Page 58 of Josh’s Play

“Oh.”

“Maybe you should talk to him.”

I muttered the next thing I said. “Yeah, maybe I should.” I pulled my phone out but decided that Josh was way too drunk for us to have a conversation that night.

After practice the next morning, though, texting Josh was the first thing I did.

Finn: Who is he?

Shelley: I was really drunk last night.

Finn: That’s not an answer.

The dots appeared and disappeared, and a little while later, Josh finally responded.

Shelley: Can we talk?

Shelley: In person?

Shelley: Devon’s at my house, playing touch football of all things. We can go to the dorm.

Finn: See you there.

I made it to Cortland Hall before Josh and slipped into the lobby as someone was walking out.

Chapter Fifteen

Josh

I took it as a good sign that Campbell had agreed to meet me. I felt like a little shit, abandoning Devon, but he seemed genuinely excited to hang out with my family for some reason even though they had decided to play a game of touch football like we were the Kennedys or some fucking thing. I laughed at the thought of our family ever including a US president. The only time my parents had shown more than a passing interest in politics was a few years ago, when the school asked them to hold a faculty party for a visiting professor who was then also in Congress. We all thought it was weird at the time, but it turned out the guy was a big fan of my father’s poetry. That guy had managed to advance his political career in a pretty spectacular fashion.

After breakfast, I told my family and Devon that I was going to rest, and my mother gave me a scathing look that said, remember this next time you decide to drink so much. I went upstairs but just to take a quick shower. I could still smell the beer on me, soaking out through my pores, so I let the hot water wash over me as I tried to remember the evening before.

Snippets came back to me, but I was pretty sure they were not in chronological order. Vance holding court over a bunch of students, Noah procuring us beer. Me reaching up to grab a cup from Campbell’s hand, and, oh shit, did I try to push him so he would spill it on himself?

I remembered Cam standing in the archway of the kitchen. It was as if the world had stopped when I’d left his room the week before, and it started up again with him framed in that doorway. Only instead of the immense joy and relief I felt in seeing him, he looked at me like I’d kicked his puppy. A cloudy haze covered the scene in my mind. I remembered yelling after him. He should have heard me, but all he did was walk away. Is that really what had happened?

“Fuck.” I exited the shower, got dressed, and texted Devon before sneaking out the back of the house and through the forest where I could cut across campus to my dorm.

Cam was sitting in the lobby, hunched over, his head resting in his palms. Memories of him hunched over and walking away from me the night before flooded back.

“You could hear me calling you last night, couldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said as he stood, knowing exactly what I was asking. He took a step toward me, but I turned to look at the person staffing the front desk. We were the only people there, and she was watching us.

“Come on,” I said and led him to the stairs.

We didn’t talk as we headed to my room. We sure as shit didn’t stop to kiss in the stairwell. We didn’t frolic or run or worry about who would see us. The dorm was basically empty for the holiday weekend anyway.

I unlocked the door and pulled Cam’s move, holding the knob so he had to walk past me to enter. Catching his scent, I worried that I still smelled like beer despite basically turning the bathroom into a sauna.

Cam sat on my bed, and I sat on Devon’s.

“I was really drunk,” I pleaded, not even trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I’m sorry if I said something stupid. And I’m sorry for whatever I did last week to make you ignore me.”

“You didn’t do anything. I just … I’ve realized that this hooking up thing, it’s really hard for me. I don’t think I’m a hookup kind of guy.”

Of course that was true. I’d be a fool if I didn’t know that the guy that waited until he was twenty to have sex wouldn’t be the same guy who could be in a casual relationship. That it was everything I wanted to hear didn’t matter, because it sounded much more like the start of a breakup speech than a pronouncement of his undying love.