One Good Play

by Meredith St. James

  "Why would you drink so much? What were you thinking?" Wren demanded. She yanked at his shirt collar like she wanted to shake some sense into him. I couldn't blame her.

  He stuttered out, "I—I want to die. J—Just let me die."

  His words seemed to really light a fire in her. She shoved him away from her, sending him sprawling back onto his elbows. He could barely hold himself up but he looked up at her. His expression was suitably guilty considering he was barely conscious.

  "Nothing is worth dying over, you idiot," she cried out. She threw the words at him like knives, and I could see from the way his face fell that she'd hit her mark.

  "Sorry." The word was quiet. Travis fell back and tossed his arm over his face, hiding his eyes. It was probably so that he didn't have to face the tears building in the corners of Wren's eyes.

  I'd never seen her cry before. Her chest rose and fell with her effort to breathe normally. Her hand went to her chest, laying over her heart in a calming gesture. I tried to step up to comfort her, but she held out her free arm to ward me off. Whatever she was experiencing, she wanted to do it alone. Or maybe that's just what she'd gotten used to after spending so long traveling alone.

  With that in mind, I ignored her attempt to keep me at a distance. I pulled her into my side at first, but then her tears started coming harder. I wrapped my other arm around her so that she was curled against me in my tight grasp. I rubbed her back gently, trying my best to soothe her.

  "Travis is an alcoholic," she whispered to me. "He must have relapsed."

  Surprise tore through me at the revelation. He was only nineteen, maybe twenty. The concept of alcoholism seemed so foreign. I thought back to the parties he'd been to with the rest of the team. I'd never actually seen him pouring alcohol, but I'd always assumed that was what was in his cup. I looked back now with a different perspective. He'd never seemed drunk. And he'd always been the first one to offer to be the designated driver when we made plans. It made complete sense.

  "Shit."

  Wren took a deep, shuddering breath. "We should put him on the couch so he'll lay on his side. That way he's not in any danger of choking himself if he ends up getting sick." She was so pragmatic about it. It made me wonder if she'd dealt with that sort of thing often.

  "My mom," Wren said, answering my unspoken question. "She wasn't an alcoholic. She was sick. There were so many times we had to help keep her on her side when she was having a bad sick day."

  "You've never mentioned your mom before." I tried not to sound too shocked by it.

  I got the impression she wasn't comfortable talking about it from the way she hunched, but I didn't want the opportunity to pass. Instead of staring at her like she was under a microscope, I extradited myself and knelt by Travis to put my focus on him. He didn't seem to be of much help to himself, so I braced myself to pull him up to his feet.

  "It's hard to talk about her." Wren's voice broke. "She was so great, Carter. Strong and vibrant and so alive. Until one day she just wasn't."

  "Ow," Travis complained as I finally managed to drag him up onto his feet.

  Wren flicked on an end table lamp and turned off the main light. "The light probably hurts." I briefly glanced back at her in curiosity. She explained, "I've had more than my fair share of hangovers. After my mom died I was wild for a few weeks."

  "How'd you get through it?" I asked, trying to keep her talking as I guided Travis along to the couch.

  She paused long enough that I started to doubt she'd answer at all. "Someone reminded me that how we spend our time matters. And I realized it was time to stop wasting mine."

  "Someone?" I questioned. "Do you mean your dad?" I'd heard her mention him once or twice in passing. Like with her mom, she almost never mentioned him.

  "No." She didn't elaborate.

  Wren picked up the glass of water I'd set aside and brought it over. I'd managed to get Travis sitting up on the couch. She forced him to take small sips of the water, ignoring the pitiful way he tried to push the glass away. His hands wrapped around her wrist when she seemed satisfied and started to pull away from him.

  "I am so sorry," Travis told her, his eyes opening fully for the first time since he'd stumbled his way in.

  She patted his cheek roughly. "Tell me tomorrow when you're sober."

