You & Me

The crowd groaned, one massive sound of dejected disappointment, as the other team scored again. Emmet had missed his block, had missed the whole offensive play, and the other quarterback threw a fade to the corner of the end zone. Emmet was on his hands and knees on the turf, and he slapped his palm on the ground and screamed.

Face yourself and face your fears sounded good on Wednesday.

Emmet was a mess all day Friday. He’d woken up puking. I met him before the game, waiting outside the doors to the athletic center with Landon. He and Bowen were quiet, both shaky, Emmet ghost pale.

The four of us huddled around the side of the building, Bowen and Landon bracketing Emmet as I took his face in my hands and told him he could do this, and that he was more than what was in that bottle, and, no matter what, when the game was over, I was going to be there waiting for him. So was Bowen, and so was Landon.

This was a home game, which meant Bethany was here, but Landon had called her Thursday morning and said an issue had arisen. He said we, the four of us, needed to be together Friday after the game. She said she understood and that it would be no problem for the five of us to be under one roof tonight.

We had to get through this game.

Emmet had been a train wreck, letting three touchdowns through his famous brick wall. The other team was roaring, the visitors’ side of the stadium on their feet. The home side looked like mourners at a wake, a sea of lost faces and misery staring down at Emmet as he trudged off the field.

Bowen grabbed him as special teams ran out. He grasped Emmet by the pads, dragged him close, face-to-face as Emmet shut his eyes. From the skywalk, I watched a tear slip down my son’s cheek. Bowen wiped it away.

When the whistle blew for the half, I was already beelining for Emmet. He lingered behind the team, helmet in one hand. “Em.”

“Dad, I can’t do this. I can’t. I suck, I’m no fucking good. I’m a fraud, everything about me is fucking fake—”

“You are not a fraud.” I steered him down the tunnel. We stood in the dark, the stadium light catching on the shine of his helmet. “Remember what the doctor said? You don’t have any steroids in your system anymore, and you haven’t for weeks.”

We’d had Emmet’s blood drawn, and we’d waited for the results for three hours. He was lucky, his doctor, the pediatrician Emmet had known since he was born, said. His liver was good, and his hormones were back to normal. The only thing elevated was his hematocrit, and he’d written Emmet a prescription to go bleed out a pint of blood at a donation center to lower his red blood cell count. We went that afternoon.

Emmet shook his head. “Dad…”

“Do you remember when you called the play that sent your safety on man coverage, and he plucked that interception out of the air? Or when you stopped the other team from advancing into field goal territory and forced a turnover that led to Bowen scoring a touchdown? What about when you blocked that third down conversion in the first game, and you stopped the other team cold in their tracks? You won all those games, Emmet. You.”

He stared at me, his face unreadable. “You’ve picked up a lot.”

“I watched you. I know you, Em, I know you are the same kid playing today who played in all those other games. You can do this.”

He shifted his weight from foot to foot. Palmed his helmet and peered back out at the field.

Landon was there, walking toward us. “Have you noticed their left side?”

Emmet blinked. “Their tackle is slow off the snap.”

“Their quarterback has exposure on his blind side,” Landon said. “Not much, but if you can get your guys to that tackle and hold him up, you’ll have a path to the quarterback.”

“Their quarterback lingers in the pocket, too.”

“You can rush him, right?” I looked from Landon to Emmet. “What’s that called? A blitz? A sack?”

Emmet almost smiled. “One leads to the other, yeah. If you do it right.”

“You do it right. I’ve seen you.” I pushed him gently in the center of his pads. “You can do this, Em. I know you can.”

Emmet missed the first two blocks of the third quarter. The stands had hoped for a reset at half, and they’d been on their feet and cheering Emmet’s name and number as the defense took the field. After two blown plays and twenty-five yards forward progress by the other team, the energy in the stadium cracked and fizzled.

“C’mon, Em, c’mon.” Landon and I were side by side. I took his hand in mine. “C’mon.”

