He laughs. “You don’t love the game.”
“Fine, tolerate it,” I amend. “Sometimes even enjoy it.” It’s true I’ve never loved, and probably will never love, football. But watching Matt play—and Jack too—always fascinated me. The thing about football is once you get past the point system and general cultishness, it’s exactly like any other hobby or skill: There’s a generally agreed-upon technique, and then there’s personal style. The latter, for those who look, is a window to a person’s soul. Personal style is my mom, after some red wine, walking like she intends to restore order and beauty to the world with her posture alone. It’s Rachel dancing like she’s fighting her way out of quicksand, Megan running across the field like she’s floating on her back in the ocean. And it’s Matt Kincaid playing football tidily, like he’s checking off boxes.
He’s always in the right place at the right time, rarely too fast or too slow. He runs, looks up, finds the open teammate, and sends the ball soaring toward him at the exact right moment; he doesn’t have to speed up or slow down or backtrack, even when he sneaks it forward. He just clutches the ball like it’s a brick of gold as he dodges beefy linemen and jumps over fallen bodies as if they’re narrow streams and he’s a gazelle. He breezes through tackle attempts and scores as the last buzzer sounds. Practically every play he makes resembles the hundredth take of a choreographed sword-fight scene.
“I was thinking,” he mumbles, and his unfocused eyes wander over to me. “Do you remember the firsssong we danced to?”
I sift through my memory. “It doesn’t even feel like we had firsts sometimes. I don’t think I even realized we were dating for, like, the first six months.”
“Well, I remember it,” he tells me.
“You do not.”
“Yeah-huh.”
“Sing it,” I say.
He starts humming something that sounds like a few different songs mashed together, and I start cracking up beside him, until I feel the back of his hand graze mine. We both fall silent, and after a second, he slides his fingers through mine. I’m so shocked I freeze.
“Why did you push me away, Nat?” he asks. “You were everything to me. I loved you so much.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say shakily. My heart is pounding as if I’m sprinting, and I’m just praying someone interrupts us fast, because I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to keep putting him through this.
“I love you,” he says. “It’s so hard, Nat, not being able to talk to you about everything. I don’t even feel like myself lately. It’s so hard, and I love you.”
I love him too. I don’t think I could know a person as well as I know Matt and not love him. “Matt,” I plead.
“I could be better,” he says. “I could make you happy, if you told me what you needed.”
“Matt, you can’t make everyone happy. You can’t be everything everyone expects you to be, and you especially can’t be what I need and what everyone else needs, because what I need is to stop trying to make myself fit here and go somewhere new.”
“You’ll find someone else,” he says quietly, “at school. I know you will. But I won’t.”
“Of course you will, Matt.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Eventually you will.”
“No one will be you,” he says.
“We have to move on, Matt. It’s only going to get harder.”
“It doesn’t have to,” he says. His eyes are soft on me, much too close to my face. The next thing I know, he’s kissing me. Still, my brain is caught in a panicked frenzy in which part of me almost thinks it would be wrong or rude to stop him, while the rest of me knows I don’t want this. It must feel like kissing a dead fish to him, but he doesn’t seem deterred.
Finally I push lightly against his chest, but he either doesn’t feel it or ignores it, and now I’m freaking out. “Matt,” I say, but my voice is mostly lost in his mouth. I push harder, and this time I know he feels it, but he just keeps kissing me. I say it again—push again—and he pulls me closer, one hand skimming the hem of my shirt much too aggressively.
“Matt,” I snarl, but then he pins my hip down when I try to sit up. I shove him backward, hard, and he rolls away from me and sits up, blinking at me in the dark.
“I—” I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I don’t have time to figure it out before he half-falls off the truck and storms toward his house.
My whole body is shaking, my mind throbbing and reeling with waves of hurt and confusion.
Why did I do that?