The Quarterback (The Team, #2)

by Tal Bauer

Hate didn’t need truth to spread like wildfire.

“It feels like a dream,” Wes said. “Good answer. Loving my son should be a dream come true.”

What if he were making a decision for we instead of me? Yeah, that would pull a guy from being a boy to being a man.

There was something more he wanted, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was yet. He couldn’t name it, couldn’t put words to it, but it felt like something that moved inside him

Would he ever throw a football again? How could his shoulder work as smoothly with thread holding everything together? Was he going to stutter and snag when he moved, like a robot who needed oil?

He wanted to be petulant, wanted to grab Justin’s coffee and fling it across the room, wanted to force their attention back to him. Wanted to not be invisible, not when his world had collapsed and his future was drip-drip-dripping away with every slow infusion from his IV

curled sideways, slumping over as his heart, with all his fears inside it, fractured.

There were days when he was in awe of the three young men, of their choices and their worldviews and their goals. And then there were days when he wondered how they’d managed to live as long as they had.

His first real friends in he couldn’t remember how long were his son, his son’s boyfriend, and their best friend, and that sounded like a midlife crisis in the making.

It even looked like a vacuum had wandered over the carpet a few times.

With Justin away, he didn’t expect their time together to last, but there was a flicker of hope burning inside him, as tiny as a birthday candle.

Colton’s jaw dropped. His fingers curled on the countertop, nails digging into the pads of his palm. He chose his son. Justin is so fucking lucky.

He looked soft, warm, and comfortable. Like the word home turned into a person.

His affection was like a star, and Colton was caught in his gravity. Danger. He’s not your dad. You don’t have a dad.

But he wasn’t a kid, and Nick wasn’t his dad, and this had an end. It always had an end. Was Nick using him as a surrogate son? With Justin gone, did he need an outlet for his boundless affection?

For fifteen years, at every game, he’d scoured the stands for his dad. And disappointment hardened inside him every time, until the hole he’d scooped out of himself to bury the shards of his hope had turned into a canyon that bored right through him. Was Nick a bridge across that canyon? He was filling up all the cracks and crevices where Colton’s hope had withered and died. Or was he an earthquake that would undo him from the inside out? Could he stand it if Nick vanished? If he wasn’t in the stands or in Colton’s life? What if Nick was just another missing face he searched for game after game after game? If he ever played again.

What was better? Suffering in silence and hardening your heart against the world? Or owning what you wanted, what you needed?

Justin and Wes and their love had stunned them both, not just into silence, but into smallness. Who were they next to the sun and moon of Justin and Wes’s love?

He felt raw, exposed. Like he’d just sliced himself open and held out his heart for Nick to look at, and all Nick had done was stare at him.

If you loved me, I’d never make you regret it. I’d never give you a reason to wish we hadn’t met. If you loved me, I’d never let you drink to try to forget us.

Guess that hadn’t been desire in his eyes at the winery. Only dust. And Colton’s runaway imagination.

He’d loved that. Loved every minute of it. Because that’s what you did when you were married. You rebuilt your married life with Colton, you jackass.

Anguish. So much anguish Nick couldn’t breathe. He was drowning in his son’s agony, in his devastation. In the Why and Why and Why that stabbed him through the heart.

Now he was nothing but pieces, the same broken jigsaw puzzle he’d always been, kicked over and scattered by other people. Pieces lost. Pieces broken. Pieces thrown away.

repeated Nick’s words, the shape and sound of them slicing him apart from the inside out.

Why did no one ever love him back? Why was it so easy for people to leave him? What was wrong with him that made everyone walk away, go back to their own lives, and leave him behind? It was just summer. You’re my whole world, Justin. Why wasn’t he anyone’s whole world?

Colton stayed in the shadowed corner of the end zone, gathering his footballs for another round of failure.

like four years ago, when he was a wide-eyed kid and he thought his life was finally beginning. Now his life was ending.

Terrible. He should delete it. He hit Send.

Colton didn’t have a job. He didn’t have a football team. He didn’t even have a best friend anymore. He had the taste of sweet summer wine on his lips and memories of candlelight flickering on someone else’s skin. He was Colton Hall, and he loved a man who didn’t love him back.

He only wanted to be loved, and cherished, and needed by one person in the world. And he was.

“The only thing I ever wanted more than football was for someone to love me.”

Planning a life for we, not me.