Page 25 of The Jock
* * *
Rain fell.He watched the drops smash into the pool, watched ripples form and crash against each other. He couldn’t cry anymore, so the world was crying for him, building an external lake of his sorrows.Thanks, God. Did me a solid on that one.
Summer rains were sticky things, but they cleared the air, beat the dust to the ground before evaporating into a sweat-slick weight that hung chest-high. Justin hadn’t been able to take a deep breath for weeks now. What was another couple of days?
Footsteps splashed across the patio, and his dad ducked under the awning that covered the pool deck. He rubbed his hand through his wet hair, soaked from the ten-foot run from their back door. Justin had come out here be alone, but apparently, his dad had other plans.
“Beer?” A longneck, offered as an opening gambit. Justin hadn’t said more than a dozen words to his mom or dad since he’d gotten the text and turned off his phone. He’d spent a week facedown in his bed. For all that, there was a restless energy humming through him as he studied the debris of his broken dreams, the ruins of the fantasies he’d built for him and Wes. The summer they’d planned to share. Fall, and how they promised to try. And what came after. Ever after, even.
He had no idea what to do now. No idea what to think. His thoughts chased themselves endlessly as he berated himself for thinking he and Wes were more than what they’d been all along. What had he done? Taken a study-abroad fling and turned it into dreams of wedding bells?
But what about that kiss at the airport? That had meant something. He’d felt it. That had been a promise, Wes giving Justin something he could hold on to, that he could remember.
No. That kiss had been a goodbye. It had been all the things Wes had been too afraid—too cowardly—to say to Justin’s face.
Wes Van de Hoek, now one of the nation’s top five college ball players. Justin had wandered into the living room as his dad watched ESPN the night before, and he’d ended up leaning against the couch through the Division I-A news and Southeastern Conference highlights. There was Texas’s football team, looping on SportsCenter. There was the quarterback—he knew his name now: Colton Hall. Knew he was Wes’s best friend. Knew he ate a box of Froot Loops a day and ran naked across a stadium on a bet to win a PlayStation once.
And then there was jersey number 87, rushing down the field. Justin had walked out of the living room, right as his dad asked him to sit and join him.
Sometime in the next two weeks, a package would arrive on his porch from the university’s team store. Inside would be the 87 jersey Justin had ordered. He’d paid extra to have the back lettered, something flirty that could also be explained away.<3 Van de Hoek. If he hadn’t been so cute about it, he could have given the jersey to his dad. Now he’d just throw it away.
“Justin…” His dad took his silence as a kind of acceptance, a tacit agreement that he could stay. He threw himself onto the chaise lounge beside Justin, sighing as he sank into the cushion. “Weather sucks,” he grumbled.
Justin took the beer from his dad. Sipped. It tasted like nothing, but the bubbles reminded him of champagne, and Paris, and splitting a bottle after the ballet. His cowboy at the opera, holding Justin when he tried to hide how he was crying in the fourth act.I loved you so much that night.
Every night, every day, all the little ways he’d fallen in love with Wes, again and again and again—
“I, uh. I thought I’d be doing this after your first girl broke your heart.”
Weeks without talking, and that’s what his dad was going to open with? Justin sent him a scathing stare. Set down the beer and started to push himself up.
“No, wait, Justin. Please. Stay. I’m trying. I have no idea what to do, but I want to help. If this was a girl situation, I’d do what I did with my friends when we got our hearts broken. Get drunk, be stupid, cry it out. Not be alone. I don’t know what you need, and I don’t know what you want, but if I can help… I want to.”
Justin blinked. That might have been more words from his dad at once than he’d heard in years. His gaze drifted to his dad, soaking wet from the rain, sitting beside him, holding out his hand and asking him to stay.
His dad didn’t have to be here.
He picked up his beer and chugged, upending half the bottle down his throat. His dad sighed, a tired smile tugging up one side of his face. “College is teaching you all kinds of things.”
He could leave. Or he could stay, let his dad try to talk to him, see what wisdom he would try to shovel into Justin. Sighing, Justin sank into the lounge. “I’m going to need more beer if you want to get drunk and stupid.”
“I’ve got more inside.” His dad’s smile faded. “I bought some for the two of us. Your mom is at a church night with her friends.”
“And you stayed to get drunk with your son?”
“I stayed to talk to you.”
“So talk, Dad. What do you want to say to me? How I need to get over it? How I’ve been moping for a month, and what good has it gotten me? How I’m being ridiculous? That it was only three weeks?”
Silence. Justin gnashed his teeth. Glared up at the awning.
“I knew I wanted to marry your mother five days after I met her.” His dad held up his hand, fingers spread. “Five days. I saw her every day for a week, and I knew. She was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The woman I wanted to have children with.”
Justin squirmed. His eyes slid to the pool, to the raindrops. They’d wanted children, and all they got was him. Something about the pregnancy. His mom couldn’t have any more children after him. Sometimes he wondered, if she could go back, have the chance to wipe him away, would she? Would she sayNo, not this one, I’ll try again next month? Would another egg and sperm have created an easier, less complicated child? Who led a less complicated life?
“I’m not going to tell you that you need to get over something that lasted three weeks, not if it meant as much to you as it did. I saw you happier than you’ve ever been. Never, not once, have you smiled at us like you did at the airport. Or said that many words to us in one afternoon. Not since you were eight years old. Whatever happened… Jesus, Justin, you were happy. And I’m fucking sorry that you’re not now.”
“Dad…”
