Thao knocked softly on my door ten minutes later. I was prepared for some awkwardness, maybe another serious conversation about his reservations regarding dating a football player, but as soon as he closed the door he kissed me with his tongue, running his palm down the front of my shorts. This caused the condoms in my pocket to let out a telltale crinkle. He stopped kissing and shoved his hand into my pocket, pulling out the string of condoms.
—Sorry, I said.
—For what?
He switched off the lights and led me to bed, dropping the condoms on the bedside table. I hadn’t closed the drapes completely, leaving a sliver of sun to blister through the gap. As he laid me down on the mattress and kissed my neck, I became hyper-attuned to my surroundings—to the sunlight so strong it seemed to emit a sound; to the drone of vacuum cleaners and voices of housekeepers in the hall. Footsteps were approaching my door, the door would fly open, Coach Zeller would be here, staring. The footsteps continued past.
Thao reached down and felt I was only half hard.
—Sorry, I said again.
—No. More. Apologizing.
He took off my shirt and moved his mouth down my chest, letting the back of his tongue trail along my belly hair. He slid off my shorts and boxers, and as he took me into his mouth I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the warm hum of his tongue, the hand cupping my balls. That didn’t work, so I opened my eyes and looked down at him, but I saw past the top of his head the reflection of us caught in the dark television screen opposite the bed. I couldn’t bear to look at the image, and now I was losing what erection I had. How could this be happening? Since turning twelve I’d had, what, a hundred thousand erections that served no purpose whatsoever? And now that I finally had a man in the same bed as me, sucking and fondling me, I was going limp as a piece of overcooked spaghetti?
Thao took his mouth off and looked up—and saw I was on the verge of tears. He slid back up my chest, but when I tried apologizing yet again, he hushed me. He lay on his back and stroked himself, inviting me to watch, to see how naturally and unselfconsciously he could get hard with me alongside. It was the sexiest thing I had ever witnessed, the steady fleshy beat of his hand, the faint moans slipping from his thin, perfect lips. By watching him I could forget myself, and by forgetting myself my mind could leave my body alone to want what it wanted, do what it had always needed to do, and now I was the one moving down on him, breathing in the slightly sour odor rising from his pubic hair, taking him into my mouth. I had no idea what I was doing, at first taking in too little of his cock and then way too much, but he was turned on anyway. Thao came in my mouth, and I onto the duvet cover.
I spat into the trash can next to the desk and crawled up the mattress, lying next to him. His eyes were closed, and he smiled when he felt my hand stroke his hair. He looked relaxed, and contented, and while we might not be out on the West Campus quad holding hands, I knew he appreciated the risk I was taking by being here.
This, I understood, was what he’d meant last month when we’d talked in his kitchen and he’d told me to “prove it.”
Much has been made of Reshawn’s intelligence, and for good reason. I’ve never known anyone else who has lived the life of the mind as ardently, as purely as him—have never known someone who has come closer to making the life of the mind his actual life.
But if we’re talking about sheer intellectual horsepower, there’s a good chance Jimbo ran on even more cylinders than Reshawn. Jimbo was to win a college-wide award at the next spring’s graduation ceremony for his honors thesis on how the nicknames football players bestow on one another reflect the intersection of African American life and corporate culture, and in that paper he coined a word—“gridonym”—that’s now a term of art in academia. He could have had great success studying language as a career, but so remarkable was his brain that, after he graduated summa cum laude in philology and philosophy, he decided that actually his true field of interest was chemistry. He changed directions vocationally just as skillfully as he had changed them as a free safety and went on to obtain a post-bacc degree, then a PhD. Last I heard, he was a senior researcher at a major pharmaceutical.
So no wonder I had a minor panic attack every time he asked how the repairs on my car were coming. If there was anybody on the team capable of sussing out the truth from the lies Coach Zeller and I were peddling, it was Jimbo. I decided to firm up my story about what was wrong with my car, and one morning I woke early and took the elevator down to the Marriott’s business center, using a desktop computer to figure out what might keep a 1997 Saturn station wagon in the shop for a prolonged stretch, and also to find the name of an auto body shop in nearby Cary, where I could tell Jimbo my Saturn was being repaired. And yet, even after I gave Jimbo this information, he still didn’t seem satisfied. He was becoming something of a conspiracy theorist, insisting Reshawn was somewhere other than Oregon for reasons that had little to do with his allegedly sick mom.
We were eating dinner the second Saturday of camp when Wheeler came hurrying into Training Table.
—Yo, I just saw a black guy driving a station wagon.
—So?
—A Saturn. It’s Furling’s.
—You sure?
—Shit
