by Ginger Scott
“It’s fine. You have to do this, and I understand,” she was gone again.
“Nolan, I mean it. Tell me what you want,” I asked urgently as she opened her door and slid from her seat. She pulled her purse strap and backpack over her shoulder and looked at me one more time.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. I…I need to figure some things out, Reed,” she said, turning away and then stopping again. “Please don’t feel bad. You didn’t do anything. Really. I’ll…I’ll just call you when I get back to school, okay?”
She was already inside when I sent her a text that read: I love you. I drove back to Tucson, and when I got into my room, I checked my phone—and she hadn’t texted back. For the first time in months, I wanted to drink. No, fuck that. I wanted to get ripped and forget fucking everything.
I picked up my phone and called Trig. “Hey, where you at?” I asked, putting a hat on my head and shoving my wallet and keys back in my pocket.
“We’re at Cooler’s, just shooting pool. You wanna come?” he asked, half surprised.
“Yeah, I’ll be there in ten. Then we’re drinking. A lot,” I said and just hung up.
Nolan
I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess that was part of the problem. I didn’t know what to think, about anything. I actually wanted just to not think, which was impossible!
By the time Sarah picked me up from my parents to drive back to campus Sunday morning, I was a mess. Thankfully, the yin to the yang that was Sarah’s spitfire temper was that she was also quick to forgive. I filled her in on everything, and she agreed that I was right to freak out over the close and personal touching by Dylan. She also defended Reed, telling me it wasn’t fair that I was mad at him for trying to include me in his decision about the draft when I was hiding such an enormous secret from him.
Sarah was right. And when we went out to dinner with Sienna that night back at campus, and I filled her in on everything—after breaking down to cry every 30 seconds—she agreed, too.
I hadn’t talked to Reed since I walked away from him Saturday afternoon. It had been almost 24 hours since I’d heard from him. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking after the way I’d left him. With the girls’ help, I drafted a text to send to him from our table.
I’m sorry I walked away from you. You’re only trying to include me, and I love you because of it. Maybe we can get together and really talk about everything sooner? I promise to have an open mind.
I didn’t think a text was a good place to elude about having to talk about other things, so I just left it at that. It took three of us to perfect the pathetic four sentences I did send.
We finished eating, and I walked back to my dorm from the café where we met. It had been an hour since I sent my text, and I still hadn’t heard from Reed. I was getting a little anxious on top of the heavy worry that had already permanently moved into my conscience.
To distract myself, I pulled out the latest spreadsheets from the testing trials for the IQ project. I loaded a few of them up on my computer and then went through my emails to see the others that my group members had sent, which only made my stress shoot through the roof. Nothing was right!
Exasperated, I flopped back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. It was going to take me hours to sort through the results and put things in the right order just so I could merge everything together. “I HATE GROUP PROJECTS!” I thought.
I rolled sideways to glance at my phone once again and there still was no message from Reed. Happy to have something new to worry about—something I at least had some power over—I pulled my laptop cord from the wall, gathered up my pages of notes, stuffed a pencil in my hair and grabbed my keys to go upstairs.
When I knocked on Gavin’s door, one floor up, it slowly slid open since it wasn’t really latched. Gavin was sitting on his floor in front of his laptop with notes spread all around and his hands on top of his head. I started to giggle, realizing he was probably coming to the same conclusion I just had.
I could tell he had headphones in and I didn’t want to scare him, so I reached over and knocked a little louder on his now-open door. He turned around quickly and pulled an ear bud from one of his ears.
“Nolan! Thank God!” he sprang to his feet, carefully stepping through his maze of papers and Monster Drink cans. He was trying to clean up a little as I walked all the way into his room.
“Hey,” I just smiled, sitting at his desk chair and putting my computer down. “So, I take it you saw the data from the dingle twins?”
Gavin started laughing, putting his hands on his hips and nodding a little. He had given them that nickname during our last class when they had completely blown an IQ test attempt. “Seriously, what is wrong with those two?” he asked, grabbing a hat from his bed and sliding it over his chin-length hair.
Gavin was the complete opposite of Reed—artistic, tall and thin. He had black-rimmed glasses that he wore all of the time and longer hair that he usually kept pulled back or hidden under a hat. Both of his arms were covered in tattoos, and his wardrobe consisted of nothing but old concert T-shirts—most of them from shows he’d actually seen. Like Reed, though, Gavin was smart, ridiculously smart. We’d talked about the stress of attending school on scholarships during our classes, and I’d found out Gavin was a Mensa Scholar. He was a bona fide genius, which was good, because I was going to need one to survive the dingle twins.
“I think we can fix it, but it’s going to take us a few hours,” I said, blowing the loose hairs from my face.
Gavin just stood at his doorway and put his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders. “I got nowhere else to be, so let’s do it,” he said, scooping up his papers and sitting down on the floor with his legs stretched out to hold up his laptop.
My estimate wasn’t even close. Gavin and I worked until midnight finishing up the data and running our results. It was worth it, though, because not only did we come up with some killer findings and draw some great conclusions for our report, but also I was able to forget about everything else in my life for most of the night.
