Page 46 of Touchdown, Tennessee

Typically it would have annoyed me that Gray just started driving us off campus without telling me a single detail aboutwherewe were going, but right now, it was exactly what I needed.

Seeing the frat house like that again was a weight on my shoulders I desperately didn’t want.

I hated making things worse for any of the other guys.

I hated the fact that doing the one thing I was proud of—playing football while being openly gay—was sometimes punished by the worst people in society.

So watching the world from the passenger side window havingno cluewhere I was going was the only thing making my guilt melt away right now. The rev of his car engine made me feel alive again rather than pissing me off like it had the other day. I liked Gray’s car, even if his acceleration felt like a roller coaster half of the time.

Right now, it felt like an escape hatch.

Like I was able to get away from my own life, just for a little while.

Like Gray had… taken me under his wing, or something.

Not that I usually wanted to betakenanywhere with him.

I watched the trees on the edges of the road, seeing which ones were already turning yellow, orange, and red. The sun was starting to lower in the sky as afternoon became evening, and the slanted golden quality of the light made the small-town Tennessee roads look like postcards.

“I love the fall,” I said.

It was the first thing either of us had said in at least five minutes.

“I love it, too.”

Is that the most we’re ever going to agree with each other?

We fell back into silence and then a few minutes later, Gray pulled into the driveway of a modest house. It was a split-levelon a standard residential street, the kind where most of the houses looked the same but there was a charm to it, somehow.

We got out and walked along a little concrete path toward the front door. The house had one colossal oak tree in the front yard, its canopy draping over the path.

“No shot you live here,” I said softly.

“My grandmother owns it, not me,” he said, reaching for his keys as we approached the navy blue front door. “Why’s it so shocking to you?”

I looked around the front yard.

“This place is so… normal,” I said.

“Gee, thanks. And I’m some weird freak who should live in an abandoned mine shaft, or something?”

I snorted. “No. You should live in a penthouse lair with black marble countertops and probably a bat signal on the roof.”

He turned the key in the lock. “Thanks for calling me a superhero, cutie, but I’m just a college student like you.”

A faint heat crept up to my cheeks.

Fucker, calling mecutie.

And the ridiculous idea that he was a college student “just like me” was equally outrageous. He was like… the second coming of Einstein, or something.

“Um. Is it going to bug your grandma, if I’m here?”

He pushed open the front door, dropping his keys on a little table inside. “For the next two days, she’s in Nashville atThe Colossal Custom Auto and Cycle Show.My grandmother likes old classic cars. She goes with a few friends twice a year.”

Walking into the house felt like being wrapped in a blanket.

It smelled like wood and faintly of spiced vanilla, probably from the cluster of three big candles at the center of the entryway table. It was small inside, smaller than any house I’d ever lived in, but there was morelifeand character in here than my parents had ever put into one of our mini-mansions.