Safety Net (19 page)

“Because I’m a stupid fucking idiot
jock,” he said, squeezing Erick in his arms. He gazed up at him until Erick
would meet his eyes and said, “Erick. Seriously. I’m the stupidest person in
the world. I had this idea that because I’ve been such a ho-bag, I’m going to
ruin everything. And I don’t want to ruin everything, because all I want is
you. I want you more than anything else.” He paused, smiling shakily. “Except
maybe an A on this paper. And a bowl game win.”

Erick smiled back, also shaky. “Okay.
For a minute there I thought you were dumping me because I’m ugly.” He said it
as if he were trying to make it a joke.

Lowell gazed into his eyes. “Dude,
don’t even. You been reading those stupid blogs again? Fuck that shit. They don’t
know you. They don’t see you the way I see you.”

Erick relaxed and rocked slightly in
his lap. He asked, eyes heavy-lidded, “And how do you see me?”

“Right now, how I
want
to
see you is fucking naked and in my bed.”

So Lowell got Erick naked and laid
out across his bed while Lowell knelt on the floor and sucked him off. The
times he’d done this with Dale had gone fast, sort of desperate, but Lowell
went as slowly as he could, as slowly as Erick could stand it. He watched Erick
and ran his hands over him, let him know how fucking sexy and gorgeous he was
right now. And Erick came, kind of strong and shuddering, gasping. It almost
set Lowell off and when he climbed onto the bed he was going to finish up -- it
wasn’t going to take much -- but Erick got hold of him first with his left
hand, which finished Lowell off even more quickly.

Lowell wished they could have
double beds in the dorm. He could see why the university didn’t provide them --
didn’t go asking for trouble -- but he wished one would fit inside his bedroom,
because he’d really like to stretch out comfortably with Erick in ways that
didn’t risk injury. Erick lay back, propped against the pillows, and Lowell lay
back against him, partially sitting in his lap. At least this way Erick could
hold him without getting his right arm in a bad position, and Lowell made sure
most of his weight was against Erick’s left side.

He propped his ankles on the foot
of the bed frame, relaxed in Erick’s embrace, and belched.

“Whoa. Semen breath,” he said.

“Oh, dude. Seriously.”

Lowell chuckled. Erick tightened
his arms around him briefly and nuzzled his hair. Lowell drifted, about to doze
off.

“Candace was the third girl I ever
slept with,” Erick said out of the silence. Calmly, his voice a bit tired. “Only
the second girl I ever, um. Made love to.”

Lowell was surprised for a nanosecond
before it made so much sense, seemed so very Erick. Erick said, “In high school
I dated this girl named Amber for two and half years. She went to my church and
we were friends. When we were in tenth grade, she asked me if I wanted to date
her so we started dating.”

“Did you love her?”

“I don’t know. I liked her a lot.
She was smart. She was a cheerleader and did gymnastics and stuff. She was
pretty. I thought I was the luckiest guy in school to be dating her.”

Lowell smoothed his hand down Erick’s
leg, liking the fuzz of it against his palm. “I always thought you must’ve been
popular in school. QB1, class president, all of that.”

“I was,” Erick said with honesty
that wasn’t boasting. “I had a lot of friends. I like people, y’know? I tried
to be friends with everybody. I was even friends with some of the goth guys.
There were two of them in my shop class, they were seriously funny characters.”

Explained some of Erick’s more
unusual online followers, Lowell thought with a smile.

“But dating and stuff...” Erick
continued. “I was so focused on football. Twenty-four/seven, pretty much. First
it was winning the cross-town. Then the regionals. Then going to State. Then
back again the next year, and practicing for cross-town again. Regionals.
State. Then coaches started coming around, talking to my father first, then
coming to watch me play. All these coaches from colleges I never even heard of.
Then the coaches from the colleges I was interested in.” He tapped Lowell’s
chest. “You know what it’s like.”

Lowell nodded, remembering the
first time he’d come home after practice to find a slick man wearing Illinois
colors sitting in the living room with his mother. He’d thought the guy was a
door-to-door salesman, like from an old movie. But for all the sniffing around
he’d gotten, he wasn’t a quarterback. He couldn’t even imagine how intense it
must have been for Erick.

“I didn’t make time for girls until
Amber asked me out.” Erick paused. “We went out for over two years but she
never let me, you know. Do it. She let me touch her there but not inside. Not
even with my finger. She’d signed a chastity contract with her father. Took it
very seriously.”

