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Absolutely fucking perfect.
“Hold on!” I said suddenly as a thought occurred to me. “When I told you I was gay, you acted like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know,” Wyatt replied.
“You just said you knew!”
“I knew you were hooking up with Rhodes.”
“And somehow that didn’t give you a clue?” I demanded. I stared at him, genuinely baffled. In my head, secretly hooking up with a man and possibly not straight had always felt like pretty closely related pieces of information. Apparently Wyatt’s brain had decided those were two entirely separate categories.
“It gave me several clues actually,” Wyatt said. He shifted and sat up to face me better. “But fucking a guy in a bathroom during the Super Bowl halftime show doesn’t automatically mean you’re gay. You could’ve been bi. Or pan. Or sexually fluid. Or figuring things out. It wasn’t up to me to put a label to it.”
Well, shit. When he put it like that, it was hard to argue, and some of my frustration faded.
“Oh,” I let out because I didn’t have the words.
“Yeah. Oh.” His grin returned. “So, when you told me you were gay, that part was new information.”
“Hm.” Jude made a thoughtful noise. “That’s shockingly emotionally intelligent.”
“Thank you,” Wyatt replied.
“I said shockingly.”
“I’m still taking the compliment.”
A strange warmth spread through my chest as I listened to them. Both of them had known things I hadn’t been ready to say out loud yet, and neither had pushed me. They’d just protected it until I was ready to get there on my own. After the week I’d had—after learning how quickly honesty could cost me something—it hit harder than I expected.
“So, you seriously knew since February?” I asked, pushing back against the rush of overwhelming emotions and needing a distraction.
“Dude,” he retorted. “I was at the Super Bowl party.”
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. “Stop saying that!”
“No!” Wyatt matched my volume. “I’m traumatized by the things I heard coming out of that bathroom—”
“We are not talking about the bathroom!” Jude cut in. “We’re going to go right back to Theo’s existential crisis.”
The humor drained out of me almost immediately, and I looked down at my hands. I’d been grateful for the distraction while it lasted, but apparently, Jude wasn’t going to let me hide behind embarrassment all night. Silence filled the room as they waited for me to share.
“My dad said something when I came out,” I said. “He basically told me there was no way I was stupid enough to choose being gay after everything he’d done for me—everything he’d put into my future football career. And he said there was no way I’d jeopardize my chances with the NFL over a trend.”
Wyatt’s expression hardened while Jude went very still. I kept going before their expressions could convince me out of it.
“And obviously, the trend part is bullshit. I know that. Rhodes knows that. But this morning, when we were talking about it, Rhodes said my dad wasn’t completely wrong about the NFL.”
“What?” Wyatt asked, his frown deepening.
“He talked about the culture behind it—that being openly gay could make things harder when I’m trying to get drafted. He said most teams probably wouldn’t care, but nobody knows what happens behind closed doors when they’re deciding between players.”
Jude pressed his lips together tightly, but he only nodded. Something in his expression told me none of this surprised him.
“Rhodes said my agent may tell me to wait until I’m established—get drafted and build a career first,” I explained. “He said that the smart idea might be to make myself valuable enough that being gay can’t be an excuse not to take me.”
“That’s fucking depressing,” Wyatt muttered.
“Yeah,” I agreed with a sigh. “And then I asked him what that would mean for us.”
