“Get to me first? You mean sleep with me?”
I shrug my shoulders in response instead of giving her an actual answer. My cousin may be an asshole, but I’m not going to throw him under the bus.
“Then you’re saying he’s a jerk.”
“I’m saying that he’s your typical college prick, Teach. Most of us are horny jerks who are looking to sleep with as many girls as humanly possible.”
“I guess I hoped that he’d be different.”
“Like I said, I’m sorry. It was a bad plan and I never should have proposed it. Sometimes my refusal to hear the word no makes me come up with some real dumb ideas.”
“I’m disappointed, but at least I know now. It would have been torture if I’d graduated and never had a genuine conversation with Aaron. I might have pined for him my whole adult life always thinking, what if?”
“And that would have been a tragic waste of your time.”
I take a sip of my drink, which is at a lukewarm temperature
“I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to be offended.”
“Go ahead.” I lean forward on the table with my elbows. “I’m all ears.”
“There are a million girls who would write your essays for you. I see at least one or two of them here tonight who’d probably pay you for the privilege. So why bother with a tutor and do the work yourself when you don’t have to?”
“I was the best quarterback my high school had ever seen.”
“There’s that modesty of yours again,” she chuckles.
“It’s true though. I could have gone to a dozen universities, but my parents and I picked CGU for a reason. There is an expectation of the players here to get a degree that they actually earn and can use if and when a professional career in sports ends.”
“I don’t get the impression from you that you need a Plan B.”
“I don’t. I’m going to be the man on whatever NFL team ends up drafting me, but I promised my mom. She didn’t go to college, and it’s important to her that me and my sister get our degrees.”
“Is your sister in college yet?”
“No, she’s in her senior year of high school.”
“Will she come to CGU too?”
“Probably, it’s a legacy school for us. My dad went here and so did my uncle.”
“Oh, so that’s why Aaron goes here, too.”
Him again.
“Yeah.”
Last skate of the night.
Attention, last skate of the night.
The announcer notifies us that it’s the last skate of the night, so Willow and I head back out to the ice and this time we hold hands as we skate in tandem to a medley of Christmas songs I grew up listening to from Paul McCartney, Donny Hathaway, and ending with Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You.
I probably haven’t done something this corny since I was thirteen years old and was trying to get a kiss from Abby Lewis, but the smile on Willow’s face the entire time was worth it.
After she turns in her skates and walks the long way back towards the dorms, Willow asks me the question I was waiting for all night. “You want to try to work on one of your essays tonight, now that you’ve skated off some of the bad juju from the game?”
“Yeah, that would be awesome.”