Lowell winced in sympathy. “Oh,
dude. Blue balls much?”

“Tell me about it. There’s a reason
I got really good with my left hand.”

Lowell lazily caressed Erick’s
legs. “Who was the other girl, then?”

“Becky. She lived next door to my
grandmother. I met her when I moved in with Meemaw my senior year. She was
younger than me, sophomore at the private high school. She was kind of weird.
Meemaw used to call her, ‘that poor Becky.’ I never knew why, exactly, but it
suited her. Her dad was deployed, so that must’ve sucked, worrying about him
all the time.”

Erick paused here to kiss Lowell’s
temple and nuzzle his hair again. He sat back and went on, “Meemaw let Becky
come over after school when Becky’s mother was working. I thought she was
annoying because she didn’t talk a lot. And she used to stare at me like I’d
killed her puppy or something. Then one day out of the blue she says to me, ‘If
you take me to the fall dance at my school, I’ll let you stick it inside me.’
And I’d been with Amber so long, bro. I thought she meant my finger. But, uh.
She didn’t. So we did it.”

Lowell struggled to imagine it all.
“Your life is a fucking movie. For real, dude. Did you take her to the dance?”

“Of course I did.” Erick sounded
slightly insulted at the suggestion he hadn’t. “Things made a hell of a lot
more sense after that. Her school was, like, serious money. Wall-to-wall fake,
snooty people. Even the teachers. And poor Becky. She wasn’t dripping rich and
she wasn’t very pretty and she was kind of chubby. I figured out, she’d bribed
me with sex to bring her to the dance so she wouldn’t be a loser in front of
those assholes.”

“Erick, you’re making this shit up.
Now you’re in fucking
Carrie
, I swear.”

Erick chuckled, a soothing rumble
beneath Lowell. “I wish I was making it up. Sad thing was... Well, couple of
sad things, to be honest. First was, I can’t dance. At all. I bet you’re
shocked by that.”

Lowell tickled Erick’s ankles. “Awww,
and here I was gonna sign you up for
Dancing with the Stars
as soon as
you go pro. What was the second sad thing?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if I
could. She went to school with a bunch of assholes who looked down on her, and
nothing was gonna change that.”

Lowell sighed for poor Becky, and
absently thought that her school would be a good insular, hierarchical society
for a case study.

“Even after the dance, Becky used
to come over two or three times a week and we’d do it,” Erick said. “I thought
I felt sorry for her, but seriously, it was because I liked getting laid. I
felt like a creep the whole time. My room was in the basement and upstairs was
Meemaw fixing dinner, thinking we were studying together even though we didn’t
go to the same school.” Erick sighed heavily. “And I was cheating on Amber.”

“Amber brought it on herself, you
ask me,” Lowell grumbled.

“Don’t be a douche.” Erick swiped a
hand at his head. “She did not. She made it very clear how far she’d go. I knew
that, but once I’d lost my virginity, I couldn’t accept it anymore and instead of
breaking up with her, I cheated on her with a girl I didn’t even like much. And
it got pretty bad, because that was part of the reason I lost control of my
team that year. The Becky and Amber thing was screwing me up and I was thinking
with my dick, thinking I was this hotshot superstar who was going to write his
own ticket to college. Next thing I know Jimmy Givens had a blood alcohol level
of point-oh-nine and drove his car into a church. Jimmy was our star running
back.”

“Yeah, I remember you telling me
about him,” said Lowell. He could partly picture it: Erick West letting high
school football stardom and popularity and easy sex go to his head. He’d known
guys like that. Hell, he’d almost been a guy like that, except he hadn’t been
as popular and he’d never catted around on April. On the other hand, knowing
Erick, Lowell had a feeling the unflattering self-portrait was more sharply
defined than the reality had been at the time.

Erick squeezed him in a brief hug,
and they fell into an easy silence, Lowell digesting the strange sexcapades of
Erick. He smiled, thinking
he
was one of Erick’s strange sexcapades.
Made him wonder if Erick had ever fooled around with guys before. He was almost
positive Erick hadn’t, but then, he’d had no idea Erick’s dating history had
been so cinematic.

They were dozing off when there was
a knock on Lowell’s door and Dale’s voice said, “You decent?”

