Going Long (5 page)

Reed

I probably could have been
smoother when I brought up lunch with my mother. I knew Nolan had strong
feelings about my mom and how she treated her. But I wasn’t expecting her to
completely shut down like she did tonight. And I didn’t get to explain who
Dylan was, either. There wasn’t really a good time to squeeze in “Oh, by the
way, Dylan is a really hot 24-year-old blonde, and she’s going to be spending a
lot of time with me until I can sign with her dad, hope you’re cool with that.”

We were walking into the golf
resort restaurant my mom had selected, and I had Nolan’s hand firmly grasped in
mine, hoping like hell she’d let me hold onto it after she met Dylan. I saw my
dad sitting in the distance at a table near the giant panoramic window, and as
we rounded the corner, the two blondes with him came into view. I forced myself
to remain calm, not show any emotion or worry.

As we got to the table, everyone
stood, and I noticed Nolan’s eyes were just a little wider than normal. Her
mind was putting this together, and I was anticipating the moment it all hit
her. Making things worse, Dylan stood up from her seat and walked around my
seated mother to me, her legs exposed in a short mini skirt and her breasts out
on display in a tiny tank top, ready to close the deal.

“Reed, so good to see you
again,” she smiled, leaning into me for a hug and then giving me a small kiss
on the cheek. Fuck!

Nolan’s hand dropped from mine
immediately. I tried to get her to look at me, but she kept her eyes focused on
the table in front of us. She was reaching to pull out her own chair when Dylan
spun around and flashed her trademarked perfect smile. “And you must be the
girlfriend?” she said, in a tone that was, I swear, a carbon copy of my
mother’s. She reached out her hand and, by some small miracle, Nolan shook it
rather than punching her in the face.

My dad took over the
conversation during lunch. I tried to force myself to pay attention, answer
questions and be engaged, but most of me was preoccupied with trying to fix the
fantastic fuck-up I was pretty sure was left in the wake of Dylan’s touchy
behavior towards me. Seriously, what the fuck
was
that!?

I tried to reach for Nolan’s
hand under the table more than once, but she always kept it at a distance. She
was pleasant and smiled fondly at my dad when he spoke; she tolerated my
mother, who never once even acknowledged her, and she conversed with Dylan
about her classes and working in special education. But I was clearly cut out,
and that was made extremely clear as soon as we left the restaurant, said our
goodbyes and climbed back into the car for me to drive her back to Coolidge.

“Noles, I’m so sorry to spring
that on you like that, let me explain…” I started before she turned to look at
me and clicked her seatbelt, her teeth gritted and mouth shut tight.

“Nothing to explain, Reed,” she said
flatly, almost removed from the conversation. She just turned to face forward
again, pulled her purse to her lap and began looking through it, avoiding me.

I reached over to stop her, and
she jerked to the side. “It’s fine, really,” she said, still looking through
her purse.

“Nolan, come on,” I grabbed at
her wrist now.

“What do you want me to say,
Reed?” she was yelling now. Yelling is better than avoiding, so this was
progress. “Do you want me to say that Dylan is awesome? That I like her a lot,
and that I’m super excited she’s going to make your life decisions with you,
because she’s born into some fancy privileged family and came out of the womb
with a CEO title stamped on her fucking forehead and is just waiting for her
time to run her daddy’s millions?”

“Woah,” she needed to slow down.
“Noles, that’s a little unfair…”

She stopped me again, holding a
flat hand to my face. “Don’t you fucking dare, Reed. Fair? I’m being unfair? I
show up for my weekend with my boyfriend, and then I spend it watching some
status-hungry woman gush over you, drape her body on you, and then treat me
like I’m a kid getting to sit at the grown-ups’ table during lunch with Millie.
Oh, and Millie…that’s just the icing on the cake. I was fucking invisible to
her, which—don’t get me wrong—is usually preferable. But not when
she’s busy fawning over the daughter-in-law she’s
clearly
hoping to have
in front of me? My replacement she’s brought in, the one she approves of?
Uhhhhg…” Nolan let it all out in one breath. She finally turned her face to
look back out her window.

