“Uh, it’s great,” Trevor said. “Really great.” Thinking that he meant it and he didn’t, all at the same time, but not sure if he really wanted to get into it or that he wanted to get into ithere, with a girl he didn’t know at all.
Trevor hadn’t really wanted to come out at all, but Lane had insisted. Talked up a big game about meeting someone—aboutTrevormeeting someone—but Trevor was beginning to wonder if all the rumors he’d heard about Lane’s many hookups had been fabrications, because he’d never seen Lane pick a guy up before.
Well, maybe tonight was the night.
The bar was crowded, and he’d headed to grab another drink when he’d run into Viola—Violet? Vienna?—he wasn’t sure he’dheard her name properly or had remembered it, if Trevor was being honest.
She was very pretty, but he just couldn’t dredge up the interest he knew heshouldfeel.
“Was this your plan all along? To play together?”
Trevor hesitated. He and Lane had never once talked about that. Theystillhadn’t talked about it. Trevor had brought it up once, on that first plane ride to Toronto the day after the draft, when Lane had seemed more prickly than he’d ever been, vacillating between echoing Trevor’s excitement and being prickly and odd about the whole thing. But Lane had shut down Trevor’s question on if he’d known the Thunder were interested in drafting him. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it, not at all.
Though he’d wanted to, Trevor hadn’t pushed. Pushing usually meant getting iced out or pissing Lane off, and he never wanted to do that. HelikedLane, despite his moodiness, especially the glimpses of Lane he’d seen behind the prickliness.
“Uh, well, no, you know we didn’t really grow up together,” Trevor hedged.
“No?” Viola-Violet-Vienna’s eyes were dark and lively, interested in what Trevor was saying, and he felt bad because the opposite was not true.
“Our parents didn’t get married until I was sixteen and Lane was older, about to head to college. And then he was in college, and thenIwas in college.” Trevor shrugged. It was a rote recitation he’d probably given in a hundred interviews and conversations at this point, whenever anyone asked them how close they were.
Because they hadn’t been close. How could they be, when Lane was so rarely around?
“But now you’re together all the time,” Viola-Violet-Vienna pointed out.
Theywere. Trevor had gotten the impression that Lane hadn’t really wanted to invite him to live in his two-bedroom condo downtown, even though there was plenty of space, and hehadconsidered declining and saying he’d get his own place.
But then his dad had sat down with him and laid out all the reasons why it was a good idea. Most importantly, that Lane had already been in the NFL for three seasons and knew intimately what Trevor should be doing. But also that he’d never gotten the chance to get close to Lane, and now he could.
Trevor hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t always entirely sure Lanewantedthem to be close, but he did think it, sometimes.
“Yeah, we live together,” Trevor said.
“And how isthat?” she asked.
He was so painfully aware of all the heavy lifting she was doing in the conversation. How she was trying to make something of nothing, and he admired that, really he did, but he was not feeling it. Rarely felt it, if he was being honest. He’d always had trouble getting close to girls, and what happened with Sophie in college had made it even tougher, after.
“Um, it’s a process,” Trevor said, trying to be diplomatic.
Trevor hadn’t known Lane all that well before he’d been drafted to Toronto—familial relationship notwithstanding—because they’d really had no chance and no time to form any kind of bond.
Living together was like living with a stranger, basically.
But it still surprised him at how prickly Lane could be, sometimes.
Not always.
But occasionally, Trevor would seemingly hit a nerve and Lane would bark at him.
Lane never failed to apologize after, looking guilty and sounding even worse, and it always made Trevor more determined to make things work.
“Hard, huh?” she asked.
“It hasn’t always been easy.” He didn’t think Viola-Violet-Vienna would go running off to the closest media outlet to proclaim that the two bros on the Thunder weren’t as close as the team tried to claim they were, but caution was too ingrained in Trevor’s personality at this point. He didn’t want to make a wave. Or make anything worse.
It kind of killed him that the team called them the demon twins. They weren’tthatbad.
They bickered, sure, but what siblings didn’t?
