Page 16 of Playing for Keeps

Coach shook his head.

I noticed Luke was the only person besides Coach who wasn’t laughing.

Right. So it appeared my former best friend’s sense of humor had been amputated.

I glanced over at him and his eyes slid past me as if I was wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, which we’d always wanted when we were kids. I still remember Luke draping a bedsheet over his shoulders and inviting me in, and then us stumbling around bumping into things, laughing together.

Luke had been the one bright spot in my fucked-up childhood. But those memories were tainted with what had come after. I’d hoped we could start over, but it was increasingly clear that forgiveness wasn’t on Luke’s agenda.

I didn’t know what else I could do. If Luke wanted to pretend he didn’t know me, then I guess I just had to go along with that.

“Right. Enough mucking around. Go find somewhere to sleep. Two to a room,” Coach barked, nodding in the direction of the cabins.

The camp had once been a former loggers’ camp, so there were a whole lot of tiny huts arranged in a horseshoe shape around an expanse of grass in the middle.

Jacob came over to me. “You want to share a cabin?”

“Sure.”

Jacob and I had roomed together a lot on the road, so we were comfortable with each other. These cabins were more basic than hotel rooms though, with a simple bunk on one side of the room.

“You want top or bottom?” Jacob asked.

I raised an eyebrow, smirking. “I thought you were in a committed relationship?”

Jacob rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about the bunks, idiot.”

I chucked my bag on the top. “I’m fine with the top bunk.”

“Cool.” Jacob threw his bag on the bottom one and unzipped it.

In the silence that followed, I suddenly replayed my words. Shit. I didn’t want Jacob to think I was hassling him about being bisexual.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to offend you,” I said.

Jacob’s eyebrows drew together and he glanced up from where he was riffling through his bag. “Nah, I’m the opposite of offended actually. I mean, you make those kinds of jokes with the other guys, so why not with me?”

I hadn’t thought about it like that. The diversity training we’d had made everyone conscious of the language we used on the field and in the locker room, and guys now got called out for anything homophobic. But treating people differently was a type of discrimination as well.

And hell, it wasn’t like I was going to judge Jacob for being in a relationship with a guy. If someone wrote a book on my sexual history, there’d be at least one chapter devoted to non-straight encounters.

Not that I was planning on sharing that with the room.

“Wouldn’t want you to miss out on my humor,” I said.

“Yeah, I’d feel really deprived,” Jacob said.

“But going forward, I’ll resist the urge to make sex jokes relating to your bunk preferences,” I promised.

“The world thanks you for that,” he said.

After lunch training camp got serious. Well, as serious as a mud run could be.

Which, for most of our team, meant it was treated as a life or death thing. Let’s face it, we were professional sports people. We could play tiddlywinks and turn it into a top-level competition.

“I wonder who first came up with the concept of a mud run,” I mused as I waited my turn at the starting line. “Like, who the hell looked at a perfectly good obstacle course and thought, you know what would make this a whole lot better? Mud.”

Ali huffed out a laugh. “It must have been someone sadistic.”