Aidan hesitated for one last second and Lane made one last-ditch move, sliding laterally over towards the sideline. Finally, he threw the ball, leading Lane a little more towards the edge of the field, and Lane put his hands out and, at the last second, caught it.
“Sloppy,” Aidan said with frustration when they huddled back up. Sure, they’d gotten the first down, but Aidan wasn’t wrong. Ithadbeen sloppy. If the protection was a shade less good, that would’ve been a sack or an incompletion.
“Dude, I don’t know what to tell you. These guys know it’s coming,” Mo said, huffing out a breath.
Aidan turned his gaze on his old friend. “Then convince them.”
Mo groaned. “You haven’t changed.”
“Not a bit,” Aidan said and then cracked a smile. Before this season, Lane wasn’t sure he’d have done that, but it was evidence of how much their quarterbackhadsoftened.
“Let’s run it again,” Aidan announced to the huddle. “Trevor, Lane, swap. I wanna get Trevor some reps in this too.”
Lane opened his mouth to argue. To say that Trev didn’t have the experience or the finesse to run that kind of route. Normally, he’d have said it without even thinking. Trevor would’ve shot him an annoyed look, and then back in the locker room, they’d go back and forth, earning their nickname and more.
But he stayed quiet.
Everything was already fucked up enough, and he didn’t want to give Trevor any more reasons to say,forget it, maybe Grindr looks pretty damn good after all.
They set up for the play again, Mo whining under his breath as he lined up next to Trevor that the defense was going to be even less fooled this time around.
That was probably true, but it didn’t matter, because they needed to practice this stuff. In the playoffs, every team was good. Every team was fighting with every ounce of skill and energy to move on to the next round.
Just because they were the first seed in the AFC, that didn’t guarantee shit.
Griff snapped the ball again, and Aidan dropped back. This time Lane fell back into his blocking stance, picking up the outside linebacker that tried to evade Levi’s grip.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Trevor ran the route.
Pretty well, actually, and Lane felt a spike of satisfaction as Trevor kept an obvious eye on Aidan as he dropped back.
He pushed a little further past the first-down line than Lane had, but Trevor had a smaller body and less dominating strength. It would be tougher if Aidan had thrown the pass short for Trevor to muscle his way across. Lane could’ve done it, but Trevor wasn’t Lane.
Similar, in some ways, but not thesame.
But in the end that didn’t matter, because unexpectedly, Mo turned the other direction, away from the coverage, and Aidan, tracking him, compensated by sliding over and tossing the pass.
“Better,” Aidan pronounced when they made it back to the huddle.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mo complained. “That was a thirty-yard freaking gain.”
But Aidan only grinned. “Could’ve been forty if you’d kept your feet.”
“Fucker,” Mo muttered. “Throw the pass better next time and I’ll keep my feet.”
The fact Aidan had managed to compensate at all was extraordinary, and they all knew it. Mo definitely knew it. Mo probably knew it best of all.
They ran another half an hour’s worth of these long third-down conversions, before Aidan had them huddle up one last time before the official end of practice.
“Some of you’ve been here before,” Aidan said, his voice even but carrying in the way it usually did, “but every year it’s tougher. It’s a given we gotta do all the big things right. Thesmall shit? More important than ever. And risks? We gotta take them. Mo took a risk on that play, curling to the other sideline, but he knew we wouldn’t get it otherwise. That’s what I want us to be. More us than we’ve ever been, and beyond that too. Evolved past standard Thunder football.”
“Future in motivational speaking right there,” Levi teased, and Aidan’s cheeks flushed bright pink.
“Shut up,” he said to his boyfriend, but Levi was smiling over at him like he’d never been prouder.
Lane didn’t know why anyone called him and Trev the demon twins when those two were likethat.
They were on their way home from the practice facility when Lane turned to Trevor and said exactly that.
