God, I feel sick.
He nods, understanding where I’m going. “Right.”
I wait for him to set the record straight on that fact, but he doesn’t. I guess he already said he’s not dating anyone, and that’s good enough for now.
“I looked you up in the beginning too. I mean, you gave me no choice in the matter, really. You gave Lele a wrong number. I tried to call you after I left.”
I can’t meet his eyes. “I thought it was for the best then.”
“And now?”
I scrunch my brows, trying to figure out what he means.
“What do you want now, Birdie? You want me to disappear again?”
I don’t respond one way or the other because truthfully, I don’t know. I’ve survived this long without him, so maybe that’s a sign that I shouldn’t go back down this road.
No!
C’mon!
Are you aiming to merely survive?
I’m so desperate for more, I wrap my arm around my stomach to keep from tumbling headfirst into Ben and demanding he remind me of what it used to feel like between us, back when I had something in life to look forward to.
For so long, I’ve deluded myself into thinking I should be solely focused on school. I could easily spend my entire life inside the Cahill Center, and the faculty and staff would applaud me for it.
Push him away.
Leave now. Just like last time.
Instead, my lips press together.
I have no idea how he interprets my silence before he continues, determined, “Come to my game tomorrow night. Lele will be there. She wants to see you.”
Now I know he’s just being nice. I don’t know why Leanna would want to see me. She must know by now that I gave her a wrong number before she left town. I hated myself for doing that, but it seemed inevitable. I knew she was going to pass it along to Ben. I knew a continued friendship with her would be a continued friendship with them all, and how was I supposed to deal with that? I needed a clean break, so that’s what I made for myself.
He stands and takes a lanyard out of his back pocket. Dangling at the bottom, there’s a plastic sleeve covering a special gold-leafed badge.
“For the private box,” he says, handing it over to me.
I take it, but still, I tell him, “You should give it to someone else.”
A beat passes—too long, and I lift my head only to realize he was waiting for me to muster up the courage to look at him.
“There’s no one else,” he says, meeting my gaze with brown eyes so warm I melt into them.
The courtyard doors open, and I turn to see the huge man from earlier standing in the doorway, the man I now realize must be Ben’s security guard. It makes sense. He’s slightly older, wearing that tidy all-black suit. He’s got an earpiece, and I suspect the discreet bulge on his right hip is a gun.
“Tomorrow,” Ben says before walking away, but I make no promises.
I sit on that bench, staring down at the badge, ignoring my lunch until it’s time for me to head back into Cahill. I keep my encounter with Ben a secret from my friends. It isn’t completely intentional. At first, I was in a daze when I arrived back at our shared office. I didn’t know quite where to start, how to condense everything into manageable bites without overwhelming them. Then, the opportunity just passed—we had to get to work and I had assignments to grade and post before the end of the day. I tucked the lanyard and badge into the bottom of my book bag and mostly forgot about it until later that night.
Tomorrow, Ryan, Kayla, and Julia will all leave town for spring break. Ryan’s road-tripping to Portland for a friend’s wedding and somehow convinced Julia to go with him, strictly as friends, but come on. Kayla is headed home to see her parents in San Diego. I was planning to spend the next ten days in my office, hunched over my desk, trudging forward. I convinced myself I was lucky to have so much undivided time to work on my thesis. No matter that I’m already way ahead compared to my peers, or that Professor Olmsted forbade me from reaching out to her via email or text over the week under the guise that it would convince me to leave my office. I think her exact words were, “Go! Get out of here! Take a few days off, for Pete’s sake!”
“Oh my god, where is that green Revolve dress I wore last week?” Kayla asks, rifling through a pile of clothes on her bed.
This is a near-daily occurrence. Her side of the room is always so messy it’s a wonder she ever finds anything.
“Here!” she says, yanking a green sock out of the bottom of the pile. “No. Dammit.”