Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer

shake it gently.
    There had been chatting during the game. I had asked questions about what was happening and he had explained (in what were supposedly layman’s terms) about formations and strategies, though I don’t remember even a word of it. What I do remember was his tone. It wasn’t condescending. It wasn’t “let me explain some man stuff to this precious little doll.” Again, he was a kid. He was excited and proud. He might as well have been talking about his Legos.
    So every time he grabbed my hand, I was holding a kid’s hand and it was cute and innocent and it wasn’t at all like holding Dylan’s hand in my living room a few days before. The gentle shakes were the ones I recognized from my youngest cousins, the can-you-believe-that-we’re-at-a-water-park-and-there-are-waterslides-and-oh-boy-I-could-pee-my-pants-right-this-minute! variety of shakes
.
    Kids grow up, though, and the kid version of Dylan went through puberty in the final seconds of the game. The scoreboard read Bloomington 38 and Covington 33. We had the ball at the fifty-yard line. Twenty seconds left on the clock. I’d seen enough movies to know that this was why people loved sports. Underdogs making good and last-second scores. Everyone on our team was wearing two black armbands, for chrissakes. Emotion to spare, my friends.
To spare
.
    And Bloomington wasn’t taking it easy on us out of sympathy. They were snarling, punching, and gouging. “It’s a sign of respect,” Dylan explained. “No true athlete wants to be a charity case. This is the way it should be.”
    The crowd was singing the alma mater, which pretty much never happens because it’s a creepy bit of propaganda about “merging together as one, for the honor of mighty Covington.” Still, in this context, it was appropriate. We had suffered together and together we were fighting through it, one throbbing mass of cheers and tears. We didn’t need to win this game necessarily, but we needed people to remember this game. Even a girl who doesn’t care about sports can be on board with that.
    Our quarterback, Clint Jessup, was doing a hell of a job, but with twenty seconds left on the clock, he buckled over and started puking on the field. I’m not sure if there are rules about such things, but I think that even in football, puking puts you on the sidelines for a play or two. Because that’s exactly where Clint headed. Helmet on the ground, head in his hands, he stumbled to the bench.
    â€œThey don’t have any timeouts left, so they gotta go with Deely,” Dylan said with a groan. “Deely has never even taken a varsity snap.”
    Deely was Malik Deely. From pre-calc. And support group. The one cool head in our woeful bunch. He was the team’s backup quarterback, which, from what I could gather, meant he stood around holding a clipboard all game until the last twenty seconds when he was expected to come in and save the day because our number one guy was too vomity.
    â€œDon’t worry, Malik can handle pressure,” I assured Dylan and Dylan gave me a you-better-be-right look, and it was that exact moment that he changed, that the hand-holding changed, that the charming became charged. He squeezed my fingers—a little too hard at first perhaps—but when he eased up, he soothed things by stroking them. He ran a fingertip over my palm, almost as though he were writing a message on it.
    Maybe it was the crowd pulsing around us or the sweaty anxiety all over the field, but it was an unbearably sexy moment, at least for me. And when Malik Deely lined up behind his teammates and started barking out the play, I was basically at a point where I wanted to pull Dylan in and stuff my face in his neck and nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle. Weird, I know, and may not seem all that hot to you, but when you want something at a certain moment and you’re not sure whether you can have it, but