Chapter 11
“Sorry to ambush you. I know you said you were okay. But I thought, I don’t know, who would turn down hand-delivered pizza from Bonetti’s?”
“Nobody would,” Chloe said, taking the two boxes from Logan and putting them on our coffee table. “Why would she not be okay?” she asked, looking between the two of us.
Logan deferred to me, allowing me to tell—or not tell—Chloe what I wanted.
“Shitty day, is all,” I said, thankful that I’d brought the flowers he’d sent into my room.
“That sucks. But how would he—”
“I brought enough for all of you, but had to guess on toppings. Hope nobody’s vegan or gluten free or anything.
But one half of one is just cheese to be safe,” Logan said.
He swung a grocery bag that he’d been holding under the boxes.
“And I took a chance on Diet Coke.” He unearthed two large bottles of pop.
“Thanks so much, Logan,” I said. “And you two obviously remember each other from the party at your place?”
Although they’d shared the elevator ride up, it was clear they hadn’t talked much. “Um, not really,” she said. “I mean, I remember he was who you… got to know better. But I guess I didn’t catch your name.”
Right. It was Emily I’d shared the details with after we got home. Chloe and Abby had retreated to their room, Abby still not feeling well. The next night we’d gone to a different party, and by then Logan had been long forgotten by Chloe.
But not by me.
And obviously I had not been forgotten by Logan Fields.
Chloe grabbed paper plates, utensils, napkins, and cups. Abby and Emily came in then, and I was able to do actual introductions between Logan and my suitemates. Emily, knowing more of the story, caught my eye at one point and did a tiny chef’s-kiss thing with her fingers to her mouth.
He was mouthwatering, I’d give her that.
We talked about typical stuff while we ate the pizza.
At one point, Logan dropped a piece of sausage on his chest while delivering a bite to his mouth.
Wiping at the grease stain on his tee, he said, “I need to do, like, occupational therapy or something. Every shirt I own has a stain right here. It’s weird. ”
I looked down at my mom’s shirt and felt a jolt of panic.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I quickly left the main room, went to my bedroom, and put on a fresh tee shirt, placing my mom’s not back in the suitcase, but hanging in my closet.
It was sticking out, but I didn’t take the time to separate the packed space and make room for it.
“Did you just change your shirt?” Chloe asked when I returned moments later. “Because Logan can’t balance a piece of sausage?”
We all laughed, but only now was the panic in me subsiding. “Kind of. This shirt can be pizza-ready. Just in case.”
“But it looked like the one you had on was worse. Rattier,” Abby said. She was just making an observation, didn’t really care about my attire, pizza-proof or no. But I found I didn’t want to share the protective instinct that had just come out in me over a thirty-year-old Bribury tee.
Logan studied me, but only continued to eat pizza. Conversation turned to Chloe asking about the hockey team, and then asking if she could shoot a video of us with Logan in it. “You’re not breaking any team rule to be here or anything, right?”
“Nope. Go for it,” Logan said, looking at me as if for confirmation.
“It’s fine,” I said. Emily and Abby agreed, and Chloe pulled her phone out (I was sure it hadn’t been further than a quick grasp away) and shot us all eating, with a close-up of the pizza with the Bonetti’s name on the box, and even caught Logan dropping another piece of topping on himself.
She did on-the-fly commentary about us and Logan and the hockey season coming up (perfectly paraphrasing all Logan had been talking about as we ate), and I knew that it was a live post.
“Pizza, bitches!”
We all held up our slices like we were making a toast. It felt lame, but the pizza was good, so what did I care?
“Tagging, okay?” Chloe asked, her last piece of pizza congealing on her plate as she tapped and swiped.
“Fine,” Emily said. Abby and I both nodded.
Chloe looked expectantly at Logan. “Yeah, that’s cool,” he said.
“What’s your Insta and TikTok handles?”
He told her, and I mentally stored them away to cyberstalk him later. I was surprised it had taken me this long, honestly.
We cleared up our trash and Emily declared she was going to head to the library for a while. Her look was pointed, and I knew I’d have our room to myself for as long as I needed.
Did I need it?
I did.
“Can you stay for a while? Or do you need to get to a team meeting or study or anything?”
“I’m good to stay, if you want me to,” Logan said.
“I do. Let’s go to my room so Chloe and Abby can have this room if they need it.”
