Page 28 of The Jock
He bit down on his lip, trying to funnel the pain in his heart to a physical sensation that would ground him. He wanted to be strong, but damn it, he wasn’t. He still cried himself to sleep some nights. He still askedWhyandWhat happenedand how did they go fromback on the same continentand smiley faces toI can’t do this. Forget you know mein the space of a few hours.
It was football, Justin knew. It was the team. It was Wes making first string. But knowing that didn’t change how much it hurt to be tossed aside—not even a second choice, but a non-choice. Nothing. All those pretty words in Paris, all those promises made over champagne and under the Eiffel Tower. None of it meant anything. None of it was real. Wes was always going to come back and be the footballer, the big man on campus.
And no big man on campus sucked dick. Ever.
Justin wanted to be happy for Wes. Wes had worked hard for what he’d earned. He’d seized his dreams and made them come true through sheer grit. He was going to be phenomenal. The trajectory of his life was straight for the stars.
It was hard to be happy for Wes, though, when his own heart was so broken. When they’d had hopes and dreams and had started to make tentative promises to each other.I would have come to every game to cheer you on if you asked me to.
Fuck. What would his dad say? Well, if he knew Wes Van de Hoek lived across the street, he’d probably ask Justin to go get an autograph for him. But if he knew that the man who broke Justin’s heart, who left him a broken mess all summer, was now fifty feet away…
He’d drive down and help Justin pack his shit, move him out, move him anywhere else. And then burn Wes’s jersey. In the middle of the street, so Wes could see.
A light winked on in an upstairs bedroom in Wes’s house. There were no curtains in the window, and the blinds were raised lopsidedly. Someone hauled the sash upward. A shape appeared: first broad, wide hands, taped at the knuckles. A chest. A wide, square neck and a defined jaw. A grim, glum face.
Wes.
Wes leaned into the open window frame, one arm over his head and resting on the glass. He stared blankly at the street, letting the wind ruffle his T-shirt.
It wasn’t enough to live across the street. Justin had to see Wes from his own bedroom?
Maybe he should call his dad. He hadn’t unpacked yet. He could move out today.
At least Wes hadn’t seen him. And Wes wasn’t looking for him, either. Why would he be? Justin was one face among a hundred thousand. He was forgettable, ignorable. He wasn’t the great Wes Van de Hoek, celebrated across the entire freaking state of Texas, it seemed. He’d started seeing Wes’s face on billboards an hour outside of Dallas.
A trio of girls dressed in spaghetti strap tanks and bandana-tied halter tops sauntered up the street, long, tanned legs gleaming beneath short shorts. The football players on the porch perked up, waving to the girls, and they waved back, called outHellos andHeys. One shielded her eyes and looked up at Wes’s open window. “Hey, big guy,” she called. “How’s it hanging?”
Justin’s fingers dug into the iron railing hard enough to hurt.
Wes waved, then backed away from the window. The girls bounced up the front steps of the jock house, and they joined the players on the porch for a beer before all six moved inside.
Wes’s window was a black hole, and no matter how hard Justin willed it, Wes never reappeared.
Justin stayed on the fire escape for hours, watching, waiting, just in case.
Chapter Ten
Laughter bubbled up from downstairs.Wes heard his friends’ deep guffaws, their loud smack talk. Heard the higher-pitched giggles and cheers from the girls who’d come by. Sandy and Lisa and Julie were sweet, and more than a few of the guys on the team were crushing hard on their All-American charm. They were smart and cute and funny and kind. Everything a Texas boy should want.
He rolled onto his side and stared at the wall next to his bed, at the pictures he’d tacked up. Over the summer, when it was just him in the house, he’d used the printer they’d all chipped in for to print out some generic pictures of Paris he’d found online. The Eiffel Tower, of course. The Seine. The market he and Justin had gone to, where he’d held Justin’s hand. The opera house, lit up at night. He’d taped the prints to the wall next to his bed and even put up the old print of the cowboy in front of the Eiffel Tower. When he lay on his side, Paris was all he could see.
The pictures stabbed him through the desiccated remains of his heart, each and every time.
It still hurt so horribly. Still felt like he’d taken a chain saw to his own chest, like he’d carved himself open and torn his insides out. It felt like he’d have that hollow, aching feeling in his chest forever.
His hand drifted under his pillow and squeezed the crumpled photo that lived there. He eyed his closed door, then pulled the photo out and unfolded it. Crease lines and crumples from where he’d balled the photo up in his fist carved white cracks and zigzag lines across Paris’s golden glow. The setting sun that night had scattered wildflowers across the evening sky, all the colors of West Texas’s fragile blooms above their heads. The Eiffel Tower was like a Monet on fire, glittering even without a single light turned on. In front of the tower, he and Justin mugged for the camera, Wes smiling like he’d found the secret ingredient to pure joy, Justin pretending to look fierce as he wore Wes’s cowboy hat. He was gazing at Justin, and it was all right there on his face. How in love he was with the man he’d wrapped his arm around for the first time. How he was thinking about kissing him in a few hours. How he was hoping Justin might be the one.
The colors were blurred where his tears had fallen and soaked through the paper. How many nights had he balled up the picture and sworn he’d throw it away, only to drag it back to his face and whisper Justin’s name? He didn’t even pretend to throw it away anymore. No, now it lived beneath his pillow, where he held it every night.
Footsteps bounded up the old wooden stairs, and he had just enough time to hide the photo again before his best friend shoved open his bedroom door.
“Dude,” Colton said, his eyes raking over Wes. “Come downstairs. The girls are here. We’re playing foosball.”
He’d heard the frantic spins of the levers, the crack of plastic against plastic. The wild cheers and the stomping of feet. Twelve football players living in an old house was a recipe for destruction. They were going to bust through the floors one day, or the walls were going to fall flat like they were living in a cartoon. And he’d be left in his bed, still curled on his side, still feeling like he wanted to die.
“I’m good,” he grunted.
“Dude.” Colton slipped into the room. He left the door open, though, so this wasn’t going to be when he finally called Wes out. No, this was just one of his regular drive-bys of concern, where he glared and shuffled his feet and then ultimately went back to the girls and the guys and the foosball and the beer. “C’mon, man. You gotta get out of your room sometime.”
