Page 119 of These Secret Years

“You think we should arm wrestle or something? Friends do that, right?”

For that, I get a laugh, but the way his eyes sparkle when he does it, I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. Maybe being out in public when we’ve never done the friends thing before wasn’t the best call for either of us.

But the underlying tension between us—that pull between us that started during UNO that first night? It doesn’t feel like it’s gone anywhere. If anything, it’s more insistent. For me anyway. Is he feeling it, too? Is that why he’s giving me shit about how I’m looking at him?

Now I have to know. “Is this hard for you, too?”

“Yeah, actually,” he admits without any follow-up questions.

“How do we make it easier?”

“Maybe it’ll just take time,” he says.

“Practice,” I agree.

“Yeah. That, too.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

SULLIVAN

The shape of a football game is triangular, and it’s also linear. There’s a roundness to it, too. It’s a full symphony of varying vibes and notes. Depending on what time of day it is, the shape changes. At night there are cones of light and spiky sparkles threaded into the cacophony. During a day game there’s a pulse shaped like the spikes on an EKG monitor. Percussion and jolts from a lull. There’s also the shape of pride, which is a swollen, bloated, heart-shaped thing that’s probably coming from me as I watch Knight Winters get better and better every single week.

Knight himself is a solo piece. Sleek and bold and vibrant. Sharp, but not staccato. Smooth but not safe. He’s a golden bullet, piercing the other shapes with his precision and pure gamesmanship. He’s so fucking beautiful to watch.

The games are the only time I get to stare at him openly, when I don’t have to look away or pretend he’s not crowding out all my other senses. When I don’t have to deadpan my reaction to him or act like he’s not the only good thing in my life.

Have we figured out the friends thing four months in? More or less. It helps that we’re both busy and most of the time we see each other, Deandre is there to demonstrate how friends actually talk to each other.

When I’m not studying, writing music, or sucking dick for money, I’m at the gym or at their house, getting fed, listening to the twins’ barrage of workout and bulking tips, or playing video games that mostly involve sports—hockey and football usually. Knight says I’m annoyingly good at the hockey one, and he and I have gotten into it one-on-one on multiple occasions this semester, not stopping until someone’s ass gets kicked or he has to go to bed.

For college football players, I was surprised at first how wholesome their home life is. I expected something more like fraternity parties with women coming and going at all hours and beer cans and pizza boxes everywhere, but I came to realize quickly these are all elite athletes with big goals in mind, and they don’t fuck around during the season.

Compared to my house, theirs is like a Disney movie. The only thing not innocent about it is the way Knight and I sometimes wind up looking at each other—like either one of us might start tearing the other person’s clothes off at any given moment. Too many times he’s excused himself to the bathroom and given me a look before getting up that felt like an invitation. And when he says it’s time for him to go to bed? It feels like he’s patting the mattress and asking me to join him.

That’s mostly projection, though. He’s been so well-behaved this semester, it actually hurts. Knowing I’ll be spending three weeks with Adrian soon over the break makes the pain of not having Knight even worse.

But it’s not like I see Knight all the time. He and the team travel a ton, but we text, FaceTime, and keep in touch. We talk about football. He tells me about going to games with his dad or uncles when he was younger. He told me about the moment the game clicked for him when he was in middle school—a moment where he was going to pass the ball, but he found an opening to run it and scored a touchdown. He says after that, the noise fell away, and all the angles and openings made sense.

It sounds a lot like the way I picked up music, but he swears it’s different than that. I tell him about what I’m working on, often sending him snippets of works in progress.

This weekend I need to write the piece I intend to give Adrian. I’ve put it off—even considered using a computer program to write it so I didn’t have to sink one more piece of myself into this miserable relationship, but I’ve decided to do something else. I’ve decided to write something he’ll hate. That might make his skin crawl, but even he won’t be able to deny how good it is.

The shape of what he’s done to me is a blunt knife, covered in static and tiny pops of shock. It’s cold, but it’s also bloody. Dripping, slow and viscous. I want this piece to give him nightmares like I still have.

The piece is complete in my head, ready to be transcribed. I just need the time to write it down and play it through to the end. Once on the violin, the cello, and the oboe respectively. It shouldn’t take long to mix, and for once, I don’t care if it sounds perfect. It shouldn’t sound perfect. It only needs to sound like a violation of his ears and whatever he has inside him that passes for a soul.

Knight completes a perfect pass to Deandre who runs it three more yards into the end zone. Knight’s mom, two seats away, leaps up and cheers. His father also stands up to clap and holler “That’s my boy!”

When she sits, as she usually does, his mom sends a huge smile my way. I return it, thinking of all the ways she’s different from my own mom who always looks tired. Who always looks like she’s just this side of picking up her car keys and driving off forever. Knight’s mom is vibrant and seems happy to be wherever she is. She’s a flute tune, rising up above the other wind instruments and making the whole piece sound a hell of a lot less serious. The shape of a treble clef.

It’s a night game, so I’m here with my friend Paulina who also plays violin and is on a performance track for her music degree. She and I get grouped up often in our Violin III class, and she’s single and shy so she’s usually available when Chelsea isn’t. It’s not like I’m going to come to these games by myself. Not when it’s so fucking obvious I’m using Knight’s tickets.

I’m polite with his parents, but I’m also very good at pretending like I don’t want to get to know them by focusing on either who I’m with or the game.

The semester is over for me, all my finals are done, but the team has to hang around to play more games in preparation for the post season. We have the best team this year, and this has made Knight extremely happy especially because he won the Heisman trophy, beating out Blake Woolsey from Tallahassee for the top spot. This is still a particular obsession of his, and once he surpassed Blake in passing yards, Knight became unstoppable on the field.

There’s a party at the guys’ house tonight they invited me to since finals are over to celebrate their winning season, but I’m not sure I have the required willpower to go.