Page 14 of Sweat

When Rowan touches my hand, I’m too out of it to think much of it. He picks my hand up and hooks two fingers under my wrist, pressing them over the vein there. He studies his watch, tutting under his breath.

“You need to lose weight,” he says.

“You know…it’s not…cool anymore…to body shame.” My words slur together like I’m drunk, and the sight of Rowan under the stadium lights looks like he’s being rained on by golden stardust.

“Only thing your current workouts are good for is looking fuckable, but for soccer, you’re out of shape, and you’re never going to make the team unless you shed bulk.”

Lookingwhat?I guess that has been the point of the daily lifting sessions. Make Lese want me, even though I constantly disappointed her. Make girls around campus interested in me while I grow less and less interested in them. Now that I’m single, what’s going to be my excuse when they ask for my number? That I’m gay? Just start blurting it out like it’s the truth, even when I’m not sure that’s what’s really going on? I could be bi. I could meet a woman tomorrow who finally makes me passionate about women. God knows I’m not ready to walk into a gay bar and start picking up dudes. I don’t know the first thing about fucking a dude, and I sure as hell don’t want any dudes fucking me.

Dry humping sounds nice, though. Grinding my cock against another one and feeling a hard body against me, a deep voice in my ear, and a stubbled jaw tickling my face.

“Are you gonna puke?” Rowan asks, vacant of any genuine concern.

“Maybe.” I stick my forehead to the grass and sway like the motion might soothe my mind, steady my stomach, and force my dick not to get hard.

Rowan walks off, and I roll onto my side, already accepting that he’s probably leaving. Wouldn’t blame him. I don’t know what he saw last night that made him think I could play on the same field as him and the other starters. If this whole thing is just to give him a laugh, I sure walked right into it.

But, he comes back. He sets an unopened bottle of cherry Gatorade on the grass beside me and tells me to, “Drink up, babyface.”

It hurts just to turn onto my ass. When my swollen hands can’t get the bottle cap off, Rowan snatches it back and cracks it open with one quick twist. He pockets the cap and hands me the bottle.

“Thanks.” I tip it back, glad it’s not cold, for the sake of my throat.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do to get your endurance up to where it needs to be.”

The exhaustion in Rowan’s tone rubs me wrong. He’s not my daddy or my coach. What business does he have being disappointed in my endurance?

I don’t tilt the Gatorade bottle back down until half its contents are swimming down to my gut. “Who cares? I’ll work out with you from time to time if you want, but I’m not making any team.”

“When did you become such a loser?”

“The fuck?” I use what little strength I’ve regained to shoot him a glare.

Rowan squats down, making it easier for me to glower into his dark, heartless eyes. “Guy I used to know wouldn’t have lied down for anything. Definitely didn’t peg him for a quitter.”

“You didn’t know me. You never said more than four words to me.”Suck my dick, faggot,to be specific.

“I knew you on the field. I remember playing against you in high school. Season before I graduated, you were a sophomore, right? You may have looked like a kid, but you didn’t play like no kid. You were a pain in my ass every time we were on a field together. In a good way. In the way I wished you were on my team instead.”

Am I high? Was there something in the grass I huffed up through my desperate heaving? “Really?” My voice cracks, and I bet my face looks as dumb as I feel. Never in my life did I think Rowan Hughes had wanted me for a teammate. If I’d grown up just a couple miles west from home, I would’ve been in Rowan’s same school zone. Life didn’t plot my path out that way. It gave me to Johnson High, and then it gave my sister cancer.

Rowan’s expression hardens. “I’m not looking for a damn workout buddy. Either you want to play or you don’t. Figure out what you want, and how bad you want it. If it’s anywhere close to how bad I want it, meet me here tomorrow. Same time. And, for the love of God, put the weights down and start running.”

“Okay.”

I think that’s the end of it, but Rowan lingers. Watching me drink his Gatorade until it’s empty.

“Another thing…” he eventually says. “Anyone who fucks around behind your back isn’t a good person. You were right to dump that girl, and I don’t want jack shit to do with her.”

4

Tommy

In fourth grade, I had a crush on a boy named Anthony. Only, I didn’t know it had been a crush until I was twelve and Rowan called my entire identity into question. Way back in Miss Katanjian’s class, I didn’t know why I was so obsessed with the gangly, gap-toothed kid who sat across from me. Figured it was a mix of jealousy over his height, the structure of his face, and how popular he was with our classmates.

When Anthony invited me to the arcade after school one day, it felt like I’d already won something. I thought about him constantly. Never anything strange, just a deep desire to be next to him whenever I could. I loved the idea of him and me being two parts of one whole. We weren’t ‘I’s’ anymore, but ‘we’s.’

“We’re hungry.”

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