Scrambling (Out in the NFL Book 1)

by Lex Valentine

  A hand dropped to his thigh and stroked the hard muscle beneath his slacks. “I think at least one of the partners would very much welcome such a play.” Bryce’s hot breath tickled Evan’s ear as the man leaned in and placed a brief kiss on the sensitive skin beneath his ear. “What do you say, Evan? Do you want to play ball with me?”

  Rigid with arousal, but still aching with the loss of his dreams, Evan stared into Bryce’s mesmerizing eyes and let go. “Yes.”

  Waking in Bryce Richardson’s bed the next morning left a bad taste in Evan’s mouth. He stood in the bathroom, hastily pulling on his clothes after a quick shower, when Bryce turned up in the doorway. One blond brow rose as he watched Evan dress.

  “Regrets?” he asked shrewdly.

  The sudden heat in his cheeks told Evan he’d flushed a bright red. Cursing his fair complexion didn’t change anything, so he did what he usually did and stuck with the truth.

  “Not exactly. It’s just that, I don’t really do hookups,” he admitted.

  Bryce nodded. “I get that. You’re a home-and-hearth guy. I knew that straight away.” The keen gray eyes studied Evan for a long moment, and then Bryce continued. “You’re in love with Reed Matthews.”

  The words took Evan back to the summer of his sixteenth year when his reactions to his best friend told him everything he needed to know about his sexual orientation. He might love football more than anything in the world, but Evan loved Reed too in a way that had nothing to do with friendship.

  Until that summer, Evan hadn’t ever had more than nebulous feelings of sexual arousal. Oh, he’d gotten an erection, gotten excited. But he could never say for sure what had aroused him. A summer spent with Reed, the two of them dressed in little more than cargo shorts and flip flops showed Evan he was definitely not straight. Every movement Reed made, every bit of skin he showed made Evan as hard as a rock. Keeping his erections a secret from Reed had been an exercise in flexibility, strategy, sneakiness, and sheer unadulterated fear.

  Brought back to the present by Bryce’s sigh, he looked into his lover’s sympathetic gray eyes. “Yes,” he said baldly. “I always have been.”

  Bryce nodded, a flash of sadness darkening his gaze. “I understand. Look, I know you don’t have a place to live yet. Darcy said you were staying with your parents. I’m not here much, and the condo has two other bedrooms. Why don’t you move in here? When I’m around, maybe we could get together, but that’s up to you. I know what it’s like to be in love with someone who doesn’t feel that way about you.”

  Evan had a hard time believing that Bryce loved someone who didn’t love him back. The man had everything going for him. Still, love wasn’t logical. He had firsthand experience with that.

  “Okay,” he agreed, a little astonished that he’d made such an important decision on the spur of the moment. It wasn’t like him at all. “Yes to all of it.”

  A smile curved Bryce’s handsome mouth. “Good. Do you suppose I could entice you back to bed, then?”

  Evan laughed. “No. I think we both have too many ghosts in the room at the moment. Instead, I’ll get myself home and start packing.”

  He scheduled a Lyft from his cell phone, and Bryce walked him to the door when it arrived.

  “You realize Darcy will exploit you living here,” he warned, his voice mild. “I’m used to the media pairing me up whether it’s true or not, but you aren’t.”

  Evan grimaced. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sure whatever Darcy tells the press about us is all for the good of the team and for making our coming out palatable to the public.”

  “That’s exactly it. Are you ready for the firestorm?”

  The sympathy in Bryce’s eyes grew, and Evan realized that his life had taken a hard turn into the public eye. He figured the press would make a big deal out of him dating Bryce fueled by Darcy’s spin-doctoring. It wasn’t much of a lie really, and since he had no other lover, it wouldn’t be hard to live with. Luckily, his only real secret was his love for Reed, and that, he vowed, would never come out.

  “I guess. They can’t really hurt me. My heart is already broken,” he murmured.

