He hadn’t been good enough. The moment had come, and like so many times last season, he’d fucking whiffed it.
Dawson stared at the end zone, at the crowd beginning to shuffle towards the exit.
He wasn’t the hero. In fact he was the opposite. He was the guy who’d fucking blown it.
“It was so freaking close,” Cam said, murmuring in his ear as he slung an arm around Dawson’s shoulders, beginning to tug him to the sideline.
Like he knew Dawson would stand there and stare at the uprights forever, hoping the outcome would magically change.
Aidan was standing on the sideline, face slack with exhaustion, but eyes still bright blue. He was holding his helmet in one hand but he didn’t hesitate to swap it to the other hand and put it around the other side from Cam.
“Hey, Daws,” Aidan said.
But even though there was zero judgment in Aidan’s voice, it was hard to even look at him. Because what if he saw it when he looked closer.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“No. Don’t do that shit,” Aidan said staunchly. “Listen, we could’ve won that game so many times. And even if you made that—how many yards was it, even? Longer than your personal best, right?—we’d just be going to OT. No guarantees there.”
Aidan was being nice, but Aidan also didn’t know what he’d had to face just a few days before this game. What he’d discovered about Simon. What he was going to have to talk about with Alex tonight.
Maybe if he’d just let it go, maybe if he’d just accepted the plea deal, he would have nailed that fifty-nine-yard kick.
“No, but—” Dawson tried to argue, but before he could, Aidan interrupted him.
“Nobuts,” Aidan said firmly.
“It was fifty-nine,” Cam said softly next to them. “And yeah, a yard longer than his personal best.”
“Not your fault,” Aidan said, nodding over at Cam. “Listen to the rookie.”
“He didn’t say it wasn’t my fault,” Dawson muttered as they walked through the tunnel, down the corridor towards the locker room.
All the people who were watching them—the various staff that always were hanging around, they’d see that Dawson was upset.They’d see Cam on one side and Aidan on the other. Like he was fragile, and he wasn’t. Not anymore. He was so tired of being a problem to fix. So fucking tired of trying to fixhimself.
“Yeah, he didn’t need to, because I heard what he wasn’t saying, and so would you, if you were thinking clearly,” Aidan said bluntly.
It wasn’t that Aidan’s tough love wasn’t welcome or convincing, it was humiliating that it was needed at all. Even as he craved the comfort of it and desperately wanted to believe in the truth of it, he still didn’t want to touch it.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Dawson said. “You should be, I don’t know, licking your own goddamn wounds. Not mine.”
Aidan laughed. “Dude, we’re six and one. I’m not going to cry about it. It was bound to happen. And honestly? We wereinthat game. It was that close. I get you ten yards closer, give me another ten seconds on the clock? And that game’s going to overtime.”
“You think it would’ve?”
Aidan scoffed. “Dude, you saw the kick. Itbarelymissed. Ten yards closer? You’re money. I’d bet on you every single fucking time.”
Aidan did sound very sure. His certainty was reassuring. But then, he didn’t have the whole story.
They entered the locker room. It was quiet, but not deathly silent the way it could get sometimes after a bad loss. This was a frustrating loss, but Aidan was right about a lot of things: theyhadbeen in it, right until the very end.
Dawson just wasn’t sure Aidan was right abouteverything. How could he be, when he didn’t have all the information?
He turned to Cam. “I’m good,” he told him. “I gotta—I’m gonna talk to Aidan for a minute.”
Cam nodded, heading towards his locker to start stripping off his equipment.
“What is it?” Aidan asked under his breath. “Youareokay, right?”