  We finished settling him in so that he was laying safely on his side. I was disappointed that Wren's interest in our discussion seemed to have waned. The fleeting openness was gone, and I'd missed my chance to delve further into things with her. I didn't want to push, though, not after I'd noticed the dark circles forming under Wren's eyes.

  "Do you want to stay here tonight?" I asked. I hated the idea of her being in her dorm room alone after the evening had ended on a stressful note. "I can take you home before your classes tomorrow," I offered as an added incentive.

  She put her hand in mine, relenting far more easily than I'd expected her to. "Take me to bed, Carter."

  20

  Wren

  I blinked up against the harsh fluorescent overhead lights. Carter's lips trailed over my neck. My hips pressed into him as I strained to get as close as humanly possible. I could feel the evidence of his arousal against my lower stomach. The only thing that stopped me undressing him right there was the risk of getting caught. The marine life section of the library wasn't a Kelley University hot spot, but I wasn't taking any chances.

  Carter's lips left my skin and I whimpered at the loss. "We're supposed to be studying," he teased. "I have that essay to write, remember?"

  "You probably already wrote it. You don't need to study." I tried to pull him back to me but he resisted.

  "My name on your tutoring schedule says otherwise." He obliged me with one quick kiss on the lips. "Or have you already forgotten why I'm here?"

  I snorted. "I think we're past the point of pretending you actually need tutoring." It had taken me all of ten minutes into our first real session to decipher that there was no reason for Carter to be in tutoring. It had been pure masochism that had kept me seeing him even as I'd been struggling not to actually like him.

  "Coach Mack sure seems to think I need it," he grumbled. "My advisor's been checking in on my grades twice as much as last year. No doubt Coach is behind that."

  "Who cares? The rest of us all know how brilliant you are," I reassured him. I took my liberties with feeling up his rock hard abdominal muscles. I loved how strong he felt under his t-shirt.

  "Brilliant, huh?"

  He leaned into me, my back pressing into the library shelves behind me. It wasn't comfortable, but I barely felt it through the haze of my attraction to Carter. I put an arm around his neck trying to hurry him. He wouldn't let me. Instead, he took his time giving me a once-over before his mouth finally came down over mine. Even then, his kisses were feather-light and slow.

  "Tell me you like me," he commanded.

  My eyes opened with a questioning look. "I've already told you that."

  "I know." He grinned. "But I want to hear you say it again."

  "I like you," I obliged, the words coming out breathier than I'd intended.

  He kissed me. "Again."

  "I like you."

  I felt his smile as he kissed me the second time. "Again."

  "I love you."

  Carter stilled, and I felt all the blood drain from my face. I had no idea where that other word had come from. I definitely hadn't meant to say it. It was just a slip of the tongue, I tried to convince myself.

  "I didn't mean to—"

  Carter shushed me before I could finish. He didn't say anything, just stared at me silently. It was almost like we'd reverted back to when we'd first met and he could barely participate in a full conversation.

  An aching feeling bloomed in my chest as his lips came down on mine yet again. I wanted to feel relieved that he hadn't zeroed in on my slip up, but a bigger part of me felt hurt by the way he didn't say anything. I tried to shake off the bad vibe but the more Carter deepened o
ur kiss the more my brain went into overdrive.

  I tilted my head back so that we broke apart. "We probably should get back to the tutoring center before Laurel comes looking for me."

  It was a bad excuse for slamming the breaks and based on how Carter's eyes narrowed, he knew it, too. He played the gentleman, though, stepping several steps back to put some space between us. I was all too aware of the way he blatantly readjusted himself in his pants. I smoothed my hands over my long-sleeved blouse, doing my best to make it look like I hadn't just spent twenty minutes smacking lips with my not-exactly-boyfriend next to a whole section of books on the mating cycles of whales.

  Classy.

  "Wren, wait," Carter called after me when I rushed out of the aisle ahead of him.

