13. nick
NICK
KNOCK MY HELMET OFF
It’d been sixteen hours since I’d seen Tallulah.
In the Everett Center’s locker room, I dug my phone out of my bag, checking the text messages that I knew hadn’t changed.
me
Did you get home okay
Tallulah
Yes
me
Did you sleep okay?
After last night i just want to say sorry
Can we talk?
Tallulah can we talk please
Are you okay??
Tallulah please talk to me
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. Every couple of hours, I texted her. She never responded. I knew she was ignoring me. Tallulah had a perfect internal clock, she always woke up early. Why was she avoiding my messages?
Why couldn’t she text me back?
Especially after she left my house in tears.
I hung my arm over the top of my stall, trying to convince myself not to ditch practice to go after Tallulah, to make sure she was okay.
“Kurosawa!” Gordo shouted. “On the ice in ten!”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I gave him a half-hearted wave and sank into the bench, my phone to my ear. It went to a chipper voicemail all too soon, so different from how miserable she’d been last night.
“Tallulah?” I hung my head, headache pounding behind my eyes. “Can you tell me if you’re okay? Please?” I checked the time. “If you don’t hit me up in an hour, I’m coming to the Village. I’ll find you myself.”
What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to fix this? Having a ‘dialogue’ or whatever Fridge called them, those mushy, over the top conversations, had never been my strong suit. I never cared, I never gave a shit, never had to.
In most cases, I could roll with the punches and crack a joke, but this? I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do for her.
Fuck me. I did know someone who did.
I had seven minutes until drills, which meant seven minutes for a call that I’d undoubtedly regret.
Montoya was mystified when he answered. “I think you called the wrong person, Nick—”
“I wish. I need to talk to you.”
“Oh. Uhhh, why?”
“You’ve gotten to know Tallulah…”
“Yeah, the girls invite me to a lot of lunches.”
“And?”
“And?”
“I’m not confirming or denying anything,” I told him, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “This is off-the-record, confidential shit.” I groaned. “What does Tallulah like?”
I could almost hear his puzzled shrug over the phone, his baby face screwed up in confusion. “Tallulah’s favorite color is yellow? She likes reading? Like reading everything, she’s not picky about the genre. She gets good grades?”
“I can’t use any of this. Come up with something better.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“What am I paying you for?”
He was confused. “You’re not paying me at all—”
“Montoya. What does she do with the girls? When they—” I frowned, trying to think of what a dozen college girls would be up to. “When they do…whatever it is they do.”
“Tallulah’s quiet when she hangs out with everybody. I think she’s afraid to say something wrong because she thinks the girls don’t like her.”
I straightened up, protectiveness surging through me. “The girls don’t like her?”
“I didn’t say that. I said Tallulah thinks that.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Well, you know…Tallulah has anxiety…”
“So what?” I scoffed. “The girls have to tell her that—”
“No, Nick. Anxiety, anxiety.”
I frowned. “What about it?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Montoya said quietly.
“How does it work?”
“You could tell Tallulah a hundred times that she’s welcome to hang out, she won’t believe it. I think my mom said anxiety is, like, you’re constantly in fight or flight mode? So Tallulah’s nervous system is waiting to panic.”
I blinked. “That sounds fucking exhausting.”
“Yeah.”
“So what do I do? How do I stop it and make her see that she doesn’t need to think like that? How do I fix it?”
“You can’t, Nick. You just have to…reaffirm a lot. You have to make sure that her nervous system knows she doesn’t have to panic and do panicky stuff.”
I stared at the cracked tiles of the floor, thinking about the ‘panicky stuff’ that kind of defined Tallulah.
The house party. Or Tallulah, thrusting the bucket list in my hand, her racing to the door, almost crashing into everybody.
Or the thousand apologies that poured out of her at any given moment.
And yesterday. When Tallulah found out Fridge immediately slept with other people, it was horrible. Her nervous system must’ve taken that as a reason for Tallulah to dip. That’s why she was ignoring me.
My stomach clenched. Tallulah was giving me anxiety by osmosis.
“Thanks, Montoya,” I finally said.
“No pro—” Montoya started to say before I cut off the call and stashed my phone in my bag.
If Tallulah’s anxiety spiraled with questions, then I’d have to be the person who reassured and soothed her. We needed to have a real conversation about this. Get her anxieties out in the open so I could understand what I was working with. No doubt, she was as miserable as I was right now.
One hour and I’d go on a trek to find Tallulah. One hour.
Stomach sinking, I made it to the ice, gliding on my skates to Gordo. I was ready to begin drills. Ready for this to be over with.
The thoughts circling my brain stopped when a voice rang over the rink.
“Nick!”
