“I don’t want you to change that,” I rasp out, my hands trembling by my sides, so I quickly flex them to work the tremors out. My chest is doing something complicated—tightening and loosening at the same time. I think about huddling under a blanket in the bed of Linden’s truck, stargazing. I think about how he held me while I told him about my parents, and then I think about kissing him in the rain.
I think about Wagner’s office, too, about‘not everything out there is worth the cost’,and Seb in the parking lot, saying‘I thought if I kept those two worlds strictly apart, I could maybe have both’.
“I love you, too,” I say. “I think I’ve been doing that for a while now. You probably knew.”
“I hoped,” he admits, his words accompanied by a breathless laugh, his hands reaching out for me. “But honestly, I didn’t dare assume.”
I step into his open arms, then grab his hips and hop him up onto the counter to lean our foreheads together. “What happened to ‘not doing’ football ogres who plan to go pro?” I want to know, my nose pressing against his cheek, then behind his ear, carefully inhaling his scent.
“Yeah, that was probably more me trying to manage my wishful thinking,” he admits. “But we still have to talk about the ‘going pro’ part.”
I flinch back at that, his words slashing through the small moment of weightlessness he created for us.
“I—” I start, but he puts a finger over my lips, successfully shutting me up.
“I know I can’t ask you to give that up—I would never. And I know it’ll be hard, Micah. You being who knows where you’ll be drafted to, me finishing up here, watching the whole nation fawn over the cute wide receiver,” he says the last part with a small grin, and I choke out a laugh.
“Istillplay tight end, sweetheart.”
“Glad to know what parts you’re focused on.” He chuckles before his face goes serious again. “I won’t lie to you: I don’t like to think of myself as a secret, but I also won’t force you to come out and tank your draft chances. I know you’re going to work with people who’ll have very strong opinions about who you should be, and those won’t always include me. I know that and yet I still…I just want us to try, okay?”
I hold my breath, my eyes searching his for a hint of doubt or hesitation, but there’s none. Just raw honesty as he blinks back at me.
“Lind…that won’t be easy.”
“Probably not,” he agrees.
“We might fight about it. If…if there’s gossip, I mean. We might fight over what people will assume about me. Or if we haven’t seen each other in weeks, and you’re busy with exams, and I’m fighting for my life to get a spot on the roster—we might argue about all of it then.”
“Not unlikely,” he agrees again, his hands reaching for my face, cupping it gently. “All of that might happen. We’ll need to figure out a lot of rules—no fake girlfriends, for example. Noorchestrated threesomes either. But I don’t want to pass this up because it’ll be hard, and others have failed at it before. I don’t want to give up just to protect a potentially easier version of my life and settle for the next Linen-Pants-Guy.”
I snort at that, my hands coming up to his wrists, holding them in place as I lean into his touch.
“I knew he wore linen pants,” I tell him, satisfaction flooding me. “I just knew it.”
“Shut up, ogre.” He laughs and pulls me in, his lips grazing over mine, teasingly at first, then hungrily.
I kiss him back with everything I have to give right now—which, honestly, isn’t much more than the promise of a difficult future.
But it’ll be our future.
And I won’t let it be difficult forever.
Linden, August 24th
After our mutual confession last week, I worried things would change between Micah and me. But surprisingly—and thankfully—things stay almost exactly the same. We are both busy, trying to catch up on our college work and training before classes resume. It doesn't leave a lot of time for this newus, though every evening I’m looking forward to falling into bed together and cuddling up, occasionally spending a few minutes talking before we fall asleep.
However, one big difference is that we no longer hide from our roommates. Telling them was extremely anticlimactic: Olli wasn't there, Vince already knew, Sasha merely raised her brows, so it was only Marisol who gave the appropriate wide-eyed-big-gasp reaction.
“God, theonesummer I'm not here andeverythinghappens!” She lamented afterward, shaking her head, and totally forgot to ask embarrassing questions, which I'm still grateful for.
Like my dad promised, he and Mom arrived in Bonham in their big pickup truck a week after the party. It dwarfs Olli’s Chevy as Dad slowly inches into our driveway. We should haveasked where his keys were before his parents whisked him away to New York.
My stomach is in knots as I step outside onto our porch to greet them.
The first instinct is to run toward my parents and hug them like a homesick kid getting picked up from summer camp. But quietly, I'm embarrassed about my outburst on the phone. In the light of the late afternoon, it feels ridiculous that I was so distraught when I wasn't even the one who got hurt. I'm supposed to be an adult, having all this independence, and still, I needed my dad to tell me what to do.
And he simply did that.
