A Game Like Ours: Suncastle College Book One

by Marissa J. Gramoll

  I cannot wait to get her home.

  The next afternoon, I pace in Crossfit Santa’s office.

  “Feeling tense, Bobby?”

  “Yeah.” I stop to look at him.

  “Tell me about your week.” Crossfit Santa has his clipboard and a cup of coffee on his desk.

  “Good. Started baseball and my dad came down to the game. And, we went out for some food, and I didn’t throw it up.”

  “That’s great.” Crossfit Santa leans back on his chair, smiling. “How are things with Lexie?”

  “Last night I couldn’t sleep. Lots of nightmares. Kept dreaming that Cody was here but then waking up and remembering he wasn’t. Then I dreamed that Lexie got hurt. It’s like I know I’m hurting her, even in my subconscious. I have to tell her.” My chest feels tight and I sit back on the couch.

  “Hurting her?” He watches for a minute.

  “I need to tell her some shit, and I don’t know how.” I look at the ceiling wishing I wasn’t in this position. I’ve been with her for months and haven’t begun to tell her what she needs to know. “It could go a lot of different ways. I’m not ready to lose her, but I’m afraid that is exactly what will happen if I tell her.”

  “It could go a lot of different ways. But you want to tell her.”

  “Yes. That night when my mom was there with her new girlfriend, I knew I couldn’t keep it from Lexie anymore. I try to forget what happened. I try to pretend it didn’t happen. But really, it did.” I get hot from talking. My eyes feel swollen. Hurt from the moment and lost in the dregs of the past, swimming in murky puddles of all that could have been so different. “I wish it never happened.” My voice is low and probably the most honest I’ve ever been. “And he fuckin’ died, Doctor. The whole damn thing tore me up like my insides went through a runnin’ disposal. I’m not in a place to heal. And I’m not in a place to hurt Lexie more.”

  “If you were her, would you want to know? At this point in your relationship?” Crossfit Santa takes a sip of his coffee and sets it back on the desk.

  “If I was her, I would’ve wanted to know on day one.” I rake my hands in my hair. “She doesn’t even sort of know.” I burrow the back of my head into the couch, wringing my hands. “I keep askin’ her if she knew what Cody told me. Wishin’ that Cody woulda been the one to tell her all this.”

  I stand from the couch and pace beside his coffee table. “It shouldn’t be me explainin’ his secrets, Doctor. Do you know how fucked up that is?”

  “How fucked up?” He mirrors my words.

  “It feels like both choices are wrong. That what I’m doin’ is a mistake by Lexie and that if I do tell her I’m betrayin’ my best friend.”

  “You feel you’d betray Cody by telling her the truth?”

  “He made me swear not to tell a soul.” I squint hard and squeeze my palms into my eyes to keep tears from coming out. “But do you know what else?” I sniffle, pointing my finger at Crossfit Santa. “He also made me promise to stay away from her. And then he fuckin’ left us here.” I clench my teeth, worried I may say too much. Not even Dr. Rogers can know what really happened. He can know there are secrets, but he can’t know what kind. Too risky.

  “Do you think if Cody could talk to you now that he would feel the same way?”

  “No.” I flick a tear off my cheek. Fucking feelings.

  “Do you think he would want you to be happy?”

  “Cody’d want both of us to be happy.” I stop pacing and collapse into the couch. “Only, I don’t think it’s what is best for anyone. Keepin’ his secrets.” My palms bore so deeply into my eye sockets that when I move them away the room is blurry. “I have to tell her, Doctor. I’m gonna lose her, but I have to tell her.”

  I feel horrible. Like every part of my insides is getting crushed. The thought of not being with her is the worst thing I can feel, next to how bad it hurts that Cody’s gone. I’ve gotten a taste of what life is with her. Living without her is going to be hell. But I won’t make her stay. Not when I’ve kept this from her. It’s not right. She deserves better.

  “Are you sure you’re going to lose her?” His tone is kind, like he understands my torment, and I’m thankful that Mindy sent me here.

