Chapter 7
No matter how many times Lane told himself he was not freaking out, he couldn’t get himself to actually believe it.
Because he was totally freaking out.
His mom and Trevor’s dad were coming to Toronto.
Still trying to playact like everything was normal and okay.
That their family was totally fine. The worst part was that Lane was happy he’d be able to see his mom.
He was even happy at the thought of seeing Tom, who he’d spent fruitless years trying to dredge up a resentment against, but it had never stuck.
“You’re distracted.” Aidan said it matter-of-factly, phrasing it like a statement not a question.
“Nah,” Lane retorted easily. “I’m solid.”
Aidan shot him a knowing look. “You were just standing there staring off into space.”
“Bro, he’s having really deep thoughts,” Levi teased.
“Deep thoughts?” Mo questioned.
Lane rolled his eyes. “I was thinking of how you ran that third and long route, and how I could’ve done it better.”
Mo just laughed though, because that was the kind of asshole Mo was. It was nearly impossible to ever penetrate his easy, laid-back chill. At least Lane hadn’t figured out how to do it.
“I don’t believe you,” Aidan said primly. “Let’s huddle up. I want to run these third downs again.”
Everyone thought Aidan was a great quarterback because he had the natural skill, but the actual truth was that Aidan Flynn was a great quarterback because nobody worked harder, or more relentlessly. A taskmaster for the freaking ages.
“Only because you think Mo is the greatest receiver on earth,” Lane muttered to himself.
“What?” Trevor appeared next to him, on the field for a jumbo blocking package.
“Ugh, nothing.”
“You’re off today,” Trevor observed.
Lane was not going to roll his eyes again. “You’re wrong.”
“No, I’m not,” Trevor said. They took their positions. “What’s bugging you? Not sleep well?”
“Fine,” Lane said shortly. “Let’s focus on this play, okay?”
Trevor nodded, not saying anything, but not looking like he really believed any of the bullshit Lane was spouting.
And it was bullshit. He’d slept like absolute hot fucking garbage, staring up at the ceiling like it was going to miraculously give him answers to questions he didn’t even know how to ask.
But Trevor had clearly sensed a weird undercurrent after last night’s call with Delia and her suggestion that she and Tom come to Toronto, and Lane wasn’t going to give Trevor any more reasons to interrogate him on how he felt about it.
Conflicted, that was how he felt. Like there were two Lanes inside of him. One which was thrilled that he’d get to see his mom, thrilled that his mom wanted to come see him play great football with a great team.
Then there was the other Lane, who’d just gotten a taste of something he’d been craving forever, and wanted to yell and kick and scream that he refused to give it up, at least before he’d let himself gorge on it.
But if he kept acting so strange, there was no way Trevor would actually want to continue doing what they’d been doing.
Lane dragged his attention reluctantly back to practice. If he fucked up this play, Aidan was going to murder him, probably, and Lane would deserve it.
Griff snapped the ball, and Aidan dropped back into the pocket. Trevor blocked the edge rusher, helping Levi maintain Aidan’s pass protection, as Lane pushed off, running the route.
He was supposed to be a distraction—grab the defense’s attention, hovering right around the first-down marker—while Mo sprinted twenty yards downfield in a nice buttonhook pattern. Turning a long third down into an even bigger conversion.
It was the kind of play that was always a risk, but Lane had been playing long enough to know that you either played to win, or you played it safe. And the Thunder hadn’t gotten to where they were this season by playing it safe.
The defensive scout team they were practicing against had more of an idea of the trickery happening, and didn’t bite as hard as an actual opposing team might, but the beauty of the play was that if the defense converged on Mo’s position, they’d possibly leave Lane open to catching the pass and at least converting the third down.
Aidan hesitated for one last second and Lane made one last-ditch move, sliding laterally over towards the sideline. Finally, he threw the ball, leading Lane a little more towards the edge of the field, and Lane put his hands out and, at the last second, caught it.
“Sloppy,” Aidan said with frustration when they huddled back up. Sure, they’d gotten the first down, but Aidan wasn’t wrong. It had been sloppy. If the protection was a shade less good, that would’ve been a sack or an incompletion.
“Dude, I don’t know what to tell you. These guys know it’s coming,” Mo said, huffing out a breath.
Aidan turned his gaze on his old friend. “Then convince them.”
Mo groaned. “You haven’t changed.”
