Safety Net (12 page)

Lowell pulled the condom out,
saying, “Yeah, I do.” He got it over his tip before he caught the cold fire
look she was giving him.

“You fucking asshole,” she spat at
him, getting off the bed. She grabbed her clothes off the floor and stormed
out, not closing the bedroom door behind her.

Lowell, furiously hard and aching,
winced after her and fell back against the mattress. He peeled the unnecessary
condom off and tossed it aside, and for a couple of seconds considered the
chances of his suitemates being up and mobile at this hour before jacking off,
the idea of a threesome with Erick still lingering in his head.

The idea lingered all the way until
Monday morning practice, and Lowell’s first impulse on seeing Erick was to tell
him about it, see how he reacted. Emma was a football groupie, and she’d
probably calmed down by now... Lowell hadn’t gotten her last name or number,
but if she was in Erick’s program, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find her.

But when he actually saw Erick from
across the weight room, Lowell came down from his lust-fueled fantasy. The
chances of Erick West being amenable to a threesome were about as likely as
Erick West swearing off football forever and devoting his life to cross-stitch.
It was ridiculous.

Lowell wasn’t even positive that
Erick and Candace had been fucking; he’d never heard Erick say the word “fuck,”
a fact he remarked upon to Dale, who didn’t believe him until he started
listening for it, too. Erick talked about Candace a lot -- for Erick, which was
to say, hardly ever, and when he did, he got shy. It was weirdly cute but meant
Lowell was short on details.

And even if Erick could be lured
into it (Lowell imagined something involving a lot of alcohol and possibly
handcuffs), there was the harsh reality that Emma, for all her good lay appeal,
was, to put it bluntly, a skank. It was one thing for Lowell to seek out a
skank willingly because he needed a quick fuck; it was quite another to
introduce a skank into Erick’s world. Lowell felt like he’d be corrupting him.

Lowell relegated the threesome idea
to the dumpster where it belonged, and had forgotten about it well before
Crocker went to Corvallis and ended their season 8-4 (conference 6-3) with a
28-17 victory over Oregon State.

-----

Rockridge was always cold. Dale was
amused at himself for adapting to the California climate so thoroughly that
anything under sixty degrees was “cold,” but he thought it was partly because
the Bay Area micro-climates made the differences in temperature more noticeable.
Crocker was a warm campus, usually bathed in sunshine. Rockridge was foggy,
grey, and cold.

It didn’t help that Brent’s student
ghetto apartment was
de facto
unheated, because Brent and his roommates
couldn’t afford the PG&E bill -- it was a choice between gas or
electricity, and with two of the roommates heavy online gamers, electricity
won.

Dale wasn’t a snuggler by nature,
but he edged closer to Brent’s sleeping body for the heat. Brent’s futon was on
the floor, and a draft came up from the garage underneath the apartment. Half
an hour earlier, they’d both been sweating and overheated after getting each
other off; everything cooled quickly in Rockridge.

On the floor next to the futon,
Dale’s phone lit up. Dale picked it up and opened a text from Lowell.

tell me u saw 2nites scorecard

I didn’t.

When
College Scorecard
was
on, Dale had been in a club in San Francisco with Brent for an all-ages LGBT
dance night. It was so far out of his scene, Dale hadn’t known where to stand
or what to say, and his discomfort was something Brent didn’t comprehend. Brent
was very social in the Rockridge gay community and active in Rockridge’s LGBT
student association. He wasn’t overtly disapproving of Dale’s relatively
closeted life at Crocker; he simply didn’t understand it.

oh fuck u missed it

Tell me!

ryan hutchinson

What?!?!

hutchinson 2 kansas state

NO FUCKING WAY.

yes way

Don’t believe it.

dude believe it

Erick????

dont know. not in room & cant find him. didnt answer my
txts.

Fuckity fuck. Wait a sec.

Dale texted Erick:
Where are
you?
and waited for an increasingly disturbing eternity before Erick
replied:
Studying, what’s up.

