Rugby Kisses

Conor Sullivan is the kind of asshole who can ruin your night with a single sentence-and then drink you under the table while you're still thinking of a comeback. By day he manages a liquor store. By night the liquor manages him. His time is split between feeding his habits and playing for the Billings Banshees, a rugby team so catastrophically bad they consider defeat a formality. Rugby is less a sport for Conor and more a flicker of meaning in an otherwise spectacularly mismanaged life.

You can name your poison at the Jackpot club, and whether ingested cheerfully or passed through the convenient, drive-up window, it is always delivered with a smile - but when a dead bouncer leaves Conor a briefcase full of cocaine, cash, and anxiety, things unravel quickly. What follows is a darkly comic spiral through amateur athletic mediocrity, questionable loyalties, and life consequences that the protagonist is profoundly unequipped to handle.

Rehab offers no salvation-only complications. There's Charlene, enigmatic and disarmingly perceptive, who seems more interested in saving his soul than sleeping with him, and "The Cat," a predator in every sense of the word. But when violence rears its inevitable head, Conor finally finds something he's good at: a perfectly executed rugby tackle that might be the closest thing to redemption he's ever known.