Spiked

“What’s it about?” Jacob asked, grabbing the wall to balance himself as he slid on a pair of sandals.

“I think he wants to try Adams out this Saturday,” Greene said. I saw Jacob’s jaw tighten, and from the way the other players shifted, I knew that this was a big deal—and recalled that Adams was the other quarterback on the team. It hardly seemed like that big a deal to me. So what if some other guy got to play in a game?

“Come on, man!” one of the guys in the pack urged, and Jacob grabbed his keys and hurried for the door.

“Let yourself out whenever!” he called over his shoulder without even meeting my eyes, moments before the door slammed shut.

I sat there, stunned. In his bed. Where I’d lost my virginity to him. Where he’d taken me, but never another girl. Where I’d allowed myself to think for a tiny, tiny moment, that given how hard he’d pursued me, that he’d left the party for me, that he’d taken me to the pool and here, that maybe I wasn’t another one of Jacob Everett’s many conquests.

I took a few long, deep breaths, willing myself not to cry. I’d wanted for Jacob Everett to fuck me, and he had— I hadn’t gone into it wanting a relationship with him, exactly. What was I so upset about? Hell, if anything, I’d gotten to be the first girl in his bedroom.

Probably the first of many, now that he’s done it, a voice in my head— that sounded annoyingly like Piper’s voice— said.

After all that, after everything, after the way he’d made me feel— the way I made him feel— it’d just been a one night stand.

Whatever. You’ve got class, and you don’t have time for a relationship anyway. Who cares? I scolded myself, and rose to find my clothes.

11

There were worse things, I decided in the end, than being one of Jacob Everett’s one-night-stands. A week and a half later, there was no denying that that’s what I was. Jacob hadn’t called— how could he, when he’d never asked for my number, or I for his? He hadn’t come by my class again, hadn’t sent one of the freshman minions to my door with a singing telegram. He’d simply vanished. Once he’d finally convinced me to pay attention to him, he’d moved on.

Piper and Kiersten had seemed to buy the story I’d told them after sneaking back into the dorm the morning after my date with Jacob. They’d been asleep, and never realized that I’d been out the whole night. When we saw each other, I played it off as though Jacob had in fact snubbed me at the bar, without really having to truly lie. Just talking about the way it had gone in the first few minutes was enough to comfort them with the idea that Jacob had rejected me as easily as they’d anticipated he would.

Since then, tensions in the suite had eased.

It hurt that in a way Jacob had snubbed me in the end, but yes, there were worse things. I shook it off each morning and focused on my classes, papers, essays, on a new obsessive-compulsive type of journaling system that was so fussy it was the perfect thing to launch myself into whenever thoughts of Jacob sprang up.

Besides, how was I going to graduate in three years if I got distracted by a guy?

There was, however, one part of Jacob Everett that I couldn’t shake— the football part. Football was such a way of life at Harton that there was no use avoiding it. Enormous posters of Jacob and the other star players in the student center. Football schedules plastered across the study cubicles. Professional photos of the marching band’s majorette line, standing in the stadium, plastered in every local bar (the majorettes were, apparently, considered the real hotties of the football field, sorry cheerleaders).

So I decided to lean into the whole thing.

Piper and Kiersten even invited me out with them to a local bar a few weeks later to watch the game. It was packed when they got there, but the three of us managed to wedge into seats beside some girls Kiersten was friendly with.

“Who are they playing?” I asked, trying not to feel too claustrophobic in the tight space.

“Who are we playing, Sasha. And it’s North Carolina,” Piper said. She still hadn’t entirely forgiven me for everything with Jacob, but it wasn’t quite as bad, these days. A perk, I reminded myself, to things with him fizzling out so quickly.

“Got it. North Carolina,” I said, nodding. The cameras peered down on the field via sweeping overhead shots and the bar began to buzz with excitement, conversations about stats and yards earned and other terms I didn’t understand swirling around me. The lineup was announced; when Jacob’s name came up, the bar cheered— me included, since staying silent would probably have gotten me thrown out.