Percy says, “Their goalie was guessing all night.”
I add, “We’ll get the next one.”
“Yeah.”
He nods at the tile. He’s quiet through the rest of his shower.
I sit on the bench in the locker room in just a towel and ice my face again. The bruise has come in across my cheekbone in a plum color with a small red split at the highest point where the elbow caught me. It looks worse than it feels.
I pull my phone out of the bottom of my bag.
Lucy watched the game with Gianna tonight. She knows we lost. My parents, Gianna, and Lucy have been texting me the entire game. I read them in the locker room in my towel and write back to my girl first. I tell her I’m about to eat dinner and hop on the bus, so I’ll see her tomorrow. I finish getting dressed. Then we board the bus.
Four hours back to Camden U through the dark. The bus is quieter than the bus on the way out. The boys are tired. The team lost. Coach is in the front. Walsh is two rows behind him on his phone. Stanley is across the aisle from me already mostly asleep against the window with his pillow under his cheek. Blue is in the row behind me on his phone. Rowan is in the back.
I have a window seat with my hoodie up. The interstate goes black past the windows somewhere around Rockford. The cabin gets darker after Coach turns the overheads off. I close my eyes and let my head go against the window. The bruise on my cheekbone is against the cold glass of the window. It keeps meup longer than I anticipated. My mind’s racing about tomorrow. I feel a mix of excitement and nerves when I think about asking her to be mine. It means I’m Camdenking the number one Hawthorne House rule, which I’ve followed the past three years. I agreed to the rules because I had my head in the game, but now I’m worried that I’ve gotten too cocky about my position. I want Vancouver so fucking bad, but I think I might want Lucy more. And it’s messing with my head in ways I didn’t anticipate.
I readjust my position on the bus and rest my head so that my cheek’s not throbbing. I start thinking about how I’m going to ask her. All the voices ring in my head, but deep down I know that she’s going to want it small. She’ll want it to be ours.
Chapter 37
Lucy
Marahasbeenonthe floor against the front of the couch for an hour, and she is, somewhere in the middle of her third glass of wine, telling us about a guy in her sociology section. The guy’s name is Bruce. I’ve heard the name twice before in passing, and I decide that I will probably never meet him in person.
“Okay, what happened?” Penelope asks impatiently. Mara has been talking our ears off about every little detail.
“I’m almost to the point,” Mara says.
Gianna is in the corner of the couch under her own blanket with her wine in her right hand and the small grin she has when Mara is mid-story. Penelope is beside me with her feet folded under her. I’m under a blanket that barely covers my feet. I have my glass of wine at my mouth.
“So we’re in his dorm room, and he is — you know — he’s on his knees, and I’m at the edge of his bed and —”
Her gesturing implies, enthusiastically, that it was the best feeling in the entire world. Gianna, Penelope, and I burst into laughter as we watch her. She lives for this, so her face pulls into a proud smile. She tells us about Bruce going down on her in his dorm room last night and not stopping until she had to push his shoulder because she could not, in her words,feel her legs.She tells us about how explosive her orgasm was, and how wet his mouth was. She’s been texting him all day today. And my insides start squirming when I think about Benson looking at me in the eye and asking if he can go down on me.
Gianna is howling.
Penelope has stopped laughing. “So, was it really that good?”
“Penelope.” She rolls her eyes dramatically. “So good. Far better than any orgasm I’ve ever had.”
Penelope glares at her. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes flutter as I drink my wine. “His mouth was so––”
I block it out. I can’t hear what she’s saying because I am going red, thinking about Benson. The morning he kissed his way down my body in the gray light of his bedroom and stopped when I pulled his hair. How I told him I was sorry, and he told me not to be. I thought I wasn’t ready for it, but I don’t think that’s been the reason at all. I was scared to feel too much. Just like Mara has explained, it feels really good, and to trust a man with my heart is already nerve-racking enough, but to give over my body completely is absolutely terrifying.
Mara is, in the middle of the next thing she is telling Penelope, saying something aboutthe heat of it,and the way she says it lands.
I’m curious. I’m really curious. I didn’t initiate it with Benson, so I decide something with the wine glass in my hand. If he wants to, I won’t stop him next time.
Gianna looks over at me and catches how uncomfortable I am. She knows that I’m inexperienced, and we don’t really talk about sex unless someone like Mara, who is open about these kinds of things, comes over and forces the conversation on us.
Mara goes on to explain how she gave him head in return, and I can’t stop looking at Gianna, mortified about this ongoing conversation. She puts more wine in my glass and bumps me every time Mara says something funny.
Around eleven, the conversation drifts toward next weekend.
“Did Benson tell you about the party next Friday?” Gianna asks me.