Erick said, “No,” and Lowell said, “We’re
not actively fucking, so come on in.” Erick bumped his knuckles against Lowell’s
ribs.

Dale opened the door, looked them
over for a moment, sighed and leaned against the doorjamb. “I was gonna ask if
you wanted to order Chinese with me, but I may have just lost my appetite.”

As soon as Lowell heard “Chinese,” his
stomach growled. Erick’s was gurgling, too. Lowell sat up, reaching for his
undershorts. “Are they still open? What time is it?”

“They deliver to campus until
eleven, so we have enough time to get an order in. I’ve got the menu up on my
laptop.”

They sat in the living room with
Chinese takeout, Erick sitting cross-legged on the floor in his undershorts and
tee shirt, Dale spread out on the sofa, and Lowell sitting at the desk, halfheartedly
trying to finish his paper. Erick snagged the last egg roll and polished it off
before leaning back against the wall.

“I’ll have to leave for New York on
Thursday,” he said. “I wish I didn’t have to go. I’m not going to win.”

Dale frowned at him. “It’s an
honor. You’re a finalist, shithead.”

Erick shrugged a little. “Yeah, I
know, but...”

Lowell lightly kicked his thigh
with his bare toes. “We’re proud of you. All of us. We wanna see you standing
up there.”

Dale scraped the last of the mu shu
filling out of the carton. “That’s right. So you better fucking shave for this
thing. I don’t want you up there looking like a polygamist murderer.”

“Someone who kills polygamists? Or
a murderer with multiple wives?” Erick asked him.

“Either/or.”

Erick rubbed the back of his neck
and glanced up at Lowell. “I have a presentation due on Wednesday, and it’s the
worst one ever. For my spatials class. And Tuesday I have a meeting with Coach
Miller.”

Lowell saw where this was heading.
He rubbed his toes over Erick’s thigh. “Dude, it’s okay. I’ll be here, y’know.”

Dale, watching them from the sofa,
said loudly, “Food’s all gone. Time for bed.” He got up with an exaggerated
yawn and disappeared into his bedroom, and Lowell felt a twinge of guilt at how
glad he was that Dale had left them alone.

Erick looked up at him. “Can I stay
here tonight? ‘Cause it’s probably the last time I can stay over until next
week sometime. I gotta get that damn presentation done...”

Lowell smiled. “It’s cool. I want
you to stay here tonight.”

“I don’t wanna be in the way.” Erick
glanced toward Dale’s bedroom door. “Not with your paper and all.”

“I’m, like, on the last sentence,” Lowell
said. Which was true, or would be, if he could think up a killer final sentence
that would tie everything up. “And you’re not in the way.”

“Okay.” Erick smiled and stood up. “Then
I’m gonna go to bed. I’m beat, to be honest.” He cleared the takeout garbage
and wandered off to clean up and go to bed in Lowell’s room. Lowell wrestled
with his paper for another quarter of an hour before finishing it more or less
to satisfaction.

Erick was curled up in the bed,
naked, with half the covers bunched to one side. Lowell slipped out of his
undershorts and curled up around him, and they slept together with no messing
around until four a.m. when Erick’s left-handed stroking woke him up.

-----

A week later Dale and Lowell went
over to Hopkins Hall and watched the Heisman show on TV in the fourth floor
lounge with a bunch of their teammates. There was a little bit of pre-ceremony
stuff of the finalists in New York: Erick walking around rainy Times Square in
a Crocker zipper jacket, looking extremely tall and, Dale was sorry to see,
unshaven.

By the ceremony, he’d shaved,
thankfully.

“What is with that suit?” Dale
said, nudging Lowell, who was wedged on a sofa between him and Tomasovich. “Oh,
Erick.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Lowell
asked, and Dale figured love really was blind.

“Nothing much, except he looks
awful in it. Who picked that out for him?” Dale gave Lowell a suspicious
sidelong glance.

“He picked it out himself,” Lowell
said with a hint of protective defensiveness. “He went over to the Crocker
Galleria this week. Wanted to buy a new suit so he’d look nice.”

Dale sighed at the TV, shaking his
head. “Oh, Erick West.”

Tomasovich said, leaning forward to
look at Dale past Lowell, “Since when are you so GQ?”

Dale ignored him, and Anson Dempsey
said, “Syracuse QB’s looking sharp, I gotta admit. Nice dreads, too.”