a thousand fireflies had come together for a brilliant show. He sighed, sipping his merlot, and slumped against the windowsill. Paris in summertime, and his heart was pitter-pattering. His eyes slid sideways, to Wes, the cowboy football player he could have met any other day in Texas, on campus, even, but who he’d met here. In the city of love.
He was so screwed. This was going to come crashing down, like it always did. This was going to end in pain, and regret, and wishing he’d never, ever tried. Don’t do it, his mind whispered. You can’t be friends with him.
And another part of him whispered back, I’m not sure what I want with this man is friendship. Not anymore.
Chapter Three
Wes splashed water on his face, washing away the remnants of shaving cream. Droplets ran down his neck and the valley between his pecs. He felt the cool touch like fingers on his skin, skittering all the way to his waist. Like Justin’s fingers, stroking—
He squeezed the edge of the porcelain sink, hard enough his arms trembled. He tipped his head forward, closing his eyes as water dripped from his nose, his chin. All his life he’d fought this. He’d choked this want, this desire, ever since the day he declared to his father he was going to marry the ranch foreman or one of the cowboys down from Montana. He’d been young enough to get away with it, get called hilarious instead of a freak. He’d been laughed at.
He kept his crush on the foreman secret after that. Stopped watching the hands work shirtless as they fed the horses, changed the hay, cleaned the stalls. Kept his mouth shut and waited, and waited, and waited for his eyes to start wandering to the girls and their bouncy ponytails at school, to focus on curves and skirt hems instead of happy trails and tight asses and bulges. It never happened. He stared at the inside of his locker when everyone changed, memorizing the same square inches of battered metal and balled-up socks. Maybe he could fake it, he thought. Or force himself to like girls.
In high school, sophomore year, he’d dated Lisa. She broke up with him when he wouldn’t go all the way in her back seat on the fourth date. Senior year, Marietta got him into a bedroom at a house party, when he was a few beers past common sense, and got his pants down and her mouth on him before he found that sense again. She was trying to get her own pants off when he pushed her back gently, told her no, and then held her when she cried. She was one of the desperate girls his senior year, looking at grades that weren’t good enough for a scholarship and no money in the bank to afford college tuition. Her only hope out of that town was to hitch her wagon to a boy on his way up, and who better than the top tight end in the state with a full-ride scholarship in the big city? “I’m sorry,” he’d told her in that dark room. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
He couldn’t force it. And he didn’t want to try.
But he couldn’t go out and find a boyfriend, either. He could count the number of out pro NFL players on one hand, and the number of out football players currently at the Division I-A level in college was zero. Coming out, at his level? The guys who had worked their way up dreamed of that NFL contract, hungered for it so deeply it gnawed at their bones, filled their veins with poisonous hope. An entire team of dreamers, each one fixated on a shared goal: winning. Championships. Scouts. One team, one purpose.
Who the hell was he to break that focus? Strike out from the team, be himself? The selfishness of that thought made his stomach turn inside out, made his lungs stop and his heart stutter. There were all kinds of platitudes, pretty talk on posters about being yourself and embracing who you were, but when a hundred other guys depended on you, being yourself wasn’t an option. He was part of a team, part of a machine, and he was helping every one of those guys achieve their dreams, scrape stars from the sky as they reached for futures hidden behind the moon. All their lives, they’d been told if they worked hard enough, they could get there. But they couldn’t do it on