Chapter 4
4
BECK
“ D ude, that was fucking awesome !” Javi shouted in my ear as he hooked his arm around my neck. Jesus, this guy had no sense of personal space or what a normal volume was.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, pushing his arm off me.
“You had him tapping out in three seconds! Three! That’s, like, a world record or something!” He was practically dancing around me as I walked toward the locker room, his black hair flopping where it had come loose from his topknot, so excited that it made me smile.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. I’d only gotten Gavin down so quickly because he hadn’t even put up a fight, and then he’d immediately tapped out. It was like he’d completely given up, and for whatever reason, that really disturbed me.
Gavin was a fighter. An angry, mean, violent fighter, and he always gave every match his all, no matter how the odds were stacked against him. Especially when it was me.
But today—the past few days, really—he’d been totally lackluster. I didn’t know what was going on with him, and I kept telling myself I didn’t fucking care.
I waved to Chris, one of my teammates. He gave me an upnod as he passed us.
“It’s no wonder everyone wanted you to be captain,” Javi said. He could talk for hours without pause. “You’re the best on the team. You should be proud, man.”
A week after the snowstorm, Coach had told everyone that we’d be voting a new captain in.
Just like Gavin said.
He’d sat in the corner like a surly cat, glaring at everyone. And every single person had voted for me—except for him. He’d voted for Javi.
I shoved Javi playfully and said, “Yeah, I am. Proud and tired. Coach has been working us to the bone this week.”
“Yes he fucking has,” he agreed, pushing open the door to the locker room and holding it for me.
“Thanks,” I said. I wanted a shower so fucking bad. I was drenched in sweat, my balls were sticking to my cup, and I didn’t even want to sniff any part of myself. I already knew I stank.
“You wanna grab a drink later? Some of the guys are going down to The Taproom, it’s half off for students tonight.”
“Maybe, I dunno. I have a test in a couple days and really need to study.”
“Okay, man. Next time.”
“Next time,” I agreed, grabbing my towel and heading to the showers. I didn’t spend a long time in there since I just wanted to go home, and after I was out and dressed, about to grab my bag and leave, Javi rounded the lockers to my right. “Hey, yo! Beck! Coach wants to see your ass!” There was a snicker that echoed with Javi’s shouted words, and then he said, “Not your ass ass, but you know what I mean!”
Fuck. “Yeah, thanks, Javi,” I called back. Coach never wanted to see me unless I’d fucked up. Which was practically never.
I stuffed my bag back in my locker and glanced around for Gavin, who was usually glaring at me from his locker, but I didn’t see him.
Something uncomfortable churned through me, a sinking sensation that something was wrong, but I had no clue what.
I made my way to Coach’s office and knocked on the closed door.
“Come in!”
I opened it, shutting it gently behind me, and stood in the middle of the room. I was hoping this was just some quick discussion about being captain or something.
Coach Troutman waved his hand toward the chair, so I sat down with a sigh. “I’m gonna get right to the point, because I’m really worried. About Gavin,” he clarified.
I furrowed my brow, not really sure where he was going with this or why he was talking to me about it. Probably because I was the captain now and needed to look out for everyone on the team.
Including Gavin.
“What, exactly, has you worried, Coach?”
“I think he’s going through something in his personal life that’s affecting his mood, his performance, his mental health. He won’t talk to me and I doubt he has a therapist. I don’t think he’s close with anyone on the team anymore, either. I know you two don’t get along very well, but I was wondering if you’d try talking to him. Could be a good opportunity to quash whatever issues you’ve got, see if maybe he’d open up to you. I don’t know, I just have a feeling he’s on a fast track to something self-destructive, and I’m ready to get other faculty involved. Just wanted to see if we could try talking to him first.”
Guilt wormed its way through me, souring every good feeling from earlier—because I’d noticed it, too. Noticed it and dismissed it, because Gavin was a homophobic asshole.
I sighed. “Yeah. I’ll try and talk to him.” Fuck, I really didn’t want to. I already knew it would be utterly pointless.
Gavin Forster hated me. He’d rather die than open up to me about anything personal.
“Great. Thank you, Beck. Let me know what he says and if we can help somehow.”
I nodded, then pushed against the arms of the chair to stand.
“Is he still here? Do you know?”
“I think he left,” I said.
“Damn it,” Coach muttered. “Do you have his cell?”
“No. Did you want me to talk to him today?”
Coach shrugged. “I thought the sooner the better. Here.” He grabbed his phone, presumably to pull up Gavin’s number and give it to me.
I didn’t want his fucking number.
But when Coach wrote it down on a sticky note, I took it and slipped it into my pocket.
I said goodbye and left the office, then walked back to my locker with a heavy fucking heart.
I didn’t want to call Gavin. He would just hang up as soon as he heard my voice—probably call me names before hanging up, too. This was ridiculous. I should just tell Coach to call Gavin himself.
I was pulling my bag out of my locker when a bang echoed from the bathroom stalls. I thought everyone had left, so it startled me. There was another bang, and then a growl of frustration.
