28 #2
“You know you’re allowed to pass before three people are touching you, right?” Koda says. “There’s no rule. I checked.”
“Fuck off.”
He isn’t wrong, though, and that’s the problem with Rafe.
He makes plays nobody else on the roster can make.
He gets away with the hardest option so often that he’s stopped seeing the easy one, and every coach he’s ever had has let him, because it keeps going in.
Until it doesn’t. Until it’s the third period and the other team’s D can read it.
“Okay,” I say. “Do it again. Mathers, be the D.”
Mathers sets his water bottle down without a word and walks out to the middle of the tiles, stick flat and knees bent, the way he’d stand at the blue line.
Rafe takes the puck from the top. I set up low.
Koda goes wide on the rail. Rafe comes down, and Mathers steps up on him, and Rafe pulls him, a real move, and Mathers bites.
“Now,” I call.
He moves it. Late, but he moves it, over to Koda on the rail, and Koda one-touches it straight back into the middle, and Rafe has already come off Mathers’s shoulder into the space Mathers left, and he gets it back in stride and rips it through the top hole of the shooter tutor so hard the whole vinyl sheet swings.
It’s so much cleaner, and everybody in the room can see it, and nobody says it.
Rafe fishes the puck out and doesn’t look at me.
“Fuck it,” he says, and goes back to the top of the room without anybody asking and does it again. And again.
On a water break, Mathers ends up next to me at the wall. He drinks and looks at the plywood and says, low, “That night at Dec’s. I—”
“Mathers!” Koda yells. “You’re up. Try not to miss.”
Mathers shuts his mouth and goes back out.
We’ve been down here for hours, and we’re starving, so we walk straight from the athletic building to the chicken place off the quad in our sweaty clothes.
Mathers comes too, because nobody tells him not to, and he doesn’t ask.
We take the back booth. Koda orders two meals.
Rafe orders two meals and gives Koda a look like it’s a competition.
Mathers eats his fries one at a time and licks his fingers after every one, which I cannot stand.
Koda’s phone lights up on the table, then again, then again. He picks it up and grins at the screen like an idiot. “She sent me something.”
“Nobody cares,” Rafe says.
“Don’t care,” I say.
He turns the phone around anyway. It’s a raccoon in a trash can with a crown drawn on it. He laughs at it for ten full seconds by himself and then types back with both thumbs, and Rafe watches the whole thing with total disgust.
“You’re pathetic,” Rafe says.
Koda points at him. “Somebody get this guy laid.”
Mathers eats another fry. My phone is in my pocket, and it doesn’t buzz. I finish my sandwich, and I don’t lick my fucking fingers.
I shower when I get back to Corvin and stand under it until the water goes lukewarm, with the raw spot on my hand stinging the whole time.
Then I put on sweats and a clean T-shirt and sit down at my desk with the econ reading.
Rafe leaves around nine without saying where, just puts his hoodie on and takes his keys and goes.
I read. The room is quiet except for the occasional noise from the hall or upstairs.
Around ten, the team chat lights up with the equipment manager asking who hasn’t turned in their sizes, and when I open it to answer, Kylie’s thread is right under it: strawberries, I know what a strawberry is, the apple selfie, so proud.
I answer the equipment manager and go back to the reading.
I get through nine more pages, underlining in pencil, while the clock on the desk goes from 10:02 to 10:31, and I don’t get up.
At 10:38, my phone buzzes.
Kylie: You awake?
Me: Yeah.
Kylie: Open your door.
I hesitate. Then I get up and open it, and she’s standing in the hallway in gray sweatpants and a black hoodie I haven’t seen before with the sleeves pushed up, her hair down and still a little wavy from this morning’s braid, slides on over her socks, nothing on her face.
She looks like she was in bed and got out of it.
“Hey, you,” she says.
“Hey.”
“Busy?”
There’s a textbook open on my desk behind me with a pencil in the crease. “No.”
She walks in past me without waiting for me to move, her shoulder brushing my chest, and turns around and shuts the door behind her. And locks it. I hear the lock go. Then she pulls my face down and kisses me hard.