We drove the rest of the way to
Coolidge in silence. It took almost an hour. Nolan didn’t make a single sound.
She didn’t turn her head my way once, and the only movement she made was to
check the time on her phone and to pull some ChapStick from her purse. I
started to panic when I turned to drive down her parents’ street. We’d fought
before. Hell, we were good at fighting. But since high school we never let a
fight go without closure. Today gave me a bad feeling, though.

I pulled into her driveway and
put my Jeep into park, half expecting her to bolt from my car and slam her door
closed in my face. But she didn’t. She just sat there. I let my seatbelt go and
turned my body to face her, my face resting on the headrest. She was just
staring straight in front of her, looking lost.
Damn it, I’ve done it.

“I’m sorry, Noles,” I was
whispering, pleading now. “I didn’t want it to hit you all at once, and I sure
as hell didn’t expect Dylan to be…well, who she is, or do whatever the hell it
was she did. I just met her, and she made
a lot
of assumptions about how
friendly we were. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

I reached for her hand, and she
let me hold it this time, giving me hope. She let her head flop to the side so
she could look me in the eyes now, and the damn water building in them was
breaking my heart. I reached up to wipe away a tear just as it fell and then
brought her hand to my lips to kiss it.

She finally took in a deep
breath and bit her lip a little, readying herself to speak. “It’s not Dylan.
Not really,” she just stopped. I reached up to wipe another tear, waiting for
her to continue. I waited for minutes, just searching her eyes, which weren’t
giving me anything. Unable to take it, I started.

“It’s the draft, I know. Nolan,
what do you want me to do? I mean it. What do you want?” I couldn’t believe I
was putting it out there like that, but I was scared. I was gambling that she’d
give in, but was I really willing to wait if she asked me to? She took in a
sharp breath and looked away again.

“It’s fine. You have to do this,
and I understand,” she was gone again.

“Nolan, I mean it. Tell me what
you want,” I asked urgently as she opened her door and slid from her seat. She
pulled her purse strap and backpack over her shoulder and looked at me one more
time.

“That’s just it. I don’t know.
I…I need to figure some things out, Reed,” she said, turning away and then
stopping again. “Please don’t feel bad. You didn’t do anything. Really.
I’ll…I’ll just call you when I get back to school, okay?”

She was already inside when I
sent her a text that read:
I love you.
I drove back to Tucson, and when
I got into my room, I checked my phone—and she hadn’t texted back. For
the first time in months, I wanted to drink. No, fuck that. I wanted to get
ripped and forget fucking everything.

I picked up my phone and called
Trig. “Hey, where you at?” I asked, putting a hat on my head and shoving my
wallet and keys back in my pocket.

“We’re at Cooler’s, just
shooting pool. You wanna come?” he asked, half surprised.

“Yeah, I’ll be there in ten.
Then we’re drinking. A lot,” I said and just hung up.

Nolan

I don’t know what I was
thinking. I guess that was part of the problem. I didn’t know what to think,
about anything. I actually wanted just to
not
think, which was
impossible!

By the time Sarah picked me up
from my parents to drive back to campus Sunday morning, I was a mess.
Thankfully, the yin to the yang that was Sarah’s spitfire temper was that she
was also quick to forgive. I filled her in on everything, and she agreed that I
was right to freak out over the close and personal touching by Dylan. She also
defended Reed, telling me it wasn’t fair that I was mad at him for trying to
include me in his decision about the draft when I was hiding such an enormous
secret from him.

Sarah was right. And when we
went out to dinner with Sienna that night back at campus, and I filled her in
on everything—after breaking down to cry every 30 seconds—she
agreed, too.

I hadn’t talked to Reed since I
walked away from him Saturday afternoon. It had been almost 24 hours since I’d
heard from him. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking after the way I’d left
him. With the girls’ help, I drafted a text to send to him from our table.

