Chapter 7 #2
I tried to look inward and decide what I was feeling. “No? I mean, we’ll see how it shakes out, and Pete isn’t the guy I’d have picked to come out to first if I’d been thinking, but no, I’m not sorry.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Bubs said.
I managed a smile. “Yeah, I trust you but, you know, at this point, I’m done worrying. If you do tell someone, don’t sweat it.”
“I had guessed about you, actually.”
“Yeah? How?” I straightened, wondering what part of my eighteen-plus-year facade I’d fucked up.
“Last year.” Bubs shrugged. “I saw you a couple of times right here in this gym, looking at—” He cut himself off and nodded toward the front doors. “Him.”
I stared at the lobby area. Sure enough, there was Miles, dressed in athletic wear but not the shorts and sleeveless T-shirt he usually wore to work out. He was peering around the gym, and the moment his gaze met mine, he began working his way between the machines toward me.
Bubs tapped my shoulder with his fist. “Gonna go do some cardio. Good luck.”
I didn’t ask how he knew I needed luck, just nodded my gratitude.
Bubs passed Miles in between the rowing machines, giving him a sharp look, but as far as I could tell, no words.
Miles ignored him and jogged my way. When he reached me, he didn’t stop, though.
Instead, he gestured with his head farther down the hallway.
I closed my open mouth and followed him back out of sight of the main floor.
Halfway to the men’s room, Miles glanced around and then said, “Hey, Logan.”
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” I asked.
“It’s my lunch period.”
“At eleven in the morning?”
He spread his hands. “What can I say, the schedule’s insane. But yeah, first lunch. I couldn’t get you off my mind all morning. I tried to text, but you weren’t answering.”
“My phone’s in my locker.” I didn’t tell him it was to avoid the temptation that was googling Miles Buckner.
“Ah. I thought I’d check the gym on the off chance you were here.”
“Okay. Here I am. Now what?”
Miles tilted his head as if trying to puzzle out something about me. “We need to talk. Not now, not here, but somewhere.”
“What, your fiancée isn’t enough to keep you busy?”
Miles’s eyes widened. “I guess you haven’t seen any of the video of Avery that’s trending.”
“Nope.” I folded my arms. “Why don’t you give me the TL;DR?”
The grin I’d remembered and craved spread across Miles’s face. “Okay. Avery’s dad is an asshole, Avery’s a lesbian, and she’s engaged to Rachel.”
My heart stuttered. “What? Your Rachel?”
“Yep.”
“So how the fuck did she end up also engaged to you?”
Miles’s grin softened. “It’s a long story. Can I tell it to you? Later?”
A young guy came out of the bathroom and passed between us with a curious glance at Miles.
When he was gone, Miles said, “I have basketball after school, but we’re done by six. If I call you, will you pick up?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Sure.” I owed him that much, even if my mind hadn’t been reeling at the idea that no, Miles wasn’t engaged to a woman. I felt a smile try to take over my face.
“Cool. Great.” Miles rocked on the balls of his feet, staring at my mouth like he wanted to do something else. “Still in the same apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“So, I’ll call. Talk to you then, I guess.”
I looked at Miles, at the width of his shoulders and the blueness of his eyes, and wished.
Except there was a year of bullshit between us, most of it on my side.
Even though I’d just come out to my captain, I didn’t have the right to go up on my toes and kiss Miles.
No matter how much I wanted to. “Later,” I told him and jogged back to the boys on the gym floor.
That was perhaps the most distracted workout I ever did. Bubs grabbed me after half an hour and said, “Get your ass out of here before you injure something.”
“I’m fine.”
“I call bullshit. Go do your laundry or something.”
I nudged Bubs, a soft shoulder-check. “Thanks. Really.”
“I’ll ride herd on the rookies. Pete’s gone anyhow. Get out of here.”
Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I went home and actually did laundry. My roommates were in class, so there was no one to watch me cleaning the bathroom, then the kitchen like a madman. When I started cleaning the inside of the refrigerator, I knew I was in trouble.
By five-thirty, the apartment had never been so pristine. Noah had fled to his room, after I yelled at him for making a mess in the kitchen with his after-class snack. I’d changed my jeans once and my shirt twice.
My phone chimed.
Miles: ~ Hey. I’m downstairs.
I fumbled to text back: ~ Don’t come up.
Logan: ~ I mean, my roommate is home.
Logan: ~ I’ll come down.
Calling, “Heading out,” to Noah so he’d know he was safe to make himself food, I grabbed my winter jacket, stuffed my feet into heavy sneakers, and let myself out of the apartment. We were the second floor of a duplex, so I took the stairs down two at a time, then froze in the entry.
I’m about to get my heart stomped on again, aren’t I? But I owed Miles that deep apology, and some small part of me clung to hope. He’d come to find me at the gym, to tell me he and Avery weren’t actually engaged. That suggested maybe he wasn’t as done with my bullshit as I’d thought.
Miles’s silver Porsche was parked at the curb three spaces down. I walked along the wet sidewalk, pulled the passenger door open, and got in.
Miles looked my way. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
He didn’t put the car in gear. “I don’t quite know where to go. Avery’s at my house, and while she’d go to the basement or somewhere to give us privacy if I asked…”
“Yeah, no.” I didn’t want to imagine her hovering barely out of sight for this.
“And your roommates are home, and Eugene weather is fucking with us for any of the places we used to go.”
Miles and I had loved being outdoors together, biking, hiking. We had a dozen quiet spots where we’d dared steal a kiss. Sadly, the leaden gray skies overhead were pissing on us with a wintery mix of rain and a few pellets of sleet, and none of those refuges were really sheltered.
