Chapter 10

A soft knock prompts Dylan to tear his gaze away from the window. The kid from his art class — Bryan — is at the doorway, a baseball and a glove in his hands.

"Can you teach me how to play?" Bryan strides into his room then holds out the glove to Dylan when he's close enough.

"What makes you think I know how?" The coldness in Dylan's voice doesn't discourage the teenager. There's a stubborn determination in his stance.

"Oh please." Bryan lowers his arms a little. "Do you really want me to rub it in your face? I know who you are, Dylan. Or at least who you used to be." 

Dylan stares at the glove as if it will burst into flames any time. It reminds him of his failure. It reminds him of what he has lost. "Get out," he says without the bite he intends. Seeing the glove makes his chest heavy so he throws his gaze back out the window. 

"Sorry?" Bryan hovers behind him like some freaking shadow and it's starting to irritate the hell out of him.

"I said get out," Dylan says, keeping his eyes beyond the grills of the window and watching the birds perched on the nearby tree. "Leave me alone." 

"But I—"

"Excuse me gentlemen." 

Dylan whirls his head at the sound of Riva's voice. She looks unusually perky and this sets off the alarm in Dylan's head. Dylan takes this as a cue to raise his guard. She's up to something. He can sense it.

"Sorry, Bryan. But you'll have to bother Dylan some other day," Riva tells the teenager without moving away from the door. "He has visitors."

Too keen on watching Bryan leave with his "Later, Dylan" ringing in his ears, Riva's words don't register in Dylan's mind until he sees her waving her arm, beckoning someone in the hallway to come into Dylan's room.

The ground slips from underneath his feet when his former teammate Mick and his best friend, Ruben, glide in with their shoulders hunched and hands stuffed in their jacket pockets, eyes downcast.

"Dylan." Ruben speaks first, tone edged with cautiousness, tiptoeing around the fragile ambiance that has settled in the room.

Mick's "Good to see you, man" sounds so wrong in Dylan's ears. Mick's approach is confrontational, familiar, without the hint of the shattered connection that exists between them in reality. That's enough to detonate the ire that he has kept buried inside him.

A storm rages inside Dylan. "What the fuck are you doing here?" shoots out of Dylan's mouth like a dagger thrown with calculated precision. Ruben flinches visibly while Mick is held up at the doorway, his eyes wide.

Suddenly, Dylan’s past flashes before him, right at the time when his sexual orientation has been unveiled. Some people whom he thought were his friends have shied away, save for Ruben. The fact remains that they weren't around back then when Dylan needed them the most. 

With Ruben, they just… they have grown apart.

"Get the fuck out of here!" He doesn't need them now, doesn't desire their presence in his solitary world.

"Dylan, look—" Mick starts but Dylan covers his ears and hums. He doesn't want to hear a word out of Mick Or Ruben.

"Get out!" Dylan screams.

Riva rushes inside the room then ushers Mick and Ruben out into the hallway. 

Ruben steals one last glance at Dylan, his eyes speak volumes. They seem to say 'I'm sorry' and Dylan's heart hurts… so much that he wants to rip them out of his chest.

*

They had been together for almost a year when Dylan asked Saxon to move in.

Saxon thought it was too soon but Dylan said, "You stay at my place more often that you did at your own apartment, anyway. "

Moving on with his life hadn't been easy. But with Saxon around, Dylan managed to pick up the pieces. His heart may not have been fully mended, but at the very least, he was healing. 

It took two weeks for Saxon to move most of his things into Dylan's apartment, subleasing his own because he didn't really want to lose it just yet. 

They lay on the couch one Friday night, the T.V. turned low. Dylan stared blankly at the images on the screen, not really keen on watching the action film.

"This is so boring," Saxon said after a while. He lifted his head from Dylan's shoulder. "Are you watching this babe?"

"Nah," Dylan muttered.

Saxon grabbed the remote and started surfing through the channels. A familiar face flashed on the screen quickly before the channel changed. Dylan gasped — It can''t fucking be — and his body had gone rigid. 

Saxon might have sensed this because he stopped changing channels. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing I…" Dylan tried to dismiss it, thought that maybe he was imagining things. But there was this strong urge that made him ask Saxon to flip back a couple of channels until the sports news logo sat on the bottom right corner of the thirty-two-inch screen.

"Someone you knew?" Saxon's words barely registered in Dylan's mind. 

Dylan never told Saxon about Lance. He’d moved as far away as possible to reconstruct his life. There was no need to drag his past into it. Saxon, not being a sports fan, probably didn't know who Lance was. It took three dates before Saxon found out what Dylan did prior to settling down in Canada.

"A former teammate," was Dylan's response. Then he realized that there was no point in hiding the truth. Saxon wasn't stupid. He could search on the internet for Lance's name. Or Dylan's name. Dylan feared that there might be remnants of the articles about him and Lance that went around the net for a short while. "There's something you should know."

Dylan told Saxon about Lance; about the relationship that was once so beautiful yet dysfunctional in some ways. 

He held Saxon that night, afraid to let go, his heart beating in fear that he might lose the one person who had been helping him heal.