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Smash falls asleep first, despite protesting loudly that he’ll be the one to outlast all of you—and that makes Matt laugh so hard he gets hiccups.
The hiccups turn pretty quickly to snores.
You don’t know what they were thinking, expecting to stay awake longer than a cripple who’s stuck ramrod straight in a wheelchair, but people have been underestimating you of late.
Hell, even Tim has underestimated you.
You’re just not sure if he’s doing it now.
In the last hour before dawn—the only hour the other two get any sleep in—you and Tim hold a sort of silent vigil, looking at the quiet expanse of the turf you used to know every angle of.
Still do, come to that.
Tim’s nursing the rest of the six-pack, which is his way. You have known about Tim and drinking since Tim started drinking. It was always sort of a tacit agreement between you two to let it be. Coaches kicked his ass at practice about it, if he was slow, and he never showed up drunk to your mom’s Tuesday night dinner—
And as far as you were concerned, the rest was up to him.
Maybe you didn’t actually take care of him, the way you thought you did when you were twelve. The thought threatens a whole lot that you don’t intend to sort through, so you let it go.
You hear him breathe. You hear another can drop.
The thing about Tim is that sometimes he drinks when he’s happy, and sometimes he drinks when he’s scared, and he’s a damn fun drunk more than half the time anyway.
Tim has never really hurt you, except by going away.
(Betrayal and loyalty and Lyla and love all have to do with something else.)
He says something about Brokeback, and it’s funny, and you laugh. He looks up at you with a decade of past life in his eyes and says,
“Friends?”
You’ve been through enough. Goddammit, you’ve suffered enough. You’re cold and a bit damp and your stomach is churning with too much beer and too little breakfast, but you’re back on the field and you can still call a play that blows the world away.
And Tim still wants you to tell him he’s all right, that the past isn’t lost forever. He wants you to shape his world—they all do, really. That was what always made the team so great.
The ride home is an anticlimactic affair. Matt’s whining again, all the quarterback verve you drilled into him gone out again. Smash is bellyaching about having to drive when he’s hungover.
“Well, Williams,” Tim drawls. “You shoulda stayed awake longer and got drunk again, then you’d have been off the hook.”
“Can’t all live by your philosophy, Rig,” Smash retorts.
“Shut uppp,” Matt moans, and you feel like shit just as much as the rest of them do, but it’s your world again, yours, and you smile to yourself and stay quiet.