My hands go into her hair, and I walk her back into the door. She laughs into my mouth and plants both hands flat on my chest and pushes. I go back a step. She follows and pushes again, and I go back again, and the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed.
“Sit,” she says.
I sit. She stands between my knees looking down at me, breathing fast, her lips already red, and grabs the bottom of my hoodie and drags it over my head.
My arms get stuck. She yanks. It comes off, and she throws it behind her without looking.
The T-shirt stays. She doesn’t touch it, doesn’t say a word about it.
She climbs into my lap with a knee on either side of my hips and pushes me flat on my back and follows me down. “You were reading,” she says against my jaw.
“Yeah.”
“On a Monday.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so sad.”
She sits up on me, reaches into the front pocket of that black hoodie, pulls out a condom, drops it on my chest, and just looks at me. She brought one, because she decided she wanted this. Everything in me goes hot and tight at once. My hands are on her thighs, and I squeeze.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice comes out wrecked.
She grins, pulls the hoodie off over her head with nothing under it.
I blink. It’s the first time I’ve really seen her.
She bends down and kisses me again, slow this time, and slides her hands down my chest over my shirt, down my ribs, down over my stomach, both palms flat, right in the middle.
For one second, I think she might find it.
Then she rolls her hips down against me, and the thought is gone.
She reaches down and rubs me through my sweats, and I sit up enough to get my mouth on her perfect tits, taking my time with each side, and when I use my teeth, she yelps and shoves me back down and bites my neck.
I buck up into her. She sits up, takes my hand, and puts it exactly where she wants it, and rides the way my fingers move.
“I wanted to do this last night,” she whispers.
I palm her breast with my other hand. “So you’ve wanted me all day?”
She nods and steps off the bed, and I watch her push her sweatpants down, then her thong.
“Kylie.”
She tugs my sweatpants down and leaves my shirt where it is, rolls the condom on, and climbs back into my lap. I guide myself into her, and she sinks down onto me with her hands on my neck and her eyes on mine.
“Fuck,” I say. “Kylie.”
She likes that. I can see her like it. She rides me like she has all the time in the world, like she came here to do exactly this and nothing else and she’s going to take her time with it.
Her hair falls around both of us. She sets the pace, and every time I try to push it, she slows down on purpose and smiles when I swear and does it again.
I don’t try to take over. I hold her hips and watch her and give her everything she asks for.
When she gets close, she drops onto my chest and presses her face into my neck and bites down on my shoulder through my shirt, and I feel her come apart on top of me, all of her, shaking, and it takes me with her. I don’t have any say in it.
For a while, neither of us moves. She’s heavy and warm on my chest, breathing hard into my neck, and there’s a wet spot on my shoulder where she bit me through the cotton. I’ve got one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, and I can feel her heartbeat through both, slowing down.
“Did you eat it?” she says into my neck.
“What?”
“The apple.”
“Yeah.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yeah.”
She lifts her head and looks at me like I’ve said something deeply disturbing. “Who eats the whole thing?”
“I didn’t eat the core.”
She drops her forehead back onto my chest, and I feel her smile against my shirt, and then she’s laughing, shaking on top of me. I’m laughing too, and I don’t even know what’s funny.
Then she sits up and climbs off. She finds her sweatpants on the floor and pulls them on, finds her hoodie hanging off the back of my desk chair and pulls that on too, shakes her hair out of the neck of it, and steps into her slides.
I watch her while I deal with the condom and pull my sweats back up.
She doesn’t find a reason to stay. She checks her pocket for her phone, then comes back and bends down and kisses me once, soft, with one hand on my jaw.
“Goodnight, you,” she says.
“Night.”
I walk her to the door, four steps, and unlock it, and she slips out past me into the bright hallway and lifts one hand over her shoulder without turning around and walks off in her slides.
I stand in the doorway. One door. Two. I hear hers open, then shut.
I go back inside and run a hand through my hair.
Fuck.