Game Changer

The ball came at my face like it had a grudge.

I didn't see it leave anyone's hands. I was looking down at my phone, thumb hovering over a text from my roommate asking if I'd remembered to lock the door, which I had, which I always did, which he asked me every single day as if I'd suddenly develop amnesia and leave our apartment wide open for the entire city to pillage. The sun was doing that late afternoon thing where it hangs low and gold and makes everything look like it's been dipped in honey, and the bench was cold through my jeans, and someone on the field was yelling something about a slant route, and then there was a sound like a fist hitting a mattress and the world went white for half a second.

I flinched. Hard. My phone slipped and I caught it against my chest with both hands, elbows flying up, and the ball, that stupid brown missile, smacked into the bench beside my hip and bounced off into the grass.

My heart was doing something unpleasant in my throat. I looked up.

The field stretched out in front of me, green and manicured and absolutely lousy with guys in practice jerseys. Most of them had stopped moving. A few were staring. And one was jogging toward me, big and fast, cleats kicking up little divots of turf, and even from thirty yards away I could see the expression on his face, which was the expression of a golden retriever who'd just knocked over a vase.

Oh, sorry, sorry! You okay, buddy?

Mason. Of course it was Mason. Quarterback Mason, six-foot-something Mason, the guy whose name got sighed by at least three girls in my intro psych lecture every time someone mentioned the football team. He pulled up in front of me, breathing hard, and bent over with his hands on his knees for a second before straightening up. Sweat darkened the collar of his practice jersey. His hair was the kind of blond that looked like it had never known a bad day.

I'm fine, I said.

You sure? That was a bullet. He winced, rubbing the back of his neck. I mean, not a literal bullet. Obviously. But I've been working on my release and sometimes it gets away from me and I swear I didn't mean to almost kill you.

You didn't almost kill me.

I almost killed you.

You almost hit me with a football.

Same thing, he said, and grinned. It was a disarming grin, the kind that probably got him out of parking tickets and into parties. I'm Mason, by the way. I don't think we've met.

We haven't.

I waited. He waited. The ball sat in the grass like a dropped egg.

I'm not gonna bite, he said. What's your name?

I told him. He repeated it back, mispronouncing it slightly, and I corrected him, and he tried again, and got it right the second time, and looked genuinely pleased with himself, like he'd solved a riddle. Around us, the practice had resumed. Whistles blew. Someone shouted about coverage. The moment was already dissolving, the way moments do on a field where everyone has somewhere to be.

You waiting for someone? he asked.

My friend. He's trying out for the team.

Oh, sick. What position?

I don't know. He just said he wanted to play.

Mason nodded like this was a perfectly reasonable answer. He had that quality, I was realizing, of making whatever you said sound reasonable. It wasn't intelligence, exactly. It was something closer to warmth. A furnace of it, radiating off him, mixing with the smell of sweat and cut grass.

Well, he said, I should get back. But hey, if you ever want to throw a ball around, I'm here basically every day. He pointed at the field, as if I might have missed it. I could teach you some stuff.

I don't play football.

You could learn.

I don't want to learn.

He laughed. Not a mean laugh. A surprised one, like I'd told him a joke he hadn't heard before. Okay, he said. Okay. Fair enough. He jogged backward a few steps, then turned and sprinted back to the huddle, and I watched him go because there was nothing else to watch, and because the sun was behind him and it made him look like something out of a movie, and because I was still shaking a little from the near miss and needed something to steady my eyes on.

My phone buzzed. My roommate again. Did you lock the door?

Yes, I typed. For the hundredth time. Yes.

He sent back a thumbs up. I put the phone in my pocket and leaned back on the bench and tried to find my friend among the guys on the field. It took me a minute. He was at the far end, standing next to a coach, nodding at something. He looked small out there. He looked like he was trying very hard to look like he belonged.

