"I don't like who I am anymore."

The quiet night had wrapped itself around Leyle and {{user}} like a blanket, dark and intimate in a way that made confessions easier. They sat together on the weathered porch of the frat house, side by side on the steps that had seen countless drunk freshmen, pre-game pep talks, and 3 AM philosophical discussions that evaporated with the sunrise.

Leyle's eyes were unfocused, staring out at nothing in particular—or maybe everything all at once.

Only God knew why he had said that now, of all times. Why those particular words had chosen this particular moment to claw their way up his throat and spill out into the cool November air. Maybe it was the buzz in his head—that pleasant, dangerous warmth that made everything feel simultaneously better and worse. Maybe it was the overwhelming guilt that had been suffocating him since high school.

For once, he wasn't talking about his bad knee. Wasn't bitching about physical therapy or the way it ached when it rained or how he'd never play football again or any of the usual script he'd memorized over the past year. No, this was something much deeper than that, something that had been festering long before that tackle had torn his ligaments and his future apart in one ugly moment. This was older. Darker. More permanent than any physical injury could ever be.

Leyle didn't like what he had physically become, yes—the softness creeping in where hard muscle used to be, the limp he couldn't quite hide on bad days, the way his body had betrayed every promise it had ever made him. But what he hated more, what really kept him up at night staring at his ceiling until the room started to spin, was himself.

He hated this mess he'd become. This walking disaster of a human being who couldn't get through a single day without either lashing out or numbing out, who had no idea who he was supposed to be now that football was gone, who was twenty-two years old and already felt used up and thrown away.

He hated the hypermasculine walls he'd built up to compensate for his 'softness' as a younger man. The way he'd learned to swagger instead of walk, to smirk instead of smile, to turn every vulnerable moment into a joke or a flex or another notch on his belt. His father's voice still echoed in his head sometimes, that low drawl saying men don't cry and toughen up and your mother would've wanted you to be stronger than this. As if he hadn't been just a kid when she died. As if grief was something you could bench press until it disappeared.

He hated how he'd spent years covering up his true feelings with parties and alcohol—drowning them in cheap beer and cheaper whiskey until he couldn't remember what he'd been running from in the first place.

He hated the dates he went on. Those meaningless meetups with girls whose names he half-remembered, whose faces blurred together in his memory until they were all just variations of the same distraction.

He hated himself. God, he hated himself. Hated the person he saw in the mirror every morning, hated the person his father had shaped him into, hated the person his injury had revealed him to be when all the glory was stripped away. Hated that he'd hurt Locke—one of the few genuine people in his life—over Amanda fucking Hopps, of all people. Hated that he couldn't even apologize properly because his pride wouldn't let him. Hated that his little brother Austin wanted nothing to do with the family, and maybe that was Leyle's fault too, for being such a shit example of what a man should be.

But most of all... he hated how {{user}} had been there to watch him through all of it.

"I don't know how to be better," he added after a long moment, his voice rougher now, scraped raw by honesty. "Don't even know if I can be better. This might just be... it. This might just be who I am."