Menacker’s looking 4 u. There’s news. Did u see Scorecard?

No. What news? Studying all nite.

Where?

Library. Basement.

Dale texted Lowell:
Erick’s in
library basement.

creepy zone oh erick why

There was a long pause and Dale was
in the middle of typing a message to Lowell when Lowell sent him:
erick sez
hes ok. but hes staying in library all nite. is ok? dude what 2 do?

Dale sat up and reached for his
underwear on the floor before sending back:
I’m coming back. Hold on.

He woke Brent getting up and
dressed, and gave him an apologetic kiss goodbye, but Brent was easy-going
about it. Dale huddled in his jacket in the misty December night’s rain on the
street in front of Brent’s apartment, waiting for the bus to the BART station.
When he was on the bus he got another text from Lowell.

found erick. hes ok.

Really okay? Or Erick okay?

i think rly ok

Dale drummed his fingers on the
back of his phone, thinking. The bus pulled in front of the BART station before
he could reply. He jumped off the bus and rushed through the station as fast as
the turnstiles would let him, but narrowly missed one train and had to wait
twenty minutes for the next one. While he waited, he texted Erick:
Are you
really okay?

When he hadn’t heard from Erick
after five minutes, he texted Lowell:
I don’t trust him
.

what u mean

You know Erick.

he said it doesnt matter 2 him & hutchinson can b good
qb

Erick’s reply finally came:
Studying,
leave me alone please
.

Dale ignored this, and stared hard
at the BART tracks, willing the train to come sooner. No texts from Lowell came
in, so he sent Lowell:
I’m on my way home anyway
.

oh sorry u didnt have 2

Is good. Fucking cold here. Where is fucking BART?

bf ok?

Yes.

Dale still found it strange and
disconcerting to talk about his boyfriend to Lowell (and Erick, when Erick was
around). Lowell had made an obvious effort after the Hammer Game to mend a
fence Dale had never thought was broken in the first place. Despite Dale’s
reluctance to talk about Brent, Lowell had persevered until Dale would, with as
few words as possible, sketch out how things were going. He’d thought for sure
Lowell would drop the subject after a few days; Lowell hadn’t.

There wasn’t much to tell, anyway.
He’d met Brent through Casey, the kid Betsy had tried to set him up with. Dale
and Casey hadn’t connected on any level, but Casey had taken Dale to an LGBT
gathering at Rockridge, and there Dale had met Brent.

It had been an odd day. The
gathering was for all Bay Area gay college students, something about sending a
petition to Congress or to Sacramento or to both. Dale wasn’t sure what it was
about, but walking around the Rockridge amphitheater he’d met Brent passing out
flyers. Brent looked at him longer than necessary, and Dale returned the look
and introduced himself. Brent was cute and the same age as Dale, and a music
major with a laid-back artistic temperament about almost everything. A welcome
change from Javier.

Neither Dale nor Brent had a car,
and shoddy Bay Area public transportation made it a long-distance relationship,
which suited Dale fine. He liked Brent a lot, but he wasn’t ready for something
intense again. They went out on weekends when they could, and once or twice a
month spent the night together, making out or messing around; Dale was
immensely relieved that Brent hadn’t yet brought up fucking. It was nice and
casual, and Dale honestly couldn’t understand why Lowell seemed to be so
interested in it unless he was worried that Brent was a Rockridge spy, intent
on learning all of Crocker’s football secrets before the next Hammer Game. Dale
teased Lowell with this ridiculous theory, and didn’t mention the fact that he’d
never told Brent he was a football player.

sorry made u leave

Homie. Not a prob.

where r u now

BART. Changed trains.

will u make baytrain

Fuck I hope so.

