lions' quarterback coach and offensive coordinator learning the Sea Lions' playbook. I certainly couldn't object, as Caleb's selection, with just the guaranteed portion of his contract, meant that we were set for life. If he played for several seasons, he'd never have to work again once he left pro football.

As it turned out, the experts were wrong about the Sea Lions' choice in this particular instance. Caleb spent the first part of the season behind the prior year's starting quarterback, who went down in the ninth game with a torn ACL. At that point, the Sea Lions had won one, lost seven, and were on their way to losing number eight. Just as at State U, Caleb had identified weaknesses in the opposing team's defense, which he immediately began to exploit. To everyone's surprise, the Sea Lions pulled the game out on a last second field goal. The remainder of the season wasn't pretty, but when it ended, the Sea Lions were six and ten, their best season since entering the league.

The next three seasons showed steady progress. Eight and eight, then nine and seven, then ten and six and a wild card slot in the playoffs. Players began looking to the Sea Lions as a possible landing site in free agency. The Sea Lions were contenders. Not Super Bowl finalists yet, but on their way there.

Caleb and I bought a house outside of Portland and settled. Unlike some players, I limited our spend on the house, wanting something manageable and homey rather than ostentatious. We started a family after the year the Sea Lions made the wild card. Caleb Junior was followed two years later by Amanda and she, in turn, was followed two years later by David.

Like many successful pro quarterbacks, Caleb was in high demand as a spokesperson and endorser. In truth, we were living off his non-football earnings and banking his pro salary. By his tenth year in the league, Caleb was one of the highest paid starting quarterbacks in the league as well as one of the most popular spokesmen and product endorsers. His off seasons were filled with trips to various locales, either to film commercials or to attend sports memorabilia conventions.

In spite of his busy schedule, I thought our marriage was in great shape. Caleb and I had sex on a regular basis and made time for each other. He was something of a disengaged father, particularly after the Sea Lions became regular playoff contenders, but I tried to make up for that as best I could, since the only work I was doing was as the Sea Lions' face on the boards of a number of local non-profits the team's ownership supported. I did notice that Caleb seemed to be a little distant sometimes, particularly after some trips, as well as less humble and more outgoing, but he continued to give credit to his teammates where due and I didn't think anything more about it.

I had continued to run after graduating, and still had the body I'd had in high school - slim hips, long legs, no real chest, no excess weight. The only real sign that I'd had three children was a slight rounding of my stomach and some stretch marks. The muscles in my abdomen had stretched slightly and no amount of crunches or other ab exercises had given me back the board flat stomach I'd enjoyed before childbirth. But none of that seemed to matter to Caleb, who regularly told me he loved my body just the way it was. And maybe he did, as long as he could enjoy other bodies with big boobs and wide, soft hips and tastes in sexual activities that would make some porn stars blush. The videos on his computer testified to his tastes in other women's bodies. None of them looked like mine.