Page 21 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Enough to make my whole body break out in a sweat.

I stare at his name until the phone stops ringing in my hand, then I turn it face down on my nightstand.

6

Julian

Practice drags today.

Normally, football is the one place I can get out of my own head. There’s no room for bullshit when Luca’s barking adjustments, when pads are cracking hard enough to make your ribs hum, and when your body has to answer before your thoughts. Football is simple when everything else isn’t.

Today, every rep feels split in half.

One half of me is on the field, planting, cutting, driving through contact. The other half is back at the Sin Bin, upstairs in Eli’s room. A lawyer is supposed to be coming this afternoon and some stranger is going to swab the inside of his mouth and the baby’s tiny cheek and tell him whether the nightmare of what he thinks happened is true.

I keep seeing Eli’s face from this morning. That split second after the baby started crying, when panic hollowed him out so fast he looked younger than I’ve ever seen him.

Killian mentioned he wanted to speak to Eli alone, so I pretended to be busy, because what the fuck else was I going to do? Hover outside the door like some overinvested idiot who can’t stop orbiting his best friend even after months of tension?

I’ve been in love with him for so long it barely feels like love anymore. It feels structural and built in. A load-bearing wall in the center of me that I stopped trying to knock down even if all it ever did was leave me bruised.

I know I don’t stand a chance; I’ve known that for years. Eli is straight, dates women, and chases the kind of life his parents raised him to want. He looks at me with love, sure, but the safe kind. The brother and best friend kind that never once promises more than what it is.

So, I made my own mistakes around that truth.

Big ones.

Ones that started with wanting to feel wanted by somebody and ended up with me answering calls I should’ve blocked months ago from a person nobody would ever suspect. Somebody older, respected, and powerful enough that even I still catch myself framing the whole ugly mess in softer words than it deserves.

A whistle cuts through the noise and drags me back into my body.

“West!” Coach shouts from across the field. “You awake, or are you just out here doing cardio for fun?”

A few guys laugh. I shove the rest of my thoughts down and tug my helmet on. “Awake,” I call back.

“Prove it.”

Luca smirks at me from under his own helmet as we line up. He sees more than most people do; that’s the thing with Luca. Half the time, he looks like he’s joking around, running his mouth, all swagger and charm and easy arrogance. But the other half has steel under it. Real leadership. Real attention.

He glances at me once, then he starts the count, and I force myself into it.

“That’s more fucking like it,” Luca says when we reset.

By the time we hit the locker room after practice, I feel scraped out. The air inside is thick with sweat, deodorant, and damp towels. The usual post-practice mess of lockers banging shut, showers starting up, guys yelling across the room about dinner and tape and whatever party’s going on this weekend. I sit on the bench in front of my locker and start peeling off gear piece by piece.

Luca drops onto the bench next to me in nothing but compression shorts and a towel around his neck. “You wanna tell me what the fuck that was?”

I snort softly. “Practice?”

“You missed two calls, almost ran the wrong side of a protection, and spent the whole second half staring into space like you were getting messages from God.”

I lean forward, forearms on my thighs. “Maybe I was.”

“Did he tell you to stop being weird?”

Despite myself, my mouth twitches. “Something like that.”

Luca nudges my knee with his. “Talk.”