“So, you’re not a couple?” she asked skeptically.
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head and sitting down across from them in a comfy, blue chair. “We’re still sleeping together. But we’re friends now too.”
Her eyes narrowed, pulling more out of me.
“Okay, and we’re exclusive. I guess. He said he hasn’t been sleeping with anyone else this whole time.”
Alyssa snorted. “Duh. I’m not at all surprised.”
I was taken aback by her brazen dismissal.
“Sophia, I barely know you both andI’mnot even surprised,” Abena said, her soft voice and gentle Ghanan accent making me feel like I’d clearly missed something obvious to everyone else around me.
“Seriously, there are a lot of girls on campus who know you by name and hate you. You’ve completely taken Leo’s interest away from anyone else in the female student body. He doesn’t even look at them anymore,” Alyssa said with a laugh. “Some freshman named Chelsea practically spits when your name comes up.”
“Am I an idiot?” I asked them.
“No,” Alyssa said. “You just have a hard time letting go of first impressions. But the guy who you saw jump out a window a few months ago is not the same guy who’s picking you up right now. I don’t think you’re doing anyone any favors by ignoring the obvious change in his behavior. Or the reason for it.”
“You think he’s actually into me, don’t you?” I asked.
Alyssa laughed. “Well, I’m not an expert in dating guys or anything—women are way easier to read.” She smiled at Abena. “But yeah, I’d say this one’s interested in something more, Sophia, even if he has zero experience articulating that.”
I looked between them for a moment before I heard a knock at the door.
With all my self-absorption with my own lack of experience and confidence, I never once considered Leo was lacking the same thing when it came to relationships. If that was what he wanted, it kind of made sense that he would have no idea how to ask me. Instead, he would just agree to a ridiculous proposal for sex, agree to keep that up while pushing me to open up to him, be loyal and exclusive without ever discussing it, and insist we were friends, until one day, we were just in a relationship.
A second knock on the door startled me.Am I dating Leo Harrison? And if I am, don’t we owe it to each other to have a real discussion sooner rather than later?I shook off the revelation and stood up.We do need to have that conversation, but we don’t need to have it tonight.
Violence and Obliviousness
Sometimes we ignore what’sright in front of us and we don’t realize it until other people have to point out the thing that should besoobvious. If you don’t already know this about me, I’m from Hawaii. That’s right, you’ve been hearing from a beach girl with some killer surf skills and zero experience with ice until recently covering the hockey team. Feeling duped? Take it up with Jana Iverson.
My mom has virtually no understanding of hockey. I can’t even tell you if games air on TV in Hawaii, that’s how little most of us care about this sport (at least, the people I know; I can’t speak for the whole state). Her response when I told her that one of the guys on the BU team had been hurt recently was, “Isn’t that a really violent sport all the time?” I laughed it off because all sports are kind of violent.
But last week, as I watched guys throwing each other into the boards, elbowing the crap out of each other, and nearly throwing fists on several occasions, it suddenly hit me: Hockeyisa violent sport. Do you know it’s normal for professional hockey players to have missing or fake teeth? And that there have been some tragic injuries associated withthe blades those men wear on their feet? And that punching each other is allowed in the pros? Now it’s clear just how naïve I am when it comes to hockey, right?
All you New Englanders are reading this wondering if I even have a point.
My point is twofold: First, hockey players are full of pent-up rage after their games and there are more productive ways to help them use that energy than watching them punch each other (or so I’ve heard from the men and women who spend time with them after games). And second, sometimes we need people to point out the obvious to us, so if you’ve got someone in your life who needs to hear something that you think is obvious, maybe you should just say it and see what happens.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Leo
I was falling forSophia. Not slowly. Not just a little bit. I was crashing to the ground at the speed of a meteor for this girl and I had zero interest in stopping myself from hitting the ground. She had just enough spunk to keep things interesting while also being one of the kindest people I’d ever met. She was funny and caring, adventurous and smart. I couldn’t think of a single thing I could ever want in a woman that she didn’t possess. I’d told her once that I knew what love looked like because of my parents, but even having seen their love all my life, I couldn’t have imagined how it would feel to be falling in love. It was like a drug I imagined people would kill for.
I’d officially hit a point where I was falling for her so badly that I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up with our arrangement without telling her how I felt, but I also wasn’t sure if telling her would scare her off, or interest her in making things official between us. We clearly had something together, and there were moments when I thoughtshe might feel something for me too, but she’d mostly brushed off the comments and hints I’d dropped about how I felt thus far as if she still doubted that I could be this infatuated with her.
Or maybe, she was just the more sensible of the two of us because she knew she was going home to Hawaii at the end of the school year no matter what happened between now and then. As far as I was concerned, I’d rather have something real with her until then than never be more than friends with benefits.
We’d hooked up after last night’s loss—which had sucked—but being with her had quickly made me forget about it. It was also the first game in weeks that I hadn’t had to push through rib pain to play. We watched Modern Family for hours before I walked her back to her room, a new post-sex habit of ours.
She’d told me she was going to be at Devon’s party tonight and asked me to meet her there. I hardly ever attended the parties thrown by Devon and his roommates, two other seniors who weren’t going pro next year. But if Sophia was going to be there, I was going. And not just because she’d asked me to be there, but because Devon’s parties were known to get out of hand. I couldn’t help myself from becoming more and more protective of this woman.
I’d spent most of my night working on an assignment for my exercise science class and was a little later to the party than I’d planned to be by the time I finally walked into the loud space. The guys had a two-story town house and the bottom floor was packed with people in the kitchen and living room. A few people were making out in corners, and I suspected many people were doing the same upstairs.
I spotted Jia in the kitchen chatting with Rickles and a dark-skinned guy I’d seen sneaking in and out of his room last week. I made my waytoward them. “Hey,” I said, slapping hands with Rickles. “Have you seen Sophia?”
