I just couldn’t bear to be with him – or any other jock – for a little while.
Olly
I was such an idiot.
How could I not have seen that Keaton would be triggered by being in a locker room again? That was where we had attacked him. Where he had been hurt so badly that others on the team had been forced to change schools. It wasn’t a happy place for him.
It wasn’t somewhere he was comfortable like I was.
I shouldn’t have been such an idiot.
All I wanted to do was scoop him into my arms and protect him. Shield him from anything that might hurt him. Even though there hadn’t been any real danger, I knew he had felt it. Somehow, that made it worse. I couldn’t protect him from panic. I couldn’t stand up to phantoms made by his fear and defend him from them.
All this strength, this hard body I’d dedicated so much time to creating, and I still couldn’t protect him.
I kept thinking about it for the whole of the rest of the day. I couldn’t concentrate in class or in practice. I wanted to run and find him and cover him even though the panic attack was long since over. Make him feel safe by protecting him with my whole body. Make it so no one could ever get past me to hurt him again. Stand by his side wherever he went, even if I had to give up my own life to do it. By the time I got back to our dorm in the late afternoon, I had gone over it so many times it was burned into my brain.
I had been such an idiot. And the only way I could think to make it up to him was to help make his documentary as good as possible.
“Hey,” I said, dropping my bag onto the bed and nodding at him. Keaton was sitting at the desk with glasses on his face. I’d never seen him wearing glasses since we came to college.
Why did my heart leap in my chest at the sight of how cute he looked?
“Oh, you’re back already,” Keaton said. He lifted the glasses and rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Five,” I said cautiously. I was watching him for any sign of lingering fear. He seemed better. Was that real? “I’m leaving it an hour and then going to the cafeteria. Do you have plans?”
“Just trying to edit the scenes we shot today,” Keaton shrugged. He popped his glasses back on his face. They were thin-framed, round, suited to his face. “I was getting a headache from my contacts.”
“Did you want to shoot some more?” I asked. It wasn’t that I was altogether keen on being on camera again. I just thought it might help to cheer him up – and make up for the locker room.
“Oh – yeah,” Keaton said. He brightened up and turned to grin at me. That grin lodged in my chest where it hurt. I would do anything he wanted to keep him grinning. “I have some interview questions I wanted to ask you if you feel up to that. It would be great to do it here where it’s, like, your home environment or whatever.”
I nodded back. This wasn’t my home. Not really. But somehow I couldn’t contradict him. Maybe it was in the process of becoming home.
And, I realized, he was a big part of that.
“Okay.” I sat down, putting my hands on my knees to steady myself. “I’m ready.”
“Oh!” Keaton exclaimed like he hadn’t expected me to turn around so quickly. The video camera was sitting next to his laptop on the desk. There was a big red sticker on it that statedProperty of Crowhill Cove College. I guessed he was borrowing it for the class. “Right, hold on – let me get this set up.”
I sat patiently as he adjusted the camera. He set it up on a mini tripod that looked like it would fall over in a stiff breeze. He fiddled around with some buttons on the back and squinted as he leaned down to look at the screen.
“Okay,” he said. He gave me a thumbs up and a smile. I gathered that meant we were filming now. “So, can you tell me about what the process was like to apply for a scholarship?”
I wasn’t expecting that one. “Uh, yes,” I said. I scratched the back of my neck. “So, I saw the scholarship options on the college website. There were a lot but only a few for sports. I’m a football player, so I just chose that one.”
Keaton nodded encouragingly. He wanted me to say more?
“Um,” I said. “I just filled in the forms. And they sent someone to watch me play at my high school.”
“You got a partial, right? Is that what you applied for, or did you apply for a full scholarship?”
I looked down for a moment and picked at the skin on my thumb. “I applied for a full.”
“Did they give you any reasoning as to why they would only give you a partial?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t want to say it, but he had asked an outright question. “I wasn’t as good at football as they wanted.”
