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“Not a compliment,” I tell him. “I just don’t want to watch Maeve mope around the house.”
“Yeah.” Wes’s amusement disappears fast. “I’m working on that.”
“Good.”
He sighs before running a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want you to find out about it like that,” he says.
I’m surprised, and it must show on my face, because he grins.
“Would it have been the worst thing, being teammates?” he asks me.
“It would have been weird.”
“Not what I asked, Liam.”
“No,” I answer. “It wouldn’t have been the worst thing, Weston.”
He nods, a hint of a smile tipping up one corner of his mouth. “You can call me Wes, you know.”
I take the comment to mean he and Maeve are on better than just speaking terms. That his decision isn’t the end of them.
“Yeah. I’ll think about it.”
“Okay.” He starts to turn around.
“Hey, Cole,” I call.
He turns around. “Yeah?”
“If you didn’t live in Alleghany and you weren’t dating my sister, I might actually like you.”
Wes grins, then turns serious. “I can’t change anything about high school, and I wouldn’t change anything about me and Maeve.”
I let that sink in and nod. He’s right about the first, and I respect the second in some way too. He’s good for Maeve. “I’ll try to get past it.”
“It was never about beatingyou, Liam—for me. It was just about winning.”
My throat tightens. “For me, it was always about beating Alleghany.”
He studies me, expression somber. “Have you ever asked yourself why?”
I know why. They were the games everyone else assigned relevance to—my dad slash coach, my teammates, my friends, my classmates, my neighbors. They were also the games I enjoyed the least, so saturated with expectations and anger it was hard to tell if it was a game I was playing in or a nightmare I was reliving.
“It’s a team sport, Wes.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t play it for yourself, Liam.” He grips the back of his neck. “Look, maybe I shouldn’t tell you this. But I hope we’re getting past the point where everything I say pisses you off. Senior year, I had the best season in all of high school. People said it was because I wanted the sweep. Because I wanted the full ride. Truth is, I spent that summer before senior year falling in love. Not with the game—with a girl.”
Wes glances away.
“There’s this park in Fayetteville. Off Oak Street. Me and Maeve used to meet there when we were just getting to know each other. We played soccer, and she kicked my ass. And she caught throws. For hours, she’d just stand there and catch everything I threw, talking about the randomest shit. And do you know what I’d think about every time I got stressed on the field senior year? Thought about scouts or expectations? I’d pretend I was back there in that park, throwing the ball to her.”
Wes makes eye contact again.
“Find what matters more to you, Liam. People think focusing all of your energy into one thing is easy. It’s not. Even when you succeed, there’s always something you could have done better. And when you fail? There’s no distraction. Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I’ve got a third sense of knowing where the ball should go. But I became a better quarterback the more I cared about other things.”
He misreads the trepidation in my expression.
“Just a suggestion. Don’t—”