Nobody but Gavin made noises like that, fucking animal that he was.
I took in a deep, deep breath, tipping forward to rest my forehead against the cool metal of the locker, and closed my eyes.
Okay. I could do this. I just had to ask him what the fuck was wrong, and when he snarled at me and called me names, I could walk away and tell Coach I’d tried.
I shoved off the locker and headed toward the bathroom. The stalls were in a separate space to the left of the showers, and three of the four doors were wide open. The last one was shut, and I could see his shoes under the partition.
I could hear him, too.
He was crying.
I sucked in a breath at the pitiful sound, my entire body tensing as an anxious energy thrummed under my skin.
I didn’t fucking care that he was crying. I didn’t care what he had to cry about. I should be glad he was crying, that he was in some kind of pain.
I should be. But I wasn’t.
I stepped silently toward the stall, listening to the quiet sniffles and intermittent sobs, every single one piercing through the armor I’d worn around him for so many years, ripping it to shreds like it was made of cotton.
It had been a long, long time since I’d seen Gavin cry.
I paused outside the door, about to knock, when I noticed it wasn’t latched. A thud sounded in the stall, like he’d punched the wall, and I seriously debated just leaving. Just leave him to whatever meltdown he was in the middle of and call him later.
But I knew I couldn’t do that.
I jerked the door open and wished I hadn’t.
Gavin had his back to me, one foot up on the seat of the toilet, his sweatpants pulled down just past the globes of his ass, all that firm, pale skin on display. His torso was twisted around as he?—
Shoved a needle into his ass.
My gaze flew up to his, my lips parting in bewilderment. He didn’t move, just stared into my eyes for so long that I almost forgot what I’d just seen.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his face streaked with wet trails of tears, and he looked so despondent that every bad memory I had of him didn’t matter, in that moment. I had the insane urge to gather him in my arms and tell him everything was okay, and that fucking scared the shit out of me.
I looked back down at his ass, at the syringe he was still holding, at the needle embedded in his muscle. Then I noticed a little bag that was laying on the closed lid of the toilet. It was open, and a small vial sat in the center.
I’d seen something like that before.
“Gavin,” I said, my voice too hoarse, too rough, like shards of glass had embedded themselves in my throat. It felt like it. Never in my life had I thought he would ever do something like this. Which seemed stupid, because he wasn’t a good person anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I shouldn’t have felt…heartbroken.
For him?
I raised my eyes back to his, and the change that came over him was instantaneous.
His lip curled up, his nostrils flared, and he ripped the needle from his ass and flung it to the ground, quickly jerking his pants back up. Then he lunged at me, lowering his head like a linebacker and wrapping his arms around my waist. He knocked me back a few feet, before I could get my bearings, before I could shake off the anguish that had started to choke me. He tried to grab my leg and lift, to knock me off balance and get me on the ground, but I turned into him at the last second, throwing my weight into his. He grunted and stumbled back, still holding my leg with one arm, dragging me with him as he slammed into the wall. I fell against him, forcing him to drop my leg. He wrapped his arms around my torso and shoved his face into my chest, springing off the wall with one foot and getting enough momentum to actually make me fall back on my ass.
He was making all these desperate, frantic noises that grated on my heart because they were saturated in fear.
He knew it was over. He knew he was done. But he’d fight until the bitter end, because that’s just who he was.
Gavin snaked an arm under my neck and locked his other arm over the front of my throat. He moved like a wolverine, quick and vicious as he scissored his legs around one of mine and squeezed. I forced a hand beneath the forearm pressing down on my throat and gritted my teeth. When he lifted his head, those wild amber eyes locking onto mine, I saw everything.
Every bit of fear, despair, self-loathing, confusion, pain, and a darkness that had never been there before.
That steel wall had disappeared completely, and for the first time in eight years, I was seeing him .
“Gavin,” I rasped, trapped in those eyes.
He made a strangled, tortured sound in the back of his throat, and for a moment, I thought he might tell me that every single second of the last eight years had been a mistake.
But the moment passed. Gavin threw up those steel walls faster than I could blink, and I wondered if I’d just imagined it all.
“Fuck you, Beck,” he hissed with more venom than he’d ever shot at me. He whipped his arm out from under my neck and smacked his palm into my forehead, knocking the back of my head into the tiled floor.
“Fuck!” I shouted, pain exploding through my skull. Gavin was up and off me in a second, running out of the bathroom.
“Gavin!” I shouted, sitting up.
But he was gone.
I sat there for minutes. Hours. I didn’t know. Just sat there, feeling more numb than I’d ever felt.
And then I pushed to my feet, grabbed the small container he’d left behind, picked up the needle, zipped it all up, and went to Coach’s office.
Despite everything he’d done, everything he was, I still felt like I was betraying him.
Nobody on the team talked about anything but Gavin for the next two weeks.
About his positive test results. About his disappearance. About his lack of integrity.
Nobody asked why he’d done it. Nobody asked if there was something more going on beneath the surface. Everyone just skated right across all that ice, and my mind could only conjure up awful images of Gavin trapped below, lost in the blue, drowning in the cold, cold darkness.