I'd known him since freshman orientation, when we'd both been standing in line for bad coffee and he'd turned to me and said, Do you think they make it bad on purpose? Like, as a bonding exercise? And I'd said, I think they just don't care. And he'd said, That's bleak. I like it. And that was that. We'd been friends ever since, mostly because he kept showing up and I kept not telling him to leave.

He'd gotten it into his head last month that he wanted to play football. I didn't ask why. He'd tell me eventually, or he wouldn't, and either way it wasn't my business. What was my business, apparently, was sitting on this bench three afternoons a week while he ran drills and got yelled at by coaches and came back to me with grass stains on his knees and a look on his face like he'd survived something.

I didn't mind. The field was quiet, mostly. The bench was comfortable. I could scroll through my phone and ignore the world and nobody bothered me.

Except now, apparently, people did.

The next day, I was back on the bench.

My friend had texted me that morning: practice again at 4, you coming? And I'd said yes because I had nothing else to do and because the library was too quiet and because my apartment was too loud with my roommate's video games and because, honestly, I didn't hate watching. The field was a good place to be invisible.

I was halfway through an article about a man who'd spent twenty years building a house out of bottles when I heard footsteps in the grass. I didn't look up. Footsteps happened. People walked. It was a public field.

Hey, the footsteps said. It was Mason's voice.

I looked up.

He was standing a few feet away, in shorts and a t-shirt now, no pads, no helmet, holding a football under one arm. He looked different without the gear. Smaller, somehow, though not small. Just more like a person and less like a position.

You're here again, he said.

I'm here again.

Your friend's tryout still going?

Yeah.

Cool. He shifted his weight. Can I sit?

I gestured at the bench. It's a free country.

He sat. Not too close. A respectful distance, like he'd been trained on it. He put the ball in his lap and looked out at the field, where a few guys were warming up, and I looked back at my phone, and we sat like that for a minute or two in what I assumed was comfortable silence for him and slightly awkward silence for me.

You don't talk much, he said finally.

Not much to say.

I don't believe that.

I looked at him. He was smiling, but it wasn't the grin from yesterday. It was smaller. More careful. Like he was trying something out.

You don't know me, I said.

I know you're here every day. I know you don't watch the practice. You look at your phone the whole time. He paused. Except yesterday. Yesterday you watched.

I was watching for the ball.

You were watching me.

I didn't say anything. He had me there, and we both knew it, and he had the grace not to gloat about it. He just nodded, like I'd confirmed something, and looked back at the field.

I'm not hitting on you, he said. Just so you know. I mean, not that I wouldn't. You're cute. But I'm not. I just. He stopped. Started again. I just noticed you. That's all.

Okay, I said.

Okay, he said.

We sat there for another minute. The sun was doing its honey thing again. Someone on the field dropped a pass and swore loud enough to carry.

Can I ask you something? he said.

You just did.

Ha. He laughed, a short one. Okay. Can I ask you something else?

Sure.

Why do you come here? If you don't like football and you don't like watching and you're just on your phone the whole time. Why not stay home?

I thought about it. It was a fair question. I wasn't sure I had a good answer.

My friend asked me to, I said.

That's it?

That's it.

You must really like him.

He's fine.

He laughed again, longer this time, and something in it made me want to smile. I didn't. But I wanted to.

You're a weird guy, he said.

Thanks.

I mean it as a compliment.

I know.

He stood up, brushing grass off his shorts, and looked down at me. I'll see you tomorrow? he said. It came out like a question, which was strange, because he didn't have any reason to ask.

Maybe, I said.

Maybe's good, he said. Maybe's better than no.

He jogged back toward the field. I watched him go. Then I put my phone in my pocket and watched the practice for real, for the first time since my friend had started dragging me here, and I told myself it was because I wanted to see how my friend was doing.

It wasn't. But I told myself that anyway.

The next day, it rained.

Not hard. Just a steady gray drizzle that turned the field into a sponge and sent most of the players running for the locker room. My friend texted me: canceled. sorry. I'll make it up to you. I texted back: don't worry about it. And then I sat in my car in the parking lot for ten minutes, engine off, watching the rain slide down the windshield, and tried to figure out why I felt disappointed.