“You can do it, Emmet,” Landon whispered. “Just one play. All you need is one play to find yourself again.”

The line set. Emmet hovered in the midfield, facing off against the quarterback. His hands opened and closed, fluttered beside his thighs. His eyes darted to the left, to the tackle. I heard him shouting, bellowing in the incomprehensible football code the team used. Landon squeezed my hand—

The ball snapped. Two of Emmet’s players rushed the slow-footed tackle. They jammed him up, pulled him away from the offensive line… and opened a hole right in front of Emmet.

Inhale. Emmet sprinted, rubber bits of turf flying behind him as he bore down on the quarterback. Squeeze, squeeze. Landon’s hand in mine, our fingers threaded together. The quarterback spotted Emmet. He jerked, ran into a cluster of players battling it out. Turned to the left—

I held my breath and watched Emmet stretch and soar, and then wrap his arms around the quarterback. He curled around him, wrapped him up in a full body hold—

And took him down to the turf.

The stands erupted, suddenly full of life, full of energy, full of chants and cheers for number 99 again. Everyone was clapping and shouting and waving Last Waters flags and towels and banners. Emmet leapt to his feet and threw both of his fists in the air. He spun, turned to the skywalk, and punched a finger at me before he pounded his chest right over his heart.

I love you, too, Em. I love you, too.

Last Waters won in a knock-down, bare-knuckle fight to the final buzzer.

Bowen fought through a bruising battle of blitzes and rushes. He and the offense won every inch, every yard, every single touchdown, with everything they had.

Emmet was like a man resurrected. He built his brick wall back up play by play, and slowly, the momentum turned from their team to ours. He called another audible in the fourth that turned into a forced fumble, and one of Emmet’s linebackers ran the football forty yards to the red zone.

Emmet personally handed that ball to Bowen on the sideline. Bowen dug his face mask against Emmet’s, grasped his pads, and then jogged out and scored the game-winning touchdown.

As the buzzer sounded, it became official: we were going to the playoffs.

Emmet cried into the neck of his jersey as the school’s fight song played.

After the game, Emmet and I followed Landon, Bethany, and Bowen back to Landon’s home. Emmet was somber beside me, reflective when I thought he might have been joyous. He’d jumped for joy on the field and had been carried on the shoulders of two of the massive defensive ends, but that had vanished. When we parked outside Landon’s house, he stayed in the truck. “Dad?”

“Mmhmm?”

“Thank you. For everything. For tonight. For believing in me. For putting up with me. For buying milk and peanut butter and protein powder. For taking care of me, even when I didn’t know what you were doing. I’m—” His voice hitched. He took a breath. “I’m really glad you’re my dad.”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say a single thing back to him. I nodded, nodded like my head was going to roll right off. Bethany waited at Landon’s front door, holding it open for the two of us. “Why don’t you run inside? Give me a minute, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.” I watched him jog up Landon’s front steps and disappear before I put my head against the steering wheel and wept.

When I finally pulled myself together and followed, Bowen and Emmet were upstairs, and Bethany and Landon were in the kitchen.

“I sent them to shower,” Bethany said. She had a mixing bowl in her hands and Landon was setting up baking sheets. “We’re making cookies. Put your feet up, Luke. Landon’s poured you a glass of wine.”

I sat at Landon’s kitchen continent and watched my lover and his ex-wife bake. They moved in harmony, passing ingredients, passing mixing bowls, passing spoons and measuring cups. They were kind to each other the way friends were, existing in an easy familiarity that came from knowing someone for over half their lives. Love existed between them, but it was a comfortable love, a friends forever kind of love.

Bethany made small talk as I sipped my wine, asking me about my job and how I was doing and how Emmet was faring. She’d heard at least the bare bones about Riley’s death, and she made a point, after putting the last of the cookie sheets into the oven, to say she was praying for me and Emmet and that we’d been in her prayers for a long time now.

