Chapter 27
Gabe
There’s this moment, a fraction of a second, where I hesitate. My arms go still, my elbows locked on either side of me, my knuckles white-fisted, the bar pressed against my chest, and I stop.
A normal place to stop. It’s a transition. I’ve brought the bar down, and now I have to push it back up. And at three hundred pounds, it’s a place where most men, even others in this weight room, would struggle through the transition. They would need this time to find that oomph, that extra strength, that adrenaline that seems to come from nowhere to push through it.
But not me. This isn’t easy by any means, but this is what I lift. Not even. There are two more sets of plates waiting to be added to this bar to make this a serious challenge. The last month’s been rough. I’ve taken some bad hits on the field in recent games. I probably won’t add the last set of plates today. But it’s not the strain that has me pausing.
I stare up at the ceiling, the rows of neon lights, the constellation of dimples in the panels of the drop ceiling. The random note cards Blaise has jammed into some of the corners, their messages a mix of crude drawings, random insults, and highest praises. I feel the weight of the bar on my ribs, the padding of muscle, fat, and flesh doing only so much to buffer the pressure. I imagine the weight I feel in my hands transferring to that thin line across my ribs.
And I stop.
An eternity frozen in one breath, just the expansion of my chest, constricted by that cold, thin bar of steel.
The industrial overhead lights are enough to blind a man who’s staring too intensely at them. When they suddenly vanish from my sight and the world goes dark, it’s like an eclipse. With a glow of fiery red along the rim.
Nope, that’s Allore’s hair as he leans over me and grabs the bar on either side of my hands.
“I’m good,” I tell him, snapping back to the moment, hating how raw my voice is and how bad my eyes burn from staring at those lights.
He keeps his hands next to mine as he says, “You’re not,” his voice low enough that the guys who are busy on the machines a few feet away can’t hear him. But he lets me lift that bar myself, his hands merely hovering.
As soon as the bar’s back in the cradle, he does take hold of it, pushing down to prevent me from attempting to lift it again.
“I’m fine,” I insist. “I just . . . needed a breath.”
That’s dumb. That sounds really dumb. That sounds like exactly the reason why I shouldn’t be bench pressing anything right now and also why I should be seeing the docs for them to work their magic so I’m upright for the game in two days.
Except I’m not sick, of course. I’m not out of breath. Not in a way that can be fixed with Vitamin C and a shot of something we don’t question since it doesn’t flag on drug tests. I just
I just can’t
breathe.
Evan continues to stare down at me from above, his face upside-down and distorted, although with Evan, it’s probably not the angle so much as the struggle of big thoughts that has his face screwed up. We test each other, playing an invisible tug-of-war with that bar, me pushing at it until he forgets and leans back enough that I can move it in the cradle, only for him to slam his weight back down on it.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Dude, you looked like you were about to do some unaliving nonsense, and we were going to have to rescue your ass, and then we’d all get stuck filling out incident reports, which suck.”
They do. I’ve had to fill them out twice now, both because of shenanigans with Blaise. “I’m not talking about this shit with you.”
His face morphs into one of those theater masks, the sad one. I swear I’ve never met a man who’s so equally stupid and sensitive who can actually function like a normal human being. “Why not? I’m practically your best friend!”
He’s not. He’s been a good buddy since our first training camp, when he basically forced us to be friends. As a Wilmington local, he’s been a useful resource. I’m not saying I’ve taken advantage of that at all, but it’s one of his biggest selling points. That and hanging out with him and Keira, especially when Dom and Cadence are also there with their kids. That group scratched an itch Merrick and Blaise and the rest of the Jugs House crew can’t.
But that group doesn’t exist anymore. I’m on speaking terms with Evan again, but it’s not the same.
I school my eyes on those lights, focusing slightly off from Evan so I don’t have to actually look at him, see every muscle in his face shift infinitesimally when I say, “Because it’s about Joss.”
He takes a heavy breath, looks up at that same light, tilts his head, and reads out slowly, “‘You’re doing amazing.’ Huh, that’s a nice—is that a dick with a little hat on?”
“Blaise calls him Carl.”
“Huh. We should go for a run.”
“There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, I wanna do less than go for a run.”
“Yeah, but do it anyway.”
I can’t breathe.
I take one step, and then another, each one lowering me to my knees so that I can gently collapse face-first.
At Evan’s prodding — his literal prodding, squatting down in a runner’s lunge and pushing at my side — I roll onto my back and suck in the air that was so frigid when we got out on the track an hour ago.
“I’m gonna die,” I groan.
Evan flops down on the grass next to the track and crushes a snow angel into the untouched blanket. We’re the only idiots outside in the frigid temps. “Man, this is nice!” Evan yells, only a couple feet away from me but facing the sky.
I roll my head over to look at him, wondering if his stupid ass is the last thing I’ll see.