  The expression on Bryce’s face held a wealth of understanding. Evan wondered momentarily if the old rumor about Bryce and his college friendship with Joss Aldean being more than friendship was actually true. Not that it was any of his business. He and Bryce would be a convenience. And it would be a damn good diversion, keeping everyone, including Reed, from knowing the truth.

  “So how does it feel to be the first two openly gay players in the NFL?”

  That question rang in Evan’s head for weeks following what Darcy Jensen called their “Coming Out Party,” the press conference she’d arranged to announce to the world that he and Reed were gay. Evan had to admit Darcy had done a great job. She’d taken a brand-new team and two newly drafted players and turned them into “The New Era of the NFL.” She’d given the press the rundown on all their accomplishments as players, the history of their friendship, Reed’s long-standing relationship with Lennox Sterling, and Evan’s budding relationship with Bryce. She wrapped it all together with the expansion team of which Bryce was one of the owners and packaged it as the wave of the future.

  Fortunately, Darcy was brilliant at her job and the Stars—including Evan and Reed—shone like Olympic gold when she was done. The media had mostly been positive. The team had mostly been positive. Many of the players already knew who was gay and who wasn’t in the league. Even the homophobes recognized that the additional press time they got was good for them, so they kept their grumbling to a minimum. Other teams hadn’t been as easy to deal with as their own team, though. During the preseason, both Evan and Reed had taken hits on the field that were dirty and done deliberately because they were gay. Off the field, there was always some heckler willing to be an intolerant redneck asshole just for the pleasure of needling them about being gay.

  Evan felt the pressures mounting on him as the regular season began. In addition to the stress of being a rookie on a fledgling team, Darcy had both him and Reed on a rigid schedule of public appearances. Her plan was to show the world and the NFL that gay football players would attract more viewers, not scare them away. So she made them as media accessible and visible as possible. She even had Time magazine calling them “trailblazers.”

  It was Darcy’s carefully planned media blitz that had Evan struggling with his tux’s bow tie on a night when all he really wanted to do was soak in the hot tub. He’d taken some hard hits in the game on Sunday, and he just wanted to ease his bruises. Instead of relaxing in the hot tub at Bryce’s condo, the two of them were scheduled to walk the red carpet for a LGBTQ charity event in Hollywood. Evan wasn’t happy about his loss of downtime, but there was little he could do about it.

  “Here. Let me. You’re mangling the material.” Bryce brushed Evan’s hands away from the tie, then pushed his chin up.

  Evan could feel the heat of Bryce’s body as they stood mere inches apart. He closed his eyes. Darcy’s plans had indeed included telling the world that he and Bryce were dating. It wasn’t the exact truth, but it would suffice. Bryce spent most of his time in Florida’s South Beach where he had a house, but when he was in town, it was easy for them to get together since Evan was now living in Bryce’s condo. Not that Evan spent much time in Bryce’s bed. Neither of them seemed to want more than an occasional hookup, and more often than not, when Bryce was home, nothing happened between them.

  The fact that Bryce didn’t seem to want more from Evan than an occasional dinner companion and fuck buddy relieved him. It even accommodated Darcy’s media plan which was how they’d ended up in the eye of the press that evening. Evan’s current balancing act consisted of playing football and appearing in public, but it was a routine that exhausted him more often than not.

  He’d had his fill of keeping up appearances in high school and college, which was why he’d wanted to come out. Unfortunately, he’d discovered that he was still expected to
keep up appearances, but now they had nothing to do with hiding his sexual orientation and everything to do with having a positive presence in the public eye. Being seen with Bryce, having the public think that they were a couple, kept talk at a minimum. The press never caught him in bars or clubs trying to pick up men. They never saw him with a rainbow of different guys on his arm. No photos of him getting sucked in back alleys or having sex in a limo surfaced to dirty the image Darcy had created. But Evan still felt the pressure of living a lie, even if the lie was different than the one he’d lived for the past six years.

  “You know they’re going to ask the question again,” Bryce murmured as he finished tweaking Evan’s tie.

