“Hey, that’s not fair,” Willie protested. “You didn’t say we could bank the shots.”

“I didn’t say we couldn’t.”

Melvin checked his watch and refilled Cal’s glass from a bottle of very old, very expensive scotch. Unlike his teammates, Cal seldom got drunk, but this was his birthday, he had the blues, and he was trying to make an exception. Unfortunately, he had a cast-iron stomach, and it wasn’t all that easy.

He smiled as he remembered his last birthday. Kelly, his former girlfriend, had planned a big surprise party for him, but she wasn’t good with details, and he’d shown up before any of the guests. He thought maybe he should miss Kelly more, but what he mostly felt when he thought about her was embarrassment that she’d dumped him for a twenty-three-year-old guitarist who’d offered her a wedding ring. Still, he hoped she was happy. She’d been a sweet girl, even though she used to irritate the hell out of him.

He was a yeller, by nature. He’d didn’t mean anything by it; it was just the way he communicated. But whenever he’d yelled at Kelly, she’d burst into tears instead of standing up to him. She made him feel like a bully, which meant he couldn’t ever completely relax and just be himself around her.

It was a problem he’d always had with the girls he dated. He was naturally attracted to the nice ones, the ones who cared about other people and weren’t just out for themselves. Unfortunately, girls like that tended to be wimps, and they’d let him run right over them.

A lot of the more aggressive women, the ones who might have been able to stand up to him, turned out to be money-grubbers. Not that he blamed a woman for looking out for herself, as long as she was up front about it.

Phoebe Calebow, the Stars’ owner and his nominee for best woman in the world when she wasn’t being a pain in the ass, said he wouldn’t have so much trouble with females if he’d stop dating such young ones, but she didn’t understand.