Landon joined me at one end of the continent with his own glass of wine as Bethany stood at the other and sipped sparkling water. They chatted about Utah and people they knew, and he laughed at a story she told about something that happened at their church. Landon wrapped his arm around my shoulders as I leaned into his side.

I learned things I never knew, never would have guessed in a thousand years. Bethany ran an LGBT group for teens at their church, and when Bowen visited, he volunteered at the summer camps she organized. Last summer, Landon’s dad had joined them, too. They were pushing hard for greater acceptance within the Church of Latter-day Saints, leading conversations with the priesthood and the governing bodies. She wanted Landon to come back to the church, she said, but only if he was welcome exactly as he was.

The boys stampeding back downstairs made me and Landon pull apart. They were freshly showered, still smelling like Irish Spring. They each devoured a full sheet of cookies, and then Landon said we all needed to play games. First came Uno, which we abandoned after Bowen won four hands in a row. “He’s eerily good at this,” Bethany complained to Emmet. “Like, card shark good. I don’t understand it.” Apples to Apples came out next, and we played until the boys were yawning and their eyelids were drooping.

“Go to bed,” Landon said. “Before you fall asleep on the table.”

Bowen hugged Landon and Bethany and said good night.

Emmet wrapped his arms around me in a goodnight hug, too. It went on and on, and the three of them moved around us, leaving Emmet and me to our space and our moment.

Emmet buried his face in my neck and clung to me. “Love you, Dad,” he whispered.

Love you, Dad. Love you.

Emmet’s voice repeated in my mind, hours after he’d gone upstairs to crash on the oversized bean bag in Bowen’s bedroom. Love you, Dad.

I’d resigned myself to never hearing those words again.

A parent can never stop loving their child. You cannot unlove this being you raised, that you sheltered and nurtured and cared for and shielded. Their joys become your joys, their heartaches, yours. Emmet tried me, often, but he never came close to making me yank back my love.

A child isn’t the same, though. A child can unlove you. A child can look at you and find you wanting, realize you’re not great, not wonderful. Parents don’t get a free pass on a lifetime of love. Blood loyalty doesn’t run upstream. If you’re a terrible parent, there’s no obligation for your child to love you after the nightmares you’ve put them through. A child’s love is hard-fought, hard-won. You have to earn it.

Love you, Dad.

After Bowen and Emmet stampeded upstairs, I’d collapsed against Landon, the world shaky, my breath reedy and choked, everything going watery. Landon hauled me to his couch as he peppered my face with paper-light kisses and whispers. Luke and I love you and I’m so happy for you and I knew you and Em could do this.

I clung to him, breathed him in.

Bethany slipped away with a quiet “Good night, guys” and closed the guest bedroom door behind her.

Landon and I held each other on the couch. Our hands were threaded together, one set under a throw pillow we shared, the other lying on our tangled thighs. Moonlight pearled the pool, drenched the backyard in silver. Wavering iridescence crawled across the living room floor toward our feet like we were on a cosmic beach outside of time.

I craved him. I needed him. Not sex—which I hungered for like a dog scratching at the door, a constant, sizzling burn under the surface of my skin—but him. His presence, his grounding. His love. I was raw, gouged open, my soul-deep bruises and holes exposed, and I needed Landon to fill me, for all that goodness and light that burned inside of him to find my cracks and crevices.

There was a part of me that thought I should be ashamed. I should be feeling shame, the revelations of all my many excruciating failures laid bare. Instead, I was relieved, like something had been cut free, wrenched loose. Taken out of me.

If someone had given me a crystal ball when I was Emmet’s age—perpetually nursing a hangover, saturated in pot smoke, and chasing adrenaline and rebellion and imagining it was emotion—and told me to look into my future, and I’d seen this? I’d have laughed and said the crystal ball was broken. I was never going to be a suburbanite. Can’t catch me in polos and khakis. And fatherhood? I couldn’t even turn my homework in on time, even with extensions and the grace of my teachers. I couldn’t be trusted to feed and water another human being.

