I was on the couch with Jaci, drinking hot chocolate, listening to Matt get it with both barrels and trying not to smile when he stalked out of the kitchen. He flopped down hard beside me on the couch.
“They like you better,” he mumbled.
“That’s because Vince didn’t make Mama cry last year,” she said pointedly, with her patented eyebrow lift. Jaci had it down to a science, and at seventeen she was just brimming with sarcasm.
He rolled his eyes, and I jabbed him in the arm with my elbow. His grunt made me smile.
We had to head out early the day after Christmas, because I had to work that night and so did Matt. It seemed like there was only us on the road in Matt’s same battered Toyota Corolla, which was somehow still running. Since we took turns driving, I was able to check my email, and lo and behold there was a message in there from Carson.
The note was not from his email, but the test results were indeed his, showing me beyond a shadow of a doubt that truly, Carson Cress was disease-free. His word was apparently good; he’d done what he’d said he would, even if the whole thing meant nothing. To have shared something amazing with someone special was one thing, but to trivialize the encounter with silence afterward––I didn’t even get a “Merry Christmas”—stripped all the magic away, leaving behind only a mistake in the heat of passion. I was devastated, and I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be as callous as he was, as cool as he was, taking the whole experience for what it was: a hot night and a fantasy come true.
I moved from hurt to anger and finally landed on disgust. And it wasn’t him who came off bad in the scenario, but me. I was the idiot; I was the one who missed the player under layers of fake sincerity and false flattery. There actually was a sucker born every minute—I had just never seen myself as one. How stupid could I be?
By the time Friday rolled around, I was better. I was, as usual, working. Matt and I were back in sync, falling into old patterns. We were arranging our trip home for New Year’s to be with his folks, and I was planning what I was going to do on Sunday, which I had off. Matt didn’t understand why I didn’t have another Saturday off, and I had to explain, again, since he hadn’t listened the first time, that the only reason I had the previous Saturday off was because I’d worked fourteen days in a row and asked for it a month in advance. It had been for Kurt’s birthday, nothing else. Having any weekend day off was an anomaly.
“Aren’t you gonna drive to the game with me and the guys?” he’d asked.
“I have to work tomorrow,” I told him for the tenth time, “from three to eleven. My clone can’t cover my shift, so I have to be there.”
“Yeah, but Cress is playing in Sun Devil Stadium in Arizona. Didn’t he ask you to go?”
That was the extent of what I’d shared with Matt. “He was just paying me back for the poster thing. I doubt he’ll even realize if I’m there or not.”
My best friend had not looked all that convinced.
So Matt was gone—along with what remained of the student body who had not gone home for winter break. Campus, and everything close to it, resembled a ghost town.
Work was dead. We ran everything in three hours, cleaned, and then resorted to a rubber band fight that degraded further into a rubber band ball fight. Office chair races were hard to do on carpet, and all the porn sites were blocked on the computers.
I let everyone go home since I was the only one who couldn’t bail and worked the last two hours alone. At ten forty-five, I had all the money counted and everything shut down five minutes after I closed. I was already walking to the Pink Lady—so named because the felt on all their pool tables was fuchsia—to meet some people from the other store. When my phone rang, I answered as soon as I saw that it was Matt.
“Hey, how was the—”
“Did you see it?”
“See what? Did we win? Is Cress gonna be drafted to the pros before he even has time to graduate or—”
“Oh God, Vince, it was horrible.”
“What was?” I chuckled.
“You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
Long silence.
“Matt?”
“Oh God, Vin. I mean, I know you guys aren’t tight and he doesn’t mean shit to you like he does to me and all the other guys who used to love to watch him fucking play, but—”
“Used to?” My stomach dropped. “What’re you talking about? What the fuck happened?”
“Jesus Christ, Vin, I mean… he… God.”