by S. E. Harmon
I cleaned up our workstations to their muted squeals and shouts of joy. A gap-toothed kid named Louis stuck to me like glue and stayed behind to help. He didn’t say all that much, but his quiet, loyal presence kept my grumbles to a minimum.
By the time Louis and I headed outside, the sun-dappled field and bright blue sky were almost too intense after being inside for so long. I urged Louis to go play and stood on the sidelines of the gigantic field, drinking a Hi-C I filched from the cafeteria. I pulled my shades down from my hair and settled them over my eyes with a smile on my face as I watched the pros toss the football with the kids. Other than their sizes, it was hard to tell the difference. They all acted like a bunch of big kids when there was a ball involved. Eventually each of the pros took a small team of the kids and headed off to separate areas on the field so they could get some one-on-one attention, or in this case, one-on-six attention.
My eyes inevitably drew back to Blue. He looked good out there, all laughing and relaxed and happy. With his hair almost white blond in the light and all that honeyed, tanned skin, he looked like an extension of the sun. Most of the kids looked up to Blue as though he should be wearing some type of cape, which was equal parts hilarious and endearing.
He was good with them, probably because he understood where they were coming from better than most. He knew what it was like to be the product of a broken home and what it was like to grow up without his mother. Hell, he knew what it was like to grow up without both parents—his father was the furthest thing from loving. Sometimes it seemed like he just loved what Blue did.
As I looked on, Blue pretended to throw the ball, and a few of the kids ran for the fake. A couple of the others jumped on him, and they went down in a tangle of limbs, laughing and squealing. He staggered up for a few seconds and then was tackled by a red-haired kid who obviously thought the sincerest form of flattery was trying to kill your hero.
They all rolled around and played like puppies. He gamely tried to answer as they peppered him with questions about money and dating Carly Taylor and any number of things that were probably inappropriate to discuss.
The red-haired kid seemed particularly interested in Blue’s love life. Getting to be that age, I guess. “My brother said you were dating Hannah Larson and Carly Taylor,” he declared. “Is that true?”
“Your brother shouldn’t believe everything he hears,” Blue said glibly as he gave his ginger inquisitor a gentle swat.
“How many cars do you have?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“How about houses?”
Blue rolled his eyes. “Someone else ask me something. How about a question about football? Or life? Maybe school?”
He almost got booed into the parking lot. One of the kids, blond-haired and covered in freckles, raised his hand. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Carter,” Blue said. “Go ahead.”
“What do you like best about playing?”
“I’ve always loved running and catching the ball, trying to make those plays that no one else can make.”
“’Cuz you’re the best, right?”
Blue smiled. The blond kid, minus the cute freckles, could have been his Mini-Me. “Not the best,” he said. “But I try to be my best. Sometimes that’s enough.”
A husky kid with glasses frowned. “But what if your best isn’t good enough?”
“Then you still did your best. You can be your worst enemy and your best cheerleader. Just depends on what you decide to tell yourself.”
“I’m gonna go pro too,” a boy with a headful of curly hair declared. From the way he’d been sprinting down the field earlier, I didn’t doubt it—running back, if I had to put money on it. “I’m gonna have a lot of money and cars and a big house with a fucking McDonald’s in it.”
“Stop cursing.” Blue swatted him on the back of the head. “And that’s not what football is all about, Mark. If you don’t love what you do, you’re going to be miserable. And if you’re going to play football, you’re going to need something healthier than McDonald’s.”
Mark shook his head. “McNuggets every morning. Sweet-and-sour sauce.”
“Barbecue.” The kid with the glasses seemed inspired by the idea. “Or maybe honey mustard.”
“All the sauces,” Mark allowed. “Any sauce you want. It’s my McDonald’s!”
Most of the kids seemed pleased with that as they talked over each other and tried to top one another with what they would buy. Eventually three camp counselors in blue polo shirts and khakis herded the kids inside. I held out a hand to help Blue up, and he took it. “Where are they headed?” I asked as I pulled him to his feet.
“Arts and crafts.”
“At football camp?”
“They have to be well-rounded.” His eyes twinkled, all big and blue and mischievous. “You should know that, Kel. You want them to wind up like you? All brains, no brawn?”
“Very cute.”
He laughed. “I certainly thought so. Come on.” He hit my arm. “Help me gather the equipment.”
“Shouldn’t that be a part of their learning experience? Cleaning after themselves?” I followed behind him with a grumble and made him practically drag me, more so because of the “all brains, no brawn” crack than anything else.
We picked up discarded footballs and other equipment across the field and tossed them into several netted bags as we went. “You look like you had fun,” I observed.
“I did. I just wish I had more time to come down here.”
I grabbed a soccer ball and lifted my eyebrow in mute question.
Blue shrugged. “Don’t look at me.”
I wondered what intrepid soul had decided to say “fuck football, I like soccer” at a football camp. A rebel. I liked that. I put it in the bag with the rest. “You ever think about doing this full-time?”
