Safety Net (14 page)

Shallowness, libido, whatever it
was... Lowell couldn’t explain why, in the fantasy, Emma tended to recede and
fade into the background until there was just Erick.

But it didn’t matter, because it
was only a stupid fantasy.

Spring got away from him, and
before Lowell knew it, he had a shitload of things to deal with. For reasons
Dale never fully explained to him, Dale wanted to move out of the apartment and
back to campus and asked Lowell if they could be roomies. Lowell was cool with
it, asked Erick to join them even though it meant they’d probably get stuck in
one of the old triples in Hopkins, but Erick, after thinking it over, said no.
So Lowell got into the junior-senior room assignment queue and managed to snag
a sweet double in Poitier for next year. It was even farther from the practice
field than Harris but it was new and convenient to practically everything else
on campus.

Then Erick mentioned he was going
to take some summer classes, and Lowell liked the idea more than kicking around
his mom’s house again, especially with Kaylee getting ready to move to New York
for art school. But none of the classes Erick signed up for were ones Lowell
wanted to take, and the idea paled a bit. Lowell was weighing his options when
Kevin Babcock invited him to Hawaii for two weeks, to stay at McIlvaine’s
parents’ time-share with a handful of the guys. The invitation was at such a
remove -- Lowell wondered if McIlvaine’s parents had any clue -- Lowell nearly
turned him down, but Babcock and McIlvaine assured him it was okay and promised
there’d be surfing lessons.

That took care of the end of June
and beginning of July, leaving only the dog days before training camp. On an
impulse, Lowell applied to be a counselor at one of the football camps on
campus and to his surprise was accepted. And after Lowell explained his
schedule to the camp organizers, who were all over themselves for getting a
real Crocker football player to be part of their camp, they managed to get him
an extended stay in the law school grad dorm until Poitier opened, so he and
Dale wouldn’t have to shack up with the guys in Harris or Hopkins when training
camp started.

All in all, sweet.

It sort of bugged him that Erick
had turned down rooming with them next year, and appallingly, Erick was
considering a random roommate assignment again, which Lowell thought was
out-and-out crazy. But Erick said that at least one roommate was sure to be on
the football team and it was a good way to meet the new guys. So Lowell didn’t
press, because that was Erick all over.

-----

“Menacker!”

“In here!”

Dale appeared in the doorway,
dragging his dead-body-sized duffel bag. “What the fuck is with the elevator? I
thought Poitier was the latest and greatest.”

Lowell pounded on the window until
he got it to open outward, letting some precious air into the stuffy,
new-paint-stinking room. “Take it up with the university, dude.”

“We should’ve stayed in the law
school dorm.”

“You enrolled in law school already?”
Lowell smirked at him.

“We could’ve faked it. Like that
girl who faked being a Crocker student for half a year before anyone caught her.”

Lowell considered moving the sofa
to the other side of the common room. The set-up in here was awkward. “You have
to be smart to be in law school. Smart and devious.”

“What’s your point? What’s in here?”

Dale opened one of the bedroom
doors and looked around. “Not bad. A little on the tight side.” He peered out
from the doorway. “Are the desks in there?”

“Yeah, but they have them pushed
side-by-side, and the sofa’s on this side. Can we fit one of them in a bedroom,
you think?”

Dale opened the other bedroom door
and stood next to Lowell as they stared at the clunky college-provided
furniture. While they were mentally calculating alternative furniture
arrangements, Erick wandered in behind them.

“Dude,” Lowell greeted over his
shoulder.

“I came to see how the other half
lives, and the other half lives without elevators on move-in day?”

“I shall write a strongly worded
letter of complaint,” Dale sniffed. “So where would
you
put the desks?”

Erick rested his elbow on Dale’s
shoulder and glanced around. “Back-to-back? Or, hmmm, front-to-front?”

Lowell held his breath for a
moment. Why. Just why. Innocent little anything. Innocent little nothing.
Front-to-front
.
And here he was, thinking...things...again. Sex addiction, maybe? He thought
they had a cure for that now.

Dale made a face. “Ugh, no. I think
it’ll fit in the bedroom. Give me a hand.”

They hoisted and turned and
wriggled one of the desks into Dale’s bedroom, stuffing it between the bed and
the closet, and it just fit but Lowell figured Dale was going to bang against
the thing every morning when he got out of bed. And it blocked half of the
closet, but Dale pushed the sliding closet doors open behind it and said, “Screw
it.”