We ordered pizza, made fun of our lab partners and swapped stories about growing up with rich kids. Gavin came to ASU from Compton. I laughed at first when he told me, because I didn’t think anyone actually came from Compton, but he assured me they did. He said his neighborhood was full of families that had lived there for years, but that it made him sad to see people afraid to go out at night. He took a bus to a private school that he was able to go to on a scholarship. And I thought I had it hard.
I’d also learned that Gavin came to ASU because of a girl, but after their freshman year, they broke up; his ex, Maya, moved back to California, but Gavin decided to stay. This part of the conversation started to make me a little uncomfortable, partly because I didn’t want to go into my relationship with Reed and the drama that had descended on my life as of late, and partly because it felt a little as if Gavin was flirting with me.
When we were eating, he reached over twice to dab my cheek with a napkin; I kept one in my hand to take care of my own face after that. Then, when I was typing up our final results, he stood behind me and massaged my shoulders a little, sometimes his touch lingering just a little too long.
Gavin was incredibly good looking. He was the kind of guy who played the guitar with random bands for fun and rolled to class on a skateboard. His intelligence was a sexy contrast with his entire bad-boy image. When I was packing up my things and getting ready to leave, I felt a rush of heat hit my nerves as Gavin put his hand on the center of my back as he walked me to the door. And when he reached over to give me a friendly hug—one that suddenly felt not-so-friendly—I panicked.
“I have a boyfriend,” I just laid it out there, just like that. No preface, no real reason to add it to the conversation, other than the massive blood-rush hitting my eardrums and making me feel as if I might soon pass out. I had nothing left other than to give Gavin the stupidest of smiles.
“Oh, uh…okay?”
he said, once again shoving his hands in his pockets, seeming to try to make himself appear less threatening. “I didn’t mean anything. I just…boy, I’m not really sure what to say here.”
He stood there rubbing the back of his neck and chuckling nervously. I had just made this extremely awkward.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to fix things. “I just… I realized that we talked a lot about you, and I hadn’t shared much. I thought it was one of those things that were good to know.”
He just smiled at me, his lips forming the most adorable grin, forcing his eyes to scrunch a bit. “It’s okay. Yeah, that…the boyfriend…it’s good to know,” he said, nodding and reaching out his hand in a fist to give me a pound. I just pounded back and laughed a little.
“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all weird. I think I just need to go home and get some sleep.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” he said, opening his door for me and leaning against the frame as I walked out backwards, making my way to the stairs. “Sweet dreams, you.”
He watched as I walked all the way to the stairway door, and then he closed his. I may have not had much dating experience, and I may have only been with Reed, but I was pretty sure Gavin was hitting on me, ever so slightly. And I didn’t hate it. But the guilt it left behind as I made my way back into my room and dumped my pile of papers and computer on my desk was certainly not worth the small little rush of being found attractive by someone who wasn’t Reed. And when I forced my mind back to Reed, I started to cry. Hard.
Reed had sent me a couple of texts while I was working on my project with Gavin: one apologizing for missing my call, and the second one—a longer one that came a few hours later—explaining that he’d slept most of the day away, hung-over from a really rough night.
I cringed a little thinking about a pissed off Reed doing shots at some bar in Tucson, cursing my name. I knew I had driven him to it, and I knew what he was like when he was drunk. The fact that he had slept an entire day away in recovery led me to believe he’d probably had a lot to drink, and that made me nervous. His texts were very formal, almost as if he was apologizing for missing some tutoring appointment we’d had. And they were without any mention of love or X or O. I was probably reading into things, but with the vague way I’d left things with him in front of my parents’ house, I couldn’t block my imagination from pairing him with some strange woman.
I knew it was late, nearly 1 a.m. But I took a chance and sent him a text back.
Sorry, I was upstairs working on a project all night. It was a mess and it’s worth most of our grade. I miss you.
I put that last bit in hoping he’d bite, and when my phone rang seconds later, my eyes teared up again, this time with relief. I answered almost immediately.
“You’re awake!” I was a little too excited.
“Yeah, Noles. I’m awake,” Reed’s tone was less happy to hear me. We both sat there listening to silence for more than a few seconds when finally he spoke, first letting out a huge sigh that put my mind on edge. “Nolan, I did something stupid.”
Oh my god. This is the second time my body went into shock in less than two weeks. I shut my eyes tightly, trying to battle the images of Reed and some girl he met at the bar last night rolling around with one another. It was impossible, though, since in the nanoseconds after he uttered that single sentence I had already visualized his hands touching someone else’s face, his lips biting at some stranger’s shoulder and his bare chest pressed up against hers, whoever she was—hoping she wasn’t Dylan. Unable to speak, I let my mouth fall open and somehow squeaked out a pained “Oh.”
“Shit, no,” Reed yelled into the phone, almost angry and frustrated. “God, Nolan, no! Not that…shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything that you’re thinking. I swear…I would never. Ever!”