  With a disgusted snort, Evan turned to look in the mirror. “I know. They ask it every time Reed or I show up in public.”

  Bryce leaned his shoulder against Evan’s bedroom wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “So how do you feel about being out in the NFL?”

  Resolve hardened inside Evan. “Like a fucking guinea pig. How else would I feel? I hate the media spotlight on me. I hate having to measure every word I speak and every action I take. I hate having to explain or justify who I’m with. If I have a burger with a straight friend, the press wants to know if he’s gay too. It’s insane, and it’s wearing on me. But someone has to do this. There are too many gay players who are afraid to come out. Someone has to go first and make it okay to be gay in the NFL.”

  He turned, and his gaze met Bryce’s thoughtful one. His sometime lover looked handsome in the tux, and for a split second Evan wished he were Reed, but he pushed the thought away. He and Reed would never be together, and he needed to accept that and get on with his life.

  “Why you?” Bryce raised one brow. “Why did you have to do this? You’d been in the closet for years when it comes to playing ball. What’s a few more?”

  Evan stepped closer to Bryce. “Because I was tired of living a lie,” he said softly.

  Bryce’s expression turned sardonic. “And you aren’t living one now? C’mon, Evan. You’re hiding your feelings and the true nature of our relationship. That’s not living a lie?”

  Pain struck Evan in the center of his chest, and he realized his heart ached unbearably. “You’re right, and it bothers me. But it’s also moving on with my life the best way I know how,” he croaked.

  Shaking his head, Bryce moved away from the wall and took Evan in his arms. “I don’t understand why you don’t just tell him how you feel.”

  Burrowing his face into the crook of Bryce’s neck, Evan held his lover tightly. “I can’t. I can’t risk losing Reed’s friendship over this. We’ve been friends for so long, I don’t know what I’d do without him. At one point, when we were teens, I probably could have told him, but I was scared. I’m still scared.”

  Bryce stroked his hair and pressed soft kisses to his head. “One day you’ll reach the point where you have to tell him you love him because you just can’t contain it any longer. Don’t you think things might go worse for you when he realizes how long you’ve kept this from him?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that I can’t risk telling him. Not now and maybe not ever.”

  With a sigh, Bryce released him. “We need to go or Darcy will kick our asses for being late.”

  Evan tried to push away the questions Bryce had raised, but they plagued him the whole evening. The first chance he got, he wanted to see what Darcy thought of him telling Reed the truth of his feelings. He’d spent a lot of time with her over the past six months since he and Reed had first come out to her. She watched over him and Reed like a mother hen, and he’d come to respect her opinion. Thus far, she’d been pretty on-target with how people would react so he thought she’d make an excellent sounding board. Plus she was older than he, and female. Her take on love and relationships was a lot more confident than his. And she knew Reed too. If anyone would know how he should handle his feelings for Reed, it would be Darcy. It might be embarrassing for him to have to confess to her, but it might be worth it in the end if she could just give him some perspective on a situation that had always been too close to his heart for him to see clearly.

  The morning of Evan’s appointment with Darcy, he sat on the balcony of Bryce’s Santa Monica condo and stared at the ocean, his thoughts lost in the past. Bryce’s words had shaken him a little, and he wondered whether there really had been a moment when he could have told Reed the truth of his feelings without being rejected. God knew that when he’d come out to his family at sixteen, they had been all for him telling Reed.

  Evan had spent that summer trying to decide just how gay he really was. At night, after his parents went to bed, he began doing research on the Internet. What he found excited him, brought him greater understanding of himself, and frightened him. His research indicated that the while the majority of his sexual feelings were wrapped up in Reed, he also found other men attractive. Gay porn turned him on. Porn with women left him cold.

  He’d read about the AIDS scares of the ’80s and ’90s and discovered what he should do to protect himself. He read about gay bashings and Pride parades…and how professional sports had no place for gay men unless you were a figure skater. His conclusions left him with a stomach filled with acid. For one, the probability of there being not one gay man in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association was phenomenal. Evan knew there had to be gay players. Even then he knew he didn’t want to remain in the closet his whole career, let alone his whole life. His first step toward coming out had been to corner his older sister.