It was the rain. I hated the rain. That was it.

I drove home and played video games with my roommate and lost four matches in a row and went to bed early and didn't think about Mason at all.

That was a lie. I thought about him a little. Just a little. Just enough to notice that I was thinking about him, which was annoying, because I didn't do that. I didn't think about people. I didn't care about people. I had my friend and my roommate and a handful of other people I tolerated, and that was enough. That was more than enough. That was the whole point.

But I thought about him. The way he'd said maybe's good. The way he'd sat a respectful distance away. The way he'd looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve, not because he needed the answer, but because he liked puzzles.

I fell asleep thinking about it. When I woke up, the rain had stopped and the sun was out and I had a text from a number I didn't recognize.

Hey it's Mason. Got your number from your friend. Hope that's okay. Practice is on today if you wanna come.

I stared at the text for a long time. Long enough that my roommate asked me if I was having a stroke. I told him I was fine. I told him I was just reading something. I told him to mind his own business.

Then I typed back: I'll be there.

He sent a thumbs up. I put my phone down and stared at the ceiling and wondered what the hell I was doing.

I was there.

Of course I was there. I was always there. That was the thing about me. I showed up. I sat on benches. I waited for people. I was reliable in the way that furniture was reliable, present and unremarkable, easy to overlook until you needed somewhere to sit.

Mason waved at me from the field. I didn't wave back. He didn't seem to mind.

My friend was in the middle of a drill, running some kind of pattern that involved a lot of turning and catching and getting yelled at. He looked better than he had last week. More confident. Less like he was about to throw up. I felt a small, unfamiliar swell of something that might have been pride, and then I squashed it, because I wasn't his mother.

Mason threw a pass. It was a good pass, tight and fast, and the receiver caught it and ran. I watched Mason's arm, the way it moved, the way his whole body followed through like it was one motion instead of a bunch of separate parts. He was good. I didn't know anything about football, but I could tell he was good. You could tell just by watching him. He made it look easy.

Practice ended. My friend came over, sweaty and grinning, and collapsed onto the bench next to me.

I did good today, he said.

You did okay.

I did good. Coach said so.

Coach says a lot of things.

He shoved me. I shoved him back. We sat there for a minute, watching the field empty out, and then Mason appeared, walking over with his helmet under his arm and his hair plastered to his forehead.

Hey, he said. To both of us, but mostly to me. You came.

I said I would.

You did. He looked pleased. He looked like a dog who'd been told he was a good boy. It was embarrassing how pleased he looked. What'd you think? Of the practice?

It was fine.

He's being nice, my friend said. He doesn't care about football.

I care a little.

You don't.

I care a little, I said again, and Mason laughed, and my friend looked between us with a strange expression on his face, like he was seeing something he hadn't seen before.

You two know each other? he asked.

He almost killed me with a football, I said.

I said I was sorry, Mason said.

He said he was sorry, I said.

My friend looked at us for another second, then shrugged. Okay, he said. Weird. You want to get food?

We got food.

It became a thing.

Not on purpose. It just happened. Practice ended and we were hungry and Mason knew a place and my friend knew a place and somehow we ended up at a diner off campus, the kind with cracked vinyl booths and a menu that hadn't changed since the nineties, and we ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes and Mason ate like he hadn't eaten in a week.

He was easy to be around. That was the thing. He didn't demand anything. He didn't fill every silence with noise. He asked questions and then actually listened to the answers, which was rarer than it should have been. He remembered things I'd said. He remembered that I didn't like pickles and that my roommate was driving me crazy and that I was thinking about switching my major. He remembered all of it, and he brought it up at odd moments, like he'd been holding onto it, waiting for the right time to give it back.

My friend noticed. Of course he noticed. He was observant in the way that people who cared about you were observant, which was annoying and also kind of nice.

You like him, he said one night, after Mason had left and we were walking back to our apartments.