I jerked back, scraping up the ice. “Tallulah?”
My teammates burst into laughter, lit up with comments about how the ice cream girl was taking time from her busy schedule of ignoring me to visit the Everett Center. I didn’t care.
In a flash, I was at the bench to see her. I’d been expecting a tear-streaked face, last night’s wrinkled clothes. I thought she’d be as fucked-up as I was.
No. That was wrong.
Tallulah was in a new sweater, her hair pulled back with a pretty cloud-print hairband. She looked incredible and incredibly put together.
“You didn’t text me,” left my mouth before I could stop it. I unclipped my helmet. “Why didn’t you text me back?”
Tallulah waved that away. “My phone was off.”
“I called, you didn’t answer, what was I supposed to think?”
“I’m here now and I need to talk to you—”
“You gave me a heart attack—”
“Nick.” She searched my face. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“February—when you told me not to come to the championship game. Why’d you do it?”
I froze, remembering that day way too vividly.
I’d spent the afternoon gaming in Denali and Elijah’s dorm when Tallulah walked in with some of the girls.
I’d overheard Tallulah in the kitchen. She wondered if she could go to our championship game to show support.
It was after her breakup with Fridge, she didn’t know if it was okay.
The girls were quick with their answers—of course she could come.
They promised to ask our coach if we could spare a seat on the bus.
I quit gaming with the guys early and waited for Tallulah in the lobby. When she came downstairs, alone, I stopped her before she could reach the doors. It was the first time I’d spoken to her in months, and I told her she couldn’t come to the championship game.
The look on her face, the way she flinched away from me…
One of the worst days of my life.
I swallowed. “Nobody really knows that Fridge is…” I struggled with what to say. Sleeping around? Being a fuckboy? I shook my head. “After the championship game, I knew he’d…want to celebrate, and I didn’t want you to see…”
Fridge had been very careful to keep his activities exclusively off campus.
He didn’t want the guys on our team to see him like that, he didn’t want the jokes to start, and he didn’t want things to get back to Tallulah.
Celebrating after the championship game would be different for him, I knew that, and I didn’t want Tallulah to get hurt.
She studied me, nodding slowly. “You’re my pick.”
“Your pick?”
“I’m not going to be the person who wallows and sits down and lets this summer fly by,” she insisted, her voice sharper than I’d ever heard it. “I refuse to be that person anymore!”
“What?”
“I want to do very specific things. There’s no better time than now! I’m in an entirely different country where I only know one other person—nobody here knows me!”
I frowned, concerned. “You’re talking really fast.”
“Whatever I do has basically no consequences!”
“Tallulah—?”
Tallulah grabbed me by the jersey and yanked me down. It was so quick, I stumbled on my skates, and she crashed her lips against mine.
Holy fuck.
My teammates roared in approval, laughing even harder, while I stared at her. I stared at her because I was so fucking shocked that she kissed me in front of everybody—I didn’t even have the time to close my eyes.
My hands went to her waist, her hips. I molded her against me, tugging her closer for a better kiss. Electricity delivered shocks directly to my brain. I was lightheaded, kissing her deeper, squeezing her tighter.
Tallulah pulled away, gasping for breath. “We both need to get tested—”
“Holy fuck,” I mumbled.
“I have rules for this,” she continued. “I wrote it on a piece of paper—”
“Fuck,” I said again.
“I’m going to need a—a couple of days to emotionally process this,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’m quite there yet—?”
“Holy fuck.”
“I don’t want oral sex involved—”
“What?”
“It’s—it’s complicated, we’ll discuss it.” Tallulah backed away way too soon, turning to walk away, still talking. “We’re going to have a lot of sex.”
“I—okay, yeah.” I nodded, numb, wondering if this was a dream or some porno fantasy my sleep-addled brain had slipped into. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“Kurosawa!” my captain shouted. “On the ice!”
I didn’t step back until Tallulah was out of immediate sight, disappearing around the boards. I got on the ice to keep looking at her, to follow her retreating figure.
“I’ll be in contact!” Tallulah squeaked like we’d finished a business meeting.
I waved a glove, unblinking.
Another teammate clapped me on the shoulder. “Kurosawa, who’s that?”
“My future girlfriend,” I managed.
“You? Future girlfriend?” He snorted, bringing me to the net. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
My mind was slow to comprehend what happened and I smacked the puck once, twice, three times before the words settled in. Tallulah said no oral sex—that was fine. I’d hung out with plenty of girls who didn’t do blowjobs.
So why didn’t she just say no blowjobs?
I straightened up, my skates coming to a hard stop.
What did Tallulah mean? No eating pussy?
“No,” I muttered. “There’s no way.”
Why would Tallulah have a rule against that?