Now, with lemon polish in his nose and tequila on his lips, he tried to put sound to the way his heart was tearing in two, the way his soul was shredding down the center.
The screen door slid open behind him. “Justin?” his dad asked. “Justin, what happened?”
I can’t do this. Forget you know me.
He buried his face in his palms and tried to scream. Not a single sound came out.
Rain fell. He watched the drops smash into the pool, watched ripples form and crash against each other. He couldn’t cry anymore, so the world was crying for him, building an external lake of his sorrows. Thanks, God. Did me a solid on that one.
Summer rains were sticky things, but they cleared the air, beat the dust to the ground before evaporating into a sweat-slick weight that hung chest-high. Justin hadn’t been able to take a deep breath for weeks now. What was another couple of days?
Footsteps splashed across the patio, and his dad ducked under the awning that covered the pool deck. He rubbed his hand through his wet hair, soaked from the ten-foot run from their back door. Justin had come out here be alone, but apparently, his dad had other plans.
“Beer?” A longneck, offered as an opening gambit. Justin hadn’t said more than a dozen words to his mom or dad since he’d gotten the text and turned off his phone. He’d spent a week facedown in his bed. For all that, there was a restless energy humming through him as he studied the debris of his broken dreams, the ruins of the fantasies he’d built for him and Wes. The summer they’d planned to share. Fall, and how they promised to try. And what came after. Ever after, even.
He had no idea what to do now. No idea what to think. His thoughts chased themselves endlessly as he berated himself for thinking he and Wes were more than what they’d been all along. What had he done? Taken a study-abroad fling and turned it into dreams of wedding bells?
But what about that kiss at the airport? That had meant something. He’d felt it. That had been a promise, Wes giving Justin something he could hold on to, that he could remember.
No. That kiss had been a goodbye. It had been all the things Wes had been too afraid—too cowardly—to say to Justin’s face.
Wes Van de Hoek, now one of the nation’s top five college ball players. Justin had wandered into the living room as his dad watched ESPN the night before, and he’d ended up leaning against the couch through the Division I-A news and Southeastern Conference highlights. There was Texas’s football team, looping on SportsCenter. There was the quarterback—he knew his name now: Colton Hall. Knew he was Wes’s best friend. Knew he ate a box of Froot Loops a day and ran naked across a stadium on a bet to win a PlayStation once.
And then there was jersey number 87, rushing down the field. Justin had walked out of the living room, right as his dad asked him to sit and join him.
Sometime in the next two weeks, a package would arrive on his porch from the university’s team store. Inside would be the 87 jersey Justin had ordered. He’d paid extra to have the back lettered, something flirty that could also be explained away. <3 Van de Hoek. If he hadn’t been so cute about it, he could have given the jersey to his dad. Now he’d just throw it away.
“Justin…” His dad took his silence as a kind of acceptance, a tacit agreement that he could stay. He threw himself onto the chaise lounge beside Justin, sighing as he sank into the cushion. “Weather sucks,” he grumbled.
Justin took the beer from his dad. Sipped. It tasted like nothing, but the bubbles reminded him of champagne, and Paris, and splitting a bottle after the ballet. His cowboy at the opera, holding Justin when he tried to hide how he was crying in the fourth act. I loved you so much that night.
Every night, every day, all the little ways he’d fallen in love with Wes, again and again and again—
“I, uh. I thought I’d be doing this after your first girl broke your heart.”
Weeks without talking, and that’s what his dad was going to open with? Justin sent him a scathing stare. Set down the beer and started to push himself up.