He followed me in, and I shut the door behind us.
I watched him looking around the room, the two sides different, but equally decorated and tidy.
Desks, beds, dressers—basic-issue for college freshmen.
Personal touches on the walls, different aesthetics in bedding choices, but Emily and I had texted over the summer about color coordination once we had our room assignments, so that it was all individual, but also cohesive. We’d gone with navy blue and khaki.
He crossed to my side of the room. “Your side?”
I nodded, not asking how he knew, but pleased that he did.
Then I saw the picture of my family on the desk and solved that mystery.
He sat on my bed, but still looked at the picture where it sat a few feet away.
I crossed to sit beside him on the bed. Not quite touching, but it would only take a lean from either one of us to make that happen.
His eyes swept from the photo to the bouquet of roses that was also on my desk.
A deep sigh escaped him and he scooched back on the bed so his back was against the wall and his feet were dangling off the side.
He kicked off his shoes. I followed suit, kicking off my flip-flops and bringing my knees up to my chest as I moved to lean against the wall too.
“Did you talk with your family after we texted?” he asked. I nodded. “How’d that go?”
“Okay. It was good I called. I’d have felt even worse about forgetting if I hadn’t talked to them at all today. But they seem to be doing okay with the anniversary part of it all.”
“That’s good,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Feel like talking about it? Not necessarily that call, but your mom?” he asked. He was looking forward, not at me, and I found it was a little easier this way.
“Not sure what to say,” I said.
He shrugged, and I smelled the fresh scent of him just like I had during Grief Group. Straight from Practice should be the name of a cologne. I’d buy it for every guy I knew.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
I wasn’t sure where to begin. Or end. Some he knew from group. So I started with why I was here.
“She went to Bribury. That’s how I even knew about it. She wanted me to come here so bad. Said it was the best time of her life.”
“Apart from being your mom, I’m guessing.”
I laughed. “Apart from that. Or maybe including that. She really talked Bribury up.”
“Was that her Bribury shirt you had on earlier?” he asked.
It touched me that he’d realized something that none of my roommates had. He had inside knowledge on that front, but still. “Yes. Your sausage stain scared me out of it.” We both laughed a little at that.
“Did she meet your dad here?”
I shook my head, and some of my curls landed on the sleeve of his sweatshirt that he’d donned after we ate. I went to scoop them off, but liked the look of it so stopped my motion. He didn’t flick the tresses away either.
“No. They met a few months after she finished. In Nebraska, where she was from originally. She always said that it was ironic that she’d left the Midwest to be on the East Coast, went to school here, loved it.
Thought she’d end up in New York or D.C.
, then went home to Nebraska after graduation to just start sending out résumés, met my dad, and ended up back in the same place she started. ”
“That’s kinda crazy,” Logan said.
“Right? She said sometimes she thought she just imagined Bribury. I thought that was funny at the time…”
“But now?” he asked, sensing the change of my opinion on that statement.
“Now? I don’t know. Sad, I guess. That the life she thought she’d have when she was at this school. In this dorm—which is crazy in its own right—was not at all the life she ended up with.”
“Sure. But that’s probably going to be true of most of us here, right?”
I leaned my head back against the wall. He was right, of course. “Yeah. True.”
“And that’s okay. I mean, what do you think your life is going to play out like? Sitting right here, today?”
“God, who knows. Does anybody really know?”
He reached across his body to his opposite arm, where my hair still rested on his sleeve.
Wrapping a finger into the curls that lay there, he shook his head.
“I don’t. That’s for sure. But people probably think that they do.
Guys on the team do, but it always involves hockey, so most of them are probably being totally unrealistic. ”
“Like going pro, you mean?”
“That, sure. Bribury has a good program, and we compete, but not many of our guys are at future NHL level. But, like, playing in the minors as long as they can. Coaching. Anything to stay in the game.”
“And do you think that about yourself?”
He pulled his finger out of my corkscrew curl and watched as it sprang back into formation.
I had a love/hate relationship with my hair and at times would spend way too long trying to straighten it, but I was mesmerized watching Logan wind his finger through my curls only to release them and start again.
“So soft,” he said so quietly that I wasn’t sure I’d made out the words correctly. “I guess I did think hockey would be in my future in some way. Before, anyway,” he said.