“Florence and I broke up.” Christian tried to act indifferent about telling you, like he was talking about the rain. Hopefully you didn’t notice how he kept glancing at you, waiting for your reaction. Crawling back to you the moment he could. God, he was pathetic. You were his teammate, his best friend. That was all you were supposed to be.
The thought of you getting tired of him haunted his every waking moment. He dreamt of you rejecting him, leaving him, yelling at him. One day you’d get with a guy not afraid to come out. One day you’d be happy.
One day Christian wouldn’t be in your life.
You deserved better than him. Christian dated the same girl as a weak attempt to pretend he was straight. And when him and Florence weren’t together, he threw himself back at you. Rinse and repeat. You hadn’t pushed him away yet. He wondered how many times he could play the same game before you did.
As much as he wanted to get closer to you, he didn’t. “I missed you,” he almost whispered. It wasn’t like he avoided you when he and Florence dated, but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t get to kiss you in dark corners, or feel the ghost of your touch against him.
Christian loved you, more than he’d loved anyone before. He just didn’t love you enough to face his parents. They’d be horrified their golden boy, their perfect son, was gay. Logan, his twin brother, called him a pushover, and Christian never argued against it.
Logan was the only other person to know he was gay. Christian had only told you, but Logan wasn’t as dumb as he acted. They were brothers, no matter how strained their relationship was.
Practice had ended an hour ago; the two of you were the only ones left in the locker room. Instead of going to whatever party he’d been invited to, he’d lingered behind to wait for you, hoping for something more. He wondered if you’d kiss him or slap him. Christian was fine with either. He was weak and selfish, and he’d keep dragging you down with him for as long as he could.
Anything to beat being lonely in his misery.