I don't like anyone.

You like him.

I tolerate him.

You tolerate me. You like him.

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. He was right, and we both knew it, and saying it out loud would have made it real in a way I wasn't ready for.

He's a good guy, my friend said. I've talked to some of the other players. They all say the same thing. He's a good guy.

I know.

So what's the problem?

There's no problem.

There's always a problem with you.

I shoved him. He shoved me back. We walked the rest of the way in silence, and when we got to my building, he said goodnight and I said goodnight and I went upstairs and lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about Mason's hands.

They were big hands. I'd noticed them at the diner, wrapped around a milkshake glass, and I'd thought, irrationally, about what they'd feel like on my skin. Not in a weird way. Just in a noticing way. Just in a way that made my stomach do something I didn't want to name.

I didn't sleep well that night.

The next week, my friend got hurt.

It wasn't bad. A sprained ankle, the coach said. He'd rolled it during a drill and gone down hard and lain there for a second with his face in the grass, and I'd stood up from the bench without thinking, my heart in my throat, ready to run onto the field like I had any right to be there. But then he'd sat up and waved and given a thumbs up, and the trainer had come over and helped him off, and I'd sat back down and tried to remember how to breathe.

Mason came over after practice. He looked worried. He always looked worried, I was learning. He wore his heart on his sleeve in a way that should have been annoying but wasn't. It was just who he was. He couldn't help it.

He's gonna be okay, he said. I talked to the trainer. Just a sprain. He'll be back in a week or two.

I know.

You look pale.

I'm always pale.

Paler than usual.

I'm fine.

He sat down next to me. Closer than usual. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, the sweat and the grass and something underneath that was just him, just Mason, a smell I was starting to recognize.

You care about him a lot, he said.

He's my friend.

Yeah. He was quiet for a second. I get that. I care about my friends too. It's important. Having people you care about.

I didn't say anything. He didn't seem to need me to.

Can I tell you something? he said.

Sure.

I've been watching you too. He looked at me. Not in a creepy way. I just. I noticed you before the ball thing. Before you started coming to practice. I saw you on campus a couple times. In the library. At the coffee place. You always looked like you were somewhere else. Like you were thinking about something nobody else could see.

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said nothing.

I wanted to talk to you, he said. But I didn't know how. And then I almost killed you with a football, which, honestly, was not the plan. He laughed. But it worked out.

I guess it did.

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, Can I ask you something?

You already did.

Something else.

Fine.

Why do you push people away?

The question hit me harder than it should have. I felt it in my chest, a little shock, like a static zap. I looked at him. He was looking back, steady, not judging, just asking.

I don't push people away, I said.

You do. You do it with everyone. Your friend, he told me. He said you've been like this since he met you. He said you're the most loyal person he knows, but you never let anyone in. Not really.

He shouldn't have told you that.

He didn't mean anything by it. He was just worried about you.

I'm fine.

You keep saying that.

Because it's true.

It's not. He said it softly. Not accusing. Just stating a fact. It's not true. And that's okay. It's okay to not be fine.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. My throat was tight and my eyes were stinging and I didn't know why, because I wasn't sad, I wasn't upset, I was just. I don't know. I was just something. Something I didn't have a word for.

Mason didn't push. He just sat there, next to me, not touching me, not looking at me, just present. And after a while, the tightness in my throat went away, and I could breathe again.

You're okay, he said. You know that, right? You're okay.

I know, I said. And for the first time in a long time, I thought maybe it was true.

The weeks went by.

My friend's ankle healed. He came back to practice, slower than before but determined, and I kept sitting on the bench, and Mason kept coming over, and the three of us kept getting food after, and it became a routine. A rhythm. Something I could count on.

I started to look forward to it. That was the scary part. I started to wake up in the morning and think about the afternoon, about the field, about the bench, about Mason's voice saying hey, you came. I started to plan my days around it. I started to miss it when it wasn't there.