  I kept my head forward and pretended I couldn't hear him. It was childish, but I was feeling too unsettled to think clearly. I left him trailing behind me all the way back to the area of the floor designated to the tutoring center. I wasn't surprised to see Matty set up at a table with his laptop, but I was surprised to see Rachel and Travis both at the table with him. They hadn't been there earlier when Carter and I had abandoned our things at the table.

  "Hey, you guys," I greeted them as I plopped down in the seat near my stuff.

  "Hi," Rachel greeted me with a bright smile.

  Travis, on the other hand, jerked his head up in a slight nod but refused to make eye contact. It was my first time seeing him since the incident at the house. He seemed embarrassed, but I was relieved. He didn't look intoxicated. He looked healthy. My worst fear had been that he'd keep drinking after his relapse.

  We'd barely been a couple weeks into the semester when we'd exchanged sob stories from our pasts. I'd skipped over some of the finer details when talking about myself, but Travis had delved right into even the most troubling parts of his own story. I knew all about how Travis had almost drank himself to death in high school.

  When I'd walked Matty and Rachel out they'd told me they'd run into him by accident. They'd gone out to eat at a restaurant near campus and had seen him at the bar. Apparently, he'd been hanging over the counter in an attempt to pour his own drink after the bartender had cut him off. They'd cut their date short to make sure he got home safely. They two of them didn't realize the extent of what they'd done, but I did. The idea that Travis was being so careless with his own life after all he'd done to make something of himself was so frustrating. Things might have turned out much different if Matty hadn't recognized him as one of my other good friends.

  Carter's shadow fell over the table. "Travis? What's up, man." The two of them did some complicated handshake thing that I didn't understand. It was nice to see that the two of them had forged a friendship.

  Matty was the one that answered, "Travis had some ideas about making my game more marketable."

  Travis slid further down in his seat. It seemed pretty obvious that he didn't want the attention on him. Despite how upset I still was with him, I felt a motherly instinct to protect him.

  "Did you get a chance to make those changes from last week?" I asked.

  Matty's face lit up. "Yeah, I got some help from those new guys you introduced me to from the programming department. They showed me how to fix the code so it would stop glitching during the origin scene. You can officially now play the game in Good or Evil mode."

  "Fight monsters... or be them," I projected in my best announcer voice. It was the slogan we'd jokingly given his game after the collective decision was made to add a mode where you could play from the perspective of a villain instead of a hero.

  As Matty continued describing the most recent changes to me, I did my best to ignore how close Carter was. He'd slid his chair over to be as close to me as humanly possible. His fingertips kept brushing my knee, but I didn't have the heart to stop him. I loved the casual way he touched me when we were sitting together. The little things like that were exactly why I liked him. Liked, not loved.

  Being in love was not an option.

  "What are you doing later?" Carter asked me when the conversation lulled. "We're doing an early workout this afternoon, and then I was hoping maybe I could take you to dinner tonight."

  I stared down at my fingernails as if I was examining them. Carter didn't know about my standing Monday night dinners. It had never come up before, so I'd never felt compelled to mention it. I didn't feel particularly interested in getting into it with other people around, either.

  Matty knew about my arrangement with my dad, but neither Travis nor Rachel did. And Carter obviously didn't, either. Eventually, I would have to bite the bullet and tell all of them, but I wasn't in the mood to sit around spilling my guts to them all at the same time. I'd already said enough uncomfortable things for one day.

  "Sorry," I told him, "I can't actually. I've got plans." I scratched a few illegible notes into my notebook, trying to make myself look busy. I tilted the notebook away from him so that he wouldn't see my gibberish.

  "What kind of plans?" Carter asked.

  "I have a dinner thing," I answered vaguely.

  I chanced a glance at him, and his lips were turned down in a harsh frown. He was eyeing me skeptically. He kept staring at me like I would elaborate, but I had no plans to. My eyes wandered to the rest of the table instead. Travis was still refusing to make eye contact with me. Rachel and Matty were exchanging a concerned look between themselves.

  I was being awkward. Everyone could see it, but no one seemed to want to call me on it.