His mouth is open, collecting snow.
I want to tell Keira he’s eating snow. She’d chew him out right in front of me, and the whole time, I’d feel like I was getting the revenge I was owed for being forced to run five miles on a snowy track. I’d tell her why I ratted him out afterward, and we’d all laugh about it.
Except I can’t tell her. Strangely, it wasn’t until I lost Joss that I realized I’d lost Keira, as well. There was this hope when I smoothed things out with Evan and me that it would make Keira see that she was being unfair to Joss. Now, I don’t think there’s any way to move forward with Keira without Joss seeing me as siding with her bully.
I’m losing everything.
Evan waggles his tongue to collect more snow. I’m wheezing; he’s having his own fun.
“If I tell you what happened, you’ll side with me even though I was the one who fucked up, and then you’ll say shit about Joss, and I won’t be able to be your friend anymore. Because if I ever get her back, I’ll remember what you said.”
He contorts himself enough that he can roll his head back to look at me upside-down. It’s going to be upside-down day. Upside-down life. “Nah, man. You’re gonna tell me how you fucked up, and I’m going to tell you how to fix it. That’s what friends do.”
“Merrick’s congratulated me for escaping. Blaise feeds me shots when I’m sad.”
“That’s why you’ve been playing like crap.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Nah, man, that’s on him.” Evan shrugs, adding a humpback to his snow angel. “It’s his fault his sacks have doubled the last few weeks.” He rolls onto his side and props his head on his elbow like a teenage girl dishing at a slumber party despite the work-out gear in three inches of snow. “Listen, you got single friends, and you got married friends, right? And right now, you’re listening to single friends who want to keep you single, but that’s not what you want. You want married. You want a honeymoon and married sex and joint bank accounts and debates about how many streaming services is too many and a good school district and what do you want for dinner, I don’t know, what do you want for dinner for the rest of your life. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I sigh, which at least means I’ve caught my breath.
“Exactly,” Evan continues. “So you need to be talking to me.”
“I don’t.”
“You fucked up, you don’t deserve Joss because she would never fuck up the way you fucked up, and what you did is a deal breaker, one hundo, not coming back from, but you don’t care because you need Joss back.”
“Right. So I’m an asshole for trying to get her back.”
“Nah, it’s like that oldie. You know, that song, it’s ancient, back when people still had actual cameras? And it’s the two dudes, and the one got busted for cheating — you didn’t cheat, did you? Because that’s not cool.”
“Of course not.” With a groan, I roll onto my side to look at the idiot.
“Cool, cool. But that song, and the other dude’s like just fucking lie, fam? You know the song.”
I shake my head. There are no oldies about that.
Evan snaps his finger. “Shaggy! It Wasn’t Me! God, it was so cringe when my parents would listen to that, but if I’m being real? It was a vibe.”
I slide my pinky up to the bridge of my nose. An oldie. I was in elementary school when it came out.
“Gabe, let me be your Shaggy.”
“Fuck.”
Evan gives me the shit-eatingest grin.
“So, that night at the fundraiser? When everyone was being an ass to Joss, including you?”
Evan nods like I didn’t just call him an ass.
“Joss and I were on the way home and ended up hooking up, but we were in my truck, and I didn’t think I had any condoms.”
“Sounds hot.”
“So I told her I had a vasectomy.”
Evan is speechless for a solid three seconds, a miracle for him, and then he says, “Fuck, that’s fucking genius, bro.”
I blink at him several times, daring him to take it back, but he doesn’t.
“Sooooo I was going to tell her the next day, make it right, you know, see if she wanted one of those pills.”
“The laxative-looking ones, yep.”
I almost give up right there, just make something else up or run another five miles to escape him. I’m pretty sure that’s the motivation I need. But Keira is a sane, relatively level-headed, intelligent woman. Somehow, Evan has kept her happy, so he has to know what he’s doing in this one thing.
“And then when I took her to meet my family, she found out I’ve always wanted kids and was lying the whole time, even after finding out the shit you and Keira are pissed at her for.”
“Okay, two things. First, I’ve never been pissed at Joss, I wanted to do you a solid, and Keira was looking out for her friends. And second, this is totally fixable. I’m your Shaggy all day.”
This is my worst nightmare.
And then I get pegged in the gut with a football. I curl up, winded all over again, tipping to see Blaise and Merrick standing no more than ten feet away, close enough to have heard that conversation, which means Evan was fully aware of their approach and kept going.
“Come on, ladies,” Merrick says as they both lean down, offering their hands to help us up. “I got a whole bunch of tampons and chocolate inside for you.”
“Boo, misogyny,” Evan grumbles in that whiny way of his. “One day, you’re all gonna be girl dads, and you’re gonna feel really shitty about saying stuff like that.”