I was still frozen. I was having a hard time bringing my mind back from the dark place it was. I was able to muster an “Okay,” just so he could continue.
“Noles, it’s the draft. I made a verbal commitment to work with Dylan and her dad,” he waited a minute, letting me take this much in.
“Can you even do that, Reed?” I was new to a lot of this draft business, but I was pretty sure committing to an agent took away Reed’s amateur status.
He just let out another huge sigh. “Noles, I fucked up. Thankfully the Nichols are family friends, and they are keeping a tight lid on everything.”
“How did you get to this?” I asked, a little taken aback from his instant decision and the fact that he did something he knew better than to do.
“I was fucking drunk, Nolan,” he exasperated. “I was so pissed after I dropped you off. I know, I know. But I haven’t done anything like that in a really long time, so spare me the lecture, okay?”
He sounded pissed, and I was still trying to sort through everything in my mind, so I just kept an even tone. “I’m not lecturing, Reed. Just trying to understand what this all means,” I said.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he continued. “I was drinking with Trig and got worked up about not being able to make a decision, not understanding our fight and then everything just got all crossed and messed up. I called Brent, and Dylan answered the line. She put me on speaker, and then the next thing I know I was making a verbal commitment to work with them. They told me some shit about me missing out on important opportunities, tying their hands when every other quarterback looking at the market was already working with someone. It was all a little fuzzy, but Dylan brought over a file with paperwork tonight, which made it all way too real. She saw the panic in my eyes and talked me down. She said she and her dad work with a lot of people under the radar and that they will be very discrete and will work with me on a press conference as soon as our last game is finished.”
The phone went silent after that, and Reed and I sat there listening to one another breathe—for minutes. Actual minutes.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he finally said. I could sense the fear in his voice.
I waited a little longer before finally answering. “I guess, I’m thinking I’m really glad you didn’t sleep with someone,” I said, laughing nervously, but also masking the gut-twisting hurt I was experiencing from this new turn in things.
“Oh my god, Nolan, I’m so happy to hear you say that. I mean… I’m not happy you thought for that second that I did that. I love you so fucking much. I would never do that to you. Not in a million years,” Reed sounded so full of hope. I couldn’t dash it. Not again.
“We’ll figure it out. The draft, huh?” I said, letting the new facts of my life align with the other ones.
“Yeah, the draft,” he sounded happy for the first time since before I came face-to-face with Dylan Nichols. “And I want you to be involved. In everything.”
I just nodded to myself, resolving myself to tell him the other surprising news that was going to hammer away at his life. “Okay,” I said, gathering up the courage to start when Reed cut me off.
“Hey, my other line’s buzzing. It’s Jason. That’s really weird for him to call this late. I’ve gotta get this. We’ll talk tomorrow, though, okay? I love you. So much.”
He was gone before I was able to get out, “Me, too.”
Chapter 5
Nolan
I used to love Fridays. I spent most of my time in lab working on my projects, tutoring students and finishing up homework. The rest of the day and weekend was reserved for Reed and me—not a care in the world, like we were both locked in our own little time capsule. But I was dreading this Friday.
My appointment at the health center was just a few days away, and I had finally come to terms with the fact that Reed needed to know what was happening. My moods had been unmanageable, and I feared that holding in the secret was starting to chip away at my insides. Sleep was sporadic, and my grades were starting to suffer from my lack of concentration. Thankfully, I was able to draft a bit off Gavin in our psych class, though I was careful not to get too close with him
after our last study session.
It was Reed’s bye week, so he was spending some extra time in Coolidge. He had several practices, but there were at least two almost full days where we would be able to get away. Reed wanted to camp again so he wouldn’t be too far from school or home. Buck had broken a leg while attempting to water ski in Mexico. Jason was staying at the house, running things while Buck was out of commission, but Reed’s brother wasn’t the most caring man in the world, and he made it very clear that he wouldn’t be playing nurse while his dad was laid up with his leg.
Reed called Thursday night after practice, during his drive to his dad’s, and spent most of our conversation venting.
“I just don’t get how Jason and I are related. I mean, how hard is it to drive dad to a few appointments, make him dinner? Hell, all he has to do is heat the shit up, Rose does the actual cooking,” Reed said, his stereo blasting in the background and the wind whipping in the phone from the open windows of his Jeep. “Sorry, I know I’ve been complaining for like 10 minutes, but I just don’t get my douche bag brother. Everyone loves him, and it disgusts me.”
I mostly listened. I had only met Jason once or twice in passing introductions. He’d spent most of his time in New Mexico. I was actually a little nervous about spending more time with him over the weekend, fearful that if Reed found him so deplorable, I would find him downright threatening. I got the distinct impression that when the gene pool divided between the two Johnson brothers, Jason was mostly Millie, and Reed was a lot more Buck.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been yapping this whole time. You haven’t even had a chance to tell me about your day,” Reed asked. My day was honestly uneventful, and the only thing on my mind was how I was going to open up to him about this pregnancy, my emotions still not ready to face the questions that came barreling at me once that little fact was out in the open. And this conversation certainly wasn’t going to happen over the phone.