Julian
Practice drags today.
Normally, football is the one place I can get out of my own head. There’s no room for bullshit when Luca’s barking adjustments, when pads are cracking hard enough to make your ribs hum, and when your body has to answer before your thoughts. Football is simple when everything else isn’t.
Today, every rep feels split in half.
One half of me is on the field, planting, cutting, driving through contact.
The other half is back at the Sin Bin, upstairs in Eli’s room.
A lawyer is supposed to be coming this afternoon and some stranger is going to swab the inside of his mouth and the baby’s tiny cheek and tell him whether the nightmare of what he thinks happened is true.
I keep seeing Eli’s face from this morning. That split second after the baby started crying, when panic hollowed him out so fast he looked younger than I’ve ever seen him.
Killian mentioned he wanted to speak to Eli alone, so I pretended to be busy, because what the fuck else was I going to do? Hover outside the door like some overinvested idiot who can’t stop orbiting his best friend even after months of tension?
I’ve been in love with him for so long it barely feels like love anymore. It feels structural and built in. A load-bearing wall in the center of me that I stopped trying to knock down even if all it ever did was leave me bruised.
I know I don’t stand a chance; I’ve known that for years. Eli is straight, dates women, and chases the kind of life his parents raised him to want. He looks at me with love, sure, but the safe kind. The brother and best friend kind that never once promises more than what it is.
So, I made my own mistakes around that truth.
Big ones.
Ones that started with wanting to feel wanted by somebody and ended up with me answering calls I should’ve blocked months ago from a person nobody would ever suspect.
Somebody older, respected, and powerful enough that even I still catch myself framing the whole ugly mess in softer words than it deserves.
A whistle cuts through the noise and drags me back into my body.
“West!” Coach shouts from across the field. “You awake, or are you just out here doing cardio for fun?”
A few guys laugh. I shove the rest of my thoughts down and tug my helmet on. “Awake,” I call back.
“Prove it.”
Luca smirks at me from under his own helmet as we line up.
He sees more than most people do; that’s the thing with Luca.
Half the time, he looks like he’s joking around, running his mouth, all swagger and charm and easy arrogance.
But the other half has steel under it. Real leadership. Real attention.
He glances at me once, then he starts the count, and I force myself into it.
“That’s more fucking like it,” Luca says when we reset.
By the time we hit the locker room after practice, I feel scraped out.
The air inside is thick with sweat, deodorant, and damp towels.
The usual post-practice mess of lockers banging shut, showers starting up, guys yelling across the room about dinner and tape and whatever party’s going on this weekend.
I sit on the bench in front of my locker and start peeling off gear piece by piece.
Luca drops onto the bench next to me in nothing but compression shorts and a towel around his neck. “You wanna tell me what the fuck that was?”
I snort softly. “Practice?”
“You missed two calls, almost ran the wrong side of a protection, and spent the whole second half staring into space like you were getting messages from God.”
I lean forward, forearms on my thighs. “Maybe I was.”
“Did he tell you to stop being weird?”
Despite myself, my mouth twitches. “Something like that.”
Luca nudges my knee with his. “Talk.”
I don’t answer right away.
The thing about the Sin Bin guys is they’re mine in ways I don’t always deserve.
We fight, we piss each other off, we say cruel shit sometimes because we’re all men in our twenties with too much ego and not enough emotional literacy.
But at the end of the day, these are my people.
Luca especially. Captain on the field, yes, but off it too sometimes.
He knows when to shove and when to shut up.
He and I have had enough late-night conversations over the years that he can read my silences better than most.
He glances around, makes sure nobody’s close enough to overhear anything real, then lowers his voice. “This is about Eli?”
I let out a breath and scrub both hands over my face. “Yeah.”
His expression shifts, not softer exactly, but less amused. “How bad is he, really?”
I picture Eli sitting in his room this morning with the baby on his chest, eyes red from crying, trying so hard to be steady that it made my own chest hurt to look at him. “Bad,” I say quietly. “Trying not to show it, but bad.”
