Parking the car, Wyatt noticed the restaurant named Dawson's, which had been there since before any of them could remember, with its dark wood tables, red-upholstered chairs, and the smell of fried food and barbecue sauce that had embedded itself into the walls over decades. It had become as much a part of the place as the red neon sign in the window, the television that always had some game playing in the far corner, or the guy behind the bar who had been there for so many years that Wyatt genuinely couldn't remember if he had always had that mustache or if he had grown it at some point in recent history.
It was the spot where the Katy Tigers team had gone after every game since Wyatt was fifteen years old, with Coach Joseph always occupying the end of the longest table, the rest of the team distributing themselves with the organized clutter of groups who have been together long enough not to need assigned seating, and the guy behind the bar who always had their orders ready before they even sat down because after three years of watching them walk in after every game, he knew perfectly well what they were going to order.
This time, Coach Joseph wasn't there, because December was different from the regular season. The players were now scattered across different universities all over the country, and the reunion was something they organized themselves without anyone needing to ask them to, because that was the nature of a team that, even when the season ended and everyone went their separate ways, remained the Katy Tigers.
Wyatt arrived ten minutes late because his father's car—the one he had borrowed that afternoon—had refused to start on the first turn. It had taken three attempts before the engine decided to cooperate, which had cost him a text message from Adam saying, "we know you're the most famous one now, but you're still late," followed by several laughing emojis.
When he walked into the restaurant, the noise of voices he recognized reached him before his eyes even found the table, and the sensation that accompanied it was one of those things you don't know you've been waiting for until you have it. There was something in that specific noise that didn't exist anywhere else Wyatt had been in the last eleven months.
"THERE HE IS!" Adam shouted from the back, rising from his chair just enough to be seen over the shoulders of those between him and the door, while pointing at Wyatt with theatrical exaggeration—which was exactly the level of exaggeration Adam considered appropriate for any situation.
"What's up, cowboy," said one of the defensive backs, whom Wyatt remembered as the guy who always arrived first to practice no matter the hour, while extending his hand. Wyatt shook it before sliding into the space they had saved for him between Adam and Marcus, his favorite receiver from his last two years of high school—the same one who had caught more than half of the touchdowns Wyatt had thrown during the state championship run.
"We ordered for you," Marcus said, pushing a plate of ribs and fries toward him. "Just like always."
"Great memory," Wyatt replied, picking up his fork.
"With some orders, it's easy," Adam said. "You've been ordering the exact same thing since we first came here."
The conversation kicked off exactly how all conversations kicked off when this group got together: right from the middle, without any need to catch up on basic details. Somehow, everyone knew enough about everyone else to skip straight to what mattered without the introductory small talk that people who don't know each other as well need to warm up their engines.
Adam had played twelve games with Nebraska as the third-string running back, which sounded modest until you considered it was his freshman year, and Nebraska didn't put anyone on the field who hadn't earned it in practice.
"And have the coordinators noticed you?" Wyatt asked.
"They see me every day," Adam responded with that smile of his. "Whether anything happens is a different conversation."
They went around one by one with stories of their first seasons at their respective universities, the volume at the table rising every time someone said something the others found ridiculous or impressive—which was often the same thing depending on the angle.
One guy shared that he had lost seven kilos in his first month of college training and then gained them all back over the next three because his university's cafeteria served industrial quantities and it was free with a student ID, causing the entire table to process that information in silence before someone said, "I want to go there," and everyone laughed at the same time.
Another had started out playing special teams for a Big Ten squad and ended the season with more snaps than he had expected because two of the starters got injured in the same week during two different games—which was bad news for the team and good news for him, depending on your point of view.
It was inevitable that at some point the attention would shift toward Wyatt, who had been listening and contributing to the others' stories without taking up much space, until Adam, with that specific knack he had for centering attention wherever he wanted, decided it was time.
"Hey, dude," one of them said from the other end of the table, soda can halfway to his mouth. "Is that Heisman stuff true?"
"Nobody has said anything official," Wyatt responded.
"ESPN said it."
"ESPN says a lot of things."
"Five touchdowns against Georgia Tech," another pointed out. "That's not ESPN, those are statistics."
"I watched it live," Adam added, pointing with his fork. "Death Valley at night—that stadium looks terrifying on TV, I don't want to imagine being inside."
"It's different when you're on the field," Wyatt admitted.
"Different how?" someone asked with genuine curiosity for the technical aspects of the game.
"Quieter than it seems from the outside," Wyatt said, thinking about it for a moment. "When you're in the huddle and the stadium is roaring, it creates a kind of bubble where you only hear your teammates and the coach. Everything else disappears."
