Page 47 of Playing for Keeps

And that fact weirded me out.

Because Luke and I joked about everything else. And there was a whole host of ways we could have turned what we did together into no big deal.Ha, that look reminds me of your come face. Fuck, you were fast, but then you always do like to finish quickly.

And when I realized I was the instigator of every encounter, it freaked me out even more.

What did it mean that I wanted my best friend to jerk me off, and I wanted to jerk him off? What did it mean that I sometimes looked at his mouth and wondered what it would be like to kiss him?

And what did it mean that I was always the one to suggest it? Was Luke just humoring me? Because that was the type of thing he did, wasn’t it? Like my fear of the dark, was this something else he put up with to keep me happy?

Sometimes I was sure Luke was secretly competing for the title of World’s Best Friend. There was this…unevenness to our friendship that I felt keenly. Because Luke brought so much more to the table than I did. He was incredibly smart and amazingly talented and came from this perfect family. Whereas I didn’t have any of those things on my resume.

Besides, I was interested in girls. I liked girls. I liked looking at them. I fantasized about touching them. And then, when I was seventeen, I got my first girlfriend, Talia Andover, and suddenly I had a willing, eager volunteer to mess around with and the idea of continuing to fool around with Luke felt wrong.

So I chucked all the shit Luke and I had done together into a closet and slammed the door shut.

The door only creaked open once more, in that weird summer after high school. I’d broken up with Talia, and Luke and I had spent so much time together and occasionally I’d found my mind drifting down the lines of “What if….?” But I’d always wrench my mind back because the last thing I wanted to do was wreck our friendship. Our friendship that meant everything to me.

And then that night with Char happened and I knew not only was the door closed, it had been bolted and padlocked shut. Hell, it had probably been plastered over so you couldn’t even see there’d been a door there to begin with.

Chapter12

Luke

“Looking good out there,” Aiden Jones said to me as we came off the field together.

It had been a hard training session, but a good one. Passes had stuck, and we’d been doing some work under the high ball. I’d taken every one cleanly.

“Thanks.” I tried to hide my happiness at Aiden’s words, but it slinked out in my smile. Because Aiden was one of the legends of New Zealand rugby. He also had the nickname The Ice King, so he wasn’t one to chuck around compliments. I figured I was allowed some satisfaction at the direction my rugby career was going.

Coach jogged up beside me. “Hunter, you got a minute?”

“Sure thing.”

I was still sweaty from training but I followed Coach into the bowels of the building to his office and took a seat on the other side of his desk.

Given I still had the praise of Aiden Jones lingering in my mind, I was fairly confident I wasn’t here to get a chewing out about my performance at practice.

But when Coach frowned at me, some of that confidence flickered.

Shit. What was this about?

“You know how Ernie’s been doing all that data crunching this season,” he began.

“Yeah.” I was vaguely aware that one of the assistant coaches had been working with the University of Canterbury statistics department, trawling through our game footage.

“I don’t even pretend to understand what they’re doing, but they produced an interesting stat I thought you should look at.”

He passed a tablet across the desk so I could see the graph on display.

“Risks taken,” I read across the top. The graph was a scatterplot, with individual players labeled as different data points.

“Yeah, they’re trying to calculate the degree of risk players take during a game. But the thing is, it confirmed something I’ve sensed about your play. You don’t take many risks on the field.”

I blinked at him. “I don’t take risks?”

“You’re at the bottom of the stats for mistakes made too, which obviously correlates to the whole avoiding risks. So it’s not necessarily always a bad thing. But I think you hold back sometimes, Hunter. I’ve been studying the tape, and there are times when you do take the safer option. Like you’re afraid of failing.”

“Okay…” I said slowly.