“Honestly?”He grimaced.“It’s kinda pathetic.”
“I love pathetic.”
“I wasn’t good enough.”He shrugged.
I frowned.“But you got a scholarship and shit.”
“My first year, yeah.Remember how I used to talk about stepping up to a Division I school after a year or two at Cooke?”
I nodded.It was all coming back to me—a little too much about the way we used to linger in the darkness after hookups and talk about life.I’d forget he was a popular jock, and he seemed to forget I was a loser nerd, and we’d spend hours just being… I don’t know.Friends who sucked each other’s dicks?
Boyfriends who never admitted it, more like.
“Well, turns out that I sucked, so my scholarship shrank.And then disappeared.So not only did I not move up, I didn’t even stay there.”He leaned one hip against the wall, his gaze fixed on my Doc Martens.“No game-ending injury, no life-changing drama.”
“But you ran one in for a touchdown?”I hated football on principle in school, as all art kids must, but in reality it was just kinda meh.I knew the rules and plays, and a quarterback pulling that was hero-level shit.
He chuckled silently, shoulders bouncing so they stretched the seams of his jacket.“We were playing the shittiest team in Div II.It was bullshit, and we were up like thirty points already.Any time we played someone decent, I folded like a paper airplane.”
I sucked on my cigarette in silence, fascinated by his expression and body language.It was exactly the fucking same as it had been in those quiet, stolen moments together back in the day.I’d almost forgotten how he slouched and smiled when he was just being himself instead of the big football star everyone wanted him to be.
Not that he’d ever said it was a burden.But I was starting to think that even if it hadn’t been then, it sure as fuck was now.“Must’ve been hard,” I said.
He shrugged with the shoulder that wasn’t against the wall.“At first.Then it was just a fucking relief.Especially when COVID hit.”
“Yeah?”
“I transferred out to a little liberal arts school.When they lifted restrictions, I played on an intramural team just for fun.No one knew I’d ever had the football hopes and dreams of Stanley County pinned on me once upon a time.It was great.”
Well, what do you know: Beautiful people can get headfucked too.“That where you met the hockey-fucker-ex?”
He laughed.“Sorta.She went to high school with my roommate, and he introduced us.We had our good times.Just ended bad.”
“That’s how most of them go, yeah.”But I laughed and shook my head.“Did you ever hate it, even when you were the big fish in the little pond?”
“In high school?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head slowly.“I guess I didn’t realize that everyone else around me was soseriousabout it, you know?Like, I knew it was supposed to pay for school, and I would’ve given my right arm to go pro, but I don’t know.I was still having fun, so I thought everyone was.”
Yeah.Sounded very, very fucking Taran.
I must’ve given him a look or something because he flushed dark and looked down again.
“What a pair of idiots,” I said, just to break the tension.
He glanced up through those beautiful, thick eyelashes, asking a silent question.
“We didn’t know the first thing about each other,” I elaborated.“Thought we did, though, didn’t we?”
He smiled cautiously.Nodded.“Probably.”
“Well, you grew up okay, Kovacs.I’ll give you that.”I squeezed out the cherry and tucked the butt into my fist.
“Yeah.So did you,” he said with the most obnoxiously sweet smile.Ugh, that dimple, too.The stubble wasn’t thick enough to hide it.Genuinely fucking unfair.
I straightened up.“Please.I’m a goddamn mess.”