I didn't tell anyone. I didn't have to. My friend knew. He'd known before I did. He'd known since the first day, probably, when I'd come home and told him about the near miss and he'd said, Mason? The quarterback? And I'd said, yeah, and he'd gotten a look on his face like he was watching something unfold.

He's good for you, he said one night.

I didn't ask what he meant. I didn't want to know.

You're different when you're around him. Lighter. Like you're not carrying something.

I'm not carrying anything.

Everyone's carrying something.

I don't want to talk about this.

Okay. He held up his hands. Okay. We don't have to.

We didn't. But the next day, at practice, I watched Mason throw a pass, and I felt something in my chest, something warm and terrifying, and I knew that my friend was right. I was different around him. I was lighter. I was something I didn't recognize.

It scared me. It scared me more than anything had in a long time.

But I kept showing up. I kept sitting on the bench. I kept letting him in, inch by inch, without meaning to, without wanting to, because I couldn't help it. Because he was Mason, and Mason was good, and being around him made me feel like maybe I could be good too.

It was a Tuesday when it happened.

Practice had ended early. The coach had given them the rest of the afternoon off, and my friend had gone to get ice for his ankle, and I was sitting on the bench alone, scrolling through my phone, when Mason appeared.

He was still in his practice gear. Sweaty. Tired. But he was smiling, that same smile, the one that made me want to smile back.

Hey, he said.

Hey.

He sat down. Not a respectful distance this time. Close. Close enough that our knees almost touched.

I've been thinking, he said.

That's dangerous.

He laughed. Yeah. Probably. But I've been thinking anyway. About you. About us.

There's no us.

There could be.

I looked at him. He was looking back, and his eyes were serious, and I realized that he wasn't joking, that he'd never been joking, that all of this, the whole time, had been him trying to tell me something.

I don't know what you want from me, I said.

I want you to let me in. He said it simply. Like it was easy. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. I want you to stop pushing me away. I want you to trust me.

I don't trust anyone.

I know. He reached out and took my hand. His fingers were warm. Rough. They fit against mine like they'd been made for it. But you could. You could trust me. I'm not going anywhere.

I looked down at our hands. At his fingers wrapped around mine. At the way it felt, right, like something clicking into place.

I don't know how, I said.

I'll show you.

He leaned in. Slowly. Giving me time to pull away. I didn't. I couldn't. I didn't want to.

He kissed me.

It was soft. Gentle. Like he was afraid I'd break. And maybe I would have, once. Maybe I would have shattered into a thousand pieces and run away and never come back. But I didn't. I stayed. I kissed him back. And for a moment, just a moment, everything was quiet.

When he pulled away, he was smiling. That smile. The one that made me want to be better.

See? he said. Not so hard.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. But I didn't pull my hand away either. I let him hold it. I let him sit there with me. I let myself feel it, all of it, the warmth and the fear and the hope and the something else, the something I still didn't have a name for.

Behind us, the field was empty. The sun was setting. The sky was doing that honey thing again, gold and pink and purple, and I thought, this is it. This is the moment. This is where everything changes.

And it was.

But not in the way I expected.

The next morning, I woke up to a text from my friend.

Call me. Now.

I called him. He picked up on the first ring.

Have you seen the group chat? he said.

What group chat?

The football group chat. The team one. Someone took a picture.

Of what?

Of you. And Mason. Last night. On the bench.

My blood went cold.

What picture?

Someone was still on the field. In the locker room. They saw you. They took a picture. It's going around. He paused. It's everywhere.

I opened my phone. I found the picture. It was blurry, taken from a distance, but it was unmistakable. Me and Mason. Holding hands. Kissing.

And underneath it, a caption.

Looks like the quarterback's got a new tight end.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I put the phone down and stared at the wall and tried to remember how to breathe.

Mason texted me an hour later.

Don't worry. I'll handle it.

I didn't text back. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know if there was anything to say.

I just sat there, in my room, in the quiet, and wondered if I'd made a mistake.

And if I had, whether I could take it back.