Page 57 of The Play

He liked to win, sure, but he wasn’t going to be an asshole about it.

These guys were already losing by three scores. It would be shitty to rub it in, and Deacon tried hard not to be shitty, even when his entire self felt like it was inflamed with temper.

“Shit,” the guy said, shaking his head. “That’s some fucking move you got there, Harris.”

“Thanks,” Deacon said, grinning.

They went only two more plays before they had to punt.

It was hard to recover from a loss of yards on the first down, and they never had.

As Deacon jogged back to the bench, Nate caught up to him.

“Jesus, what a move,” Nate said. “I didn’t know what you were doing, right away, but the way you moved after, what a fucking work of art.”

Deacon just shrugged. He was pretty sure Riley was wrong and there was a lot of harm in continuing to let Nate’s hero worship continue. He needed to nip this in the bud, before Nate started getting even more grandiose ideas, like somehow that person Deacon wanted to come home to was going to be him, someday.

And he wasn’t ever going to be.

Deacon would rather it be nobody than the wrong guy.

Anyone other than Grant.

He shed Nate by moving down the sideline after the linebacker had already headed towards the bench, choosing instead to stand by Beck.

At least he wouldn’t gaze up at him with stars in his eyes—because those stars were reserved entirely for someone else.

“So I take it the fighting for him didn’t go too well,” Beck said quietly a few moments later.

“How do you know?” Deacon asked, even though he already knew the answer to that question.

Beck shot him a look. “Because you’ve been in a pissed-off mood, since. You didn’t try to step in and fix everything, did you?”

“I, ah, no. Not really.” At least not exactly. That hadn’t been the problem, anyway. He hoped though, that Beck wouldn’t ask what the problem had been. Because what else could he say other than, the problem is me? I’m the problem. My whole existence is why Grant can’t be with me.

Somehow, that hurt even more, nearly a week later, than it had the first time he’d realized it.

At some point, he’d expected his anger would fade, and he wouldn’t be so pissed off anymore. He’d just be hurt. And sad. He’d be sad, and full of regret.

“Then what happened?” Beck asked.

“It’s just not . . .it doesn’t matter what I want, or even what he wants. It’s not in the cards, Beck.”

Beck looked floored. “So you’re just going to . . .let it go? Let him go?”

“It was a pipe dream, anyway.” Grant Green had always been a pipe dream. But the problem with pipe dreams was that sometimes they burst, unexpectedly and with force.

Sometimes that wasn’t anyone’s fault. It just was.

“Micah and me, that was a pipe dream. And we made it happen, anyway. We made it real, and we made it to last,” Beck argued.

“Oh, was that what you were thinking of when you took yourselves off to a wedding chapel in Vegas?” Deacon teased, because the teasing, the focus on something other than the train wreck of his own love life, was easier.

“We weren’t really thinking, at all, actually,” Beck admitted, which Deacon had already guessed. “We just knew we wanted to pick each other—we needed to pick each other. And when it was over, when we were sober and back home, it was easy to keep doing that. It might’ve been fast. It might’ve been impulsive, but it was still exactly what we wanted.”

Deacon didn’t want to hate Beck. He liked him, actually, a whole hell of a lot, and had from the moment he’d been drafted by the Condors last year. But it still stung, what he said. The happy ending he was going to get that Deacon couldn’t see for himself.

“Look at you all earnest and fucking in love,” Deacon said, roughly, nudging him in the side with an elbow. Trying to keep things light and joking, but probably failing.

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