-12-
KAYLA
A freshman’s feet landed hard on the mat, and the sound echoed in the cavernous fieldhouse. After we’d finished choreography, I’d sorted the squad into two lines to work on tumbling passes, and this was the first time the returning squad was getting a look at what the new kids could do.
“Nice,” I shouted over the music coming from the stereo. “Rachel, watch your landing.”
Lisa raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she likes blowing out her knees.”
I shot Lisa a look that said she needed to keep her comments to herself. I’d hoped once our practices began, her attitude would improve, but no such luck. If Lisa kept pushing the line with me, I’d pull her aside with Samantha, our head coach, and have a chat about team unity.
The final pair of freshmen stepped off, and the two girls tumbled down the mat. Kelly had been all-state in gymnastics her senior year of high school, and it showed. Her full twisting layout at the end of the pass looked effortless.
“Water, Commandant?” one of the guys joked.
“What?” I fake scowled. “You had water yesterday.” I glanced at the clock. It was a good stopping point. “Okay, let’s take a quick break.”
I moved toward my water bottle and Lisa followed me like a bad shadow. She hovered around me as I drank. “Have you picked the travel squad yet?”
Was she serious? “No, but it’s only the second day of camp.”
She bristled. “I was talking to my boyfriend—he’s pre-med—about how great it would be, since I wasn’t selected as captain, to at least be on the travel squad.”
I gave her a plain look. “Message received, Lisa.”
“What?” She made a face. “I don’t know what you mean.” Although she so clearly did.
It only exaggerated the nagging headache I’d been battling all day. I fished a bottle of Advil out of my purse, popped two pills into my mouth, and swallowed them down.
Lisa bent and picked something up off the ground beside my purse. She stared at the white napkin in her hand, reading the handwritten name and numbers on it—
Crap!
I nearly spit out my water. I’d left the napkin with Jay’s info on it in my purse, unable to deal with it. It must have fallen out, and now it was in Lisa’s hand like a grenade with the pin pulled.
“Who’s Jay Harris?” she asked, her tone innocuous. She didn’t seem to recognize the name, thank God. I wanted to rip the napkin from her grip, but tried to play it cool. If I went after it too aggressively, it might tip her off.
“Nobody,” I said quickly, lying. Jay wasn’t a nobody. In fact, he’d dominated my thoughts every day since I’d left Biff’s more than a week ago. “He’s just some guy I met.”
“You call him?”
“No, I don’t think I’m going to.”
She nodded and strode toward the trashcan near the door, carrying the napkin with her.
Wait a minute, a voice inside me screamed. “What are you doing?”
She paused. “You said you weren’t going to call him.”
“I haven’t made up my mind.” My voice wavered. “It’s just, he’s—”
“Not pre-med?” Lisa nodded as if she understood completely. “I told you Brent is, right? I get it, no guy’s perfect. Well, mine is. I meant most other guys.”
She marched back to me and handed the napkin over. I stared at the black ink. He did seem perfect, other than the one flaw. Too bad that flaw was so big, it’d swallow me whole.
“Time’s almost up,” Lisa said.
“What?”
She pointed over my shoulder, and I turned to see the clock. “Break time’s almost up.”
“Oh, right,” I said, shoving the napkin inside my purse and pretending I wasn’t relieved to have it back.
While the incoming freshmen finished stacking the mats, a side door opened and a guy peeked in.
“Brent!” Lisa shrieked in delight. It was so loud, it couldn’t be anything other than a call for attention. She wanted everyone to know her boyfriend was here to pick her up after practice. He stepped inside as she hustled toward him. He was so slender, it looked like a strong breeze would knock him down, and as Lisa reached him and attacked him with her lips, she nearly did.
After she’d collected her stuff, he took her hand and pushed open the door for her.
Ugly jealousy flooded me. Despite her personality, Lisa had found a guy who liked spending time with her. Why couldn’t I? The napkin was burning a hole in my purse. I pulled it out and stared at the numbers.
After Chuck finished laughing at me about going into Biff’s, he told me I was being stupid about this. Since I had the maturity of a four-year-old, I immediately told him he was stupid. What was the point in talking to a guy who played for Michigan? We couldn’t date. We couldn’t even be friends.
“Hi!” Marcy answered on the second ring when I called.
“Hey. How was the honeymoon?”
“Awesome!” she said. “It rained and we both got seasick. We never left the cabin.”
“I think your definition of awesome is different than mine.”
She laughed. “I repeat, we never left the cabin, if you know what I’m saying.”
“Ah.”
“We had sex. Like, tons and tons of dirty, hot sex.”
I pretended to be dumb. “Thank you for explaining it to me.”
“Oh, great,” she said dryly. “Dave just opened our sixth party platter. We didn’t even register for one, let alone six. Don’t my friends know I hate people?” Her voice seemed to brighten. “Anyway, what’s up? How are you?”
“I’m okay.” The last cheerleader had left the fieldhouse, so I was all alone. I sat down on the stacked mats. “Hey, question for you about Dave’s friend, Jay. Anything about him I should know?”
“Uh . . . nope.”
“Okay, so he doesn’t go to Michigan? Or play tight end for them?”
She sounded like she was faking shock. “What? He does?”
“Marcy.”
“Okay, fine. You know what I want to tell you about him? He’s a great guy who goes to a good school. Maybe it happens to be the one you don’t like so much. Did you know he helped save the wedding?”
