He had no idea how to do this. No idea how to take those steps, walk the hundred feet into his own locker room. Three years he’d been on the team. Waking this walk, from the parking lot to the stadium. Today, he didn’t know how to summon the courage to take the first step.
Justin sat beside him, holding his hand. He kept apologizing, kept saying he was sorry, so sorry. They’d wept together in Justin’s room, clung to each other. ESPN had picked up the story, and so had three major news networks. Everywhere they turned, it seemed, there was Wes, holding Justin’s hand. Kissing him. Their private love, on display.
Wes had taken his phone with him into the bathroom at one point. After he’d locked the door and made sure Justin couldn’t see, he’d checked the message boards and Twitter and found exactly what he’d feared: vitriolic hatred. Shock. Disgust.
Threats. Threats against Wes, which he could shove down, push away. Threats against Justin, which made him see red, made him ball his hands into fists and slam them into the tile wall until his knuckles split. Promises to come and find him, find Justin. Show them what faggots deserved. He’d buckled, screaming into the bunched-up fabric of his sweatshirt until he couldn’t breathe, until he was gasping, choking. It was so, so much worse than he’d feared.
Three hours before the biggest game of his life, there he was, sitting in his truck like a coward. Those threats ran on a loop in his mind. He didn’t want to let go of Justin’s hand. What if something happened while he was in the stadium? What if he couldn’t get to Justin in time? What if someone took Justin from him? What if he lost everything today? Not just football, not just his friends, or the team, or his scholarship. What if he lost Justin, too?
“You need to go in.” Justin’s voice was small and broken. So unlike him. “You have to talk to Colton.”
“I don’t think Colton wants to talk to me.”
In fact, he knew Colton didn’t want to talk to him. Colton’s last text messages had told him to fuck off forever, that Colton didn’t know him, had never known him. That Wes was a liar. A fraud.
“This is your team,” Justin whispered. “This is your game. These are your friends.”
“Not anymore.”
Justin buried his face in his palms, his arms braced on the dash. His hair fell forward, and Wes brushed it back behind his ear before pulling Justin across the bench seat, into his arms. “We knew this was the risk.”
“We should have been more careful,” Justin gasped. “I shouldn’t have pushed you at that party. I shouldn’t have played beer pong. I shouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t force me to do anything. I was right there with you. I wanted it all.”
Justin leaned into Wes’s chest as his tears soaked Wes’s T-shirt. Wes’s own eyes were dry now, and there was a hollow sort of finality inside him, along with a formless, aching dread at the thought of walking into that locker room.
“Go,” Justin choked out. “Go. Or you never will.”
“I don’t want to leave you—”
“Go.” Justin pulled out of his arms, dragging in deep, shuddering breaths in a valiant attempt to calm himself that Wes saw right through. “I’ll be here after the game. We’ll figure this out. But you need to go. Now.”
He nodded. Gripped his duffel. Exhaled.
And then he lunged across the seat and grabbed Justin, kissing him deeply, like Justin was the only thing tethering him to the world anymore. Maybe he was. He kissed him one more time, and then he threw himself out of the truck and slammed the door quickly, before he climbed back in and drove him and Justin straight to the middle of nowhere and stayed there forever.
Every step felt like he was walking to his end. He trudged forward, his clammy hands sliding up and down the strap of his duffel. Fans had already started to tailgate, and when they spotted him, the jeers and the heckles began. They were a roar of static, the background noise to the collapse of his life. The wind billowing off the freight train that was headed right for him. He was standing in the center of the tracks, his feet cemented to the railroad ties. Nothing to do but face his end.
He felt eyes on him with every step he took into the stadium’s depths. He passed janitors