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Jay hasn’t stopped talking since you pulled out of the gas station. Which is fine. It’s all fine. You’re here for him, and the fact that Lyla’s hip is pressed against yours and you can smell the jasmine perfume she wears, which you only know the name of because there was a slim glass bottle of it on her dresser, which you saw when you—
Anyway. You’ve totally lost your train of thought, and he’s still going.
You need to listen. You always need to listen to him.
(Coach told you to let yourself off the hook, but you didn’t take that advice the way it was meant. You went and ruined everything, is what you did.)
Jason says, “The food is disgusting. I don’t get it. A rehab place should be trying to make you feel better. Nobody here’s getting their lunch through a tube, you know? There’s nothing wrong with my stomach. I just want a rib-eye. They can cut it up for me. Hell, they can spoon-feed it to me.”
“I can bake you something,” Lyla offers, turning her head to say it, and you have to bite your tongue until you taste blood to distract yourself from the way her hair brushes against your arm, just where shirtsleeve meets skin.
“You should have let me get a rally girl,” Jason says, teasing. “Then I’d get double. Kidding! Kidding. You’re the only one, baby.”
Lyla laughs. It sounds fake. You stay squinting at the road ahead.
He never looked at you and saw meanness. Everyone else did. Tyra cried over your stubborn spells and then got pissed off about crying. She hated to look weak, even though she wasn’t weak.
The team didn’t screw with you. Your classmates gave you a wide berth. And Billy was an echo, a reminder that your dad had been proudest of you when he saw those sharp edges in you, when you took what you wanted. Little bastard, that’s what you are, Timmy, he’d say, and he was proud or amused or he loved you a little, something like that.
Jason has never seen that side of you. Maybe that’s why, when you betrayed him, it was a stab in the back.
“Are you even listening to me, Riggins?” His voice breaks through to you now, friendly but heated, like a sun-ray. Jay is the sun, and you are the earth, trampled and muddy, growing and warming only when he shows you how.
“Yeah, I hear ya, Six. Food’s crap.”
“Food’s crap. Beds are crap. Whole place makes me feel like I’m eighty-freaking-seven. Your truck is more comfortable than those beds, Riggs.”
“Glad to oblige.”
Jason grins. You can’t help but watch it in the rearview, that grin. You can’t help but rake yourself over for what you did to him, and still believe that it will all be alright.
The lake. That’s what you need.
You need deep waters, so that the earth can shine the sun back on itself.