  “It’s a big possibility.” The room is still and cold. I think about how so much of our relationship is woven on lies and secrets.

  Her face comes to my mind. The way she feels against my chest. The sound of her giggle when I’m cracking jokes. The way she takes time to pick out things at the store. But it isn’t for me. I’m broken by things that neither one of us can ever fix. “I’ve been a horrible boyfriend.”

  “How so?” He leans on his knees with his elbows.

  “This ain’t a foundation for trust.” I grind my teeth. “She already has such a breakable heart. Her parents aren’t worth her trust. Cody lied to her as much as I have been. She won’t want anythin’ to do with me.”

  The truth lays in front of me on the table like a lost game of baseball. I played my best, but at the end, there’s nothing I can change. What has happened, has happened. All I can do is try better next time.

  There won’t be a next time with her.

  “Seems you’re making a lot of decisions for Lexie. Maybe you ought to talk to her about it.”

  “I can’t be with her,” I whisper.

  “What’s that?” Santa leans closer to me, his rolling chair up against the small coffee table.

  “I can’t. We never should’ve done this. I was horribly and completely wrong.”

  My heart is heavy as I go into my apartment. It’s time to meet Lexie for dinner but I can’t bring myself to go.

  I sit on the floor, crumpling in the same spot where Cody poured out his soul to me. Tears run down my face like a faucet that won’t switch off. Only I don’t want to switch them off. I want to feel this. I want to grieve him without pretending it never happened. Because it fucking happened. Every last moment of his life that I was with him, happened.

  I should’ve told you not to go. I should’ve had you stay over. I should’ve been with you. This was supposed to be the two of us, Cody. And now I’m too beat up to be with her. There’s no healing from this. Not if I went to years of therapy. I’m too broken. I’m too fucked up. I can’t handle being here with her, knowing that there is a mess inside of me. That I’m only with her because you’re gone. She deserves someone better, Cody. Someone better than me. Better than you.

  I grab a fist full of my hair and tug, grateful for the grounding sensation of pain. I hold my breath. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to slip away. If I close my eyes long enough, can I fade into eternity?

  I haven’t been alive since you died. I haven’t drawn breath since you sputtered out your last bloody one.

  There is no healing. There is no peace.

  There is no way for me to be with her.

  There never really was.

  36

  LEXIE

  Where the fuck is Bobby?

  Working all day has me worn out and ready to climb into bed. I broke down and ordered wings thirty minutes ago. They were cold before I decided to go ahead and eat a few, expecting him to walk through the door any second.

  Something feels wrong.

  I’ve texted him a dozen times. We went out with his dad last night, and he doesn’t like going out much, it seems to make him on edge. Probably the crowds or the noise or the calories. Maybe I should’ve changed plans and he could’ve popped spinach leaves into his mouth like they were potato chips.

  I hope he’s alright.

  When I went to grief therapy, they called this hypervigilance. Since Cody died in a car wreck, I’m now afraid that anytime Bobby is late, he has also died in a car crash.

  I force a breath. He’s just late.

  Frantically, I text him again.

  Me: You ok?

  I wait for a long time, sipping from my second glass of lemonade, bouncing my eyes from my phone screen and the restaurant door. Bobby
’s glass of water is misty, a fat drop of condensation rolling down the side, ice cubes mostly melted.

  The waitress has checked on me three times. I’ve been here an hour and a half. About to leave and drive the streets looking for him, he walks through the door. A smile pulls at my lips, but doesn’t stay.

  He looks horrible. As he gets closer, his eyes are puffy. His skin is pale. Walking to the table, he doesn’t say a word.

  Nerves bubble in my stomach while I stand and give him a hug, but he barely hugs me back. Did I do something? I can’t think of anything. The air feels wrong, like something bad happened.

  “Hey, how was your day?” I try to keep conversation light, knowing that won’t help and wishing I knew what would.

  He had therapy right before this. Some days digging up everything feels like it does more harm than good. I’ve been there. The only way through shit like this is by making it worse to make it better.

