"Would you like me to tell you what you and Wilder looked like on the dance floor?" I goaded.
She held up her hands in defense. "Okay, okay, I got it. Neither of us can help ourselves when hot football players have their hands on us."
I feigned disappointment. "We're such hussies."
We both laughed again, and she gently threw my pillow back to me.
My ringtone interrupted us, and I grabbed my phone to see who was calling me. Seeing my dad's name, I silenced the call. I was not ready to talk to him yet.
"What's wrong?" Olivia asked.
My face must have shown my distaste.
"It's just my dad," I answered, no emotion in my voice.
"Is everything okay?"
Ugh, no it wasn't. He wanted me to come visit him and his new family for Christmas break this year.
When I had found out that my parents' perfect marriage had been a total fraud, it had rocked my world. They'd kept up the pretense of a loving relationship until my dad got another woman pregnant. A woman a lot younger than my mom. He'd felt like he needed to step up and be there for this other woman and their child. Forget about his current child who still needed him.
It had all come out right before my sixteenth birthday, a highly anticipated year for a girl in the south. Everything had been planned at the country club, invites had been sent out, and I'd picked the perfect dress. My dad had been going to escort me down the staircase, and we'd practiced our daddy daughter dance.
But instead, he'd left my mom and me to go be withSamantha.
The party had still happened, and everything had been fine, but it had felt tainted. My grandpa had walked me down the staircase in my dad's place, an obvious statement that my dad was no longer a permanent and reliable fixture in my life anymore.
I realized I'd been quiet for a while and finally said, "Yeah, he just wants me to come visit him."
"You still haven’t seen him yet?" she asked softly, knowing my relationship was non-existent with my dad now.
"I tried to meet him for coffee once during the summer, but I chickened out," I answered.
It had only been since my mom had married Coach Matthews that my dad had tried to reach out. Almost like he didn't want to be replaced or something. I didn't even know why he cared. He claimed he regretted how he'd handled the divorce and didn't know how to have two families, but it didn't take any intelligence to know that you didn't drop one kid for another. It was all lies, and I'd never trust him again.
I'd asked my mom why she'd stayed with him for so long if she'd known he had been cheating on her the whole time, but she’d told me that her mom's marriage had been the same way, and she'd assumed that was just how marriages were. Then she'd met, Ian who was completely devoted to her. Over time, he had won me over as well.
"So you still haven't met his new wife or your little brother?"
"No, and I have no desire to," I answered honestly, putting the phone back on my desk.
Olivia was no stranger to family drama and understood that not answering the phone was sometimes the easiest way to deal with things.
"So what's your plan with Rush?" she asked, thankfully moving us from a topic she knew I didn't want to talk about anymore.
"There's no plan," I answered. "We haven't spent any time together, at least not time talking or acknowledging that the other exists, and then tonight we were talking and he was flirting, and I think it was just all too much for me.” I smoothed my hand over the pillow on my lap. “I'll keep my distance like I usually do, and everything will go back to normal."
"Do you want it to go back to normal?"
"Of course. Why wouldn’t I?"
She looked at me sheepishly. "Because you still like him?"
I pursed my lips. "That doesn't amount to a hill of beans since he is a total jerk. He doesn't get to treat me like I'm disposable and then get another chance. I can find some other good-looking guy who gets me all hot and bothered. There are plenty of hot guys on this campus."
"I don't doubt you can find lots of other guys to date," she agreed.
Now let's just hope I wouldn’t compare them all to a certain football player with mouthwatering muscles, brown eyes as smooth as melted chocolate, and lips that made me wonder if magical powers really did exist.
