“A couple of my roommates have NIL contracts with them, so I’ve been there a few times.”
Zoe wrinkled her nose. “NIL?”
“Name. Image. Likeness. People like to go where the team is, so businesses pay players now to advertise for them.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted an answer, but the weird way Danny was acting what with his arm still draped over the back of my chair and ordering the same meal I’d ordered threw me. The fond way he looked at me threw me too.
“You said you already had a table here, and I haven’t seen you since classes started, so I decided to celebrate our win with a burger rather than a pizza.”
Our dinner arrived, and we all tucked in as though we hadn’t eaten in a week. Yet when it was all said and done, fortunately for Danny, neither Zoe nor I could finish our fries.
As he swirled the last of Zoe’s fries through the ketchup left on his plate, she asked, “Are you joining your teammates at the celebration party tonight?”
He shot me a side-eye and said, “Depends. Do you want to go?”
“No, thanks. But Zoe’s interested.”
?Chapter Seventeen
?Taryn
Exactly the sameas when we were in high school, Danny attracted all the girls in college. He couldn’t seem to help it. They’d see him walking across campus or sitting in the library or the Union and would walk right up and start flirting with him. While I had no idea how he responded when I wasn’t around, when I was with him, he was polite and mildly flirty, which I didn’t think he could help. He didn’t outright encourage their attention, but he didn’t turn it away either.
Which meant nothing between us had changed despite the way he liked to touch me sometimes. If he were any other guy, I’d think those subtle touches—a brush of my hair over my shoulder, a slide of his hand down my arm, the occasional arm around my waist—were his way of letting me know he was interested in pursuing something more than friendship. But this was Danny, and none of that meant anything.
Exactly the same as in high school, we studied together a couple of nights a week. We started out studying at the library or the Union where I witnessed firsthand the football groupies vying for his attention. After a while, I finally gave in to his begging and invited him over to my place for study nights. Without the distraction of girls stopping by to flirt with him, we did get more done, and I didn’t have to hide my irrational hurt at seeing him basking in the attention of other women.
The only strange difference was the fact he skipped football parties. The Wildcats were on a roll, winning their first four games of the season, but Danny had yet to attend one of their celebratory parties, opting instead to do something with me. We went to the movies or bowling or hung out with Zoe, playing video games at her place because she owned a console and I didn’t. Maybe he’d moved on from the party scene after being in the military. Whatever. At this point in the semester, we’d sort of fallen into a routine—something friends did.
A guy in one of my communications classes, Josh Snow, had started the semester paying attention to me. He was handsome in a businessman sort of way with his form-fitted button-downs tucked into dressy jeans that showed off his lean physique. His artfully messy hairstyle and tortoiseshell glasses gave him kind of a hotGQvibe. By the fourth class, he’d started sitting next to me and comparing notes. Once or twice we’d grabbed a coffee after class. He didn’t fire me up the way Danny did, but he was available and obviously interested, which was way more than Danny had ever been.
While he had yet to ask me out on a regular date, I sensed he was working up to it. So of course I talked the possibility over with Zoe one Saturday when the ’Cats were playing out of town.
“Do you think it’s fair to lead Josh on with the way you’re hung up on Danny?” she asked as she swirled her ice cream in her bowl.
“Do you think it’s fair to mash the hell out of ice cream?” Ever since we were kids, she’d insisted on turning hard ice cream soft before she’d eat it.
“Ice cream should always be soft,” she said with a sniff. “And don’t change the subject.”
With a sigh, I said quietly, “For a while last fall, I wasn’t hung up on Danny at all.”
My friend’s sympathetic expression came perilously close to pity. “That didn’t turn out well either.”
I lamented shoving in a mouthful of mint chocolate chip when it gave me a brain freeze. After taking a few seconds to recover, I said, “But for a while, I wasn’t hung up on him. With any luck, Josh isn’t a jerk like Aaron.”
Of course, I hadn’t told my friend the reason Aaron had turned out to be a jerk—which was the reason I needed to be honest about and not date Josh. Or dream about dating Danny. Because if I dated anyone, we’d end up in the same place I’d ended up with Aaron, and any man with a normal sexual appetite would absolutely run from there.
“You’re right. I can’t date Josh.”
Zoe’s eyes popped. “Are you finally going to tell Danny how you really feel?”
Staring over my shoulder at my friend seated on the opposite side of the couch, I said, “Have you lost your mind? I do not need the humiliation of his pity when he tells me he’ll never feel the same. The status quo is working fine. We’ll get through this year, I’ll graduate, and go somewhere out of state to grad school, far away from him.” I spooned another bite of ice cream, willing the conversation I’d started to end.
“Uh-huh. You keep telling yourself that, girlfriend.”
I had no choice. I couldn’t deceive someone I was dating. When he wanted to take the dating up a notch, I’d have to do the right thing and walk away because no way would I ever expose my weirdness to someone I cared about. Better not to start anything in the first place.