I stare at the concrete floor. A minute ago, I thought I was too empty to feel anything new. Turns out I’m still capable of being tired all the way through.
“I want to be there for them when the lawyer comes, but I had practice. Now by the time I get back there’ll already be shit happening, and I hate it.”
Luca leans his elbows on his knees beside me. “That’s not all.”
“No,” I say.
I should shower, change, grab my stuff, and get the hell out of here. Instead, I sit there in my compression shirt and football pants, sweat drying cold on my skin, and stare at nothing because if I move too fast, the rest of my life catches up.
Luca’s voice drops another notch. “What’s going on with you?”
There are questions you can dodge, and there are questions that make your blood turn to ice before the answer even forms. Luca’s isn’t suspicious; that makes it worse. If he were accusing, I could deflect. He’s not. He’s worried.
“Nothing,” I say, too fast.
His eyes narrow in that unimpressed way he’s perfected as captain. “Bullshit.”
I force a shrug. “Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired for months.”
“Yeah, welcome to college athletics.”
“I mean different.” He pauses, choosing his words because for all Luca runs hot on the field, he’s careful where it matters. “You flinch more. You disappear more. And today you look like you’re trying to get off this campus before somebody catches you.”
I hold his gaze for half a second too long, and that’s enough to make his face change.
I don’t know why it’s easier to talk around the truth than through it.
Maybe because saying it cleanly would crack something open that I’ve spent too long forcing shut, and I’m a coward in exactly the ways that matter most. If I say I’ve been in love with Eli for years, while also letting some other mess use me up in private, I have to admit that loving him never stopped me from taking whatever scraps of attention I could find elsewhere… no matter how toxic they became.
“I fucked up a while ago,” I say instead.
“With someone?”
I nod once.
“Bad?”
I let out a hollow breath. “Yeah.”
He studies the side of my face for a second. “You in danger?”
The question makes my stomach clench. I shrug, which is not an answer, and we both know it.
“Julian.”
“Not here,” I say quietly, and his jaw flexes.
He wants to push; I can see it. But he also knows me well enough to recognize the line when I draw it.
The wrongness of this thing already lives in my body, heavy and humiliating.
Naming it in a crowded locker room with shower water running and half the team ten feet away feels impossible.
Luca nods slowly. “Okay, not here. But you listen to me,” he says, dropping his voice even lower. “Whatever you’ve got yourself into, if you need help, you tell Killian or me. I mean that. Don’t do the stupid macho shit where you decide suffering in silence is noble.”
I huff out a humorless laugh. “You make it sound so appealing when you say it like that.”
“I’m serious,” he says, and bumps my shoulder with his. “And for what it’s worth, Eli’s not alone. Even if you can’t be standing next to him every second.”
That one lands square in the middle of me because it’s true and still not enough.
I nod once. “Yeah.”
He lets out a breath through his nose. “But somehow that’s not the same thing, is it?”
There’s no smart answer to that, so I don’t try for one.
Luca reaches for his bag and stands. “Go shower, then get home. He’ll want you there whether he says it or not.”
Before I can answer, he turns and heads toward the showers, leaving me sitting there with my pulse going strange and my skin feeling too tight.
I shower fast, dress faster, and get the hell out of there.
The late-afternoon air outside the athletic center hits warm and heavy, the sky washed gold at the edges as the day starts sliding toward evening.
I fish my keys out of my bag while walking to my car, already mentally calculating the quickest route back to the Sin Bin.
I’m halfway through planning what I can do the second I walk in—grab food, check in quietly, make sure Eli’s eaten, maybe take the baby for a bit if he looks wrecked—when my phone rings.
I know who it is before I even see the screen; my body knows first.
That old, immediate drop in my stomach. The flare of dread.
The stupid reflexive tension in my shoulders that thinks if I brace fast enough, I can stop what’s coming.
