Page 179 of These Secret Years

“Since when?”

“Around the time of your first game this season, I guess.”

Knight takes this in with raised brows then gives a thoughtful nod before sitting down on the mattress. He kicks off his slippers to reveal gray wool socks and draws his knees as close to his chest as he can get them. “So that was also around the time my agent started blowing up my phone with all the draft stuff.”

I press my lips together. Yep. Yes, it was.

I hated myself for being a terrible boyfriend, but what I don’t hate myself for—at least not tonight, is being bad at taking a break. I’m glad he’s making himself a little pallet on the floor to go over the details. I’m glad he’s proving to be as good of a guy as I’ve always claimed he was. That he meant it when he told me he loved me.

I meant what I told him about wanting him to take me back—with some force if necessary, but if I implied in any way that I never wanted to see him again, or that I was done with him, that would have been a lie, and so in that case, it’s good that we’re doing this. Knight’s been my best friend for almost two years now. He knows things about me my own mother doesn’t know and never will.

But yeah—this idea of him leaving, moving away to pursue bigger and better things, things he wants even more now with his dad gone than he ever wanted when his father was alive, and me—not quite done figuring my shit out yet, only just now beginning to chart a possible career path? Going our separate ways has become a given. The constant contact with his agent all season really impressed upon me that he’s moving forward, and I’m still stuck.

When I decided I’d be staying in Missouri for grad school with Shannon, and Knight was going to be on some coast playing football and making millions, everything about us that once made sense here at the lake, or in the back of his truck, or in our apartment stopped making any kind of sense at all.

Maybe I lack the imagination, but I’ve never been able to picture us together long term. Once he gets drafted, we’ll lose each other all the way. For good. Even though life has chipped and chipped away at what we could have been since the day we met, his starting his career with the NFL was always meant to be the final blow of the axe.

“It makes sense that you’d want to go to grad school,” he says, very good at echoing my own train of thought. “I wish you would have mentioned it before. There’s never been a need to keep something like that a secret from me.”

A horrible sense of numbness settles over me as I stare at him on the floor. His mid-season body is in peak condition, and the scruff on his face is thick. He doesn’t look like a kid anymore. And he certainly doesn’t look like the dumb jock my stoner friends and I used to pretend they all were freshman year. “What difference does it make?”

He shrugs with no answer to that because there isn’t one. In his head, I think he hoped I’d follow him wherever he went, and there was a time I might have wanted to. Needed to. But, while my trauma still has a way of rearing its ugly head at inconvenient times, it is more predictable now. I’m capable of being on my own, of not having my life centered around Knight’s.

“Did any of this mean anything to you?” he asks.

“I told you it did,” I say.

“Other than ‘making life bearable’,” he says with air quotes.

“I love you,” I tell him, adding some firmness to the words.

“As a friend, or…”

“As everything.”

“But when I mentioned having a future, what? Did you just tune that part out?”

“No. But I never really thought it was possible.”

“Even when I was willing to come out?”

“Yeah, even then.”

“But when we were here over the summer—when you drove all the way up to be with me and stay with my family—could you at least see it then?”

“Maybe? But I also kind of saw you quitting football at that point. I didn’t know what you were gonna do. And then you just came back stronger.”

He tilts his head slightly to regard me. “You’re stronger, too, you know?”

“In some places,” I agree.

“But you think you’ll be better off if you just get rid of me?”

I run my hands down my legs and sit up straighter. “Tell me how you think we can still be in each other’s lives when we’re thousands of miles apart? How does it work?”

“I’m not even gonna get into that if you’re just gonna shit all over it and tell me it can’t work. You’re acting like you’re trying to teach yourself how to hate me.”

“Or maybe I’m just scared.”