Prologue
It was Paris, and it was summertime.
Study abroad, his counselor had said. We can make it work with your scholarship. Knock out a year of language. What do you say?
Sounds great. As long as I can clear it with Coach Young.
He’d been careful to plan everything. Schedule his flights so he wouldn’t miss the final week of football practice. Pick up extra shifts so he had a little more leeway in his budget. Work up a travel training routine so he could stay in shape away from the campus gym. So careful.
But he hadn’t anticipated Justin.
At night, the Eiffel Tower lit up every hour, a million dazzling lights twinkling off and on, off and on, and the glow played over Justin’s face as he turned stared, eyes so full of wide-eyed wonder it stole Wes’s breath away, made his lungs stutter and choke. The image crystallized, every flicker stilling as Wes’s mind freeze-framed the moment.
Justin’s smile, the lilt of his laugh, curled around Wes’s heart.
He’d always thought kissing his first guy would be harder. That he’d be afraid, nervous. Shouldn’t his heart be pounding? Shouldn’t his hands be shaking? Where was the earthquake in his soul? Why wasn’t his mind screaming at him to stop?
He didn’t want to stop.
Everything felt right. Perfect. The moment, the man.
He stepped forward and cupped his hand around Justin’s cheek, then stroked his football-calloused thumb over Justin’s sharp jawline. He waited, watching the lights dance in Justin’s eyes, in and out of the curve of his smile and the dimples in his cheeks.
And when Justin’s gaze flicked to his, Wes leaned in, eyes open, until their lips were millimeters apart.
He was risking everything. His past, his future, and even his now, reaching for a kiss based on one week of stolen glances and sideways looks and a frisson underneath his skin he couldn’t scratch away. A hum in his head, an itch beneath his fingers, and it didn’t matter what he did, he couldn’t get rid of this because it was already so deep inside him. Twenty-one years of ignoring himself, of looking down when he wanted to look up, drink a man’s body like he was a cold glass of water under the Texas sun. Of turning away. Of not going there.
One week in Paris, with Justin, and here he was, ready for—aching for—his first kiss. Or, at least, the first one that counted. The first one he’d ever really wanted.
Wes waited, his vision dazzled by the lights winking in Justin’s eyes, the glow tangling in the strands of his honey hair. It was like he was looking into the stadium lights.
But there was no route for this, no pattern. No timing. This was his Hail Mary.
Chapter One
One Week Earlier
The flight to Paris was long and loud, the engines like a drill through his skull for the entire nine hours over North America and then the Atlantic. He’d been squished in the middle seat between two businessmen who both wanted to work on their laptops, and both shoved their elbows into his eighteen-inch seat space until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. If he shifted at all, he jostled both men, from their shoulders to their knees and definitely their elbows, type-typing away. He’d apologized the first few times, but unless he held his damn breath for the entire flight, he was going to move now and then. A guy his size, well. He was born big, and he was destined to be big. Years of football and ranching had only hardened his raw strength. He’d been described as mountainous.
Halfway through the flight, one of the flight attendants had taken pity on him, or on the businessmen, and guided him to an empty row in the back. It was near the bathrooms, and he heard the toilet flushing every five minutes, but he could at least stretch out his arms and legs and not ruin another man’s hard work. He could inhale and exhale without needing to apologize.
Paris was loud, too, and even though he was used to standing out, apparently they didn’t make men his size in France, because Lord Almighty, he was stared at. He almost checked his face for food or snot or boogers, because that many people staring at him, conversations dying as he passed, as his boots clicked over the tile floor—well, that had to mean something, right? Maybe it was the boots and the hat. Maybe it was just him.
He took the train from the airport to the transfer hub before getting off in the seventeenth arrondissement, where the study-abroad group was staying. Everyone else had come in three days before, but he couldn’t miss the last week of football practice. They were the final days to impress Coach Young before he decided the starting line for next year.
But an opportunity to spend three weeks in Paris covered by his scholarship? He’d grabbed that with both hands. Never in his life had he thought he’d ever be able to go to France.
Never mind that he wouldn't be able to do any of the add-ons, the day trips, the real moneymakers for the trip organizers. No, he would not be going up in a hot-air balloon or taking a weekend trip to the Riviera or out to the wineries. A day flight to Vienna. He’d be just fine walking the streets of Paris, taking in the sights. The online guide said he could feed himself for ten euros a day on a budget, which was what he was going to do. Pizza—they had that there, right?—French bread, cheese and ham. It was enough to be there.
Things like this didn’t happen to West Texas farm boys. Paris, when he was growing up, was a town in Hill Country, foreign because it was a ten-hour drive to the other side of Texas, way out there near the city folk.
There were only two ways out of West Texas: on the gridiron or in shackles, bound for Huntsville. Even the oil jobs were evaporating, moving on to other fields, offshore or up north, where West Texas boys froze as soon as they saw a flake of snow. Where he was from, kids sometimes waited years before they felt actual rain on their faces. It was hard and dry and bitter in West Texas, and most people quit, but his father was a rancher like his father before him. Their parcel of land was small, their herd modest, and they eked just enough out of the dust and the scrub to keep on living for the next year.
Boys like him grew up looking skyward, not to God, but to those Friday night lights, and the swarms of beetles and gnats and cicadas that swam in and out of the stadium lights at the high school. He’d looked up from the time he was as tall as his dad’s boots. When he was four, he played dirt ball with other kids, tying kitchen towels to their belt loops to mimic flag football. He was fast even then, they said, and big. A boulder rolling one way. In middle school he was ranked in the top ten players in the state. In high school, the top five.
He earned his athletic scholarship with every torn muscle, every bruised bone, every hairline fracture, every black eye, every concussion of his youth. He’d seen his dad proud of him a lot of days in his life, but he’d never seen him as proud as when they opened that letter from the university together at Mama’s grave. His old man had stared at Mama’s headstone for a long time, the brim of his hat angled down so Wes couldn’t see his eyes. But when he looked up again, there were tear tracks running down his leathery cheeks.
His DNA was in that dust, generations of Van de Hoeks who had worked the land with their sweat and blood and given their bones to the dirt. His dad had always told him, “You’re gonna have a better life than this, son. Keep you playin’, and you’ll be able to create your own future.”