It gave them much more space in the
common room, though. Lowell pushed the other desk into a corner and they had a
nice little living area with the sofa and desk chairs. Lowell slumped into a
chair, sweating in the stuffy September heat. Erick unzipped his backpack and
tossed water bottles at Lowell and Dale. “I brought housewarming gifts.”

Dale gulped his water. “I
registered at Macy’s, shithead. But this’ll do.”

“I heard it’s gonna be this hot on
Saturday,” Lowell said, downing his water. Their opening game, a home match
against Colorado.

Erick shrugged. “It was hotter in
Phoenix when we played there.” He sat back, and they vegged for a while. Out of
nowhere he said to Lowell, “Your hair looks good long. You gonna keep growing
it out?”

Lowell self-consciously pushed his
hair back and tucked it behind his ears. He’d started growing it out in Hawaii
from simple laziness, and when he’d come back and the guys gave him shit about
it, his knee-jerk response was to keep growing it out. He didn’t see what the
big deal was. A couple of the other players had long hair.

Lowell met Erick’s gaze. Intent,
sharp eyes, and the way they watched him. Lowell had to break eye contact
first.

“Yeah, I guess. Not too long,
though. Maybe like this.” Lowell flashed him a grin. “You gonna keep growing
that ratty beard of yours?”

Erick made a show of scratching his
jaw, and Dale edged away from him on the sofa. “Beard cooties. Get the hell
away.”

“Doesn’t it make me look wise and
distinguished?” Erick said, smiling at Lowell.

Dale said, “It makes you look like
one of those weirdos on BART who talks to himself and smells like piss. But to
each his own, I guess.”

Lowell returned Erick’s smile. “Nothing
will make you look wise, Texas. And distinguished?” He motioned
half-and-half
in the air.

Erick shrugged and got up to go. “Then
I guess I’ll have to find something else to make myself beautiful.”

Dale laughed at him as he left, but
Lowell, though he laughed, too, thought that Erick had sounded half-serious.

-----

Menacker groused about the heat so
much Dale was surprised he waited a whole day before bicycling into town to
pick up a cheap fan. Dale thought it was a waste of money -- a heat wave for a
week, then it would be back to overnight lows in the fifties -- but no denying
it felt pretty sweet after Lowell put the fan on a chair in front of the open
window.

It was their second night in
Poitier. After class, they’d lifted weights -- the weight room was
air-conditioned, Lowell pointed out -- grabbed dinner at Hopkins Hall with
Erick and a bunch of the guys, and biked back to the dorm. They sat on the sofa
in a lazy slouch, sharing the other chair as a foot rest. If they had a TV
mounted on the other wall, Dale thought, it would be perfect. TV was about all
his mushy brain was good for right now. He closed his eyes, half-dozing.

“Hey, Dale. What happened with you
and Brent? Why’d you break up?”

Lowell’s voice sounded lazy, and
Dale supposed he was making conversation to relieve the sluggish boredom, but
fuck, could he have picked a more intrusive topic? Dale didn’t hurry to answer,
but eventually said, “I don’t know. He was okay, but... We didn’t have a lot in
common, and it just stopped working between us.” Which made the whole thing
sound far more serious than it had felt at the time. Sometimes Dale wondered if
they’d split up because they were both tired of hauling around the bay on
public transportation. If Brent had had a car, maybe they’d still be together?
Truthfully, Dale didn’t think so.

There was a long silence, and Dale
was glad the subject was dropped when Lowell asked, “You ever think about
getting together with another football player?”

Dale opened his eyes, squinted at
the empty far wall. His brain was too tired to come up with the acidic quip
Lowell was no doubt baiting him for. All he could muster was the truth, more or
less.

“Not really. I’m not attracted to
football players --”
Besides you
, his traitorous brain supplied, but he’d
been dealing with Lowell as his whack-off fantasy for nearly a year now and had
it all under control. “-- as a general rule. Plus, y’know. Teammates? That’d be
weird.”

“Oh.”

Silence. Dale’s eyelids drooped.
Then Lowell said, “‘As a general rule’?” with a low chuckle in his voice.

Dale gave him a sidelong look, saw
only a curtain of blond hair above a hint of a smile. “Uh-huh. As a general
rule.”

Lowell’s smile broadened very
subtly. “But suppose you were attracted to another football player. What would
you do?”

