Safety Net (18 page)

Lowell wanted Erick to win, but the
clear favorite for the Heisman this year was the quarterback from Syracuse, who’d
finished a perfect 12-0 undefeated season. “You don’t know that,” he said,
rubbing a wide circle between Erick’s shoulder blades.

Erick flashed a grin. “I do read
the sports columns sometimes, you know. Besides, Davaughn Charles deserves it
as much as I do. And anyway, it would be weird to win it this year and have to
live up to it next season. What if next season we’re one-and-eleven again?”

Completely selfish relief flooded
Lowell. “So you’re, uh, staying? You’re not thinking about the NFL?”

Erick glanced at him, an intent,
unreadable look. He looked up at Dale, then back to Lowell. “This has to stay
between the three of us for now, right? I’m staying. I want to complete my
degree. That’s been my plan all along. It’d be kind of stupid to come to a
school like Crocker and not have a degree at the end of it.”

“Plenty of guys do,” Dale said
without judgment.

Erick cocked his head. “Yeah. But
that’s not me. And, anyway. There’s another reason I want to stay, which I can’t
tell you yet. You’ll know it soon enough. But, um. After I get my degree? I’m
going pro.” He and Lowell had redshirted as freshmen, and they both would have
an additional year of eligibility to play for Crocker as fifth-year seniors.
Lowell hadn’t thought that far ahead, though he linked finishing his degree
with finishing his time at Crocker.

Dale had played as a freshman and
only had one more year left anyway. They’d all be entering the NFL together.
Lowell smiled at this, imagining the three of them signing their names to play
pro while cameras flashed around them.

Dale said, “Any bloggers or
reporters come sniffing around? My lips are sealed, bro.” He added caustically,
“About this. And other things,” and raised an eyebrow at Lowell.

Lowell bumped a fist against Dale’s
knee in mock threat. “Not even funny, dude.” But Erick chuckled softly and
nudged Lowell in the ribs.

“Shit, can you imagine the press on
that one? ‘Heisman finalist sex scandal with Crocker tight end’.”

“I’m afraid it would be far worse
than that,” Dale said seriously, frowning. “C’mon, before my knees stiffen up.”

There was a team meeting in the
afternoon, a season performance wrap-up, and Coach Bowman mentioned that they’d
likely get a bowl game, causing a deafening cheer from the entire team. As the
meeting wound down, Tomasovich shouted out, “Cheer for our Heisman finalist,
Coach?” Coach Bowman waved them on, and they cheered for Erick. Erick grinned
at them, completely at ease with their support of him, and there was something
in his confidence that mirrored back to the whole team, made them all feel it.
Lowell sat near the back, watching him, wondering how it was possible to love
him more than this.

After the meeting, they split up to
study. Lowell had to finish the paper for his Gender and Society class. He’d
done a case study of a “male group’s use of gendered language in a
single-gender environment,” using the team as his guinea pigs. He’d gotten a
kick out of recording snippets of their normal locker room talk on his phone
and writing it down afterwards for credit, though as the quarter progressed and
he gathered more data, there were aspects of his research he wasn’t comfortable
with.

The easiest part was tracking use
of female or male pronouns referring to “non-person objects,” as he called
them, after deciding “inanimate objects” could include dead people. Not that
there were any of those hanging around the locker room, but better not give
anyone the wrong idea.

The second part of the paper was
recording their language in conversations about nonromantic relationships. Most
of these relationships were between the teammates, their coaches and trainers,
or friends and rivals on other teams, so almost exclusively male. But Lowell
had noticed how casually the guys put down anyone they didn’t respect by implying
they were gay, and although this wasn’t really the focus of his paper, he was including
it in his findings. He thought of Dale the entire time, imagining Dale
listening to this crap his entire life...

Lowell drummed his fingers over the
laptop keyboard. Not just Dale anymore, was it? What about him? What about
Erick? Lowell pushed those thoughts aside uneasily to focus on the paper. He’d
just noticed an anomaly in that the wide receivers group -- Dale’s group --
almost never used sexual orientation slurs. Huh.

He moved on to the last part, the
hardest one: conversations about romantic and sexual relationships. On the one
hand, these conversations occurred the least frequently, a finding Lowell was
sure would surprise the professor and his classmates.

