I press further into the wall and bend my knees to work out my stiff muscles. Taytum has one of the best bedrooms in her sorority house, and I’m pretty positive her floor is more comfortable than my bed that the school supplied to every dorm room, but still, I’ve hardly gotten any rest.
Looking over at Taytum for the one hundredth time since getting back from the bar, I can’t help but trace the outline of her lips with shame. I’m suddenly thirteen again, training my brain not to get a boner at the sight of her. I’m happy to announce that after several hours of being in her bedroom, I’ve finally stopped thinking about how fucking hot it was to kiss her in that stupid bar bathroom. Even if I’m still angry with her, my heart can’t help but skip a beat when I remember the madness I felt when kissing her.
I rub my hand down my face and think about everything after the kiss. The panic that came from an obvious trigger of the past lies heavy in my gut, and I feel partly guilty for not keeping it under wraps in front of her.
Taytum is the only one who has ever seen me have a panic attack, but I promised myself, long ago, that I’d never lose it like that in front of anyone ever again. Naturally, she’d be the one to bring it out of me, because if Taytum is involved, everything is intensified. Everything.
Her phone dings, and I wait to see if she’ll stir in her sleep. We haven’t spoken since I put her in my car and drove back to Bexley U last night. She has no idea that I crept back into her room after dropping her off, because my anxiety couldn’t handle it.
To my surprise, she stays asleep even though the sun has begun to rise and is casting an angelic glow over her. I sigh and stretch my legs out in front of myself as I reach for her phone to check the alert. I swipe away the text from her group chat because I already crept on it through the night, and it was practically a foreign language to me as they were talking about makeup.
I open the glucose tracker app that’s linked to her monitor. The little ding was an alert for a high glucose reading, but it isn’t any higher than normal at this time. I won’t admit to her that she was right, and the one sip of alcohol she drank last night didn’t affect her sugar too much, but it’s hard for me to trust her when she’d been in the hospital more times this past year than ever before.
When it comes to Taytum, I can’t even trust myself.
Clearly.
I yawn and reach up to massage my sore neck. My own phone buzzes, and I quickly pull it out of my pocket to see Theo’s text about a spur-of-the-moment practice this morning before our game.
I mumble under my breath. “Shit.”
There goes my naptime.
I click my phone off, slip it into my pocket, and busy myself in the bathroom to get her insulin pen ready. I walk over to her bedside table and put her prepped pen there, along with an alcohol swab. After I change her alarm tone to the most annoying one and set it to go off in a few minutes, I go to exit out of her insulin app before pausing with my finger hovering over the X.
It’s a controlling thing to do, but I take out my phone, and download the same app.
Taytum’s login information hasn’t changed since we were teenagers–it only took Emory and me three tries to guess her password the one time we went in and broke up with her boyfriend of three days on her socials without her knowing.
Not our best moment, but whatever.
Relief replaces the last remnants of anger that I’ve kept a hold of when I have her blood sugar readings right at my fingertips.
She’ll be irate if she knows I have access to the app. She specifically told her parents and Emory that it was unneeded because she was an adult, but it’s as much for me as it is for her.
Maybe now, I won’t have to stay in her room all night to make sure she’s not going into a diabetic coma and potentially play like shit at my game from lack of sleep.
After scribbling on a torn piece of her notebook paper, and signing it Walker, I place it on her forehead. Then, I walk out her bedroom door and head straight for practice with a little chip on my shoulder.
My skates glide over the ice as smoothly as they always have, but I’m unfocused, exhausted, and every time I look at Emory, all I can think about is how I had my tongue halfway down his sister’s throat the night before.
Whether we were role-playing or not, I’m fucked up over it.
“What is with you?” Ice flies up behind Theo when he skates over to me. He slaps the side of my helmet, and the only thing it does is make my head pound harder.
I try to clear my vision. “Nothing, nothing. I’m good. Swear.”
“Then start fucking defending. It’s the best of seven, and I don’t want to gamble with it. This isn’t practice.”
Practice.
One simple word, and I’m thinking about Taytum again.
I won’t even let myself look into the crowd to see if she’s here, because I’m afraid I’ll lock eyes with her and get a boner on the ice. A boner when you’re wearing a cup is my own version of hell.
“You look like shit,” Emory chimes after skating past to head to his home, also known as the net. “You’re playing like shit too.”
I follow after him and attempt to play it cool in a desperate measure to erase the shame from last night. I’d like to erase the very vivid memory too. “At least I don’t smell like shit,” I quip.
Our teammates laugh before the rest of us skate to meet at the net for an encouraging chat from our captains, who I refer to as Dad One and Dad Two. Coach, who is off on the sidelines with a beet-red face, is Gramps.
Though, he doesn’t know we call him that behind his back.
It’s even funnier now because Aasher is shagging his daughter, so the joke of him being called Gramps is a real zinger in the locker room.
“Alright, who are we?” Theo slaps his stick on the ice.
We follow suit and slap ours at the same time while chanting, “The Wolves!”
“It’s the best of seven, but fuck that. We’re gonna sweep the ice in the first four games and be on our way. Got it?”
We slap our sticks again in agreement.
“It’s 2-1, them. We have one period left to secure the W. So let’s fucking go.”
The sounds of the sticks echo off the ice, and we all break to get into position. Aasher does a lap and gets the crowd fired up, then he and Theo both look up into the stands with their sticks raised for a cheesy salute to their girls.
By reaction, my eyes follow. I immediately land on Taytum, who is planted dead center between them.
She didn’t. Taytum’s sweet smile wakes me right up. Then, she yells, “Yee-haw!” and takes my cowboy hat off her head and tips it in my direction.
I turn around to conceal my grin.
It’s not the reaction I was hoping for. What I need is to be angry with her or, at the very least, for her to be off with some guy so I can stop secretly hoping she’s saving herself for me like she’s a reward for after we win this game.
But she isn’t, and she never will be.
