“No, okay? No. I don’t.” Lane gave a resigned sigh and slid out of bed, the blanket slithering from his lap, andyeah, Trevor was definitely interested in a second round, but first, he needed to understand what the fuck was going on here.
He felt like he’d just been dropped into an alternate universe, where Lane was possibly better at figuring out this shit than the people that the teampaidto do it.
“Why not?” Trevor asked. He watched as Lane grabbed his sweatpants and pulled them back on, no underwear.Hot, he thought, before he could shut that right now with anot never, just not now,reminder.
“’Cause I don’t want to,” Lane said, the tone of his voice growing edgier. “It’s not a big deal. Just leave it, okay?”
“But—” Trevor tried again.
“I shouldn’t have showed you, okay? I just wanted you to know, for sure, that I wasn’t watchingthatplay.”
It occurred to Trevor, realizations toppling over one by one, like dominoes, that Lane had shared something he hadn’t wanted to share at all, just so that Trevor wouldn’t think he was obsessing over the play he’d fucked up. So Trevor wouldn’t feelbad.
“Maybe you should have,” Trevor said, which wasn’t as hard to say as it might have been five minutes ago. But something was shifting, still, under his feet. The ground might be unsteady, but it was hard to deny that whenever it trembled, Trevor saw something new in Lane. And all the new things he’d seen were things heliked.
Lane shot him a look. “You don’t mean that,” he said and continued walking out of the bedroom. Trevor scrambled out of bed, pulled onhispants, and followed Lane into the kitchen.
He’d pulled a stack of menus out of a drawer and was sorting through them. “You hungry?” he asked, glancing over at Trevor, like he’d expected him to be there. Like he’d already anticipated that Trevor would follow him. That he wouldn’t let it go.
“Don’t change the subject,” Trevor complained.
“I’m hungry,” Lane said, continuing to change the subject. Sometimes Trevor just really wanted to smack some sense into him. Or maybe it wasn’t that he wanted to smack him, it was that he wanted to do a whole lot of other things, starting with pulling down Lane’s sweatpants and finding out right here, in the kitchen, if he liked sucking cock the same way Lane did.
“Come on,” Trevor said.
“I’m not hashing this out on an empty stomach.” Lane pushed the menus in Trevor’s direction. “Pick something.”
Trevor sighed, guessing that he wasn’t going to be able to dissuade Lane from this. Besides, he could eat too. He’d grabbed a sandwich after the game, but now that Lane mentioned it, he was hungry again. Maybe from the sex. Or the nap. Or both.
He pulled out a menu for a Middle Eastern place they’d gotten food from a number of times and slid it over wordlessly.
Lane picked up his phone, typed in the order, and a minute later, set it back down.
“Okay,” he said, “you wanna talk about it?”
“I thought we weren’t talking about it on an empty stomach,” Trevor said.
Lane rolled his eyes. “Are you really gonna sit on the couch and pretend you’re not dying to interrogate me—or force me to interrogateyou—until the food comes? Really?”
“I’m not that impatient,” Trevor argued. But he could be. He knew he could be.
“And I’m not stubborn,” Lane said wryly.
“Okay, a little impatient. Fine. I don’t want to wait. I want you to tell me.”
“I already told you,” Lane said in a careful voice. “You weren’t tracking Wes and the pass rush that was bearing down on him. He had to throw the ball. You weren’t ready.”
Lane wasn’t wrong; he hadn’t been watching Wes, really. The ball, sure. But the rest of the play unfolding around Wes, or theblockingaround Wes, no.
But then he’d never done that with Aidan before either, and it hadn’t been a problem.
“If you say,” Lane continued, before Trevor could even bring that fact up, “that you don’t have to do it for Aidan, well, of course you don’t. He’s Aidan Flynn. You’re spoiled rotten playing for a guy who sees pressure coming and figures out how to evade it before it ever becomes an issue. He’s a future Hall of Famer. A Super Bowl winner. He gets his shit done. Andbefore you defend Wes, he’s just not as experienced. Not even close. You gotta figure out those adjustments and make them, seamlessly.”
Trevor digested that. It didn’t feel great, still, but he was just beginning to realize why everyone said the transition to the NFL was hard. He’d thought he was pro-ready. A ton of scouts, his agent, his coaches had all agreed that he was. But nobody ever mentioned the thousand intangible things, the little tweaks, that you had to make to trulybeready.
Nobody except Lane.
“Mo said today that nobody expects me to know a lot of this stuff,” Trevor said quietly. It was the only reason he wasn’t melting down in a puddle of acute humiliation.
