locker room floor. Pushed himself to his feet. “You look like you just punched your best friend. Newsflash, jackass: I’m not your fucking friend anymore. I’m not friends with people who lie to me. Or who use me.”
“I didn’t use you—” He tried to reach for him. Colton ripped his arm away. “I’m sorry,” Wes choked out.
“You think punching me is so bad? How could you possibly do anything worse than what you’ve already fucking done?” Colton shook his head. He grabbed his pads and his helmet and turned his back on Wes, striding out of the locker room and leaving Wes alone in the wreckage of his life.
When he jogged out onto the field, a ripple went through the stands, through the fans already in their seats two hours before the game. He heard the boos, the jeers. His skin crawled. He wanted to jump out of his skeleton.
Coach looked right through him as if he wasn’t even there. He spoke to some distant point over Wes’s shoulder, even though Wes was standing right in front of him. “You have made a grave mistake.”
“Coach—”
“This is not the time for your lips to be moving. The time for you to open your mouth was months ago. Maybe even years ago. You put a bomb at the heart of this team and played with the detonator, and now you’re shocked and shaken that everything’s fallen apart, huh?” Coach shook his head. Glared at the scoreboard. “I warned you, Wes. I warned you what would happen.”
“It’s my private life—”
“It’s not!” Coach pushed right up into Wes’s face, finally looking at him. “I told you they would turn your life upside down. Turn you inside out. You want a private life? A secret boyfriend? Then you keep that shit private! You don’t go flaunting it all over Paris or all over this campus! At the very least, you should have come to the team, or to me, with this. Given us a goddamn heads-up that this was a possibility. That one morning we might wake up to some news. We’d be able to handle it together, then. But no, that’s not what you decided.”
He paced away from Wes, shaking his head. “You think you’re paying for it, but it’s not just you. The whole team is about to suffer for your decisions.”
This was what he’d so desperately wanted to avoid. Everything he’d done, every choice he’d made, he’d thought it had all been for the team. For them.
How wrong, how horribly wrong he’d been.
“I’m ignoring ten calls from the NCAA. I can’t ignore them much longer. It looks like there’s going to be an investigation. No one really understands what you’ve done. Did you misrepresent yourself? Make false statements? Cause the university to earn more money than they would have if you’d been out? There’s going to be an inquiry into your life. Into the choices you made and didn’t make.”
Wes looked away, staring at the brittle blue sky over the scoreboard. It was a perfect day for football. A bite to the air, the open sky so pure and wide it felt like the lid had been lifted off the world. Not a cloud in sight. Slight breeze, just enough to tickle the skin but not to interfere with any passes. The perfect day for the end of everything. No more football. No more scholarship. No more college. No more future.
He tried to keep his chin from quivering. “I understand, Coach.”
“I don’t think you do. Not yet.” Coach took a step back. “You’ll warm up on your own before today’s game. Run, Wes. Run until I say stop.”
He set off around the field. He tasted salt with every ragged inhale.
When he and Colton walked out for the coin flip, half of the stadium booed as his name was announced. Colton ignored him, wouldn’t even look at him. Wes kept his helmet on to hide his swollen, red-rimmed eyes. He turned away when the cameraman tried to zoom in to his face.
They lost the coin flip. The captains of the other team only shook Colton’s hand. They left Wes hanging, his hand in the air, as if he didn’t even exist.
Mississippi elected to receive, and in under two minutes, they marched up the field for an easy touchdown, putting seven points on the board with barely any effort.
The sideline around Wes was deathly silent. No one spoke. No one joked around or tried to rally any excitement. Clusters of Wes’s teammates sat in