  “Hey,” he’s looking at the wall behind me, his voice horse. “Lex, I, um,” his words go flat. “I need to tell you somethin’.”

  “Yeah, of course.” I slide my hand across the table to hold his. “Is everythin’ okay?”

  “After dinner.” He doesn’t tell me if everything is okay, and that worries me even more. My mind wanders through worse case scenarios, not sure what on earth this could be.

  “Yeah.” I try to smile, but it all feels so heavy.

  “I can’t do this.” His voice is so quiet I strain to listen, and then question myself twice, wondering if I heard him right. He rakes his hands through his hair and pulls harder than normal. Since he got here, he hasn’t looked at me once. His eyes are on the table. Then they’re back on the wall behind me.

  Just fuckin’ look at me, Bobby.

  “Can’t do what?” I tap my fork on the edge of the wing platter.

  He’s in his own world where all I can do is wait until he’s ready to open up and let me back inside.

  “We can go home. I know we went out last night and you don’t like crowds and loud restaurants–”

  “It’s okay.” He looks up with so much pain in his eyes it kills me. My feet tap the floor, worried about whatever is going on and how long it will take him to unravel it.

  The world sways around me while I try to adjust to this sudden tension. I don’t do tension. I avoid it like the plague. It is a plague, because I’m physically ill whenever things get like this.

  “Did somethin’ happen?” I bring my hand to his.

  He forces a long breath. “Yeah.”

  Looking deeper, I see that his eyes are red.

  My heart thunders the longer we go without words.

  He doesn’t touch the food I ordered.

  Why won’t he eat?

  He won’t even eat the salad I ordered for him without dressing. I thought he was driven. Now I’m wondering if all this is unhealthy. No, he just eats extra healthy, that’s all. He’s just having a rough night.

  “It’s okay, baby. Whatever it is, it’s okay.” I let out a shaking breath, the tension around me seizing every ability to function properly. I wave down a server and get takeout boxes and the check.

  His head is in his hands, the salad bowl in the middle of the table, I’ve never seen him this upset.

  “We can come back for your truck.” I offer to drive.

  “It’s fine. It’s just been a long day.”

  “That’s alright.” I take his arm but he’s quick to hug me. My mouth hangs open as he jets to his truck. No kiss hello. No kiss goodbye. So late getting to the restaurant without any explanation.

  What the fuck is wrong?

  Still in the restaurant parking lot, I sit in my car for a while trying to figure out this hell of a night. For the first time since we’ve been together, I wonder if he wants me to come over. He did say he needed to tell me something after dinner. Of course he wants me to head to the apartment. An ache blooms in my chest and the longer I sit with it, the worse it hurts. What isn’t he telling me?

  I force myself to turn the car key and drive across town. My thoughts are so focused on him that I can’t recall a single detail from the drive over, almost as though someone else had been driving. When I open the apartment door, he’s sitting on his couch, elbows pressed into his thighs, head in his hands.

  “I’m not much company tonight,” he sighs, looking at my Vans butterfly print shoes.

  “It’s fine.” I put the food in the fridge and notice it’s empty of his normal food prep containers. It’s been a crazy week for both of us. I should go get some groceries, give him some space. Maybe when I come back, he’ll be over whatever the fuck is going on.

  I take a deep breath and lean against the wall. This is every kind of uncharted territory. I can’t say this is a fight, but it feels tense like maybe we are about to have one.

  “I can’t do this.” His voice rings in my mind. What was he talking about?

  I sit beside him on the couch and wait.

  “I’m not okay right now.” He stares at the carpet by the door.

  “How can I help?” I put my hand on his back, drawing hearts and butterflies against his hoodie.

  “I need to tell you somethin’ that I wish I told you a long time ago.” His voice cracks and he clears his throat.

  “Anythin’.” I take his hands in mine. “Whatever it is.”

  “It’s not good, Lex.”

  His voice worries me, icing on the shit cake of this night.

  “Tell me.” I plead, surprised how desperate I sound.

