“No, that’s fine.”
“I saw you talking to that football player and his groupies,” she says.
“You saw that?”
“I was feeling your pain.” She laughs. “Those girls’ faces when they saw it was you and not them he was chasing after.”
“Well, they can have him. I hope I haven’t already made a few enemies.”
“Those girls will be fine as long as you stay away from the football team.”
“You know them?”
“I know their type.” She sets a picture of her family on her bedside table. She has a lot of brothers, it looks like. “My brother was the quarterback at my high school in Wilmington. My other brother was a wide receiver. And my other brother was a halfback. We had girls like that camping out on our doorstep every night of the week.”
“Wow. Well, I’ll definitely be staying away from the football team,” I assure her. “As far away as possible.”
“There’s no way we’re not going to the game tonight, though,” Violet says. “You have to come with me. I don’t know anyone else here yet.”
I laugh a little as I put my bag on my bed and start unpacking it. “I’m probably going to skip the game, sorry.”
“No way, roomie, you can’t bail on me! I refuse to sit there by myself and I can’t miss the opening game of the season. My brothers would kill me.”
“I’m not really into football,” I admit. I’ve honestly never watched much of it and couldn’t tell you the rules if my life depended on it.
“What are you into?” Violet’s face is open and sunny, like she’s actually interested and not just asking to make small talk. So I find myself telling her.
“I’m a writer.”
“That’s so cool! Are you an English major?”
“Yeah. How about you?”
“Psychology. I’m planning on becoming a shrink. Believe it or not, it’s been my lifelong ambition.”
“Wow.” I start putting some of my stuff into drawers.
“Yeah, just be careful. I might go all Freudian and start psycho-analyzing you any minute.”
I smile without meaning to and it feels good. It’s been a long time since I made a new friend. “I’ll watch out for that.”
“If you ever feel like you might need some therapy, just let me know. You can be my first patient.”
I take my hat off and toss it onto my bed. My hair tumbles out and hangs past my shoulders. It’s been a while since I cut it.
“Wow,” she says. “Is that your real hair?”
I have strange hair. It’s a very pale shade of red that’s almost blond, but not quite. It looks pink under certain lights. A lot of people comment on it or stare at it or want to touch it, which is why I usually keep it hidden. I cut it shorter after my mother died, in one of those weird moments where you do something and you don’t know why. But it’s grown back since then. I have bangs and it’s sort of angled around my face, unevenly in places, because going to a hairdresser wasn’t something I could ever afford. “I’m thinking about dyeing it black.”
“Don’t you dare. It’s amazing.”
“So’s yours.” It really is. It’s a coppery red with gold highlights.
Her phone pings and she’s busy for a few seconds. Then she says, “So, what do you say? Kick-off is at four thirty.”
“I don’t know the first thing about football,” I tell her.
“I’ll teach you,” she says. “Who knows, you might actually enjoy it.”
I climb out of the pool after doing my daily two hundred laps and grab a towel. My house, as usual, is quiet. It’s been a long summer. I was glad to start football practice again, just to get out of my own fucking head. I have plenty of friends, but a lot of them go back to their hometowns for the summers, to hang out with their families. This is my hometown. And the only family I have left is a brother who was deployed to Afghanistan eleven months ago and has been through some very real shit, and another brother who lives in Chicago. Besides, Gage is busy. He’s basically the biggest manwhore on the planet, so even though we get along well, I always feel like I’m encroaching on his bed-hopping schedule.
Me … well, I have the opposite problem.
Not that I couldn’t bed hop if I wanted to. Not at all.
I don’t, though. For … reasons.
Reasons I prefer not to dwell on.
In fact, the whole topic is one I avoid like the plague.
The problem is, a lot of other people seem to thrive on speculating continuously, like they have nothing better to fucking do.
Maybe because I’m the starting quarterback. I’m 6’4’’ and I work out for four hours a day, so I’m built as fuck. I keep to myself when I’m not partying with friends or at practice, so I’ve been labelled “brooding” and “mysterious.” Go figure.
The more I deflect, the more they want me.
Like now, as I park my car and make my way towards the players’ entrance of the stadium.
“Hi, Bo.”
I turn. It’s three girls, hanging out next to a yellow Jeep. They’ve been waiting for me.
I glance at them as I walk past. “Hey.”
“What are you doing for the next twenty minutes?” one of them asks.
“Getting ready to play a game of football.”
“The game doesn’t start for two hours,” one points out.
I don’t feel like having a conversation with these girls. They’re dressed like they should be hanging out on a street corner. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just finished banging the entire basketball team. Be nice. “We have warm up.”
“What about later?” says the blond. “What are you doing after the game?”
“Celebrating, hopefully.”
“We could meet up with you. That is, if you’re sure you don’t want us to help you warm up a little … before warm up.”
“Yeah, Bo,” says the dark-haired one. “We could all help you warm up.”
I keep walking. “Maybe another time.”
My behavior would probably be considered strange to most people, I know that. Most guys would be thanking their lucky stars that every woman they meet is desperate for some goddamn action. My problem is, I can’t bring myself to go with it.
Which could have something to do with the fact that my mother died of a particular aggressive form of pancreatic cancer on my fifteenth birthday. A few weeks later, my father hung himself in our garage. He loved her so much he just didn’t want to live without her. On her death bed, my mother’s final words to me were … promise me you’ll stay true to your own heart.
I told her I would.
Which I now regret.
Caleb joined the Marines a few years later and Gage coped by jumping into bed with legions of women, maybe for some kind of comfort or distraction, who knows. As for me, I’m stuck in a zone that’s partly about honoring a promise and partly about trying to find a way to respect what my dead parents once had.
I’m not exactly fucking thrilled about any of it, but it’s the hand I’ve been dealt: I’m incapable of letting myself have random, meaningless sex. I’m waiting for the real thing, as ludicrous as that might be.