Cause she’s the sea, Nate
Rory: Heard Fairfax gives legendary head.
The message appears before I see a single one of my teammates.
I stop outside the locker room and stare at my phone.
Leon: Which Fairfax?
Rory: The little one. Obviously.
Mason: Who on the team is getting there first?
Rory: Captain has home-court advantage.
Leon: Bro lives ten feet from her bedroom.
Mason: Monk season about to end.
Rory: Will gets first refusal by seniority.
Mason: Apparently she doesn’t do repeats. Better make the roster.
My thumb stills over the screen. I have laughed at worse things in this chat. Probably written worse things too. But today, I do not find this funny. Not even remotely.
The girl they’re currently talking about lives in the same house with me and I clearly do not need the mental image right now. Not when I’m sweaty from early gym, and my team just lost the last game one goal short.
Too late. The image enters my head without warning and now I’ve got a semi.
Captain patience. I remind myself. My father taught me nothing good comes from fury. So I’m really trying to practice some captaincy calm here.
Will: Enough. Stop putting her name in here.
Three dots appear immediately.
Rory: Captain claiming territory?
Will: No.
Will: Just stop.
Another pause.
Leon: So roster?
Leon’s such a little shit sometimes. Not sometimes. All the time. I remind myself of patience again while pushing through the locker-room door.
Will: You’re late.
“Cap, we’re not late.” Leon looks up from his phone as I enter. “You’re early.”
The answer comes from three different voices at once.
Of course I’m early.
I have already completed two lifting sets, watched part of yesterday’s game film and identified six separate reasons Leon should never have taken that final shot.
I drop my bag beside my locker.
“Where are Nate and DJ?” Leon asks me but I’m not exactly in the mood to answer.
“Nate’s on the way,” Mason answers for me. “Recovering from poetry club or some PJ party shits last night.”
That tracks.
“And DJ?”
Leon grins. “Probably doing cardio with—”
“Finish that sentence and you’re running until Thursday.” I warn. Again. Little shit.
Enough. DJ can arrive late once without the team collapsing into lawlessness.
I pull my jersey over my head. My chest is already damp from the weight room, which is a good way to begin a morning involving suicides.
“Stop with the messages,” I tell them. “DJ will kill all of you if he sees them.”
Leon snorts. “He’s not in the chat.”
“He doesn’t read the chats he is in,” Rory adds.
“He also doesn’t give a shit about gossip,” Mason says.
This is technically true.
The chat is not the official basketball thread. That one contains practice times, travel details and Coach’s increasingly aggressive reminders about hydration and macros.
This one began during my freshman year when a senior added half the team after an away game.
Nobody ever deleted it. Graduated players remained.
Friends from other teams appeared. Weekend plans turned into lunch photographs, film clips, complaints about professors and reports of whatever happened after midnight.
Girlfriends. Breakups. Phone numbers exchanged. Normal athlete bullshit.
That is what I have always called it.
“See what messages?” DJ’s voice cuts through the room from behind an open locker.
Jesus Christ.
The dude cannot locate a conversation happening directly above his own message, but apparently he has the hearing of a military animal and the movement patterns of a trained assassin.
Leon opens his mouth.
“The Fair—”
“Nothing,” I cut in. “Just stupid messages.”
DJ looks at me.
His expression barely changes, but I have known him long enough to recognise the question. I ignore it.
“Everyone ready for suicides?” I ask instead. “Coach plans to make you puke.”
The locker room erupts in complaints.
“Is he seriously making all of us pay for one missed shot?” Rory groans loudly.
“You missed an open shot.”
“The Akron guys were all over me.”
“You waited too long.”
“I had no angle.”
“You had two.”
Rory throws his hands up. “Easy for you to say.”
It is. I saw the opening before he did. That’s why I’m freaking captain and about to suffer with my team because of his mistake. But they already know that. I don’t explain things beyond what is needed.
DJ closes his locker. “You’re in a terrible mood, Will.”
He gives me the same flat look he always does when he thinks I am becoming unbearable but has decided friendship requires one line, followed by silence.
I lace my shoes tighter.
I never grew up dreaming about playing professionally.
I know how that sounds, so I do not say it aloud around the team. It was simply the thing I was good at.
Then I became very good at it.
Good enough for Princeton. Good enough for the starting lineup. Good enough that when the former captain graduated, Coach handed me the team and expected me to know what to do with it. And for the most part, I did.