  “First, I need to tell you somethin’ else.” He swallows so loud it echoes off the thin walls. “I have loved loving you. Ever since junior high, Lex. I’ve loved every part of you. Your laugh could play in my ears a million times and I would never get sick of it. And I hope that one day, you’ll have even more love than I can give you. Because you deserve it, Lex. You deserve all the love there is.” His voice drops off.

  This either sounds like a breakup or a proposal, and I don’t know what warrants either conversation. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “I loved you when I couldn’t have you. Just like I loved him.” Bobby bites his lower lip and his jaw quivers. “Both of you were a constant reminder of what I couldn’t have.”

  “What are you referrin’ to?”

  He looks at me for a long time but I don’t know what to think. “Wait here.”

  A moment later, he returns with a notebook. He sits by me and thumbs to a bookmarked page, well loved, like he’s read it a hundred times. But it’s not his writing. It’s Cody’s.

  My heart hits against my chest so hard it sends a throbbing pain through my lungs.

  “I thought I had all his journals.”

  “Not this one.” Bobby’s voice is soft, heavy. “He gave it to me the night after your first date and made me swear never to share it.”

  My eyes glaze over the sloppy writing as if my heart doesn’t want to know what it says. What secrets did Cody possibly have that made it so hard for Bobby to tell me?

  He felt so right in my hands. Like we were supposed to touch each other. One second we are just hanging out under the peach tree and then I’m kissing him, tasting him. I always knew there was something there. Something between us that I had to figure out if it was real. It was so real. The realest thing I’ve ever felt. We went so far under that peach tree. I thought that it was just me. I didn’t know he’d be okay with it. But fuck, he was. It was so amazing I can’t even explain it. I was flying, Seeing him so happy.

  It takes a minute to really believe what I’m reading. Feels more like he wrote this as fiction, but I know he only wrote journals, swearing one day he’d publish a memoir about his rise from a trailer park into a baseball star.

  This is not the Cody I knew. My throat burns, my insides feeling dead and dark. What else don’t I know?

  “Please tell me he was workin’ on a fictional story.” The words stay in the air between us.

  Bobby looks like he sinks lower
into despair. His eyes squeeze shut. “No. It’s not fiction.”

  “He gave this to you to keep his secret?” There is a war going on inside of me that I can’t fathom. “He told you, but he never told me?” The truth rattles my soul, everything around me shakes. First my fingers, then my toes.

  I’ve never been jealous of him and Bobby. They were best friends. But he told him when he didn’t tell me? Cody liked guys? Trembles that I can’t control reek havoc on my body. I look at my hands. Stop shaking.

  “Lex, he didn’t have to tell me.” Bobby’s eyes are sad. “I was there. I’m the him that he wrote about.”

  Lava pours through me. It’s sudden, this change, wracking my being and making it into something vile and ugly. I was there, he said.

  “You and he–” I can’t go on, but I don’t have to. Bobby’s nodding his head slowly. Yes. He’s nodding his head yes. Oh fuck. No…this can’t be.

  My body rages. Cody was into guys, and he never told me. He was with Bobby and never told me. I close my eyes.

  This can’t be real.

  And after all this time together, Bobby never told me either.

  37

  BOBBY

  I didn’t want it to go like this, but there was no good way to tell her. Just like I thought, it’s an earthquake shattering any foundation we had. I feel every bit of her simmering rage so much that she doesn’t need to say a word. I’ve always been empathetic. I feel things, all the things.

  Cody, man…how could you keep this from her? I wish she already knew and I wasn’t the one explaining it. I’d hoped maybe she just pretended it didn’t happen, like I do. But the look of pure shock proves that she didn’t have a fucking clue. We were good at keeping it to ourselves. For better and worse.

  She should’ve known this months ago.

  She should’ve known this years ago.

  You made me tell her, Cody….

  My anger knows no bounds watching the girl I love fall apart because of things he and I did. I’m hollow inside. Ruined. The death that absorbs my insides flares it’s hideous fangs, like some monster from the underworld coming for me.