  "So, anyway," I trailed off, gathering my things and rising to my feet. "Bye, everyone."

  Carter reached for my arm but I side-stepped him. Frustrated, he asked, "Where are you going?"

  "My shift is over. I really need to go back to the dorms and get some laundry done. I'll talk to you later, okay?"

  I pivoted and walked away, forcing myself not to look like I was rushing. I'd known the chance of Carter actually letting me get away with that little move was slim to none, so I wasn't surprised when he easily caught up to me. He fell into step beside me, quietly at first.

  Then, "Is this about what you said earlier? Is that why you're trying to run off and avoid spending more time with me?" His concern was so genuine but made me feel defensive. A therapist would have been able to have a field day with me at that particular moment.

  I responded with a resounding, "No."

  "I don't understand what's wrong." I kept walking. He tried again, "Can we just talk about whatever this is?"

  "This isn't anything. I don't know what you mean," I told him, doing my best to disguise the slight wobble I could hear betraying me from my own voice.

  He grabbed my arm, pulling me to a stop before I could step onto the departing elevator. I watched the doors close without me. The small waiting area was clear of other people. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that no one else was around to witness my bratty attitude. I just couldn't seem to help myself.

  "Look at me," Carter demanded.

  Guiltily, I looked up at him from under my eyelashes. He didn't look mad. He looked worried. He stretched out his arm so that he could fidget with a strand of my hair. It was another little move that had become like second-nature to him when he was around me. He'd always touched my hair every chance he got, even before I'd admitted to liking him. Mindless touching was my ultimate weakness in a relationship.

  His voice was softer when he said, "I just want to make sure you're okay."

  I took a deep breath in and held it for a long moment, only letting it out when I felt somewhat calmed. I stepped in, letting his arms come up to surround me. I liked when he held me like that. His cheek came down to rest on the top of my head. I breathed in the masculine scent of him. The scent was another comfort all its own.

  "I'm just being stupid," I mumbled into the safe wall of his massive chest.

  "Never," he fiercely defended me against myself. "Now, will you at least tell me if the two of us are okay?"

  "We're okay," I answered in the best
serious tone I could muster. His body instantly relaxed against me, so badly he wanted to believe it. I wasn't all that sure we were okay, but I hoped saying it would help me believe it, too.

  21

  Carter

  Weight training was one of those things that I wouldn't miss about playing football when the day came for me to hang up my cleats. I enjoyed the workouts, and I like that it helped keep me in such good shape. I just didn't like having to be trapped in a concrete box with several dozen other guys as we all sweated out bodily toxins and life's frustrations. No, I much preferred the quiet solo workouts that I was able to get in when the weight room was gloriously empty.

  Travis and I were partnered up for the day like usual. Before, it had been because of our common team position. Now, we'd sort of become friends. It made it easier for us to be partners. We even talked some, though I went out of my way not to bring up how he'd come home drunk.

  We were doing the manly thing of not talking about it, but I was pretty sure that sooner or later we wouldn't be able to avoid the topic anymore. Even though he was only a year younger than me, he was still like a kid in my eyes. I felt an obligation to help look out for him, despite how awkward it made me feel.

  My friendship with him was actually in better shape than his friendship with poor Wren was. I was pretty sure he was trying to mostly avoid her altogether. It hadn't escaped my notice that he hadn't said a word to her that morning while we'd all been in the library together.

  "Bench press is open in the corner. Ready to switch?" Travis asked.

  I nodded, ditching the free weights I'd been wielding while we waited for a free spot to grab. The back corner happened to be my favorite. There were no mirrors visible back there, which meant I didn't have to stare or be stared at by teammates in the middle of their own workouts. Weight training was notoriously competitive, even between those of us that played opposite positions on the field. I didn't feel the least bit threatened by a linebacker's position on the team, but you better believe I'd be keeping an eye on the size of his weights. I figured it was an ego thing. Most of us had come out of good high school programs where we were used to winning and being top dog. We liked to relive that feeling whenever possible.