Then time runs out. And we’ve lost.

Silas squats, resting his elbows on his knees and covering the back of his head with his hands. And he just looks so . . . small.

And I know he’s feeling that way, too, and I ache for him.

Boyfriend or not, he holds a bigger piece of me than any guy ever has, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get that back.

I’m not sure I want it back.

Chapter 27

Silas

I‘m restless all night after the game.

I barely sleep. My thoughts bounce between the team and Dylan. Keyon and Dylan. My mom and Dylan. And I wonder how long this shit will last. How long will the memory of her stay under my skin, in my thoughts, in this bed?

After a few scant hours of rest, I do the only thing I know how to do to quiet my thoughts.

I pull on some clothes, do a few fast stretches, and then set off on a run. Levi and I picked this house because it’s on the side of campus where all the athletic stuff is located. We’re about a mile from the athletic complex, so that’s where I head. I figure I can squeeze in some weights, and then run home, try to focus on the things in life I can control.

What I don’t expect is to find the weight room already occupied on a Sunday morning after a game.

Keyon has two of the larger dumbbells and is doing lunges across the weight room. His back is to me, and for a moment I consider leaving, but instead I watch him. His head is down, and he’s moving at a fast pace. He’s focused. Determined.

“Your strength isn’t why you can’t break a tackle.”

He drops the weights and whirls around to look at me.

He’s immediately tense and defensive.

“What do you want?”

“For this team to win games.”

Keyon scowls and waves a hand at me. “I get it. I ran my mouth and now it’s your turn to give some back. Go ahead. I can take it.”

“I’m not here to cut you down, man. I came here to work out, same as you. But I’m serious. Strength isn’t your problem. It’s your pad level. You’re getting laid out because your body is too high, and you can’t fight them off when they come up underneath you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you the lowest man wins?”

“Do I look like an idiot? Of course I know that.”

“Then why aren’t you working on that instead of being in here lifting weights?”

“I am working on it. Stronger legs can stay lower longer.”

“I told you strength isn’t your issue. It’s your head. And muscle memory. You need to get used to staying low.”

“I’m trying.”

I’m probably going to regret this. I don’t even f**king like the guy, but I think back to how I felt watching that game, like the only thing I had left was slipping through my fingers, but I didn’t have control over my own hands to do anything about it.

Seems like I’m feeling that way a lot lately.

“I’ve got an idea. Let’s go for a run. I think I might know something that can help you out.”

I grab a football from the locker room, and tell him to follow me.

Sometimes to switch things up, I run away from campus instead of toward it. So, I know the neighborhood behind ours is mostly families. Professors who want to live close to campus, grad students who are married and have kids. When I run that way, I always end up passing this park with a cool, modern playground.

Williams looks confused as f**k when our run ends up there.

“Is this some kind of joke? Hazing or something? Because if so, you suck at it.”

I laugh. “No joke, man. We could have done this with some of the official stuff on campus, but I don’t have a key to the equipment closet, so we’re improvising.”

“On what? The merry-go-round?” I step up into the playground area, deserted this early on a Sunday morning, and feel my feet sink into the soft wood chips that cover the ground. That’s going to make things even more difficult for him, but that might be a good thing.

“Anyone ever make you run arches?”

He shrugs.

“They look like giant versions of those metal croquet things you hit the ball through. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Not a f**king clue.”

I laugh. “Yeah, I’d never heard of it, either, when my high school coach mentioned it. It’s a rich-people thing, I think. Or old people. Both probably. Anyway, they’re small enough that you can’t run through them upright, and they’re narrow so that you have to keep your arms in close, the ball tucked tight against your body. Run through those long enough and it becomes second nature to bend your knees and stay low.”

“But we don’t have those.”

“No, we have this.” I place my hand on top of a long set of monkey bars, made for kids. I’d guess it’s about five and a half feet tall, maybe a little more. Point is, it’s low enough to make it hard for guys like us to run underneath at full speed. I toss him the football and he automatically holds it tight against his stomach the way we’re taught. I walk to the end of one set of the monkey bars and look down the length of them. It’s a little less than ten yards, so not ideal, but I think we can make it work. I decide to have him work on his feet at the same time, too.

“Let’s do it like this.” Slowly, I show him what to do, running beneath the bars with my knees bent and my body hunched. There are three sets of bracing on the sides of the monkey bars that also serve as miniature fireman’s poles, and I use them like cones, popping out from underneath the bars to weave around one pole and then back under the bars until I weave around the next fireman’s pole on the opposite side. I round one more pole, and then circle completely around the ladder at the other end of the monkey bars before ducking underneath them and repeating the same process on the way back. It’s a little lower than the practice arches we have on the team, but he’s not wearing a helmet or pads, so I figure that evens out the difficulty level.

He follows my lead, moving through it once at half speed to get a feel for it, and then he tries it at full speed. After rounding the second fireman’s pole, he knocks his head going back under the monkey bars and drops to one knee.

He curses, and I do my best to hide my smile.

“I don’t want to be a dick,” I say. “But I told you that you were running too high.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be a dick?”