Playing for the Other Team Read Online Free Page B

a room full of treadmills. Then we entered a mostly bare and rather tiny gym room with dimmed lights. Jasper didn’t hesitate to approach a dark doorway on the opposite side of the room.
    “What’s in there?” I asked cautiously.
    “Gymnastics equipment.” He flipped a switch. One dim bulb in a fixture on the wall sprang into action. “I pick up Rayna’s sister here after her training sometimes.”
    Together we made it past several wooden bars and onto an enormous pile of mats. Sitting there, so near the ceiling, really did make me feel like we had found a supersecret meeting spot. The light barely even reached us up there.
    “All right.” Jasper stretched out his legs, leaned back onto his forearms, and looked at me. “What else did you want to talk about?”
    I swallowed, hard and painfully. My stomach seemed to be in protest of what I was about to do, twitching and spasming. I tried my best to ignore it.
    “I wanted to ask you something personal.” I was actually shaking a little.
    “Yeah?”
    “Back then—”
    “Back when?”
    “In eighth grade.” I couldn’t believe I was actually going to do this. I took a slow, deep breath and forced it out along with the next few words. “Did you really think I was beautiful?”
    For a moment that felt like an eternity, I waited in silence.
    “Holy shit,” Jasper said. His voice was brittle. “You…you remember that note?”
    “Yes.” I desperately tried to moisten my dry mouth.
    “Wow.” He had turned his head away from me, which was too bad because I would have given a lot to be able to see his expression just then. His next words were much quieter. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
    Squeezing my eyes shut, I waited. There was nothing else I could think to say until he answered the question.
    “I still think you are.”
    It took me a moment to make sense of Jasper’s words. When I finally did, I felt like I was simultaneously frozen and burning up with pleasure. Breathing deeply, swimming in the feeling, I tried to figure out what to say next. It had been an intimate question I’d demanded he answer. It would only be fitting to share something intimate in return.
    “I still have that note,” I confessed, staring down between my knees at the dark mat I was sitting on. “I…I still read it sometimes, and every time, I think it was a brave thing to say to me, and I wish I could have given you a response, at least said thanks. But I figure…maybe you…maybe it’s okay if I do it now? Because you’re beautiful too. I think that every time I watch you draw something or sculpt something, when you sit there and I know you want to make it perfect, and your hair falls into your eyes, and you kinda clench your jaw, and your eyes look like the ocean, and sometimes…sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, but it’s okay because everything about it is beautiful.”
    Silence.
    Panic. Complete and total fucking panic.
    What the hell did I just say to him?
    I’m drunk, aren’t I? Please tell me I’m drunk.
    No, I’m not. Oh crap.
    The words had passed over my lips like a flood I would have been powerless to stop even if I’d seen it coming. It happened to me sometimes, as though my mental filter had gone temporarily on strike, but it had never been as bad as this evening. First the gay thing, now this.
    “Damn,” Jasper breathed. “When you decide to compliment someone, you don’t hold anything back, do you?”
    I didn’t reply. Couldn’t. Was too busy trying to will a hole to open up for me to crawl into and die of embarrassment. The silence pressed down on me heavily.
    “It was your hair,” Jasper said suddenly. I was surprised enough to react.
    “Huh?”
    “Your hair. It was the first thing I noticed about you. I never saw anyone with natural silver hair before.”
    “Silver, huh?” The less polite descriptor would have been “medium blond with some really premature graying going on.” It was a family curse. My mother, my