I’m sorry I walked away from
you. You’re only trying to include me, and I love you because of it. Maybe we
can get together and really talk about everything sooner? I promise to have an
open mind.

I didn’t think a text was a good
place to elude about having to talk about
other things
, so I just left
it at that. It took three of us to perfect the pathetic four sentences I did
send.

We finished eating, and I walked
back to my dorm from the café where we met. It had been an hour since I sent my
text, and I still hadn’t heard from Reed. I was getting a little anxious on top
of the heavy worry that had already permanently moved into my conscience.

To distract myself, I pulled out
the latest spreadsheets from the testing trials for the IQ project. I loaded a
few of them up on my computer and then went through my emails to see the others
that my group members had sent, which only made my stress shoot through the
roof.
Nothing
was right!

Exasperated, I flopped back on
my bed and stared at the ceiling. It was going to take me hours to sort through
the results and put things in the right order just so I could merge everything
together. “I HATE GROUP PROJECTS!” I thought.

I rolled sideways to glance at
my phone once again and there still was no message from Reed. Happy to have
something new to worry about—something I at least had some power
over—I pulled my laptop cord from the wall, gathered up my pages of
notes, stuffed a pencil in my hair and grabbed my keys to go upstairs.

When I knocked on Gavin’s door,
one floor up, it slowly slid open since it wasn’t really latched. Gavin was
sitting on his floor in front of his laptop with notes spread all around and
his hands on top of his head. I started to giggle, realizing he was probably
coming to the same conclusion I just had.

I could tell he had headphones
in and I didn’t want to scare him, so I reached over and knocked a little
louder on his now-open door. He turned around quickly and pulled an ear bud
from one of his ears.

“Nolan! Thank God!” he sprang to
his feet, carefully stepping through his maze of papers and Monster Drink cans.
He was trying to clean up a little as I walked all the way into his room.

“Hey,” I just smiled, sitting at
his desk chair and putting my computer down. “So, I take it you saw the data
from the dingle twins?”

Gavin started laughing, putting
his hands on his hips and nodding a little. He had given them that nickname
during our last class when they had completely blown an IQ test attempt.
“Seriously, what is wrong with those two?” he asked, grabbing a hat from his bed
and sliding it over his chin-length hair.

Gavin was the complete opposite
of Reed—artistic, tall and thin. He had black-rimmed glasses that he wore
all of the time and longer hair that he usually kept pulled back or hidden
under a hat. Both of his arms were covered in tattoos, and his wardrobe
consisted of nothing but old concert T-shirts—most of them from shows
he’d actually seen. Like Reed, though, Gavin was smart, ridiculously smart.
We’d talked about the stress of attending school on scholarships during our
classes, and I’d found out Gavin was a Mensa Scholar. He was a bona fide
genius, which was good, because I was going to need one to survive the
dingle
twins
.

“I think we can fix it, but it’s
going to take us a few hours,” I said, blowing the loose hairs from my face.

Gavin just stood at his doorway
and put his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders. “I got nowhere else
to be, so let’s do it,” he said, scooping up his papers and sitting down on the
floor with his legs stretched out to hold up his laptop.

My estimate wasn’t even close.
Gavin and I worked until midnight finishing up the data and running our
results. It was worth it, though, because not only did we come up with some
killer findings and draw some great conclusions for our report, but also I was
able to forget about everything else in my life for most of the night.

We ordered pizza, made fun of
our lab partners and swapped stories about growing up with rich kids. Gavin
came to ASU from Compton. I laughed at first when he told me, because I didn’t
think anyone actually came from Compton, but he assured me they did. He said
his neighborhood was full of families that had lived there for years, but that
it made him sad to see people afraid to go out at night. He took a bus to a
private school that he was able to go to on a scholarship. And I thought I had
it hard.