Dale shifted to look at him, and
Lowell tilted his head to one side, meeting his gaze steadily. Dale said, “Another
football player, like you?”

Lowell’s smile twitched. “Yes.”

“Are you asking me, little straight
boy, what -- if I were attracted to you -- I’d want to do with you?”

Lowell’s gaze was shadowed from the
evening light by his strong brow, his long lashes, a lock of his hair, but Dale
could sense that gaze capturing him. Trapping him. Lowell said, low and deep, “Yes.”

Dale smiled coolly. Whatever game
this was, whatever was running through Lowell Menacker’s heat-addled brain, so
be it. Dale leaned closer and said, “I’d suck your cock,” and was close enough
now to see Lowell’s eyes widen slightly. Dale sat back and added, “If I were
attracted to you.”

Lowell licked his lips and
swallowed and after a moment looked away, back to staring at the empty wall.
Dale turned, watched the wall, too.

After a very long silence, Dale
said, “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

“Oh, dude. I am so thinking about
it.”

Well, fuck it
, Dale thought
in the seconds before he moved to the floor in front of Lowell, and Lowell was
unbuttoning his fly, and then yeah, he must’ve been thinking about it. Already
half-way there, and Dale’s mouth watered. He tried to take it slow, but he
wanted it so bad, and Lowell wanted it so bad, there was no slow. He took him
in --
the whole big, hard, hot Lowell package
, Dale thought whimsically
-- and fucked his mouth on him and sucked him off until Lowell came.

In the immediate aftermath, before
Lowell could stir from his melting position half-way off the sofa, Dale leapt
up and rushed to the bathroom, full and aching, and whacked off alone
furiously. Come still pulsed over his fingers when the door he hadn’t locked
swung open and Lowell was standing in the doorway, his shorts pulled up but
unbuttoned, staring at him in confusion and,
oh fuck
, hurt.

Dale gulped for breath, heart
hammering, body cooling so rapidly he thought he’d pass out. Lowell stared at
him for a long moment. Stared, though Dale tried not to see it, at Dale’s wet
cock trapped in his fist. Lowell opened his mouth to say something, and Dale
shook his head rapidly. He reached for the faucet, turned the cold water on as
hard as it would go.

“No,” he said, and Lowell backed
away. Dale closed and locked the door and stayed in there for a long enough
time that when he re-emerged, Lowell had gone to bed.

The next day Dale woke up angry. At
Lowell, at himself, at everything. He threw himself into drills and weights
with all of that anger, slowly burning it off, and skipped class to take a
hard, exhausting jog up into the remote areas of campus. He went so far he
almost lost sense of where he was, and then he stopped, looked around at the
rolling, bare brown hills around him, and noticed how beautiful it was. He sat
down on the dry grass, drank from his water bottle, and cleared his mind. Did
nothing but feel the earth below him and watch for hikers and the occasional
dog accompanying a jogger. By the time he got back to Poitier, the sun was
setting. Lowell was studying at the desk in the living room, in front of the
window and the fan.

“Hey,” Dale greeted, and Lowell
glanced up and said, “Hey.”

And things shifted back to normal.
It had been nothing, Dale told himself. One of those incidents that makes
people say, “Oh, I did some crazy stuff back in college.” Luckily Lowell was a
good guy, someone who would let it go and move on. No dramatics.

Things stayed normal until Saturday
and the Colorado game. Crocker won, 52-17, and Erick had thrown his best game
yet. Both Dale and Lowell had made TDs, Lowell’s off a soaring ball he jumped a
foot off the ground to catch. Not overthrown, but exactly the way they’d
practiced with Erick ever since last year’s Hammer Game.

Back at the dorm, Lowell walked
from bedroom to living room and back, taking off his tee shirt. He paused in
the doorway to his room and tossed the shirt inside and said to Dale, who’d
been brushing his teeth with the bathroom door open, “Nice TD.”

Dale spit out toothpaste. “Nice
catch,” he said, meeting Lowell’s eyes.

The next thing Dale knew he was on
his knees, swallowing Lowell’s cock while Lowell clutched the doorjamb,
groaning. The taste of Lowell’s musk mixed with spearmint toothpaste in a sharp
tang, almost medicinal. When Lowell came, he stopped Dale leaving by the look
in his eyes, his gaze traveling to Dale’s crotch. So Dale, kneeling on the
floor, pushed his undershorts down and beat off while Lowell watched him.