But more than anything, if I’d looked into the future, I wouldn’t have believed I could be this happy. I’d never have believed it, not for one moment. You can’t have that kind of happiness, I’d have said. It doesn’t exist. It’s a lie. I’d hungered for it, I’d searched for it, I’d craved it, I’d scraped my bones raw trying to find it in booze and pot and flinging myself from drawing to drawing, trying to freeze onto paper the fleeting moments where I glimpsed the edges of something that teased at this happiness.

Twenty-three years later, I’d finally figured out the truth. Joy was a gift bestowed by another. Two lives coming together and combining. Happiness couldn’t be chased or captured or caught. It grew in the together places. Father and son. Lover and partner.

You and me, Landon.

Sometime around two in the morning, Landon and I began to yawn, falling asleep in the middle of whispered sentences only to be woken up with a kiss and a “that was you this time” and then a little puff of laughter that tickled our faces.

“I’ll crash out here,” I whispered. “Your guest bedroom is occupied.”

“No way. You take my bed.”

“Crashers get the couch.”

“But the man I love gets the best of everything.” He kissed me. “You take my bed. I’ll sleep out here.”

I melted at his words. “Landon—”

“It’s selfish, too.” He nuzzled the side of my face. “If you sleep in my bed, I get to smell you in my sheets again. I can imagine you’re with me at night and that you never leave.”

I kissed him, pushing him back against the couch as I slid on top of him and molded our bodies together. Desire flared, pushing against my exhaustion. Landon wrapped one leg around me and ground his hips against mine. I hid my face in his neck and groaned.

“I would love to keep going,” he breathed in my ear, “but I’m not brave enough to make out on the couch in my living room halfway between my ex and my son.” I chuckled and kissed the curve of his jaw. “Besides, you are never quiet.”

“I’m really not.”

“Which isn’t a problem.” Our eyes met. He was smiling. He kissed me, quick and hot and dirty. I groaned. He laughed. “Go sleep in my bed. Think of me holding onto you. And when you go back to your place, I’ll be dreaming of you in my arms.”

It took another seven minutes to extricate myself from the couch and his kisses. When I did manage to escape, my cock was half-hard against the zipper of my jeans, and my lips felt kiss-bruised and swollen.

I changed into boxers and a T-shirt of Landon’s, brushed my teeth with the toothbrush he kept for me, and crawled into his side of the bed. His scent was everywhere, the smell of his shampoo and his skin all over his sheets. I was hard again, holding his pillow to my chest and huffing the cotton.

The bedroom door opened. I popped up on my elbow, staring at the spilled light pouring in from the hall. A moment later, the door closed.

My heart hammered. Landon wouldn’t sneak in. He’d been adamant: he didn’t want to fool around with the boys in the house until Bowen and Emmet both knew. Kissing was one thing. Anything else, anything further than a little heavy petting, made him squirm. Hard line. One I respected and never pushed.

This wasn’t him sneaking into the bedroom.

I heard footsteps, light and delicate, crossing the floor. Three steps, and then whoever it was stopped by Landon’s dresser. “Luke?”

I sat up. Dragged Landon’s covers across my lap. “Bethany?”

She flicked on the little antique-style lamp Landon kept on his dresser. It was worthless as an actual light, did nothing but throw out a fading butter glow in a six-inch circle. It was atmospheric, Landon said when I teased him about it. We made love one Tuesday evening with only that light on, nothing else. Landon was gorgeous in the barest brush of light.

Now Bethany’s face was lit by that golden glow. She stared, taking me in as I sat on Landon’s bed. Her hair was piled on top of her head, rolled around and around into a loose bun and held with a clip. She was in leggings and a Last Waters hoodie, and as she stood, she flicked one of her manicured nails against the other.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” she said. “I was waiting up because I wanted to talk to you. I heard you getting ready, and I thought…” She gestured back to the door.

“How did you know I wasn’t Landon?”

“Landon wouldn’t let you sleep on the couch. Nothing but the best for the people he loves.” She smiled like we were sharing knowledge between friends. “Can we talk? Alone?”

