More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes a year changed a man in ways that couldn’t be measured in hours and days and weeks. Sometimes a year became the cornerstone of a life.
Boy Scouts, and then football, baseball, basketball. His pack leaders and coaches were surrogate fathers, new men in his life with every change of the season. He’d had to get used to new expectations, new encouragements and diatribes, new ways of showing care and affection. But for that season, his coach became his world. Of course, Colton was one boy among dozens on each of his teams, and the only way to get attention was to stand out. Be goofy. Be good, damn good, at sports. Be anything except himself. People left when he was himself.
He looked soft, warm, and comfortable. Like the word home turned into a person.
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?
Your hearts didn’t beat together. That’s the hardest damn thing about growing with someone: you gotta make sure you keep your hearts beating together and that you really know each other. It’s too damn easy to go spinning off on your own and leave each other behind.”
His tears fell in slow drips until the sun rose and spilled rose-and-gold-flecked light across their bedroom. Then he dried his eyes on the pillowcase and turned his back on Nick. Maybe he could get an hour of sleep if he stopped staring at the man. Of course, when he fell asleep again, Nick was waiting in his dreams.
Sometimes he cried. Cried boiling, frustrated tears, furious at himself for falling for someone impossible. Not impossible like falling for a movie star, or the girlfriend of one of his buddies, or a chick so far out of his league it wasn’t funny. He’d fallen for his friend’s dad. His friend’s straight dad. The best guy he’d ever known.
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.
I want to be your quarterback. I want a million nights like this. I want you to always smile at me exactly the way you are right now.
He gave Nick a palm-size teddy bear holding a pink heart as a consolation prize. Colton knocked down nine milk bottles with bean bags and chose a stuffed longhorn with a rose in its mouth as his prize. “Trade?” He held out the longhorn to Nick. “That wouldn’t be fair. Yours is bigger than mine.” “Well…” Colton grinned. “I mean…”
Deep into the drive back home, Colton slowed the truck to a stop in the middle of the farm-to-market road and checked his mirrors. No one was around, and he’d been alone on the road for half an hour. He flicked off his headlights and interior lights, and pearl moonlight suddenly swam through the waves of summer grass, turning the waist-high prairie into a silver sea. Iridescence glowed off the asphalt, and starlight dipped in and out of Nick’s features, painting his lips and his forehead and the spray of his eyelashes on his cheeks in secret shades of colors Colton couldn’t name. I love you.
...more
Even if together they could shake the stars, and even if, when Colton fell asleep in his arms at night, Nick knew that what they’d become had gone far outside the boundaries he’d tried to scribble around his heart.
He’d thought he was becoming someone, especially to Nick. 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. Didn’t you know this was how it was going to end? It always ends like this. People leave when you’re yourself.
Nick had gone after Justin, leaving Colton behind in the wreckage of them. With the ghosts of his hands on Colton’s skin, his kisses still lingering on Colton’s lips. He was still inside Colton, too. The shape of him. His wet heat. His come. Nick had left the way he’d been planning on leaving Colton at the end of the summer, apparently.
Colton walked out Nick’s front door—this isn’t home anymore—and headed for the elevator. He left the football, the one-handed controller, and his broken heart behind.
You selfish, greedy bastard. Justin, gone. Colton, gone. Finally, noise tore through the oppressive silence in his condo: the sound of his weeping.
“It’s hard to live in this world, son,” the old man said. “Some days are harder than others. But they even out, in the end. Eventually.”
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?
“What happened?” Justin whispered. “Team workout. Clarence gave up,” Wes said. “Colton didn’t.”
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.”
It was like Justin could read his mind, read the shape of his thoughts. He tugged Colton into their own hug and lay his lips against Colton’s cheek. “Take care of him, okay?” “I will. I always will.” “And he’ll always take care of you. You’re his forever, Colton. Everyone can see it.”
He’d thought he wanted a team, and for a while, that worked. But what he really wanted—what he really needed—was a family.
