“Like I’d be anywhere else,” Levi reassured him.
“Is that ’cause of what I did to you last night or because it’s the right thing to do?” Aidan wondered.
“What did you do last night?” Cam wondered and then made anoophnoise as Dawson must have shoved an elbow in his side.
“Your job to imagine,” Levi said, winking at their punter.
Lane liked studying film—otherwise he wouldn’t spend so much of his free time, unbidden, doing it, but that didn’t mean he was prepared for watching Aidan go over every play, every frame of the Piranhas and Bengals game with a fine-tooth comb.
By the three-hour mark, it felt like his eyes were glazing over.
“Babe,” Levi begged, slumping over at the table dramatically, “you’re a fucking machine. You gotta remember that the rest of us are human.”
“There’s just a few more plays—this one in particular I think is good,” Aidan said, fast-forwarding and then letting the video play at half speed.
Burrow, down ten points and needing to make a serious fourth-quarter comeback with only five minutes left in the game, dropped back and made a pass right down the middle of the field, clearly hoping to get the ball to Ja’Marr Chase.
The rookie safety, who’d replaced Sebastian Howard when he’d retired at the end of last season, had sat right in the middle of the zone, right in front of Chase and had managed to bat the ball away before he could catch it.
It looked like a great play, and Aidan seemed to think so, too. When they finished watching it, he talked about how they needed to avoid throwing in his direction, he was having a breakout rookie season, etcetera.
Lane actually thought he’d nearly fucked that play up, and he and Trevor had talked about it, at length, after it had happened. Trevor’s head had been in his lap, and he’d been ruffling his hair, as they’d discussed the positioning of that rookie safety.
It was so easy to flash back to that conversation, not just the content of it but the particular feeling of bone-deep contentment. Like he’d been running and running for ages, for as long as he could remember, and now he could not only slow down but actuallyrelaxinto this feeling.
He did, for a second, consider saying thathe’dhad a totally different impression of that play, and of that rookie safety’s play on it. But he was so used tonotspeaking up, and besides, who was he to argue with Aidan Flynn? Aidan had been doing this for eleven years. Lane wasn’t a rookie anymore, but he’d still only been on this team for three years.
But at the same time, if him speaking upcouldhelp the team, wasn’t it his responsibility to do it? To say something just in case it could be helpful?
Lane was in the middle of internally debating when the decision was snatched neatly right out of his hands.
“That’s not how we saw it,” Trevor said calmly, like he disagreed with Aidan every day and it was no big deal. “Well, notwenecessarily. Mostly Lane.”
Aidan’s gaze latched on to Trevor and he raised an eyebrow. “No?”
Sometimes Lane wondered if Trevor actually listened to everything he said, especially about the games they watched together, but it turned out that not only was Trevor listening, he was absorbing it all.
“Play it again,” Trevor said, still seeming confident. He glanced over at Lane, not like he was asking permission, but more like he was inviting him to contribute. Well, Lane still didn’t know if he wanted to.
He didn’t know whether he was annoyed or grateful that Trevor was just freaking volunteering him and his opinions in the middle of twenty of his teammates, including the king of film study himself, Aidan.
“Alright,” Aidan said. He let it play once and then twice, and Lane shouldn’t have been surprised when Aidan turned to him instead of Trevor when it finished the second time.
“Well,” Lane dragged out, hesitating. “I just noticed that he was further up, closer to the line of scrimmage initially.” He went through the progressions that the rookie safety had done, and how he compensated for making the wrong read at first with his speed, and how he almost hadn’t gotten there in time.
When he finished, Aidan just frowned and then rewound the video, watching it for a fourth time.
“Anyone disagree with Lane’s take?” Aidan asked, glancing around.
But instead of anyone arguing, Lane was surprised—maybe stupidly, because hedidknow what he was talking about, even if he didn’t love sharing it—to see a lot of slow nods of agreement.
“I’m with you guys.” Aidan shot Lane a look that told him that he absolutely remembered the conversation they’d had at the hockey game on Saturday night, and that he knew now that everything Lane had said was total bullshit.
Great.
It wasn’t Trevor’s fault, not really anyway, because Lane had never made it clear to him that his private film study was just that:private.
He’d said he didn’t want to talk about it, but he’d never explicitly told Trevor not to tell anyone.
