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His face doesn’t do anything at all, and that’s how I know. “That’s good, right? You’re happy.”
“I’m suspended.”
“You’re happy about him.”
“No.”
“Nash.”
He walks about ten more feet. “He wanted my spot.”
“Now he won’t ever have it.”
“Nope,” Nash says, and puts an arm around my neck.
“Okay,” I say. “Now I feel significantly better.”
He still has practice. It doesn’t matter that he’s sitting a game; he still has to show up and put in the work, film and lift and ice. He comes back Monday with his hair wet and his mouth in a line, and I follow him into his room, and Rafe comes in a few minutes later.
“He’s been unbearable,” Rafe tells me.
“Nobody asked you,” Nash says.
“He’s suspended, and somehow we’re the ones getting punished,” Koda says from the doorway, and leaves.
Rafe goes with him, and before he does, he turns around. “If you’re gonna fuck, do it now. I’m sleeping in my own bed tonight.”
Nash glares at him, and I lighten the mood.
“Yes, sir.” I salute him, and he goes.
Nash pulls a shirt out of the drawer, sits down at his desk, and opens his laptop, and I don’t talk. I work on my own laptop at the head of his bed and watch him whenever I need a minute to think. He watches film with one earbud in, and for two hours, the only sounds in the room are the whistle on his laptop every time he rewinds and my keys. He gets up for water and comes back with two and puts one down by my knee without a word.
When he’s done, he comes over, picks up my legs, sits down, and puts them across his lap. I watch him for a few minutes. He isn’t looking at me, and I don’t like it, so I rub my foot over his cock. His eyes dart to mine, and I smile. He doesn’t tell me to stop, and he doesn’t reach over to kiss me. That lasts about two minutes. The next thing I know, he’s fingering me while I take him in my mouth, and then he’s bending me over his desk with his hand around my throat.
The next day, I have class and my first volunteer shift at a nursing home ten minutes off campus, which I’ve been excited about for two weeks and immediately regret when they hand me fourteen pages of paperwork and a badge with a photo that makes me look recently arrested. I spend the first hour learning everything I’m not allowed to touch, which is apparently most things. Then somebody sends me to the activity room to help set up bingo, and an eighty-six-year-old woman named Dorothy tells me I’m putting the cards too far apart.
“Nobody can reach those.”
I move them closer.
“Not that close.”
I look at her. Dorothy looks at me and moves them exactly where she wants them. I decide I like her.
Nash has practice. We meet everybody for dinner at the dining hall, everybody but Koda.
Tuesday night, I’m in Nash’s bed instead of mine. He keeps his window cracked even though it’s freezing, because apparently sleeping at a normal temperature is beneath him, and when I complain, he calls me a big baby. I’m not. I tell him I’m going back to my room, mostly because I know exactly what’s going to happen. I make it two steps before he catches me around the waist and pulls me backward into his lap.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere with heat.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You just called me a baby.”
“You are a baby.”