“Not a bit,” Aidan said and then cracked a smile. Before this season, Lane wasn’t sure he’d have done that, but it was evidence of how much their quarterback had softened.
“Let’s run it again,” Aidan announced to the huddle. “Trevor, Lane, swap. I wanna get Trevor some reps in this too.”
Lane opened his mouth to argue. To say that Trev didn’t have the experience or the finesse to run that kind of route.
Normally, he’d have said it without even thinking.
Trevor would’ve shot him an annoyed look, and then back in the locker room, they’d go back and forth, earning their nickname and more.
But he stayed quiet.
Everything was already fucked up enough, and he didn’t want to give Trevor any more reasons to say, forget it, maybe Grindr looks pretty damn good after all.
They set up for the play again, Mo whining under his breath as he lined up next to Trevor that the defense was going to be even less fooled this time around.
That was probably true, but it didn’t matter, because they needed to practice this stuff. In the playoffs, every team was good. Every team was fighting with every ounce of skill and energy to move on to the next round.
Just because they were the first seed in the AFC, that didn’t guarantee shit.
Griff snapped the ball again, and Aidan dropped back. This time Lane fell back into his blocking stance, picking up the outside linebacker that tried to evade Levi’s grip.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Trevor ran the route.
Pretty well, actually, and Lane felt a spike of satisfaction as Trevor kept an obvious eye on Aidan as he dropped back.
He pushed a little further past the first-down line than Lane had, but Trevor had a smaller body and less dominating strength. It would be tougher if Aidan had thrown the pass short for Trevor to muscle his way across. Lane could’ve done it, but Trevor wasn’t Lane.
Similar, in some ways, but not the same.
But in the end that didn’t matter, because unexpectedly, Mo turned the other direction, away from the coverage, and Aidan, tracking him, compensated by sliding over and tossing the pass.
“Better,” Aidan pronounced when they made it back to the huddle.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mo complained. “That was a thirty-yard freaking gain.”
But Aidan only grinned. “Could’ve been forty if you’d kept your feet.”
“Fucker,” Mo muttered. “Throw the pass better next time and I’ll keep my feet.”
The fact Aidan had managed to compensate at all was extraordinary, and they all knew it. Mo definitely knew it. Mo probably knew it best of all.
They ran another half an hour’s worth of these long third-down conversions, before Aidan had them huddle up one last time before the official end of practice.
“Some of you’ve been here before,” Aidan said, his voice even but carrying in the way it usually did, “but every year it’s tougher.
It’s a given we gotta do all the big things right.
The small shit? More important than ever.
And risks? We gotta take them. Mo took a risk on that play, curling to the other sideline, but he knew we wouldn’t get it otherwise.
That’s what I want us to be. More us than we’ve ever been, and beyond that too.
Evolved past standard Thunder football.”
“Future in motivational speaking right there,” Levi teased, and Aidan’s cheeks flushed bright pink.
“Shut up,” he said to his boyfriend, but Levi was smiling over at him like he’d never been prouder.
Lane didn’t know why anyone called him and Trev the demon twins when those two were like that.
They were on their way home from the practice facility when Lane turned to Trevor and said exactly that.
Trevor, who’d been scrolling through his phone—he was certifiably the most passenger princess, a fact that Lane had not given him enough shit about—looked up, startled.
“What?”
“Everyone gives us shit,” Lane said, “but Aidan and Levi are like that.”
“It’s . . . uh . . . it’s different, right?” Trevor didn’t sound particularly convinced, though.
“Well, obviously they’re dating and we’re—” Lane broke off.
They weren’t defining this. Well, no, that wasn’t true, was it?
They’d already defined it. It was a fucking experiment.
An experiment that was slowly driving Lane out of his mind because it had been three days since Trevor had touched him. “We’re bros,” Lane finally finished.
Trevor shot him a dubious look. “Are you freaking joking? You’re gonna say it now?”
No, he wasn’t. He didn’t even know why he’d said that. Wrong again. He’d said it because it had somehow seemed better than anything else currently in his stupid brain.
“It . . . just . . . it didn’t mean anything,” Lane said weakly.
Suddenly afraid that even with all the tangled shit winding their way around his brain stem and his heart and his dick, that was still the worst thing he could’ve said.
God, what had he been thinking, reminding Trevor of that right now?
When his mom and Tom were coming in a few weeks?
The ultimate reminder of how fucked up this whole thing had been from the beginning.