The guys with serious girlfriends
did not talk about them intimately. This didn’t surprise Lowell in the least.
Once it was serious, she was a protected topic. They would occasionally
complain about relationships in general or say where they’d gone out for a
date. Normal, neutral stuff.

But when the topic was a
prospective girlfriend, a casual relationship, or a quick hook-up... Lowell
sighed. There was no way to pretty up the data. He rested his chin on his fist,
staring at the pie chart he’d generated for the usage percentages of the words
“slut,” “ho,” “skank,” and “whore.” Behind each usage of those words was an
actual girl. It was a disturbing thought, looking at the numbers.

And when he came to think of it
like that -- each usage of the term reflecting an actual or an inferred sexual
encounter -- wasn’t he a slut, too? After Kelly, all those girls he’d dated and
fallen into bed with. Emma, the football groupie. Dale. And now Erick.

Lowell pushed back from the desk.
Shit. Was there any relationship in his life he didn’t ruin with sex? What the
hell was
wrong
with him? Erick. An honest-to-goodness Heisman finalist,
one of the best college quarterbacks in the country, and Lowell couldn’t keep
his hands off of him. Like he was a piece of meat.

What if someone caught them? What
if rumors reached the media? They had joked about it earlier, but Dale was
right: it was no joking matter. If their relationship were exposed, no Heisman
trophy for Erick. No NFL. No going pro. Thinking about it made Lowell queasy.

And Dale. He’d seriously screwed
Dale over, dropped him the second Erick kissed him. No warning, no apology.
Lowell covered his face with his hands. All those times he and Erick had told
Dale to find some nice boyfriend and avoid the assholes. Now Lowell was one of
the assholes.

But I was never his boyfriend
,
Lowell thought. He didn’t know what he’d been, and he didn’t know if Dale saw
it that way, either.

Lowell wallowed in disgust at
himself for a few minutes before sitting up straight and writing out the next
part of the paper. He was deep in the middle of his conclusion when he heard
Dale come back from the library and disappear into his bedroom. Lowell kept
working and heard Dale moving around again, opening the door. The next thing he
knew, Erick was standing behind him, messing Lowell’s hair with both hands and
saying, “What’re you working on?”

Lowell bent his head back. “Wrapping
up my case study paper. Where did you come from?”

Erick grinned. “Texas. And before
that, from what Mama told me when I was three, a cabbage patch. Dale let me in.”

“Is he here? I thought I heard him
go out again.”

“He went over to the student union,”
Erick said with a sly smile Lowell hadn’t known him capable of. Erick leaned
forward and kissed his forehead upside down. “He said he was gonna be there,
um, most of the night.”

“Really.” Lowell’s skin flushed
from wanting to grab Erick, get naked with him, cover him with kisses, taste
him. They hadn’t messed around since last weekend, Erick’s schedule was so
busy. Lowell ached to hold him, bring him off, watch him come.

And this, Lowell thought with a
snarl, was exactly his problem. He was incapable of a relationship that wasn’t
built on sex.

Erick crouched down to be level
with Lowell and held onto the chair back. He touched Lowell’s neck and kissed
him slowly. “I thought I could, um, hang out with you.”

“Yeah,” Lowell said with a sigh,
resisting the urge to pounce on him right there and fall to the floor with him.
“I, uh, just have a couple more paragraphs to finish. I want to get this
monster done.”

Erick kissed him again and smiled. “Okay.”

He got up and went to sprawl on the
sofa, pulling his phone from a pocket and tapping on it. At first Lowell
assumed he was texting or checking blogs, but after a few more sneaking glances
came to the conclusion that he was playing a game. He had never imagined that
Erick played phone games; Erick had mentioned playing video games in high
school as if it had been a rare occurrence -- football was his life. Lowell
forced his attention back to his paper, distracted by how cute Erick playing a
phone game was, and he couldn’t even say why.

He was on the last paragraph, rereading
the same sentence for the third time, wondering if it made sense or if there
was a better way to phrase it, when he heard Erick swear quietly, “Damn.” Lowell
glanced over. Erick was tapping away on his phone, frowning in concentration.

Lowell couldn’t stand it any
longer. He saved his paper and got up, joined Erick on the sofa and looked over
his shoulder. “What’re you playing?”