The time Dale had missed the last
Baytrain, Lowell had begged Jule to borrow her car and had driven up to
Millbrae to pick him up. Jule had been pretty chill about it, considering, but
it wasn’t an experience Dale wanted to repeat. Stuffed in Jule’s Beetle, Lowell
had described the promises he’d made and pleading he’d done to win her over,
and Dale had wondered why Lowell hadn’t asked any of their teammates for a car.
He knew Breitenstein had one, and Breitenstein was one of Lowell’s tight ends
buddies.

“’Cause they’d wanna know why you
were stuck in Millbrae in the middle of the night, where you’d been by
yourself, stuff like that,” Lowell had said, “and I thought, better not get
into it.”

And Dale had felt the familiar
uneasiness of keeping secrets by omission. He’d looked at Lowell, so damn
grateful for Lowell’s protectiveness, and wished he was brave enough not to
need it.

looking @baytrain sched where r u

Left Daly City. Should make it.

ok. oh i picked major

What?

sociology

Why?!?!

4 classes count already & like classes

It’s ur life.

bite me. economics snooze

Econ = money = fabulous life 4 me.

"fabulous” u r so gay dude

Ur phone has punctuation?!?! & yes I am.

fuck off. hey where u 4 xmas

Here I guess? Feeding cat. B&J going 2 HI.

hi?

Hawaii. Idiot.

lets go w them

U drunk?

no i want 2 go 2 hawaii n surf

Surf? LOL. On Baytrain now. All good.

meet u @station. im bored lets hang

Let’s drag Erick out of library.

ok. he rly ok tho i think

Then he needs 2 b out of basement!

lolol ok

-----

The Hammer Game. So many reasons
why Erick wanted to forget that day, and so many reasons why he couldn’t.

Physically, in quarterback-space,
he’d moved on. He wasn’t perfect in Corvallis, but he’d had a good game, a good
win. They’d finished the season PWAC 6-3, tied with UCLA in the 4th berth but
ranked below them. After a PWAC 3-6 season last year, suddenly everyone was
talking about Crocker and watching Crocker again. Watching him.

Erick mostly didn’t care. The
rankings only mattered to him insofar as their bearings on whether Crocker
would get invited to a bowl game (which was unlikely). In quarterback-space,
all Erick cared about was improving his strength, improving his accuracy, and
pushing himself to the limits of what he could do. He stepped back and actually
saw that he was growing as a QB, and it was humbling and incredible to
recognize it. When he’d told Coach Miller this, Coach had said, “Don’t stop
growing, and don’t stop seeing that you’re growing.”

Quarterback-space was, if not his
comfort zone, where he felt the most comfortable. Where everything was as right
as it could be, even if it wasn’t perfect.

So even though he’d overthrown that
damn final pass in the Hammer Game and had wallowed afterwards in the sports
blogs, reading about what a loser and weak-armer he was, Erick could let it go.
He wasn’t going to make that same pass ever again, and he knew exactly what he’d
done wrong.
Mistakes exist so we can learn from them
, his father was
always saying; Coach Bowman’s version was,
If you fuck up, don’t do it again
.

Now the season was over, and that
was always a sharp drop down from the high of playing. It was worse this year
because he’d been on the field for every game. He missed it so much he spent
sleepless nights tempted to sneak into the stadium and lie down in the grass.

It was also worse this year because
after the Hammer Game was when he’d realized he loved Lowell.

He’d always loved him, of course,
in the generic way he loved all of his teammates, and then it was slightly
beyond that, more like brothers. When it had moved beyond that, Erick didn’t
know, but it wasn’t until after the Hammer Game, when Lowell had said he needed
to get laid, that Erick felt it. A swift sting of jealousy and longing, then
the lightness of a weight lifting as things made sense now, for some value of “sense.”

Ignoring it wasn’t going to help
him any, Erick knew that, so he analyzed it and came up with reassuring labels
like bromance and mancrush. Very handy for dealing with it on a day-to-day
basis even while he knew it was more than that.

He loved Candace, too. Deeply. And
he thought it was significant that the only person he even considered telling
about this was Candace. Before he saw all the ways in which telling Candace
would be so very, very wrong.