That generated the kind of silence that happens when someone describes something the rest haven't experienced but can perfectly imagine, before the conversation resumed its course with more questions about the season, about Dabo, about Tajh, and about what it was really like to live in South Carolina when you come from Texas.
"And Tajh?" Marcus asked with genuine interest. "What's it like splitting the position with the starter?"
"Good," Wyatt said with the same natural ease with which he said everything. "I learned more from him than from any other practice."
The response generated a moment of silence—the kind that happens when someone says something nobody expected to hear due to its honesty. Wyatt took the opportunity to take a long sip of his soda while the conversation naturally drifted back toward other stories and other players.
It wasn't until nearly an hour later that the restaurant door opened again, and the group at the table recognized the newcomer with a collective murmur that Wyatt didn't fully process until he looked up.
Nichelle hadn't changed in almost a year, and at the same time, she was completely different from the girl he remembered from Adam's party back in January. Her curly black hair fell over the shoulders of a brown leather jacket, and she moved in that way of hers that made it seem like she knew exactly the effect she produced in any room she walked into—because she did.
"I knew you guys would be here," she said, approaching the table with a smile she shared among everyone, though Wyatt got the impression it lingered specifically on him for a moment before continuing its rounds.
She settled into the space they made for her next to Adam, and the group absorbed her with the usual naturalness because Nichelle had always been part of that universe, just like the Katy Tigers were.
The next two hours went exactly as the night had gone up to that point, with Nichelle integrating with the ease of someone who has known them all her whole life, and the conversation moving between high school memories and vague plans for the following year.
Wyatt spoke with Nichelle naturally within the general conversation, without either of them doing anything specific to seek each other out or avoid each other, though at some point their eyes met over the noise of the table for a fraction of a second longer than necessary before either looked away.
When the group began to break up in the parking lot with goodbye hugs and the "see you before break ends" that were always half-promise and half-hope, Wyatt was already by his father's truck, searching for the keys in his pocket, when he heard footsteps behind him.
"Where are you going so fast?" Nichelle said, leaning against the truck with her hands in her jacket pockets and that same familiar smile Wyatt knew by heart.
"Home," Wyatt responded.
"Lie," she said simply.
Wyatt looked at her for a moment before a small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. "Do you need a ride somewhere?"
"I took a taxi here," Nichelle said with the same casualness with which she might say it was cold outside, though in Texas in December, it wasn't cold.
Wyatt unlocked the truck, they both got in, and Dawson's parking lot fell silent around them as the last table of the group said their goodbyes by their cars.
He didn't quite know how it had happened exactly, in the sense that each step had possessed its own logic, yet the final result had something inevitable about it that Wyatt recognized too late to do anything about. By the time his brain formulated any kind of objection, Nichelle's lips were already on his with the same intensity from a year ago, and his brain unilaterally decided that the objection could wait.
The kiss lasted as long as it lasted, and when they separated, catching their breath, Wyatt closed his eyes for a second, his chest heavy. In that exact second when the brain returns from wherever it goes during those things, his head produced—without asking permission—an image that had absolutely nothing to do with Nichelle. Before Wyatt could do anything to stop it, the name slipped out.
"Blaire."
The silence that followed lasted less than two seconds, but Wyatt felt every bit of them, as if time had decided to be especially cruel tonight, as he opened his eyes and met Nichelle's gaze. Her expression shifted in real-time from confusion to something considerably colder before the sound hit.
The slap wasn't the hardest hit Wyatt had ever taken in his life, because ACC defenders could hit him significantly harder, but the difference was that none of those ACC defenders actually had a right to do it.
"You're an asshole," Nichelle said in a perfectly controlled voice that was sharper than if she had screamed, before opening the truck door and slamming it shut with a force that made the side mirror vibrate. Her footsteps quickly receded across Dawson's empty parking lot without her turning around even once.
Wyatt was left alone in the truck, the side of his face still processing the information of what had just occurred, his elbows on the steering wheel and his forehead dropping into his hands. The parking lot fell completely silent around him, with only the distant hum of the highway and the flickering neon sign of Dawson's in the rearview mirror for company.
There was no way to construct any version of what had just happened that wasn't exactly what it was: Wyatt had said someone else's name at a moment when there clearly shouldn't have been any other name in his head. The part he struggled most to process as he kept his forehead resting on his hands wasn't the slap—which, from a certain perspective, was completely deserved—but the fact that the name had come out all on its own.
Without him thinking it, without him deciding it, without any kind of conscious instruction on his part, Blaire's name had left his mouth at the most inconvenient moment possible. That told him everything about a situation Wyatt had been refusing to accurately name for weeks.
His head was a complete mess.
Author thought
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