“It’s this dumb game Anson got me
into.” Erick tapped furiously on the screen. “There’s these ghosts and zombies
and... Oh, damn, not again. See? If your ghost gets trapped by one of these
little tiki guys -- those are the ones with red eyes -- he gets sent back to
the previous level and you lose more points the higher up you are. Argh!”

Lowell watched him playing,
practically dying from the cuteness of Erick West stabbing at zombies on his
phone screen. “What’s that thing?”

“Oh, that’s the coolest. That’s the
zombie shark. He usually leaves the ghosts alone, but he’s awesome. He eats the
other zombies, so you can get a whole level cleared for you if he shows up and
starts munching away. You don’t earn as many points though, and you gotta be
careful ‘cause sometimes he eats your ghost. And if he ate one of the purple
zombies, he’s got ghost-killing gastric juices so you’re seriously hosed.”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, he glows purple.”

Erick tapped a few more plays, then
glanced at Lowell. “Am I being completely dorky?”

Lowell grinned. “No more than usual.”
He rubbed Erick’s hair.

Erick turned his phone off in
mid-game and set it aside, pulling Lowell into an easy, soft kiss. Lowell
responded and they made out, slow and nice, and Lowell fought back against
getting totally aroused. He had to stop being such a sex fiend.

Erick kicked off his shoes and
spread out on the sofa, as far as it would hold him, and tried to pull Lowell
down over him. Lowell held onto the sofa back and kissed him.

“Kind of uncomfortable here,” Erick
murmured.

Lowell smiled. “Five foot sofa,
dude.”

“Your bed’s bigger,” Erick
suggested, and the intensity of his eyes made Lowell’s breath falter.

“Little bigger, yeah,” Lowell said,
sitting back. “Um, y’know, we can just chill.” He glanced away. “We don’t have
to, like, mess around.”

Erick sat up and said slowly, “Okay.”
He paused. “Did you finish your paper?”

“Near as. I’m on the last paragraph.”

Erick frowned at the desk. “Should
I leave so you can finish?”

“No,” Lowell said, and it came out
harsh from his urgency. “No, I don’t want you to leave.”

Erick gazed at him, intense again.
“Lowell. I want to go to bed with you.”

“Oh God, Erick,” Lowell said,
breathless. “You’re making this very--”
Hard
was so not the word Lowell
wanted to use. “--difficult.”

“Let me make it easy for you.” Erick
got up and slid onto Lowell’s lap, straddling him, hitching at his jeans as he
settled into place. Lowell wrapped his arms around him and they kissed, and the
heavy weight of Erick pressing against him filled Lowell with sparking heat.

Erick deepened the kiss, and Lowell
sucked on his tongue, imagined sucking him off. Wanted to taste him so much...
Erick shifted, holding onto Lowell’s shoulders, devouring his kiss. Lowell felt
how hot he was, felt him getting hard.

“Oh, fuck,” Lowell groaned
miserably, pulling back from the kiss.

“What’s wrong?” Erick asked
quietly, watching him. He combed his fingers through Lowell’s hair, pushing it
back. “Why don’t you want to...? Do I, like, suck at it or something?” And he
looked afraid, really afraid that Lowell was going to say yes.

Lowell tightened his hold on Erick,
pressing him closer until he tucked Erick’s hard-on, wrapped in jeans, against
his stomach. “God, Erick, no. I want to. Believe me, I want to. I’m just trying
to be good here. Trying not to be a slut.”

Erick sputtered out a laugh. “What?”

Lowell said seriously, “I think I’m
kind of a skank. I’ve been thinking about all the people I slept with. People I
didn’t care about. It’s sort of sickening when I think about it.”

Erick’s expression closed, and he
asked with a wavering brittleness, “How many guys have you been with? Besides
Dale.”

Lowell clutched at him. “No. Oh my God,
no, Erick. Just you. I swear. No, no...the rest. It’s girls. I’ve slept with so
many girls. And I’m sort of disgusted at myself.”

Erick relaxed slightly, stroking
Lowell’s hair, but his expression was still hiding something. He didn’t say
anything, and Lowell rubbed his lower back. “Erick?”

“I guess I’m wondering why you
decided to be good now. With me,” he said carefully, focusing on a spot past
Lowell.

Lowell wondered if he should cut
his tongue out and be done with it.