Part 2. Antonio Meraz was a quiet, standard intense Italian guy. Liz told me he played rugby like he did everything else, looked it over, planned his steps, then made things happen. He was scary good, she said, when he wanted to be. He had shown up at a few of the parties, kept an eye on me from a distance, but never did anything with me. Two or three of the players didn’t want anything to do with what was being done to me, and he was one of them. Happy to socialize, happy to drink the beer, wasn’t into abusing the furniture. He took crap from some of the guys for never doing anything with me, even when they taunted him to come up and kiss me or feel me up or have sex with me, but he pretty much just waved a beer bottle at them and laughed them off. They all did respect him, he was almost a 4.0 student, came from some manufacturing family in New York City, was a marketing and management double major, and everyone had penciled him in as one of these “take over Dad’s company when he gets old enough” stories. And by all the looks of things he could. And he could kick a rugby ball, Liz told me, half the field and quite often land it in a four-foot circle.
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