THE PRO

John Perry was not looking for a relationship; the last thing he kissed was the tip of a gun. It was his comfort with the taste of metal that got him here, on a mountain in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of rehab wanderers who got the brilliant idea to spy on a monk commune in the middle of the night. Despite his immunity to the warmth of passion, right now, this girl with six platinum records and pink braids, was breaking a lot more trespassing rules with her skin-to-skin manner of conversing, than any of them were on this mountain path in the dead of night. Being a professional athlete comes with a lot of choices for bed buddies, which only added to the brewing stew of bad choices in John’s head. But there was something about this one he’d just met, Figgy Lee, she was something else and she wasn’t about to take any prima donna crap from him. Perhaps that’s why she was able to get through; because she wasn’t after him for the celebrity of it – her music provided way more of that than John’s NFL career with the LA Rams. Was it possible that she actually saw something human in him? He had a hard time believing that. Regardless, John was hoping that this secluded break from suicidal thoughts would be a place to empty his head, not fill it with more nonsense, no matter how intoxicating.

Maybe it was the monk commune he should’ve signed up for and not the addiction treatment program. There was something provocative about how that rehab counselor described the monks, ‘there was no talking allowed, no interaction with them allowed,’ that intrigued John, it sounded more like the respite he really needed as opposed to this Kumbaya Kombucha with Kimchee shit. Which brought him to this moment, and why he agreed to this unlawful excursion at this ungodly hour… The distraction of checking out the monks’ compound in the middle of the night seemed like a good idea – at the time, he entertained the idea of joining them and leaving the others