“My college coach, my agent, Rush management, all of them have said at one point or another that I’ll be fighting the stigma of my dad, that I had to be on my best behavior at all times. This…this could impact your career, Garrett. If we get outed unexpectedly and there’s some kind of outcry about us being on the same team, who knows what would happen?”
Fuck, he wasn’t wrong. There was no way to know how shit would play out if we created a media circus. I’d honestly never thought we’d even get so far that it’d be an issue.
“You just bought a house,” Ramsey continued.
“I don’t care. If anyone gets traded, it’ll probably be me. It should be me. The problem is, there’s so much uncertainty with…everything.” I didn’t necessarily want to be traded, but I really didn’t want Ramsey to be traded if Coach got pressured from higher up. “I know you’re just trying to protect me.”
“And you’re doing the same, so…”
“Stalemate. Rock and a hard place. Catch-22. That’s all I’ve got.” I bit my lip. “We can’t protect each other and keep going the way we have been. Something’s gotta give, and I think we both know what the responsible thing to do would be.” Ramsey gave me another hard stare, so I barreled on. “We’re friends, right? And we’re both capable of being adults in a shitty situation. I think. So…we go back to the friends part and nix the benefits part of that equation.” I made it sound so simple, when it was anything but.
Ramsey frowned. “Is that what you want?”
I shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
“Me neither.”
Ugh, well, that threw a wrench in my gusto. I’d been expecting him to accept my statement on the basis of logic alone. “But what I want even less is to be the cause of a media circus around you. Or the team. Or have what we’re doing cause you to feel like you need to come out.”
“You’ve never pressured me.”
“I know, but…” I gestured vaguely around. “The circumstances are, and I’m part of that.”
“It’s not the being outed that’s necessarily the issue. I can handle that—”
“But you shouldn’t have to.”
“Let me finish,” he said sternly. “It’s that I don’t want you in the spotlight for anything other than the badass rookie year you’ve been having.” Ramsey rubbed his temples and flopped back on the bed. “So we’re back to stalemate. Fuck you for making sense. You’re right. Total rock and a hard place. I’ve never realized how much the responsible shit sucks sometimes.”
“Welcome to the dark side. There’s no welcome wagon, sadly. No one remembered to load it.” I sprawled next to him, buoyed slightly when he smiled faintly at my dumb joke. “So we finish out the season as friends and teammates, and once the season is over, we’ll talk. Agreed?”
Ramsey was silent for a long while. “Okay, yeah. Agreed.”
“Good.” I forced a smile that was reluctant to come. There was no guarantee Ramsey would still be into this once the season was over. “We can just focus on the playoffs.”
“And getting a Super Bowl ring.”
“Honestly, I was kind of getting sick of you sucking me off anyway. So sloppy.”
Ramsey jerked his head in my direction, eyes flashing. “Seriously?”
“No. Not even close.” I chuckled and was relieved to see his expression lighten. “The sloppiness is definitely a pro.”
“Learned it from you, dipshit.”
I shrugged. “Neatness is overrated.”
“Like responsibility?”
“Touché.”
I dropped heavily onto a stool at the kitchen counter after Ramsey left, watching Houston make one of his giant salads.
He eyed me as he picked up a bell pepper and started dicing it. “All right, lay it on me. What the hell is going on?”
“Ramsey and I are going to stop hooking up.”
“Okay…” He set down the knife. “Feel like I’m not getting the full story here.”
I slumped on the stool and filled him in on everything that’d transpired. When I was finished, his brows furrowed even deeper.
“So you really think you two can stop, just like that?”
“I mean, there was never a larger plan. We were just hooking up for kicks.” I shrugged with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “And maybe this is the best thing anyway. Cut things off before it gets even more complicated, possibly with real, actual feelings.”
Houston snorted. “You’ve had ‘real, actual feelings’ for Ramsey for a long time.”
“No, I had a crush. That’s different. Real feelings are…” More like everything I’d been feeling around Ramsey lately, but I wasn’t about to say that to Houston. Didn’t matter. The way he was looking at me said he already knew. “I figured we’d hook up for a while and then get tired of each other and move on. I’d…fulfill my crush and be done with it.”
He shook his head with a sigh. “Yeah, because that always works out so well.”