He sent me a measured look. “I already have a full-time job.”
There was a warning there that I normally would have heeded. That was before he practically moved in with me and threw away all my snacks. Oh, and let’s not forget the fucking. He’d given up the right to tell me to mind my business.
“It’s not like the world would end if you didn’t play football,” I said.
“I can’t just quit,” he snapped. He jammed another ball in the already full net. “I have a contract. People count on me for their jobs, their livelihoods.”
“I realize that,” I said evenly.
At a certain point, a star athlete wasn’t just an athlete anymore. He was a corporation that routinely loaned his name out to products and endorsements. He had a lot of staff to make Britton Montgomery into a brand and a household name. I got all that. But at what point did he finish? When would his obligations be fulfilled?
“Why are you so afraid to leave it behind?”
“I’m not afraid. I just love football,” he said. “What else do you want me to say?”
“You can still love football and not put yourself out there like that. It’s getting more dangerous the more you get hurt. Your physical therapist said—”
“Kai doesn’t know everything.”
“Are you really willing to take those kinds of chances?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I am.”
I growled. If there were a grand prize for giving me answers I didn’t want to hear, he’d win it, hands down. “So what is it, Blue? Because this is more than just loving football. Is it the fans screaming for you? The adulation? Being a football god under hot lights?”
We’d both stopped collecting balls at that point and stood facing one another. I barely kept from poking him in the chest, and he didn’t look any happier with me than I was with him as he shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand? Is this some Any Given Sunday shit? Gridiron fucking giants?” My voice grew stronger as I gained self-righteous steam. “Because you know that’s ridiculous.”
“Are you done?” His voice was cold,
and his eyes, normally warm and soft like a field of cornflowers, were hard chips of blue ice. “I love the game because it’s part of my life. Part of me. When I’m on the field, I’m not the kid in class who needed extra help and still couldn’t pass.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You earned a degree from a good school—”
“Because you helped me. A lot. And don’t say that’s not true, because we both know it is.”
I closed my mouth, mostly because that’s exactly what I was going to say. I guess I did help him out with homework quite a bit, helped him study for exams… a lot. But that’s just what friends did. Calculus was a special nemesis of his, and those times when I got to tutor him were some of the best times of my life. We would share my desk, chairs pushed together, and I savored having an excuse to be so close. I always pretended not to notice when our arms accidentally touched or when his shoe nudged up against mine.
When I told him as much, a half smile played on his mouth. “I knew.”
“You did not.”
“You think I didn’t notice you blushing every time our elbows touched? I may have only acknowledged it recently, but I’ve always felt more for you than I should.” He made a noise at my dumbfounded expression. “I told you that before, when I was in the hospital.”
“I remember.” My voice was quiet with introspection. I kind of wished I could review our every college interaction with a microscope and a notepad—I was obsessive like that. But I really had to stay focused. “So what? You’re upset that I helped you?”
“Of course not. I appreciate everything you did for me, probably more than you’ll ever know. I’m not complaining.”
I didn’t point out that it sounded like he was doing exactly that. “Then what is this about?”
“You were always the smart one in school, dragging me along so I wouldn’t fail.”
“That’s not how I saw it.”
“Because you’ve always seen me as better than I am, Kel. You were the smart one, the witty one—quirky and special.”
I blinked at him. That was so not how I’d seen things, or how most of the free world had. I was pretty sure his love for me made those rose-colored glasses pretty damned thick. But if he wanted to think of me as the cool, quirky one instead of the weird kid who really, really dug science and was the president of the robotics club three years running, that was fine by me.
“Football was always mine,” he said quietly. “It was the one thing that I was good at. When I was on that field, I wasn’t the kid who couldn’t do anything right at home… anything right but play sports. Throwing a perfect fucking spiral was the only thing that ever made my father happy with me. He’d come out in the backyard with me, and we’d throw that football, and just for that little bit of time, everything was okay.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Hell, I think to keep his attention, I would’ve thrown a fucking spiral clear to heaven.”
My heart squeezed a little, and I regretted even bringing it up in the first place. “Your father… isn’t a real father, Blue.” My voice cracked, and I cleared my throat. “You playing football until you’re broken and bloody isn’t going to make him into one.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Then why keep going? You have enough money, enough championships, enough fame—”
“Because—”
“You don’t have enough concussions? Enough sprains? Can you give me one goddamned reason to keep—”
“Because I don’t have anything else!” His shout almost made my ears ring.
I asked for the truth, and there it was.
I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to keep my idiot brain from blurting out something stupid. You have me. If he didn’t see that, then maybe I wasn’t important enough…. Maybe we weren’t important enough. I didn’t need him to come out and declare us before the world, but if he couldn’t admit what I was to him right there, right then, in the middle of a field with nothing but thick honeyed sunshine and floating gold dust motes between us, I didn’t know when he ever would.
His eyes widened like he suddenly realized what he’d said, and he swore. He swiped a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.”
