Page 71 of Puck You Very Much
“Come on, bro,” he said, “if some hot babe is sitting on your face every night, you should take the chance to crow about it a little.”
I burst out laughing mostly because he’d made yet another Levi Dunn comment. Pain in the ass though he was, I could always count on him for a laugh.
“Are you actually in love with Quinn,” I asked, “or…?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“An honest one. Since you drew first blood with the personal questions, I figure I’m perfectly within my rights.”
“There’s no such thing as a personal question on this team.”
Levi had a point. While only tacitly understood, nothing was supposed to be off-limits for teammates. The Larkin Lions were a brotherhood, and my teammates flesh and blood. That would only make this way worse. If they learned the truth, I could imagine how far the shit would fly.
“If nothing’s off-limits, why don’t you answer my question?” I asked.
“No problem, bro. I love him to death. I don’t go around telling people that, but I tellhimenough, if you know what I mean.”
“What does it feel like?”
“You’re the one who’s in love. Shouldn’t you know?”
I wanted to slug him—you know, if he wasn’t four inches taller than me, and thirty or forty pounds heavier.
“I guess what I’m asking is how did you know?” I asked. “Tell me about the moment you stopped and told yourself,Holy shit, this is it!”
“Didn’t happen like that, bro. There wasn’t a moment that I fell in love with Quinn. I always was.”
“What do you mean you always were?”
“Quinn and I knew each other in elementary school. I used to bully the shit out of him. I totally didn’t get it at the time, but I was in love with him. I just couldn’t handle it. Acting like an asshole was my dumb-fuck way of dealing with it.”
“Because you were scared?”
He shrugged. I felt sort of relieved at his mild reaction. I totally would’ve expected him to lash out at the mention of fear. Guys like him insist that the word doesn’t belong in their vocabulary.
“I don’t think I was scared,” he said. “Just confused. I grew up thinking that guys like me are supposed to like girls, and that’s pretty much it.”
“What about gay people?”
“Oh sure, I knew about that stuff, but figured gay people came in short supply. I didn’t think you could mostly like girls, but also like a guy… and that my feelings for the guy would be way more powerful than what I’d felt for any of the girls.”
“But you didn’t, like, have this eureka moment? Nothing that screamed L-O-V-E to you?”
“That’s just in the romance stories, bro. Well, maybe some of the cliches are true. For me, there actually was a warm, fuzzy feeling. I know that sounds like something totally mushy for pussies, but it’s the truth.”
I sputtered laughter because that last remark proved the most Levi Dunn comment yet. I couldn’t deny he’d struck a nerve, too. I’d felt warm and fuzzy around Zane Hirst, a huge departure from the days in which he’d made me want to throw up, but nevertheless.
“But there was more,” Levi said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about him.”
“Oh yeah, I get that.”
Levi arched his eyebrows like I’d confessed to murder… or had proven his original point. In truth, I didn’t see the difference.
“Uh, um, I mean, I can totally see how you would feel that way,” I said.
He half-smiled as if to say I hadn’t hidden jack shit from him and that he was so on to me.
“But it was more than that,” he continued. “I wouldn’t give up. No matter how many times he shot me down in the beginning, I wouldn’t quit. You know why?”
