The server arrived with their beer, and Callahan poured each of them a glass. Then he raised his—a signal for all of us to join him.
“Welcome to the team, Danny and W.C.”
I used the distraction of the basket of wings arriving to discreetly slide my phone from my pocket to check my messages, doing my best to tamp down my disappointment at seeing nothing in my inbox. Worry nagged at me even though I knew I didn’t have a right to it.
My love life was off to a nonexistent start, but at least I’d started some friendships on the team.
?Chapter Seven
?Taryn
The Fourth ofJuly was the big holiday in my hometown when people held class reunions and everyone came back to celebrate and see each other. Even though my class had only graduated three years before and Danny’s four years ago, there was a surprising number of our classmates in town, especially with the holiday falling on a Thursday. Danny sat with my family in our prime viewing spot on the corner of Broadway and Second Avenue North, but he didn’t seem to see more than two or three floats with all the people stopping by to talk to him.
I played my usual part of wallflower like a pro and wondered why he wanted to sit with me at all since we’d barely exchanged two words from the moment he joined us. Another of the perks of being the most popular guy in school was that all he had to do was hang out in one spot, and like a black hole, everyone gravitated to him.
A glaring absence among the friends who stopped to talk was Derek Watson. Guess they’d had their moment at my house on the night Danny returned. I couldn’t be sad about that. The less time I spent anywhere near Derek, the happier my life was. Especially since Danny told me Derek had entered the transfer portal in the spring with his sights set on Mountain State. If the Wildcats would have picked him up, I would have had to look for a new school.
As it was, Danny was going to be enough of a problem for me. After only spending only two evenings and a day with him, my heart was in serious danger of falling off a cliff named Daniel Thomas Chambers. I didn’t need a crystal ball to see that if I let myself fall, I’d land in a boulder field not on a cloud bank.
When he texted me after he arrived on campus, I was at work. I didn’t see that text or the next one until the end of my shift. At the picnic on the Fourth, he’d mentioned something about maybe hanging out once he arrived on campus, but we didn’t make a definitive plan. The fact he thought I’d be readily available the second he arrived spoke volumes about the imbalance in our friendship. My fault. In high school I’d never said no to any adventure he suggested no matter how short notice. If it meant spending time with him, I was in.
Did I mention how pathetic I was when it came to Danny Chambers?
Since it was after seven and he hadn’t texted again, I was pretty sure he’d given up and found something else to do. Knowing him, he’d already made six friends and snagged some girl’s number.
That second thought made me throw up in my mouth a little.
The Wildcats were perennial contenders for the conference championship. They regularly sold out the stadium on Saturdays, and the players were all local celebrities. Being a student at Mountain State made it impossible to avoid the team.
Because they were such a big deal, the players’ practice schedules were listed online. After I returned to my cubicle of a studio apartment following my shift, I pulled out my laptop and checked when the team would start drills. The perfect time for me to text Danny back would be when he was too busy to return my text. That way I wouldn’t be ignoring him per se, but he wouldn’t expect me to text back and forth with him until he convinced me to hang out.
Despite my long-standing feelings for him, after what I’d learned about myself during the mess with Aaron, the less time I spent in Danny’s presence, the better. If he’d given me any clue at all that he planned to attend Mountain State and join the football team, I maybe could have prepared myself for it—for the possibility of seeing him on campus occasionally, of maybe hanging out a time or two until he drifted away to hang out with the athlete crowd and the cool people (and team groupies) who were always around them. Even with the Coffee Kiosk located a couple blocks off-campus, I’d observed the lives of enough of the athletes who were among our regulars to know the score.
Instead, he’d sprung it on me the night he returned from active duty, leaving me no choice but to pretend I was excited to return to old times—studying together, grabbing a pizza, listening to his struggles with the team and his dad, Danny making me laugh through all of it. And watching from the sidelines as he dated every hot girl in school. At Mountain State, that part might actually challenge him.
It wasn’t something I wanted to watch.
As though I’d conjured him with my morose thoughts, my phone alerted me to an incoming text. For a second, I stared at it as if it were a coiled snake. But when I picked it up, it wasn’t Danny, but rather my friend Zoe Lampee.
Zoe: I’m bored. Want to grab a drink?
Me: It’s Sunday night, Zo-Zo. And we have class in the morning.
When Zoe saw the business administration class offered over summer, like me, she’d jumped on the chance to take a super-challenging class during the laid-back summer semester. So far, it was paying off for both of us—but not if we showed up on a Monday morning hungover.
Zoe: Come over and eat popcorn and watch a movie with me then. We’ll find something campy and make fun of it.
That actually sounded like a great idea. If Danny happened to text again, I wouldn’t have to lie to him—something he’d know I was doing the second I said I was busy. He had a weird radar when it came to catching me in a lie. Except for the biggest lie I’d never stopped telling him: that I was happy to be just his friend.
WhileAustin Powers in Goldmemberplayed on the TV, my friend and I chowed on cheesy popcorn and cheap wine.
“So your high-school crush is now playing for the ’Cats.” Zoe tossed a popcorn kernel in the air and angled her head beneath it to catch it in her mouth. “The plus of this is you’re not in high school anymore.”
“What does that mean?” I asked as I popped a couple of popcorn kernels into my mouth like a normal person.
“You won’t see him in the halls at school, and since you’re not a cheerleader, you don’t have to attend the games if you don’t want to.”
Tucking a foot under my thigh, I faced her on the couch. “How was it you never went out with him when we were in high school?”
