After a few moments’ hesitation, I felt Bella sink down onto the bed. She flopped back onto my second pillow, her arms folded behind her head. “It was a strange evening,” she said.
Tell me about it.
“I’m going to like working for the hockey team. Even if people are going to give me shit for it.”
“What kind of shit?” I mumbled.
“The same kind I always get. They’ll say I might as well ride the bus. Because I’m already riding the players.”
I laughed, although being very drunk made that difficult. I rolled onto my side, which made my head swim. Bella was right there. So I pulled her closer to me and gave her what was probably a pretty sloppy kiss. She went with it, though, wrapping her arms around me. And when I dove into her soft mouth, she met me stroke for stroke. I hadn’t planned to do this tonight. But suddenly it seemed like a great way to keep my head on straight. Losing myself in Bella.
But then she pulled back. “You’re so drunk,” she whispered. There was accusation in her voice.
“I’m always drunk,” I argued. “Never stopped you before.”
Now her voice had an edge to it. “Youstopped me before,” she hissed. “You said that we weren’t going to do this anymore.”
“I changed my mind.”
As drunk as I was, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. And Bella confirmed that by giving my chest a rough shove. “Don’t treat me like a slut, Graham.”
Shit. With great effort, I propped myself up on an elbow to squint down into her pissed-off face. “I wouldnevercall you that, Bells. I don’t think that way.” It wasn’t an eloquent apology, but it was true. Bella was the greatest. She never apologized for what she wanted. She just owned it.
The way I never could.
Pulling my sloppy thoughts together, I tried to do even better. “I’msorry. I shouldn’t have gone there. I’m just a train wreck tonight.”
Having said my piece, I slid back down onto the pillow, rolling onto my back. Making a move on Bella had been very, very stupid. Not only was she mad at me now, but it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. There was a window of drunkenness that I had to hit in order to get it up for a girl. I had to be drunk enough for the whole thing to seem like a good idea. And drunk enough to claim whiskey dick if it didn’t work out. But I couldn’t betoosloppy. Because I needed to concentrate to pull it off.
And right now, my eyes were too heavy to stay open. But I curled one hand around Bella’s, and she let me.
I was just drifting off when Bella got up off the bed. There was some rustling of clothing. I heard her belt hit the floor. And then my dresser drawer opened and shut, probably as Bella helped herself to one of my T-shirts. A minute later she came back into the bed. She put her head on my chest, and one knee over mine. Her arm snaked around my waist as she curled into me. She’d always been a cuddler.
Tucking a hand over her smooth knee, I fell asleep.
—Rikker
There were pros and cons to signing on at a new college the July before your sophomore year. In the plus column, I’d lucked into a single. But they didn’t have room for me in Turner House where I was assigned. So my room was in a little overflow dorm called McHerrin. There were two other rooms on my floor, both housing exchange students from China. McHerrin wasn’t exactly the party dorm. But I was okay with that.
After a stop in the shared bathroom to pee and brush my teeth, I let myself into my little habitat. Last year I’d made the effort to hang stuff on the walls, and make the place my own. But this year, I didn’t bother. I was jaded, I guess. Before, I’d thought that once you chose a college, you were there for four years. You could go ahead and hang the felt pennant over your bed.
I’d jumped the gun on that one.
So my little room looked like monastic living quarters. Or a prison cell. I got into bed and shut off the light, but sleep didn’t come for me right away. I was too amped up by everything that had happened today.
In the positive column, I knew I’d done well on the ice. And both Coach and Hartley had been good to me. Bella had beengreat. But that was only a start. There were still a thousand ways this could all go south.
And then there was Graham, who’d looked as cheerful as a mushroom cloud tonight. I knew things about him that he didn’t want others to know. After he got over the shock of seeing me, I hoped he would just call me and say that. If he did, I’d tell him not to worry. I’d never out anybody, because I knew how much that sucked.
Even someone who’d been as lousy a friend as Graham.
But if he wanted that assurance from me, he’d have to actually acknowledge that we knew each other. And when we’d been seated three feet apart at Capri’s, he hadn’t even been able to manage eye contact.
Hell, it was trippy. It had been Grahamright there. But also not. It had felt a little like keeping company with a ghost.
I lay there in the dark, thinking about him. And it wasn’t the first time I’d done that. When I’d signed on to come to Harkness six weeks ago, the memories had begun to roll over me. Before the bad ending, there had been a whole lot of good. Call it nostalgia. Call it idiocy. But my subconscious preferred the memory of Graham’s embrace to the memory of his rejection.
Also, we were fifteen then. Everything I shared with Graham had been so vivid and new. No wonder that shit was still projected on the inside my skull in Technicolor.