I liked to think I knew what he meant. But maybe part of me was afraid that little slip of the tongue was really how he felt—that football was all he had. Where did that leave us? I wasn’t interested in playing second fiddle to a piece of dried-out old pigskin.
His color was still a little high as he avoided my eyes. Clearly his relaxed mood was a thing of the past, and I swallowed a sigh. I was sorry I’d brought any of it up at all.
I took one of the footballs from the netted bag and tossed it to him. He caught it almost reflexively. “Come on, hotshot,” I called as I jogged backward. “Show me how the overpaid pros do it.”
He smiled and palmed the ball. It looked tiny in his big hands as he cocked his arm. “Go deep,” he instructed.
He sent a pass my way that made me stop playfully jogging and start running for real. Getting Kennedy to toss me the ball at the family barbecue and having a ball thrown at me from a professional like it was a speeding, spiraling bullet was like night and fucking day. I almost fell over another net of balls as I tried to make the catch. I windmilled to the sound of Blue’s laughter as the ball bounced harmlessly to the ground.
It was a second before I could catch my balance. “Who put this here?” I demanded.
“You did,” he managed through tears of laughter.
Oh. Right. I picked up the ball and threw it back his way. Well, threw was a relative term. I kind of lobbed it like a beach ball. It landed a couple yards away, and I stared at it in dismay. My face set him off again, and his shoulders shook from laughter.
I glared at him holding his stomach like it actually ached from hilarity. I wanted to tackle him good, but I eyed his frame, built so solidly and streamlined for athletics. The fucker was built like a Mack truck, and he had a good six inches and seventy pounds on me, every bit of it muscle. I was no lightweight, but I had a feeling any sort of tackling wouldn’t go well. Not that he would ever hurt me. He would just gently lay me out flat and bury my face in the dirt until I cried uncle. Which was something I knew from experience.
I shook out my hands. “Okay, I’m ready this time. All warmed up. Gimme another.”
He wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes with his thumbs. “Shit, I’m almost afraid to. How’s your life insurance?”
“Minimal. And my mama’s the beneficiary, so don’t get any ideas,” I said. “She’ll also have your nuts in a jar if you hurt me, so keep that in mind when you throw that thing.”
He smacked the ball twice in those big hands, and my eyes widened. He grinned. “I don’t like sassy fucking receivers. So I’d go long, if I were you.”
We played in the field as the sun went down, whooping like a pair of crazy kids. He threw to me and ran to tackle me, and I was still losing. But it would probably have helped if I could stop laughing. At one point he lifted me completely off my feet, and we went down in a tangle of limbs. Then he started tickling me as I laughed helplessly.
“Uncle,” I finally cried out breathlessly. “Uncle, you bastard.”
He grinned and balanced on his forearms on either side of me. “That’s what I thought.”
I lay there sprawled in the grass, in no particular hurry to move. I glanced up at the darkening sky and then my watch. “They’re probably going to be serving dinner soon. We should go and say our goodbyes.”
“In a minute.”
In a minute was going to be a bit of a problem for me, and from the look on Blue’s face, he knew why. His proximity made it hard to think—that and his heady scent, which went through my nose and seemingly straight to my dick. It was sweat and grass and soap and Blue. He leaned down a little more, almost closing the distance between us, and was dangerously close to burying his face in my neck.
I swallowed
hard. “You should let me up.”
“I will.”
I glanced down at his shorts, only to find him completely hard. I pushed at his shoulders and he barely moved, his gaze locked on mine and rife with promise. I didn’t need to be a genius to know what he was thinking, because I was thinking it too.
“Let me up.”
“I will,” he repeated and rocked his hips once. I gasped. “After.”
“Blue,” I said urgently as I felt my body start to respond. “We’re in the middle of a fucking field. At a fucking camp for kids.”
It was like I slapped him in the face as his eyes widened. Whatever madness had possessed us receded, and he sprang back like I was made entirely of fire. We both stood and busied ourselves brushing dirt and grass off our clothing.
“I have to check in to the hotel tonight,” Blue reminded me. “Game tomorrow.”
I grimaced. “I know.” Fuck, I’d be glad when football season was over.
“Coach thinks that having sex before the game is a bad idea. Saps our energy and all that.”
“Your coach is full of shit.”
He snorted. “That has nothing to do with the fact you want to get laid, right?”
“I think we should conduct our own experiments, is all,” I said indignantly. “In the name of science.”
He grabbed the two bags of balls we had gathered and slung them over his shoulder as though they weighed nothing at all. “So what’s your hypothesis?”
“If we have copious amounts of sex before you have to check in at the hotel, then you’ll be able to perform at peak levels of athletic agility and win the game.”
“Do you have a test subject in mind?”
“That I do.” I waggled my eyebrows. “Hello there, test subject.”
He shook his head and smiled. “I’ll be your perverted experiment anytime.”
Poetry. The man wrote pure poetry, designed for my pervy heart. “Say your goodbyes, test subject,” I instructed. “We’ve got some experimenting to do.”