I nodded, and she padded the rest of the way across the bedroom and perched on the edge of Landon’s bed. She kept her hands in her lap, kept playing with her nails.

“I’ve known Landon since we were seven years old,” she finally said. “I started dating him when he was still in braces. Big mouth of brackets and rubber bands.” She smiled, her gaze going distant. “It’s an incredible thing to know a man his whole life. I knew him when he was running around the playground, zooming little trucks all over the swings. I saw him get his first pimple. Watched him go from short and cute to gangly like a baby horse. Awkward in the space of three months, all arms and legs and no idea how to walk right anymore.”

She was still smiling, though it was fading, and her voice was getting thinner. “I used to go to his Little League and his junior football games. My mom made me a pink jersey with his number on it every year, all the way through high school.”

I didn’t know where this was going. “Bethany—”

“I love Landon.” She interrupted, squaring her shoulders as she turned to me. “He’s been my best friend for over half my life. He still is, though I know I’ve made him doubt that sometimes. I know I screwed up last year, and I made him think I wanted to get back together with him. That’s not what I was trying to do.”

She shook her head. “I love that man, and more than that, Luke, I know that man. I know him down to his soul. I know what real happiness looks like on him. I know when he’s in love. And I know you guys feel it, but I wanted you to hear it from someone who knows Landon. He loves you in every way that man can possibly love someone.”

I swallowed.

“All I want, all I’ve wanted for years, is for Landon to find his happiness. He has, finally, and he’s happier than I’ve ever seen him in his whole life. His whole life, Luke. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Her accent was widening, a Utah lilt that wasn’t as strong as a Texas twang but still dropped lingering spaces between her vowels.

“He loves you, and I don’t know if he’s told you or not yet, but he wants what you two have to go on for forever.”

“Bethany…”

“Hold on, let me finish. I’ve been praying for Landon to find the love of his life and the man he’s meant to be with. I wasn’t sure it was you when we first met at the stadium, but I saw how Landon looked at you and how much he adored you. I prayed you wouldn’t break Landon’s heart.”

The first time I met Bethany, I’d pretended to be Landon’s boyfriend. We were just friends, I’d thought. The way Landon looked at you.

“I know you’re not Mormon, and I know you don’t share my faith, but can you try to understand where my heart is coming from?”

I nodded.

“Did Landon ever talk about our sealing in the temple?”

“He said you refused to dissolve it after your divorce, and that you believe you guys are still married for eternity.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what Landon believed about their celestial marriage. It was hard to shake a lifetime of faith. If he hadn’t cared about it, and if he thought it was all make-believe, then why did he care that she hadn’t gone to the temple to dissolve the seal?

“I did refuse to break it. And yes, as of right now, according to my faith, we are still bound to each other in the hereafter. But I didn’t refuse because I’m trying to cling to him, or because I think that his being gay will ‘wash away’ after this life.” She made air quotes when she spoke. “I kept our seal because I didn’t know if Landon would find the love of his life. There have been a few times in the past ten years when he said he wasn’t going to look anymore and that he was done trying. He was settling to be alone.”

Negative space. Emptiness around Landon. The absence of everything he needed. My heart squeezed, something deep inside me spiraling tighter and tighter.

“I love Landon and I always will, but not as a wife or as a woman loves a man. As a best friend loves her best and oldest friend. That’s what I was trying to tell him last year. I will always be here for him if he needs me.” She took a breath, held it. “Luke, I believe our souls continue after this life. So the thought of Landon all alone? Forever? In this life and the next? I can’t be that cruel to my best friend. I am not willing to cut my best friend loose in eternity like that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I think you’re the love of Landon’s life, and I think you’re the man he’s meant to be with. Here, and always. For eternity. And if you are, then I want to go to the temple and dissolve our sealing, because I want you to be Landon’s forever. But before I do that, before I let Landon go, I have to know if you love Landon as much as he loves you. Are you in this for forever, Luke? Is Landon the love of your life?”