AllFreeNovel
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Football was the number one love in my life, don’t get me wrong. But after the last three days of doing organized group training, I wasspenton football for a little while.
“Thought I was about to keel over out there,” I called out after chugging water. Brent Engles, one of our wide receivers, was pouring water over his head.
Brent was red-faced, just as sweaty as me, and breathing hard. “When did it get so fuckin’ hot out?” he asked, squinting up into the sun. “And when did my quads go numb?”
I was still catching my breath. “It ain’t a training activity until you feel like you got hit by a truck.” My biceps, quads, and ankles were aching, and I knew I’d be sore as hell tomorrow.
“Thought the off-season might have started to make you weak,” Brent teased. “But Tomlin’s still got it.”
I lifted an eyebrow at him, wiping sweat from my brow with the back of my arm. “No shot. We were so close to perfect last season. I’m training my ass off this summer. Going full beast next season.”
We started ambling over toward the locker room entrance. Each step felt like my quads were moving through molasses, heavy and slow and bone-tired.
“Is that what you call those videos you posted the other day?” Brent teased. “Training?”
“Are you shitting on my lip-syncing videos?”
“Correction: your lip-syncing and dancing near your pool in a Speedo videos,” Brent said. “Never thought I’d seethreeof those fuckin’ videos from you in one day. Especially the one where you were dancing with that dude who looked like Captain America. Humble-bragging about your hookup that night?”
“I’m the one who looks like Captain America. And I didn’t hook up with him,” I said. Brent must have been referring to the video I’d posted where I’d been dancing with my friend Kev.
Brent stopped in his tracks, giving me a pointedoh, really?look.
“I mean, Iusedto hook up with him, sure,” I said.
“Called it.”
“That was weeks ago, though. Now he’s just a workout bud.”
Brent laughed. “You live life on a different frequency than the rest of us, bro. I’ve been seeing Steph for over a year, and you think a hookup from ‘weeks ago’ is ancient history.”
“What can I say? I’m not a one-man kind of guy.”
A hint of guilt settled in me.Recentlyit was true that I wasn’t a one-man kind of guy. The desire for that had been beaten out of me long ago, after my first real relationship with a guy had to be kept completely secret and had ended in a total fucking dumpster fire.
But I’d learned from that.
Learned that I was never going to let myself get hurt like that again. And it was pretty fucking convenient that when I came out of the closet about a year ago, I had just become famous and filthy rich. These days, I had my pick of cute dudes, and I let myself have all the hot, careless fun in the world.
We headed inside and joined the rest of the football team in the big locker rooms. The air was steamy, and the sound of chatter, laughter, and hot showers filled the entire space.
Sure, Brent was right that I had a reputation for being one of the biggest partiers in the football league. It was true that I was always down for a good time, but I also always wanted to create a good time for the people around me, too.
I’d spent way too much of my lifenotfollowing my heart—following, instead, what my family or schoolmates or hometown wanted of me. What my mom, especially, had expected and demanded from me: tradition above everything else, where being gay had no place.
Now I lived for me. And I lived to make the people around mehappy, and accept every single one of them for who they were.
I gave Brent a pat on the back of his uniform. “I work hard and I play hard,” I told him. “I do just abouteverythinghard, I guess.”
“He’s telling us he does everything with a hard dick, guys,” someone said from behind a set of lockers.
“Hey, I call bullshit on that,” I protested. “I only have a hard dick maybe ninety percent of the time, and it’s definitely not while I’m on the field.”
Half of the team cracked up laughing at my comment, and the other half groaned.
“Forgot you’renasty, Tomlin,” our best tight end, Marcus Billy, called out from the showers at the other end of the locker room.
“How could you forget?” Brent said. “Kace’s Insta profile is nothing but dick jokes and half-naked selfies—”