My father built businesses by treating talent as useless unless it survived discipline. Show up early. Stay later. Correct the mistake before anyone has to point it out twice.
Also the captaincy has brought the competitiveness inside me to the surface in full force. Because yes. There is nothing I hate more than losing.
Coach blows his whistle from the court.
“Let’s move!” I shout.
“Cap, you look way too calm for someone who is about to puke excessively.” Leon claps my shoulder in passing.
————
I walk into the living room and find Nate and Maddy beneath the same blanket, watching a black-and-white film neither of them appears qualified to discuss.
Nate is staring solemnly at the television.
Maddy is staring at her phone, giggling at something on the screen. A second later, the sound explodes into a full-body laugh, and she collapses sideways against Nate, gripping his shoulder while she attempts to breathe into his sleeve.
Nate barely reacts. Clearly, this is the new normal of our house now.
“What are you watching?”
Maddy answers before Nate gets the chance. “No fucking idea. Something about two married people who refuse to say what they want, so they stare at each other beside trains.”
“Brief Encounter,” Nate corrects her. “It’s a classic, baby.”
“You’re not even a film major.” Maddy turns towards him, genuinely offended. “Why do you voluntarily watch educational movies when no tutor is threatening your grades?”
“I’m still an Arts student.” Nate points at the screen. “This is yearning.”
“It is ninety minutes of preventable problems!!!!” Maddy points at the screen too.
I groan and cross the room, dropping into the armchair opposite them.
My thesis has reached the point where every sentence sounds fraudulent, and spending twenty minutes with these two losers seems marginally less destructive than deleting the entire document.
Four hundred and eleven words on the market for college-athlete endorsement in the Ivy League, five and a half months before it's due, and I am already behind my own schedule.
Four hundred and eleven words in three weeks. I have identified the problem, and the problem is that this house has stopped being quiet.
Because Maddy has been home more often this week, which is not what I predicted after the performance she delivered at her first party.
I assumed she would disappear into another Princeton party and return occasionally for clean clothes and whatever meal she could steal from the fridge. That was exactly what I did in freshman year.
To my surprise, no scratch that, to none of my surprise, Maddy does not believe in predictable schedules.
Some days I barely see her. Other days I somehow cross paths with her three times before lunch.
She is difficult to miss. Not because she’s blonde, Princeton has enough blondes.
Maddy wears headphones everywhere and forgets the rest of us cannot hear whatever is happening inside them.
She does not exactly walk across campus. She gets about six normal steps in before one shoulder moves, then her hips, then suddenly she’s half dancing down the pavement to music nobody else can hear.
Nobody can hear it.
Everybody can see Maddy.
Maddy dresses as though she found the first oversized T-shirt on her bedroom floor, paired it with shorts that may once have belonged to a child, and decided the rest of campus could deal with it.
They’re already a boner problem when she’s standing still. Dancing in them is fucking unnecessary.
And she wears those shorts everywhere.
Lectures. Cafés. Our kitchen at seven in the morning. And right now, cozy up with Nate watching— what is it called again? Brief Encounter.
It is the last week of October in New Jersey. It is forty-two degrees outside and dropping.
At this point, the shorts are less an outfit than a military uniform. If Princeton ever sends Maddy into battle, she will apparently be armed with three inches of denim, headphones on, with absolutely no concern for anyone else involved.
She leans towards the coffee table for the chips and half of her ass makes another appearance.
Holy hell.
I would normally consider that a generous contribution to the household. Unfortunately, my track pants are thin, my self-control is thinner and my dick has already noticed.
And of course we have chips in the house now.
Yesterday I found Nate eating barbecue chips over the sink at midnight. She is corrupting the athletes.
“I cannot watch two emotionally constipated people inhale at each other for another hour,” Maddy throws her phone to the couch.
She kicks off the blanket and stalks into the kitchen.
Cabinet doors begin opening.
I get up and turn the heating up two degrees then immediately return to my chair.
“We don’t have tequila,” Maddy calls. “Or whiskey. What kind of life are you people living?”
“A disciplined one,” I call back.
She ignores me and begins assaulting the fridge instead. “Will, can I drink your beer?”
“Not mine.”
I have not touched alcohol since the party. The team is still sour about the Villanova scrimmage, and alcohol makes it far too easy to stop caring about things I currently need to care about.