  Lacey had an open-mindedness that Evan envied; she believed in cultural diversity, inclusion, equal rights, and peaceful social change. If anyone would accept his homosexuality and support him, Lacey would. And so, Evan came out to his sister who oddly wasn’t surprised about his sexuality or his crush on Reed.

  “I’m gay.” Speaking the words out loud nearly tore him in two from stress, but he managed to say them to his sister.

  She eyed him curiously, her head tilted to one side. “So your crush on Reed finally told you some home truths?”

  Evan went boneless in his chair. “How the hell do you know things about me that I didn’t even know myself?” he asked, frustration washing over him.

  Lacey smiled. “Little brother, to me you are as transparent as glass. Don’t forget, I’ve changed your diapers. I know you.”

  “Yeah, but how could you know…this?”

  “Dude. You are so in love with Reed it’s pitiful to see. Your eyes follow him everywhere, and he may not have seen you springing wood when he bends over to pick up the football, but I know a tent when I see one.” Lacey’s blue eyes, so like his own, sparked with humor. “Does he know?”

  “Hell no! You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  His sister nodded calmly. “You should tell the parents.”

  “Come out to our parents?” Evan gasped, shock dropping his mouth open. “Are you nuts?”

  Lacey shrugged. “No. Trust me on this. Tell the parents.”

  “That’s scary. I can’t do that, Lace.”

  “Sure you can,” she soothed. “Look, don’t tell them together if it freaks you out. Tell Mom, then tell Dad.”

  Evan stared at his older sister in dismay. “I don’t want to.”

  A change came over his sister’s face. One moment she was his warmhearted, easygoing sister, and the next she became fiercer than a great white. “Tell them.”

  And that was how Evan ended up cornering his mother in the laundry room the same day. “I’m gay,” he blurted out, wondering why the words seemed to be more difficult to say each time he said them.

  His mother stopped folding towels. “Oh, so you figured it out, did you? Good for you,” she said with a smile. “I wondered how long it would take you. I mean, it was obvious to all of us how you felt about Reed.”

  Evan ran a hand over his head, ruffling his hair. “Does everyone in this family kn
ow about my sexual orientation and my crush?”

  His mother smiled. “Well, Lacey and I were pretty sure. Your dad’s just waiting for you to confirm or deny our assumptions.”

  After another day spent wondering how the hell his family had known more about him than he’d ever thought possible, Evan approached his father. “I’m g-gay,” he said, stumbling over the word and furious with himself for having such a hard time telling his father a truth the old man seemingly already knew.

  His father pushed his reading glasses to the end of his nose and peered at Evan over them. “Glad to see you drummed up the courage to come out, son. Have you told Reed yet?”

  Evan felt a surge of anger inside. Everything he’d read about coming out indicated he would have resistance from his parents. Their complete acceptance messed with his head. He’d mentally prepared himself to deal with shock and disbelief. He’d gone over in his head just what he’d say to justify his orientation. But every member of his family knew more about him than he knew about himself, apparently. Their easy acceptance left him floundering. He’d agonized for weeks about telling them, all for nothing. They still loved him. They didn’t care if he was gay. And holy shit, they knew he loved Reed! Evan knew exactly how Alice had felt when she slipped down the rabbit hole. He was confused and way out of his element.

  “No, I haven’t told Reed yet. Do you think he knows too?” Evan asked bitterly, his senses feeling a bit battered by how complacent his family was about his sexuality.

  “He might. That boy’s hard to read sometimes. Mark of a good quarterback. He makes it hard for the defense to know what he’s about to do.” Evan’s father nodded solemnly. “Make sure you tell him, boy.”

  Since Evan’s entire family already knew he was gay and in love with Reed, the only one left to tell was his best friend. Their acceptance made it possible for Evan to work up the courage to come out to Reed. But in an unusual twist, his sister had objections. Not to him telling Reed but when.