32
Steve
What a heartbreaking day it had been, breaking the news to the team that he was moving on. If there was a silver lining, it was that they’d taken it better than he had thought they would.
In fact, other than giving him a little bit of a hard time, everyone was pretty encouraging. They could all see it was for the best and didn’t want to hold it against him.
He stepped out of the locker room and into the hall, drying his damp hair as his mood soared. He’d showered quickly so he could get home to his lover.
He couldn’t wait to get back to James’s place to have some one-on-one time in private. With his brother always there, it was quite hard to find the time.
He stopped as he stepped into the hall. Was that…? “Hey, what are you doing here?” Steve asked Dennis. He hadn’t expected to see his best friend there. In fact, he was the last person he had expected to see.
Truth was, he’d hoped to put off seeing him for a few days until he could prepare himself for the hard conversation he’d have to have with him about coming out of the closet and why he’d hidden it from him. This had totally caught him off guard, and now he’d have to improvise.
“Hey,” Dennis said, leaning against the wall wearing a cashmere sweater. Steve had never noticed it before, but his best friend was kind of a good-looking guy.
Nerdy or not, he could see why so many women had crushes on him. He had always wondered why his friend was single, actually, considering the girls he could pick from.
“You wanna grab a milkshake?” Steve asked, breaking the ice. He hadn’t seen or talked to him since the whole phone thing the other day, and it was true that they really needed to talk.
Walking over to Steve, he said, “No, I…there’s something I need to talk to you about and it’s important.” Fuck, what was it this time? Everything was going so well, he really didn’t need Dennis coming in here and messing it all up.
Steve cleared his throat and walked next to him as they strolled down the hall. “What?” he asked. He hoped it was a setup for a joke. His best friend liked to make him worry about things only to joke about it later.
But something told him this wasn’t one of these times.
Dennis sighed. “Shit, this is hard,” he said. His fingers trembled and Steve worried. He’d never seen him this nervous about anything before.
Was it in relation to James? Was he about to find out what James had been hiding? Although he had convinced himself that it was probably nothing and he didn’t need to know, a large part of him still wanted the truth. If he was going to be happy and settle down, he needed to know everything.
Steve stopped and tugged on his sleeve. “What? You can tell me anything, remember?” It was funny coming from him, someone who’d hidden such a big thing from his best friend. But he was serious about this. There would be no more secrets.
Dennis stared at the floor at first, not answering. “So, remember how I heard you and the coach on the phone?” he said.
Steve cracked a smile and said, “Uh, yeah. How could I forget?”
Dennis looked at everything except for Steve as he said, “I guess what I’m saying is…you and me have something in common.”
Okay, that wasn’t what he’d been expecting. In fact, he wasn’t even too sure what it meant. What was Dennis rambling about?
He scratched the back of his neck and asked, “What’s that?”
Dennis groaned as if he were frustrated, maybe at himself, maybe at Steve for not understanding. “I…fuck, why is this so hard?”
Steve squeezed his shoulder. “Just say it, fucker.”
Dennis locked eyes with him and then said, slowly and clearly so as not to confuse the words, “I’m into dudes too, sometimes.”
Steve’s heart stopped.
Dennis was the last person he’d ever expected to say something like this. He must have been joking. That was…yeah, he must have been.
Steve cracked a smile, trying to see through his friend’s joke. “Wait. What?”
His best friend swallowed, biting his lip at first to stop his quivering chin. “I wanted to tell you, so many times I wanted to tell you, but I was worried you wouldn’t want to be my friend and—”
He wasn’t lying. Everything he had said was the truth. The funny thing was that Steve had no idea how he felt about it. He could only say, “Dennis—”
Dennis started to raise his voice, but then, noticing someone passing by, he spoke so only Steve could hear. “Listen, I mean, I’m still into chicks. Can’t give them up. It’s just sometimes…I need a little extra.”
Steve had to lean against the wall to get a grip on what he was hearing. “No, I…wow. This is…lots to digest.” That was an understatement.
The room spun around him. It was like he’d stepped into an alternate reality and was struggling to get his bearings.
Dennis cracked a smile and exhaled as if the weight of the world had been on his shoulders. “Yeah.”
There was silence between them, both young men not sure what or how to say what needed to be said next. “At least now we can talk about shit, right?” Steve said, offering an encouraging smile. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Dennis cleared his throat, the smile not returning. “Yeah, but there’s more…”
“What do you mean?” asked Steve, scrunching his eyebrows. How could there be more?
He took a deep breath and then said, “You know my sister?”
Steve chuckled. “The crazy one, of course. She used to give me wedgies when I was a kid.”
Dennis spoke quickly and softly, as if he wanted to rush through to what he really had to say. “Yeah, so you know how she got married to this dude and…”
Steve crossed his arms. What was he leading to? “Yeah, the one that she finally married after years of dating and then divorced two years later?”
“Uh, yeah, that one…” said Dennis. He fidgeted in place, crossing and uncrossing his arms. Steve had never seen him this nervous before. As worried as he was about his friend, he was more worried about what he was about to say. It was obviously something serious.
“What about her?” asked Steve. Whatever he had to say, it couldn’t be that big of a deal, right? He’d already confessed to him the biggest thing they’d ever talked about. How could there be more?
Dennis looked at him eye to eye. “That was Coach.”
Steve’s heart stopped. Had he heard him correctly? Did he say that James was his sister’s ex-husband? “Wait…what?”
Dennis paced in circles as if he still had more to say. He then stopped, taking a few deeps breaths as he held Steve’s gaze. “And…oh, Jesus, I just have to say this, because if I don’t I’ll regret it…One night, he and I, after we were both drunk…after he broke up with my sister…something happened.”
The room spun, and Steve knew that he wasn’t in some alternate reality. It was a nightmare that he wasn’t going to wake from, a hell that he had been cursed to live the rest of his life in. If what Dennis said was true, then Steve’s life was over.
Steve’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘something happened’?”
Dennis swallowed before repeating, “Something happened.”
It hit like a sack of bricks. His fingers curled into a fist. He wanted to hit something, hit someone. “Holy fuck.”
A tear rolled down Dennis’s cheek as he said, “I’m sorry. I should have told you before…”
Steve took off. He needed to before he punched his best friend in the nose. “I need to…I can’t fucking breathe…I’ll talk to you later,” he said, picking up the pace as he stormed down the hall.