When they were finished, and Justin had collected the mountain of recycling and bagged it all up, Wes lay on his side and watched the ducks swimming across the pond as he chewed a long blade of milk thistle, plucked out of the grasses growing by the water. “Oh!” Justin unzipped his backpack and pulled out the gift he’d bought for Wes. “I ordered this for you on Amazon.”
Wes looked from Justin to the bag of duck feed and then back to Justin. A smile spread over his face, warm and soft and sweet. “Thank you,” he breathed.
“One of my favorite memories of Paris is watching you feed the ducks. There were probably five hundred people at that school, but no one fed them except you.”
“Probably because those ducks were jerks after they got fed. Remember when they chased us?”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
Wes rubbed his thumb across his forehead. “Always kind of thought I was a little bit of an idiot for doing that. Kind of country boy, hickish. I thought I looked dumb in front of you.”
“The opposite, cowboy.” He wanted to reach for Wes, cradle his face in his hands, kiss him slowly.
Instead, he stood next to Wes as Wes tossed feed to the ducks, and then they walked around the pond, to the back side and into the shade, where no one went. There, Wes pulled him behind an old oak tree and backed him against the trunk, then tipped his hat back and kissed Justin as softly, as sweetly, as Justin could have imagined. Kissed him so good Justin’s toes curled inside his shoes and he clung to Wes’s waist, dug his fingers into the skin between his waistband and his T-shirt.
They only stopped kissing when a bicyclist’s bell echoed across the pond, and they peeled away from each other, but they still nuzzled each other’s noses and cheeks as Wes laced their hands together and whispered his name.
Wednesday, they walked into French together, much to the professor’s bemusement, and sat side by side in the back of the class. The assignment for the day was to write an essay in French on their major and their career field, and they spent the class period helping each other look up the specialized vocabularies of nursing and public health, then read each other’s essays to double-check everything before they turned them in. The professor gave them both a raised eyebrow, but he spoke only to Wes, wishing him well at the game on Saturday.
Thursday, Justin talked himself into going to Wes’s afternoon practice. Some practices were open to the public and some were closed, but Thursday’s was open, and he went. He’d never been inside the stadium, and for a moment, he had no idea where to go. He followed the sounds, the whistles and the grunts and the shouts, and wove through the empty tunnels to the lower bowl seating. He ended up near the thirty-yard line, down almost at field level, watching the offense drill play after play.
There was Wes, bursting off the line of scrimmage. Rushing, running a slant route, his hands darting for the ball almost faster than Justin could see. Sprinting, launching into a breakaway. There wasn’t any defense set up, so this was all timing practice, working on routes and hitting marks and perfecting the plays.
Wes is pretty damn perfect.
He made the game look effortless. Justin’s dad always said that was the measure of greatness: when someone makes the challenging look easy.
If Justin didn’t know better—and he did—watching Wes, he’d think he himself could waltz out onto the field and run a route, turn, and catch the seventy-mile-per-hour football Colton launched at him. Pluck it out of the air like he was picking grapes. Dance on his toes as he landed, twirled, and took off at full speed.
For the past week, Justin had stayed up late watching YouTube videos about football. Football 101 and Football for Dummies. What Does This Mean in Football. He’d even texted his dad a few questions. He could feel the shock coming through the texts back, but so far, his dad hadn’t asked him why he wanted to know who the greatest tight ends of all time were, or why it was called the strong side when the tight end lined up there.
He could follow along at Wes’s practice now, follow what Wes was doing. More than that, he understood it, at least a little bit. Understood how good Wes was. Him, and