Secrets, Lies, & Football

Secrets, Lies, & Football Monteska University Book One Sydney Stephens Copyright © 2023 Sydney Stephens All rights reservedThe characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher with the exception of brief excerpts for the purpose of review or commentaryCover design by: Bring DesignPrinted in the United States of America For my grandma, who always said books were better with sex and violence.You would have loved this. Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Author's Note Prologue One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty Twenty-One Twenty-Two Twenty-Three Twenty-Four Twenty-Five Twenty-Six Twenty-Seven Twenty-Eight Twenty-Nine Thirty Thirty-One Thirty-Two Thirty-Three Thirty-Four Epilogue About The Author Author's Note Hi there! Thank you so much for giving a little indie author like me a chance. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. The Monteska University series is going to be a series of interconnected stand-alones that can be read in any order but are recommended to be read in the order that they are published. I hope to have at least the first three books out in 2023 so make sure you come back in a few months or follow me on social media to see what I’ve been doing. If you are my family and bought this book, thank you so much for supporting my writing. I appreciate you more than you know. Writing something and sending it out into the world is scary, so your support means everything to me. I wouldn’t be able to do it without you. That being said, you cannot read this book. Don’t even read past this paragraph. I know you think you want to, but you don’t. When I say that this book has explicit content, I’m not kidding. I want to be able to make eye contact with you in the future, so it’s the best thing for all of us if you stop here. Thank you and goodbye. Now that that’s out of the way, here is a non-exhaustive list of content warnings for what can be found in this book. This list contains possible spoilers, so if you don’t want that, stop here and make your way over to the prologue. This book contains graphic sexual content not suitable for underage groups, mentions of past toxic relationships (cheating, lying, mistreatment, general douchebaggery), brief discussion of mental health, crude language & profanity, derogatory language towards women, public sex (no voyeurs), unprotected sex, violence, bodily injuries (cuts, bleeding, bruising), description of getting a tattoo (needles, pain, etc.), underaged drug and alcohol use, and themes of cyber crimes including hacking, revenge porn, and cyberstalking. Reader discretion is advised. Prologue The Frat Party Vienna The reverberations from the heavy bass of the speakers blaring through the frat house mixed with someone’s cheap, stank-ass weed have already given me a migraine, and I’ve barely been here an hour. It doesn’t help that the room is spinning a bit, although I can’t blame that on the music. If I was smart, I would have preemptively taken Tylenol the second Mal convinced me to come to this party with the rest of our dorm. “It’s the first party of the year,” she had said to me as she pulled clothes from my drawers, putting together an outfit for me. “You can’t sit in your room on your computer all weekend.” She insisted it would be fun, but now my shoes are sticking to the alcohol-saturated floor and I’m hard-pressed to find a bathroom that doesn’t smell like vomit. I don’t usually have a hard time telling her no but it’s the last weekend before classes start, so even I had to be a bit flexible. I will not be making that same mistake again. When I find a bathroom without a line and minimal smell, I duck in quickly, fumbling a bit with the lock as I try and turn it. With the music now slightly more muted, I shut my eyes and take a breath. Then another while I re-evaluate just how drunk I actually am. My tolerance is lower than I thought. That, or the more likely option, which is that the drink Mal made me had more alcohol in it than I thought. It tasted like fruit punch and smelled like Jolly Ranchers and acetone, which means it probably had enough alcohol in it to kill a horse. In retrospect, I should have known I was in for it the second she picked up the Peach Schnapps. The whole frat house, bathrooms included, has been strung up in dim LED lights for the night so when I open my eyes I have to squint, which also isn’t helping my throbbing head. I momentarily consider searching the medicine cabinet to see if there’s some Tylenol or Advil or something, but decide to leave the mystery of what frat guys keep in their bathrooms for another day. I turn on the faucet and cup some cool water in my hands, drinking a bit and then splashing some on my face, belatedly remembering that I’m wearing mascara. I lean into the mirror and squint to see that only a little mascara flaked off. When I grab a tissue and attempt to wipe it away, I nearly poke myself in the eye when someone starts pounding on the door. I dry my face on a hand towel that probably hasn’t been washed in the last eight years and open the door. An annoyed-looking guy in a Monteska University Athletics t-shirt brushes past me, nearly slamming the door on my ass. Fuck you too, dude. Feeling no less drunk than I did a few minutes