Page 27 of Cleats and Pumps

Owen held up his hands. “Dude, calm down. I just found out myself. He met some hotshot journalist in Corpus Christi this summer, and they hit it off. The guy recruited him to do an internship with a magazine up north. He didn’t know if he was going to take it until they offered a job after he graduates.”

I quickly forced the jealousy down. It wouldn’t do to lose my shit until I knew everything Owen did.

“Because you forced us to go to summer school with you, he’s got enough credits to take the semester off and still graduate next May.”

“Why do they need him now and not the spring?”

Owen laughed. “Because it’s football season. The magazine is sports-related, and they want to see how well he can cover the season.”

I shook my head. “He hates football… Well, maybe he doesn’t hate it, but he’s pretty neutral about it.” Owen looked at me funny before he got up to start unpacking again. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing, just need to finish cleaning this room up. Don’t you have to unpack?” he asked.

“Nah, they didn’t paint my room, so I didn’t have to do any packing. It’s the same as before we left summer school.” Owen shrugged and kept cleaning. “Owen, I know you have something to say, so say it!”

Owen stood and said, “You don’t know shit about Tommy, do you?”

“What? What does that mean?” I asked, fighting back the desire to call Owen a dumbass for even suggesting I didn’t know Tommy. Of course, I knew Tommy.

“He came to every one of your fucking games. He scrupulously documented your plays and kept track of your strengths and weaknesses. The fact that you don’t know that is why he isn’t here right now.”

Owen turned away from me, took a huge box off a shelf, and tossed it on the bed.

He turned back to me angrily and said, “You’ve taken Tommy for granted since you met him. He crushed on you the first damned time he saw you. He let you take the limelight and sat back, nurturing you all the years we were friends. But you sit over there and say shit like he didn’t like football. Truth is, I don’t know if he liked it or not. That wasn’t the issue. He liked you; then he loved you. Then he gave up, and that was more about saving himself than anything. I’m not mad at you for not loving him back. That’s just emotions, and we can’t feel what you don’t, but taking him for granted sucked to watch. Now he’s gone, and it isn’t just you that lost him. I have too.” Owen started throwing clothes out of the box onto his bed before he finallyturned back and said, “You fucked up, and that’s something you’ve got to come to terms with. Nothing I say is going to fix that.”

Owen went back to unpacking, and I could tell I’d been dismissed. I slunk back to my room and brooded. Finally, I wrote a long email to Tommy, apologizing for being a jerk. I told him I was happy about the internship and hoped it worked out for him.

“When, or if, you can forgive me, I miss you and would like to reconnect.” I ended the message and sent it off.

I never got a response, and my heart broke when I finally realized I’d tossed everything away by my indecision and fear of committing to my sexuality and, more importantly, to my friend.

11

Tommy

“Youngman,”theguywho’d offered me the internship said, “you’ve got a real knack for this. When you graduate, you’ve got a job waiting for you here.”

“Wow, thanks!” I said and for the first time in a long time I felt excitement over my future. The fact was, I loved sports reporting! I took the internship to avoid Amos and fell head over heels for the work. Because I’d spent the last three years analyzing football plays, I realized I was damned good at it. That fall, I followed plays, sat in on meetings with other reporters, and talked about the different players’ skills and abilities. I also advised a few reporters on how to pick apart the plays to give insight on what could be done to improve or, at the very least, predict how they would play the rest of the season.

By the time the season ended, I wasn’t thinking so much about Amos, or at least not obsessing about Amos, and I’d been offered a full-time job starting next summer.

Okay, yeah, I was lying to myself. I thought about Amos a lot. I wondered how his career was going and how he liked being ona professional team. I wondered what it would have been like if we could have dated in real life, with me writing about his career from a personal perspective.

Not that football tolerated such things—two openly gay men in a relationship, one in sports journalism, the other an NFL star. And yeah, Amos would be a star. He was made for the game.

Amos was a touchy subject. I knew I’d been a coward by running away, but when I met Clifford Price, and he half-heartedly offered me an internship, I decided to accept for no other reason than to avoid Amos.

I’d spent the weeks in Corpus Christi pouting and moping. I figured the internship was an answer from the universe— my way of avoiding the guy and never having to deal with him again.

The last email I got from him stabbed my heart though. I hadn’t opened it for several weeks because no one reads email anymore. The only reason I did was to check the status of the scholarship I’d put on hold for the internship.

I then cried for a full day before I put the whole Amos thing behind me, convinced it was for the best. One of my great uncles once told me the best way to get over a relationship was to stay away from your loved one for six months. I was determined to get over Amos, so if six months with no communication was all I needed, then by God, that’s what I’d do.

I returned to the university at the end of January and had another crying fit at seeing Amos’s and my old room empty. His being drafted meant he was no longer at school. I decided not to move back in, knowing living there without him would kill me. Owen agreed to let me room with him during our final semester.

Time flew by, thank goodness, and although I knew Owen was still in contact with Amos, I intentionally didn’t lean on him, nor on any of the contacts I’d made, to learn more about how he was doing. The truth was I didn’t want to know. I was past my six-month hiatus, but I still missed him, but damn if I was going to give in now.

I graduated in May and started work in June with no downtime in-between. The magazine wanted me to help them cover the rookie training camp that began in mid-July. The work was a lot less hectic during the summer than in the fall, and I was happy about that since I had a lot to learn before I was thrown into the work.

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