Alone.
And no matter how hard I tried not to, he was all I could think about. The sticky note with his number had been sitting on my nightstand for weeks, just gathering dust.
Every day I thought about calling him, and every day I pushed the thought aside. What the fuck would I even say?
But I couldn’t get his eyes out of my head.
The utter hopelessness in them.
I hadn’t seen him since that day. He hadn’t come back to the gym. Coach and a few other faculty members sought him out, tested him, and then quietly removed him from the team and gave him a serious warning. Coach said his standing with the university was up in the air and he might not be able to graduate, that the dean was seriously considering expulsion.
My loathing for the person he’d become came nowhere close to overshadowing the sorrow in my heart for the boy he’d been. For the life he could’ve chosen for himself, but hadn’t.
Flickers of memories began to flit in and out of my mind, and I found myself pulling open the drawer on my nightstand, rummaging through all the junk until I found the picture I kept in there.
I didn’t look at it very often. Hadn’t looked at it in over three years, in fact. It brought up too much grief, like he’d died instead of just…changed.
I supposed in a way, the person I’d known had died.
I shoved the drawer shut and stared down at the picture, my hand shaking a little.
It was always a punch to the gut, seeing us how we were back then.
I had my arm thrown around his shoulder and was staring up at him with the goofiest grin. His arm was around my shoulder, too, but he was giving me bunny ears and smiling at the camera, mischief in those golden eyes. His hair was long and shaggy, hanging over his eyes, his face soft and warm.
We were both wearing our jiu-jitsu gis, sweaty from class and standing in the parking lot of the gym we trained at.
I was an instructor there now. But back then, we’d taken classes together, grappled and roughhoused, messed around when we should’ve been paying attention. Always together.
We were twelve in the photograph, and I’d just discovered disposable cameras. All the pictures I took featured him or us. Laughing, smiling, making dumb faces. This had been the last picture on the roll, and I’d told him to make it count because my mom told me she wasn’t buying another one.
He’d said, “All right, I’ll make it count. But just to two,” then gave me bunny ears. I hadn’t even noticed, was too busy loving the way the setting sun lit up his eyes like molten amber.
It wasn’t a profound memory or moment. Just a small, simple slice of time in the eight years we’d spent together. A snapshot of a past which, at one point, lifted me up. Now it felt like dead weight I couldn’t shake off.
“You promise you’ll always be my best friend?”
“Yeah, I promise. Of course I promise.”
“You sure?”
“How many times do I gotta say it? I promise I’ll always be your best friend. Nothing will ever change that. I can’t think of a single thing that would ever make me stop loving you. You’re the sky and I’m the stars, Becky. We’re stuck together. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I shoved the picture back in the drawer and slammed it shut.
Then, before I could think about it, I picked up the sticky note and started punching in the numbers on my phone.
Hit call.
My heart was slamming against my ribcage as the line trilled, the sound battering at my nerves.
The ringing stopped abruptly. “Hello?”
I froze up when his voice came over the line. The raw, scratchy sound of it, like he’d been doing nothing but swallowing gravel for two weeks, was like sandpaper on my heart. But relief washed over me, because he was there. He hadn’t…
Hadn’t…
Hadn’t what?
I rubbed my thumb and middle finger into my temples. “Hey. It’s me,” I said. “It’s Beck.”
There was silence for so long that I pulled the phone away from my ear to see if he’d hung up, but the call was still connected.
And then he started laughing, but it was weak. Forced. More sad than cruel. “Well hey, Beck ,” he said with faux cheer. “What can I do for you? No, hold on, I know. Did you call to tell me how nice it is to have me gone? Can you breathe a little easier now? Or did you just want to gloat about being better than me in every single fucking way? How the fuck did you even get my number anyway?”
“Coach Troutman,” I said, ignoring his other words.
“Mm. Of course. The two biggest do-gooders I’ve ever met.”
I ignored that, too. Got right to the point. “What’s going on with you? Seriously, Gavin, is something…is he…” I didn’t even know how to form the question, didn’t even know what I was asking in the first place. Because I didn’t have a single fucking clue what might possibly be going on with him. If it wasn’t his dad, if he’d just woken up one day and decided to use steroids, then he really was lost. To himself, to me, to the world.
What the fuck was I thinking, he was already lost to me.
There was another long bout of silence, and then his voice had gained a wealth of menace and strength when he finally spoke again. “Now you give a shit? Now you ask me? It’s a little fucking late for that. Fuck off, Beck. I’m blocking your number. Again.” I thought I heard his breath hitch, but I had no idea. “Just go back to your perfect little life and keep pretending I don’t exist.”
There was an audible click when he hung up.
It echoed in the hollowness that that entire conversation had excavated inside of me. I’d always given a shit, I’d tried to ask him a hundred times what the fuck was going on, and he pushed me away every single time.
I shouldn’t have expected that to go any other way, and I hated the ugly disappointment it stirred up.
But if I had known that was my last chance to try and help Gavin, I would have done everything in my power to save him instead of just sitting there with my head in my hands.