“What?”
“Jay left the wedding early to babysit Dave’s shithead cousin, who was plastered and started getting into it with my mom.”
I pressed my fingertips to my forehead, trying to massage away the headache that persisted. I didn’t want confirmation that Jay was a nice guy. He was supposed to be the enemy.
“How’d you find out?” she asked. “Dave wants to know.”
“I say this with love, Marcy. Your husband’s a dick.”
She snorted. “He has his moments.”
I told her the story about being blindsided at Biff’s, the diner, and then everything that happened in Jay’s sweltering backseat, but made her promise to edit the version she relayed to her new husband.
“Oh my God,” she gasped. “You left him with blue balls?”
“At least they match his school colors,” I said.
“You’re terrible,” she groaned. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I can’t hang out with a guy who plays for that team up North.”
“You are so one-track. Hope you like cats, spinster.”
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, forcing myself to ask. “Did he . . . I don’t know, mention me?”
I could hear her huge grin through the phone. “He did.” She made me wait a lifetime before elaborating. “Dave’s not allowed to give out Jay’s phone number, but you never said anything to me.”
My heart skipped. “You gave him my number? When?”
“Last night.”
Oh my God. Why the heck was I disappointed he hadn’t called?
Wait a minute. The text I’d received at ten o’clock last night from an unknown number made a lot more sense now. At the time, I’d written it off as a wrong number. I thought it had been a picture of a chicken drumstick made out of Play-Doh. It wasn’t.
It was probably tofurkey.
“Dave just unwrapped the wedding gift you gave us.” Marcy’s tone was pointed. “How thoughtful of you.”
I’d never understood why Dave was so anti-OSU before. He and Marcy had graduated from Ball State in Indiana. So, I’d sent them the 11x14 dish as a joke, mostly aimed at Dave. The Pyrex glass had our logo and the words “Ohio State Kick-asserole” frosted on the bottom. Knowing now that Dave’s close friend played for Michigan, I got it.
“I ordered you a real present off your registry,” I said. “Your coffee maker is on backorder. It’s supposed to arrive next week. Or maybe never. I’m reconsidering after what Dave did.”
“You know what? You can keep the coffee maker if you call Jay.”
“Come on, man. Fooling around with him in his back seat was crazy, but you know that’s as far as it can go with us.” Maybe he was a nice guy. He was definitely smart, and funny, and obviously into sports. But he was a Wolverine, full stop.
So, why couldn’t I stop thinking about him? Stupid lust. I flopped down backward on the mats, hoping if I lay still long enough, the feeling would pass. I just needed to flush him out of my system.
The thread of an idea developed. What if . . .
I’d been blindsided at Biff’s, caught with my defenses down. What would it be like if I saw him again, now that I knew the truth? Maybe he wouldn’t seem quite so funny, or smart, or even attractive. Perhaps this was the fastest way to get rid of the distraction that was Jay Harris.
“You realize he’s the first guy who’s seen all your OSU ‘crazy,’” Marcy said, “and it hasn’t scared him off.”
I launched myself upright to sit, pleased to have a plan of attack, even though it filled me with anxiety. “You know what? Fine. I’ll call him,” I said. “But when it ends in tears—his—I’ll blame you.”
Marcy laughed. “Yeah? I can live with that.”
Even after the decision had been made and I’d hung up, I struggled. I pulled up the text message, took a deep breath, and flung myself off the cliff into the murky waters of the unknown. Good God, I was about to willingly call a Michigan guy.
The phone rang.
And rang.
What if Jay didn’t pick up? Should I leave a message?
A male voice came on the line after the fourth ring, breathless as if he’d just made it before voicemail kicked in. “Hello?”
“Hi, is this Jay?” My voice was constricted by nerves.
“It is.” I couldn’t read his tone based off those two short words.
“It’s Kayla.” When there was a long pause, I added, “The crazy girl from Ohio State.”
“Believe me, I remember you.” He sounded warm and friendly, and I pictured him smiling. Just the image made me feel funny. I was already off to a bad start. He sounded like the guy I’d driven all the way to Toledo to see. “What are you up to?” he asked.
I rolled and unrolled the napkin in my hands. “Not much. We just finished our second day of cheerleading camp. How about you?”
It was noisy where he was, and I could hear music playing. “I’m in the weight room.”
“Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting you?”
There was a clank of metal hitting metal. “No, it’s good. I just finished my set.”
“Okay, cool. I got your text.”
“Good.”
I realized at that moment, I wasn’t sure what else I was going to say. Should I make a joke that I owed him one and “wouldn’t mind” giving him a hand job? The silence between us dragged, and I arrived with a screeching halt at the town of Awkwardsville, population: me.
“I was beginning to think,” he said, “the next time I’d talk to you would be in Ann Arbor in November.”
He was talking about The Game. It was Michigan’s year to host. I didn’t like traveling to the stadium nicknamed the Big House, but victory was extra sweet when we made them lose at home.
I swallowed a breath, and even though he couldn’t see me, I straightened my posture to mimic confidence. “I thought we could see each other before then.”
“Oh, yeah?” His voice was eager, and it had my heart skipping along. The music grew softer until it was gone, and it sounded like he was on the move. “What changed your mind?”
“Marcy,” I lied.
“I guess that serving platter I sent them is paying off already.”
I couldn’t hold back the smile. “When do you want to get together, and more importantly, where?”