“Feeling better?” I asked.
“So good. I’m done. I promise.” He let his head fall back against the cushion. “No, that’s not true. I can’t promise anything.”
“This is the sexiest game ever,” I said, tugging at the Red Cross T-shirt where it looked like Luke had wiped some nacho cheese.
“You do make a great nurse, Daph,” he said, reaching to tuck my hair behind my ear. “At least, you would, if you weren’t destined to be a brilliant pharmacist instead.”
I studied his face, wondering how somebody could make me burn with want and shake with laughter and swell with gratitude, all in the space of a few minutes. And then it all swirled into one feeling inside me, and there was no keeping it in, even if I’d wanted to.
“Jake,” I said as the corner of my mouth crept up into a smile. “I love you too.”
“Then I’m the luckiest man alive,” he whispered, and then he kissed me.
We crushed the competition all summer. Nobody expected it after Jake’s injury, including us. But the wins kept coming, and the team kept jelling. And even though Jake was mostly on the sidelines with Coach, it still felt like he was the leader we needed.
But as time went on, things got weird. For example:
Jake quit football to keep roofing, but even with all the extra money he was making in the preseason, he was always asking me to spot him at Best Burger.
Then the night of the first football game (a big L), the team was literally sitting there talking about what a difference Jake would have made on defense when we got the word he was back in the hospital after another accident. I swear, the first thing I thought was that I hoped he was okay. But the second was that I hoped he’d be fully recovered before basketball season.
And he is, I guess. I mean, he stopped cracking jokes, and he’s even worse about taking them, which I didn’t think was possible. But even though he hasn’t been as consistent on the court as he was junior year, there are still moments when he belongs on the SportsCenter highlight reel, and even whole games when you see all those buckets of promise inside him poured out on the court.
Basketball season—our season—is going strong, but I miss him sometimes, even when he’s standing right in front of me. And that doesn’t make sense, until one day it does. Until the day I see Jake and Coach together in the locker room after Jake’s worst practice of the season. He’s acting like it’s the end of the world, even though he still smoked the rest of us.
“It’s my knees,” he tells Coach. “I can play through the pain, and I’ll keep doing it, but it’s hard to be at the top of my game. It’s like the harder I play, the more it hurts, you know?”
I keep behind the corner of the lockers so they won’t see me, but I still have a clear enough shot of them to see the way Jake’s biting his tongue but trying to hide it.
He’s not telling the truth about something.
Coach nods. “I know. Let’s get you to the athletic trainer. I want you alternating ice and heat, every night. We’ll get those knees back where they belong.”
“It felt a lot better before I ran out of oxys—”
Jake hasn’t finished the sentence before Coach is in his face, shoving Jake’s chin up with his clipboard. “We’re not fixing one problem with another. And trust me, pills are a problem. Heat, ice, PT, tape or braces, if you need them. That’s what we’re going to do about this. Ibuprofen, if you have to have it. Understand?”
Jake nods, hangs his head. But when Coach walks back into the office, Jake’s eyes follow him, still begging.
We swore we wouldn’t use any of that stuff, I want to say. Did you forget? Or did you lose that part of you too?
Because it wasn’t just one promise on that first day, in the back of Coach B’s Jeep. We promised again when my brother got so high that he missed his own hearing and again the day he went to prison for selling. We promised every year on the anniversary of the day Jake’s dad drove his truck into the ravine.
I want to grab him and shake his shoulders. Hell, I want to punch him in the face. I must have made a sound, because he looks up, and suddenly the smile is back.
“Hey, there you are. Want to go spotlighting?”
“Sure.” I scratch the back of my neck and tell myself I imagined it. The begging, the hunger, the supposed-to-be-smooth cover-up when there’s no promise of scoring what you want. Because this chill guy in front of me is my best friend, and even superstar Jake Foster can’t go coast to coast that fast.
It’s dark so early now that we grab the spotlights and some Best Burger and head out right then. Once we’re surrounded by sagebrush, Jake turns on the spotlight while I drive. We find all kinds of animals: deer, pronghorn, a couple of foxes that dart away so fast I wonder if I imagined them too. But the others stay still and let us get a good look, so blinded by the light that they can’t turn away. Sometimes we climb out of the truck and see how close they’ll let us come, neither of us really sure what we’d do if they decided on fight over flight.
“We should have brought Luke,” Jake says when we find a doe and fawn, bedded down under a juniper. We get out of the truck, but this time we don’t walk any closer.
“Nah. He’d just give us some lecture on nocturnal versus crepuscular or the anatomy of the eyeball
