Chapter 3
It was supposed to be a perfectly normal day. A perfectly normal practice.
But there was no way it could be, not with what Lane had said to him this morning.
Had he been a little disappointed and slightly frustrated with how Lane had reacted last night when he’d confessed that he might not be straight? Sure. But it hadn’t been all that tough to reconcile it. Lane could be a prickly guy; he didn’t always react the way that Trevor expected him to.
Coach Zane blew the whistle and Griff snapped the ball, Aidan dropping back as Trevor pushed off, slanting one way, and then abruptly turning the other, as Jordo shadowed him, not giving him the room to work he wanted—that he needed.
Jordo—Jordan Atkinson, one of the other rookies on the team, and Carl Hererra—was good, but he was not usually this good. Or maybe Trevor was just distracted. Too distracted.
Out of the corner of Trevor’s eye, Aidan shifted to the left, holding the ball back. He pump faked it once and then again, a sure indication that he was trying to extend the play.
Trevor tried one last-ditch move, a sharp cut, intended to shake Jordan, and it kind of worked.
Enough that Aidan must’ve felt comfortable enough attempting the pass, because he drew back and threw, finally.
The ball spiraled through the air in a perfect arc, but before Trevor could leap up and snatch it out of the air, Jordan did it first, batting it away.
Goddamn it.
Trevor let out a hard, frustrated breath.
“Dude,” Jordo said, glancing over at him.
Trevor rolled his eyes. He didn’t really want to talk to Jordan, but it was still better than going over to where Aidan was standing with Levi and Griff and Lane. Putting their heads together like Trevor was a problem that needed to be solved.
Trevor’s eyes met Lane’s for a single moment. It wasn’t anything special but something in Trevor’s stomach fluttered. Not unpleasantly.
“You party too hard last night?” Jordan asked, nudging him with an elbow.
“Of course not,” Trevor said. He didn’t want to talk to Jordan about this. He didn’t want to talk about it at all, in fact.
How would he even say it? Sorry, I came out to my stepbrother and then he suggested this morning that we hook up. And instead of telling him that he was insane, I thought, yes please.
“You’re totally fucking off. You’re faster than me. Wilier than me, too,” Jordan said self-deprecatingly, not sounding particularly happy about that fact.
At least he hadn’t said any of his semi-disastrous thoughts to Lane. Not yet anyway.
But you know you’re going to.
He probably was. Trevor almost never felt that melting-organ feeling, like candle wax dripping through his insides. But he’d felt it the moment he’d realized what Lane was suggesting. As insane as it would be to do what Lane suggested, it almost felt more insane not to.
“Yeah, you suck,” Trevor agreed and Jordan made a face, like it hadn’t been him to say it in the first place.
Aidan gestured them over, and Trevor had run out of good reasons to not go.
He jogged over, bracing himself for whatever shit Lane was going to give him about not being able to evade Jordan’s coverage. But to Trevor’s surprise, he didn’t say a word.
“You good?” Aidan asked him.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll—” Trevor broke off, took a deep breath. Dug down to find the well of focus that had never failed him before. “I’ll be good. I’m good.”
“Good, ’cause we’re gonna rerun this with Wes,” Aidan said. “’Cause he’s probably starting on Sunday. And so will you.”
Trevor had seen that coming, considering it was the last regular season game of the year and that the Thunder’s record and the AFC playoff picture made winning it basically irrelevant.
“Alright,” Trevor said, nodding.
“Come on, let’s do this again,” Aidan said, gesturing over to Wes.
Wes looked nervous, kind of how Trevor felt. Sure, he’d played in every game this season, but Lane had been on the field, too, or at the very least dressed and on the sideline. It had never hung entirely on him, before, as the starting tight end.
Normally it might be a challenge he welcomed, but Trevor felt like his ground had shaken beneath him last night and then this morning, and he hadn’t found his balance again.
They ran it again. And again. Wes was less experienced and therefore less good at delaying a play, at holding the ball longer. He got sacked twice, once which Aidan straight-up told Trevor and the other wide receiver—Bryce McCarthy—was their fault, as they hadn’t gotten open.
“No excuse for a coverage sack,” Aidan said, tone kinder than they probably deserved.
It was not a great practice. But still, on their last run-through, Trevor and Wes finally connected, Wes tossing a great pass just as Trevor got open. He made a move Jordan didn’t expect and cut up field, leaving him in the dust, finally.