I stop dead between two rows of cars, look down at the phone in my hand, and consider letting it ring out.
But I know exactly what happens when I don’t answer, so I give in.
“Yeah?”
The voice on the other end is calm in that carefully controlled way that means danger, not peace. “Where are you?”
I close my eyes briefly. “Just finished practice.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you.”
It’s one missed call from twenty minutes ago, but facts have never mattered much in this particular dynamic when there’s anger to be manufactured instead. I start walking again because standing still makes me feel cornered. “I was on the field.”
“Come see me.”
Demand dressed up as preference. Same as always.
I yank open my car door and toss my bag into the passenger seat harder than I mean to. “I can’t tonight.”
Silence—his silence—is always worse than shouting. Then, very softly, he says, “Excuse me?”
I grip the roof of the car with my free hand and stare out across the parking lot.
Two freshmen linemen are laughing over something on one of their phones.
A golf cart rattles as it passes by near the equipment building.
The whole campus keeps moving while I stand there, feeling my options shrink to a singular point.
“There’s shit going on at home,” I say carefully. “I need to get back.”
“That house of yours is always full of drama.”
My jaw tightens. “Yeah.”
“So, leave them to it and come see me.”
It’s the certainty that gets me. The absolute confidence that I’ll come because I always come in the end. Because secrecy is a leash if the other person knows how much shame you’re carrying.
I lean my forehead briefly against the top of the car door and close my eyes. “Please.”
The word is out before I can stop it, soft with exhaustion instead of defiance, and I immediately hate that.
“What was that?” he asks.
This is the part where I always start trying to predict the angle.
Anger. Mockery. Cold disappointment. Threat dressed up as concern.
He has a whole shelf of them, and I’ve seen enough by now to know there’s no winning once he’s decided I’m the thing he wants to put his hands on tonight, one way or another.
“You’ve gotten bold,” he says.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then don’t start now.”
I get in my car because I need the illusion of movement even if I’m not driving yet. The seat is hot from the sun, and my hands are slick on the steering wheel.
“I can’t stay long,” I say.
“You’ll stay as long as I want you here.”
The phrasing is so familiar that it makes me feel sick.
I stare through the windshield at nothing. In the silence, memory starts doing what it always does at the wrong moment.
I think about the bruises on my ribs. About biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to keep from making a sound.
About explanations nobody asks for, and the relief I fake afterward, because admitting any of it out loud makes the whole thing more real.
I think about Luca’s face in the locker room when he almost saw too much.
I think about Eli trying to figure out fatherhood and legal paperwork while I sit in a parking lot, letting some fucking predator talk me into submitting to him again.
I hate that part of me still responds to his tone before my brain catches up. Hate that fear and habit have started to braid themselves together so tightly I can’t always tell which one is steering.
“I need to go home,” I say again, weaker now.
He lets out a soft breath that carries a smile I can’t see and don’t want to. “You know what happens when you make me repeat myself.”
I lower my head and rub my free hand over my mouth, then finally concede because survival with him is picking the least catastrophic option in a room full of even worse ones.
“Fine,” I say.
“Good.” The voice on the line goes softer, and that softness is the cruelest thing in the world because it means he knows he’s won. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
The line clicks dead.
I keep the phone in my hand long after the call ends, staring at the black screen that does nothing more than reflect my own face back at me.
Then I reach into the glove compartment, pull out the cheap mints I keep in there, and shove two into my mouth because I already know the drill.
Don’t show up smelling like practice.
Don’t show up looking reluctant.
Don’t show up with too much of your real life still clinging to you or he’ll decide you’re distracted and punish you for it in one of a dozen ways that leave no easy mark but still ache for days.
My reflection in the rearview mirror is somebody I’m beginning to hate on a cellular level. I look tired. Older somehow. Hollow around the eyes.
With a final sigh, I pull out of the lot and head in the wrong direction.