“Maybe drive,” I suggested. “Find a place to park. Maybe that old farm we biked to, that one time?”
“Good idea. Except.”
“Except?”
Miles turned to me, his brows furrowed. “If you decide you need to get away from me, like, immediately, you’d be stranded out there with no way home.”
I couldn’t help snorting. “Dude, I guarantee you’re still the Miles I knew. If I needed to run that bad, you’d give me your Porsche to drive off in, and hang out on that falling-down porch yourself, waiting for a Lyft.”
Miles chuckled and God, I’d missed that sound. “Okay. Old farm it is.”
We drove in silence except for the swish of the wipers. Words loomed in my head like an avalanche, waiting to come roaring down, where even a basic, “How are you?” would set the cascade loose. I stared at the gray scenery and Miles paid attention to the roads in the drizzling sleet.
“How slick is the pavement?” I asked after a bit. “Maybe we should stick closer to home.”
“Nah, not that bad.” He took the turn onto the county road.
Five more minutes, and he left the pavement onto the dirt lane we’d decided to explore that summer day.
The track twisted and turned through cedars and evergreens, their heavy branches dripping and dark in the looming dusk.
After a quarter-mile, the lane opened out to a clearing with the remains of an old wooden farmhouse.
Even on a sunny summer day, we’d decided the roof and floor looked too iffy to explore. On this cold January evening, Miles simply pulled over near the foot of the stairs and put the car in park.
“So.” He took off his seatbelt and turned to me.
“Wait.” I unbuckled too and pivoted as much as I could in the seat.
“Let me go first.” I cleared my throat. “I am so, so sorry about how that whole day went down. And about the stuff I texted. I was… Okay, no excuse, but I was in shock. I’d spent a month anticipating that evening, gathering the courage, and then everything shifted under my feet.
I handled it really badly. I wasn’t fair to you. ”
“Fuck fair.” Miles stared at me. “Do you have any idea how scared I was?”
“Huh?”
“I thought maybe you were dead.” Miles scrubbed his face with the heels of his hands.
“You vanished. All I knew was, you had practice and then a tape day. You were supposed to be done at three, maybe three-thirty. Then back to my place by four, so we could get dressed together and shit bricks together over the speech.”
“I’m sorry—”
He waved me down. “So when you weren’t there by four-thirty, I started texting. I figured tape ran late or your coaches had something to discuss with you. Five o’clock rolled around, and I started calling, but your phone went right to voicemail.”
“I turned it off.” My voice came out thin. I’d known at the time what I was doing sucked, that I was wrong to avoid Miles, but my brain had felt like a bag of marbles in a tornado. I’d focused on the easy stuff. Showering, packing, letting my roomies know I’d be gone, maybe for weeks.
Miles huffed. “Yeah, apparently you did. So there I was, on the biggest night of our lives, and I didn’t even know if you were alive. You know, I drove past the arena in my fucking suit.”
“You what?”
“Yeah. I asked one of the maintenance guys if any of the players got hurt at practice. He said no, but then, they’d probably be trained to say no even if someone got knocked out or broke their neck. NDA, you know.” The raggedness of Miles’s voice made my chest ache.
“I’m sorry.”
“If Rachel had been in town, I’d have had her calling the hospitals.” Miles’s blue eyes bored into mine. “I went into that dinner not knowing if you were even alive, or if you’d freaked out and were ditching me. Not just ditching the speech, but the rest of our lives.”
I swallowed hard.
Miles pressed a fist to his lips for a moment, then went on, “I sat there, not knowing, while all those other folks gave their lovely, happy speeches. And then it was my turn, and even when I got up behind the podium, I still thought maybe you arrived really late. Maybe you were sitting in the back, so you didn’t disturb anything, and when I said, ‘a man I fell in love with,’ you’d come walking up the aisle in the suit we picked out for you and stand next to me. But you never did.”
My vision blurred, even as the dome light went out, leaving us in darkness lit only by the dashboard indicators.
I couldn’t see Miles’s eyes now, but I could imagine the pain in them.
“Fuck.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes, blotting out even the big, familiar silhouette of him.
“I didn’t think. I wasn’t… I ran on blind fear and instinct that day.
I wanted to stand next to you and I wanted that chance with the Tornados, and I didn’t think I could have both.
I told myself I had a contract with the team, no choice. ”
“Well, the contract was real.”
“Yeah, but I still could’ve done the banquet and gone up to Tacoma afterward. I didn’t have to report till practice next morning. I just, fuck, after all that time working up to that moment, I turned chickenshit.”
“Listen, Logan.” Miles’s hand landed warm on my knee, and I opened my eyes. Now dark-adapted, I could see the thin line of his lips pressed together and the glint in his eyes. “Logan, why didn’t you fucking tell me?”
Shame flooded through me. “I was scared. I was selfish. I thought, if I talked to you and you asked me to come to the banquet anyway, I’d do it and fuck up my future with the team. Or if I said no, I’d fuck up my future with you. So I… didn’t. Until it was too late.”
Miles peered at me, his hand heavy against my leg. “Logan? Why didn’t you trust me to understand?”
All the love, fear, uncertainty, and sheer panic of that evening rose in my throat to choke me.
To my horror, I burst into tears. I slammed my hands over my face and turned away from Miles toward the window, but I couldn’t hold back the sob that racked my chest. So humiliating, to fuck up the apology and burst into tears.
I owed Miles a fucking lot more than this, but I sat there in the dark cab, eyes burning, throat locked down, and totally failed to keep my shit together.