Still, one out of ten or so attempts was not exactly stellar, and Trevor fully expected that Lane would kick his ass about it on their way back to the locker room. He had, too, every single other practice they’d ever shared in Toronto.
But not today. Instead, he hung back, talking to Mo and Levi. Trevor shouldn’t have been angsting about it, but he inevitably was.
Maybe he should wait—but no, he wasn’t going to.
He wasn’t going to wait on Lane. He was going to do his regular routine.
Not that this was probably going to help his situation at all.
He’d told Lane he wanted to think about it, to consider the offer, but the blunt truth was he’d only said that because how much he’d wanted to, suddenly and unexpectedly, had freaked him out.
Sure, he’d noticed that Lane was attractive.
Sure, he liked Lane. He always had. But he hadn’t known it was that kind of like.
Hard to escape the abrupt realization that it might be exactly that kind, followed up by the even more radical speculation that it had always been that kind.
“So what gives?” Jordan asked, jogging to catch up with Trevor as he headed into the tunnel.
“Just distracted,” Trevor said.
Jordan shot him a look. “Please. You hook up with someone hot last night? Not get enough sleep?”
Maybe if he had, if Lane had suggested last night they go to bed together and Trevor had gone, he’d be less preoccupied with what it could be like. What it would be like.
“Nah,” Trevor said.
“Saw you talking to that dark-haired girl,” Jordan said, nudging him as they turned the corner into the locker room.
Trevor stripped out of his jersey and tossed it into the laundry bin. “Yeah,” he said. “But it was only a few minutes.”
“You didn’t like her?”
“Just wasn’t feeling it,” Trevor said. He liked Jordo, he really did, especially since he’d begun to get his head out of his ass, mostly courtesy of Nate, but he didn’t always love how pushy Jordan could get about girls.
“Me either, lately,” Jordan admitted, which was surprising.
Maybe this was another result of Nate’s mentorship. Jordan had certainly been spending less time at strip clubs recently.
“In fact,” Jordan hesitated, glancing around and lowering his voice. “I think . . . I’ve started to wonder if maybe I was using girls as a distraction.”
Trevor couldn’t agree, because he’d never used girls as a distraction, but he was definitely understanding what Jordan was putting down. “You know, if it had been a dark-haired guy . . .” He trailed off.
Jordan smiled, relief softening his features. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Trevor said, flushing a little. “Something I’m still working through, though.”
He hadn’t meant to give Jordo the wrong impression, though, because he was not anticipating the guy leaning even further into Trevor’s space.
But before Trevor could back up or figure out how to gently dissuade him from thinking that maybe they could work on it together, a sharp-edged voice cut through the air.
“Trev,” Lane said, striding into the locker room.
He shot Jordan a look that Trevor thought might have been jealousy.
But before he could figure out if he was right, it was wiped clean, replaced by a smirk.
Jordan seemed to get the message though, because he headed deeper into the room, back to his locker to finish getting changed.
“Hey,” Trevor said weakly, ignoring how his stomach and his knees both went liquid. “What’s up?”
“Tomorrow, we’re gonna get here early,” Lane said firmly. “We gotta work on your routes.” He loomed right over Trevor, making the most of the three inches he had on him, and unlike Jordan, Trevor didn’t want to immediately take a step back. He wanted to step closer.
Close the space between them once and for all.
“If you think I need to.”
“It’s not me who thinks you need to,” Lane said. It was unfair that even when he was being an asshole—even when he was being a truthful asshole—Trevor couldn’t forget how he’d looked this morning when he’d said, in that soft, entreating voice, experiment with me.
Like he really wanted it. Like he’d wanted to say it the whole goddamn time.
Trevor hadn’t thought he’d singled Lane out to tell for that reason, but the more he considered the possibility, he wasn’t sure he could dismiss it entirely.
“Who said I did?” Trevor asked, trying to drag his uncooperative, distracted mind back to what was most important: which was, of course, football.
Lane rolled his eyes. “Who do you think?”
“Aidan, obviously,” Trevor muttered. It did not feel great that the future, guaranteed Hall of Fame quarterback thought he needed more work. It felt even less great that he and Lane had talked about it, behind his back.
Trevor made a face.
Nudging him, Lane said, “Come on, don’t sulk. It’s not hot.”
It was hard to resist retorting that Lane had just said he was hot, this morning and last night, too, but Trevor swallowed the words back.
This wasn’t about the offer Lane had made, and the last thing he wanted was for Lane to realize just how much Trevor had been obsessing about it.
It would be even worse if Lane realized that Trevor’s shitty practice had been because he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.