SULLIVAN #2
He hasn’t come out to anyone else yet, and he’s stopped talking about wanting to, but I get the feeling he’s thinking about it a lot. About what his uncle told him. About what he knows from his own experience. More and more, I don’t want him to do anything because of me.
I love him, yeah, but we might as well still be “just friends.” I’m beginning to think I’m not capable of offering him any more than that. And it breaks my heart every time I think about it.
There are far better lovers out there for him for sure, and maybe one of them would be worth putting his career on the line for, but it isn’t me anymore, if it ever even was.
I swallow hard because I haven’t really let myself have that thought with such full, nauseating clarity until now.
“I was gonna ask what your dad would want, but now I think it matters a lot more what you want.”
“Obviously I want to see it through,” he says with the bitterness that came free of charge with his new operating system.
“It’s not obvious,” I say softly.
“I’m doing it, aren’t I?”
Yeah, I guess. With a complete lack of joy.
“I think…maybe…just see how it feels tonight. To be back out there under the lights with the team and the fans and all the school spirit. Just…see who you’re there for if not to prove something, then see what about it feels right.”
He scoffs. “If anything.”
“If anything,” I repeat. “Yeah.”
He picks up the razor, shaves the one spot he left undone then rinses his face before turning to me. “Is Chelsea coming with you?”
I nod.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“It’s been a while.”
“Is she still doing the sex house thing?”
“She moved,” I tell him. “She’s got an actual boyfriend now. He’s a dermatologist. She met him on an app.”
“Good for her. Does he want a ticket, too?”
I shrug. “It didn’t come up.”
Both Knight’s mom and his uncle will be at the game tonight, and this time, I can’t pretend we don’t know each other.
Having Chelsea there will help. I want to tell her about Shannon anyway.
She and I have barely talked since she started dating this doctor over the summer, but that’s not all on her. I’ve been very preoccupied.
Knight turns toward me when he’s done in the mirror. “Come here.”
I stand and walk to him, stopping just before our chests touch. He looks my face over while he runs his hands down my arms in the way that always makes me shiver. Need roars like a fucking dragon inside me, licking my insides with flames that make their way to my now burning cheeks.
“I couldn’t go through with this without you,” he says quietly.
“You could,” I tell him. “You can do anything. You’re Knight Winters. You’re the most perfect man in the world.”
He gives me half a sardonic grin and a slight shake of his head.
“The best of the best. The greatest of all time,” I add, trying to turn his grin into an actual smile.
“Stop,” he whispers before pressing his mouth to mine in a light kiss. “I love you.”
For the hundredth time this summer, love doesn’t feel like enough. I love him, too. So much, but it’s like he said—for what? What’s the point when neither of us can be what the other truly needs anymore. When we’ve both been broken in ways that neither of us knows how to fix.
“I love you, too.”
During the game that night, I see the moment things change for Knight.
It’s the middle of the second quarter, and USM is down by three points.
Knight struggled to find his rhythm in the first fifteen minutes of game time, relying too much on Rod, who couldn’t break through Texas’s line.
But there’s this one point after we win a turnover from a fumble where I see Knight speaking with his coach on the sideline.
He nods sharply at whatever the old man says and then puts his helmet on before taking his place on the field at the center of the huddle.
When he comes out of it, and the offense forms their line beneath the lights, they’ve all got more swagger.
Knight’s gaze looks sharper, he’s standing taller, and his count off rings so loud and sure it sends a chill down my back.
Then, when he drops back into the pocket, and Deandre heads down a route at the sideline, shifting sharply for the center of the field, Knight lets fly a perfect pass that sails directly into D’s waiting arms. The wide receiver—my friend—runs it twenty more yards into the end zone with no one even close to touching him save for Derek who covers him the entire way.
The crowd erupts, and I look back to see Knight walking off the field, helmet in hand, head held high, grinning wildly, and he looks up to where we’re sitting.
His mother gasps, her hand on her heart.
His uncle Luke whistles through his teeth. “There’s our boy,” he says.
His mom bursts into tears, but when she and I look at each other, she’s smiling.
“What did the coach say?” I ask him later, at home once he’s showered and getting into bed.
“He said the game was mine.”
“That’s it? And that changed everything?”
“No.” Knight turns to face me, his face limned in moonlight and not stadium lights.
“I felt my dad in there. I think—since he died there’s just been this absence.
This hole. A million regrets and conversations I wish had gone differently.
But when I came out of the huddle, it was like he was right there, telling me to trust my instincts, look alive, all the shit he used to say when I was a kid.
He was there—he is—” He presses his hand to his heart. “Here.”
I touch the side of his chiseled face and try to smile. I’m happy for him. This is huge and important, and he needed it so much, but it also reminds me how far away I am from closure like that. How my wounds are not only still open and bleeding, but I swear they’re beginning to fester, too.
“It didn’t feel meaningless at all,” he says. “Playing that game, I felt like—just for a little while, I had the best parts of him back.”