“I’ll cock you later. CATCH you later. I’ll catch you later!” Knox whisper-shouts, his back practically glued to the perimeter of my walls as he slowly but surely inches out of view, taking the only rubric I had with him.
And just like that—with barely any headway made on his essay—my friend with zero benefits disappears into the pewter night, leaving me with a bittersweet feeling in the crumbling colosseum of my ribs.
14
JEALOUSY IS A BAD LOOK ON YOU
KNOX
Idon’t know what’s more embarrassing—the fact that Staten touched my dick on accident, or the fact that I was already hard from her striptease. She didn’t even show any nipple, and it took me negative two seconds to inflate like some virgin who’s never seen a pair of tits before.
God, and then I had to go and make things more awkward by running out of her house. It’s a normal bodily response, okay?
I haven’t heard a peep from her. Granted, it’s only been a few days, but still. Did she…like…touching my cock? Was it an acceptable size? Oh my God, what if she never knows how big it really is? An over-the-clothes sneak peek doesn’tpossiblycompare to the five-star fucking I’m capable of.
I think I’ve officially lost it. It’s eight p.m. on a Friday night, I’m sitting in Crew and Harlan’s apartment with the rest of the guys, and I haven’t even garnered the courage to indulge in the beers that they’ve so generously offered everyone. Mine just sits before me, weeping condensation onto the varnished table, a solitary plinth with no other purpose than to aid the neuroses of others. The thought of puttinganything in my temperamental stomach makes me want to puke like a frat pledge drinking hunch punch for the first time.
“We hitting Sigma Chi’s party later?” Sutton asks, already getting started on his toxicity for the night with a swig from his beer.
I don’t look up from my phone—the phone that has Staten’s contact info blared across the screen.
I wonder what she’s doing tonight. She’s probably busy with schoolwork, right? Ugh, I don’t know whose ball is in whose court anymore.
The ghost of my anxiety wanders the dismal hallways of my gyri, my pulse like a racehorse bucking against its own paddock. Angry, impatient.
“Fuck yeah,” Crew replies from the kitchen, making a last-minute sandwich with all the fixings—pastrami, Swiss cheese, dill pickles, sauerkraut. A wise call if we’re going to spend the rest of the night facing down the barrel of a bottle.
“I need a break from school. Mrs. Moriarity has us doing polynomials at seven in the morning,” Foster groans, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and lolling his head back against the sofa.
Axel doesn’t hesitate to add his two cents. “Yeah, and Coach has been extra pissed off during practices.”
I haven’t really beenall therefor practices like the rest of my teammates. I should be—I should pummel these foreign feelings back into submission—but I could erase Staten’s entire existence from my memory and still have fleeting thoughts hoarded away in an underground vault.
“Let’s look on the bright side, guys,” Harlan intervenes, his optimism refreshing, like the first sip of ice-cold water during the dry bed of June. “We’ve won our last few games, and we’re getting closer and closer to the Frozen Four. Our hard work is paying off.”
That’s right. Making it to the Frozen Four will show my dad that I’m serious—and capable—of pursuing my hockey dream.
Although I haven’t, uh, made it through a lot of tutoring sessions with Staten, I’ve been researching literary analysis examples in my free time so I can really impress her when we meet up again. We started with my thesis, and I’m determined to have at least half of it written by our next session.
Needless to say, my schedule has changed drastically.
Seven a.m. wake-up time, hot-and-ready oats and a Monster Energy for breakfast, a speed-read through my worn-down copy ofThe Great Gatsby, hockey practice before my business management class, Pepto Bismol in between because caffeine was a terrible idea for my system, long-winded tangents about strategic marketing and human resources, a race over to the English building, a chance to admire Staten for a full hour and thirty minutes, no lunch, a fifteen-minute walk to my foreign language class, a lonely, silent drive back to my apartment as I think about all the schoolwork I have to tackle in exchange for my social life. Depressing, I know.
My teammates’ voices rumble in my ears, yet I can’t comprehend anything that they’re saying. Sometimes, in order to escape from the chaos of my life, I disappear through a veil in my own mind. A repose; a safe haven.
I’ve never been one for daydreaming—I always considered it too feminine given my father’s sexist dogma—but now my fantasies consist of one five-foot-nothing brunette with eyes the color of felled timber. I’m malleable under her touch; she has the power to build and destroy me with a single lift of her pinky, and I yearn for such divine consecration.
“Yeah, and then she licked whipped cream off my junk,” someone says, resuscitating my awareness and snapping me from my reverie.
“What?” I croak through a shredded throat, my voice as rough as a fire rucking over a charcoal grill.
Harlan snorts, slapping me on the shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Crew trains his gaze on me, dissecting the heart that I’ve recently decided to wear on my sleeve. His cerulean eyes are accusatory, and no facsimile of calm will ever be enough to upend his detective work.
“Jesus. You’re still thinking about Staten, aren’t you?”
Heart tumbling, the sound of her name is a crutch I don’t want to admit I have, and it feels as if my tongue has been pinned to the roof of my mouth. Denying it will only make me look worse, so, as my chest hefts a latent breath, I confirm what my friends suspect to be true.