I’d also learned that Gavin came
to ASU because of a girl, but after their freshman year, they broke up; his ex,
Maya, moved back to California, but Gavin decided to stay. This part of the
conversation started to make me a little uncomfortable, partly because I didn’t
want to go into my relationship with Reed and the drama that had descended on
my life as of late, and partly because it felt a little as if Gavin was
flirting with me.

When we were eating, he reached
over twice to dab my cheek with a napkin; I kept one in my hand to take care of
my own face after that. Then, when I was typing up our final results, he stood
behind me and massaged my shoulders a little, sometimes his touch lingering
just a little too long.

Gavin was incredibly good
looking. He was the kind of guy who played the guitar with random bands for fun
and rolled to class on a skateboard. His intelligence was a sexy contrast with
his entire bad-boy image. When I was packing up my things and getting ready to
leave, I felt a rush of heat hit my nerves as Gavin put his hand on the center
of my back as he walked me to the door. And when he reached over to give me a
friendly hug—one that suddenly felt not-so-friendly—I panicked.

“I have a boyfriend,” I just
laid it out there, just like that. No preface, no real reason to add it to the
conversation, other than the massive blood-rush hitting my eardrums and making
me feel as if I might soon pass out. I had nothing left other than to give
Gavin the stupidest of smiles.

“Oh, uh…okay?” he said, once
again shoving his hands in his pockets, seeming to try to make himself appear
less threatening. “I didn’t mean anything. I just…boy, I’m not really sure what
to say here.”

He stood there rubbing the back
of his neck and chuckling nervously. I had just made this
extremely
awkward.

“Sorry,” I said, trying to fix
things. “I just… I realized that we talked a lot about you, and I hadn’t shared
much. I thought it was one of those things that were good to know.”

He just smiled at me, his lips
forming the most adorable grin, forcing his eyes to scrunch a bit. “It’s okay.
Yeah, that…the boyfriend…it’s good to know,” he said, nodding and reaching out
his hand in a fist to give me a pound. I just pounded back and laughed a
little.

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry, I
didn’t mean to get all weird. I think I just need to go home and get some
sleep.”

“That sounds like a good plan,”
he said, opening his door for me and leaning against the frame as I walked out
backwards, making my way to the stairs. “Sweet dreams, you.”

He watched as I walked all the
way to the stairway door, and then he closed his. I may have not had much
dating experience, and I may have only been with Reed, but I was pretty sure
Gavin was hitting on me, ever so slightly. And I didn’t hate it. But the guilt
it left behind as I made my way back into my room and dumped my pile of papers
and computer on my desk was certainly not worth the small little rush of being
found attractive by someone who wasn’t Reed. And when I forced my mind back to
Reed, I started to cry. Hard.

Reed had sent me a couple of
texts while I was working on my project with Gavin: one apologizing for missing
my call, and the second one—a longer one that came a few hours
later—explaining that he’d slept most of the day away, hung-over from a
really rough night.  

I cringed a little thinking
about a pissed off Reed doing shots at some bar in Tucson, cursing my name. I
knew I had driven him to it, and I knew what he was like when he was drunk. The
fact that he had slept an entire day away in recovery led me to believe he’d
probably had
a lot
to drink, and that made me nervous. His texts were
very formal, almost as if he was apologizing for missing some tutoring
appointment we’d had. And they were without any mention of love or X or O. I
was probably reading into things, but with the vague way I’d left things with
him in front of my parents’ house, I couldn’t block my imagination from pairing
him with some strange woman.

I knew it was late, nearly 1
a.m. But I took a chance and sent him a text back.

Sorry, I was upstairs working on
a project all night. It was a mess and it’s worth most of our grade. I miss
you.

I put that last bit in hoping
he’d bite, and when my phone rang seconds later, my eyes teared up again, this
time with relief. I answered almost immediately.

“You’re awake!” I was a little
too excited.

“Yeah, Noles. I’m awake,” Reed’s
tone was less happy to hear me. We both sat there listening to silence for more
than a few seconds when finally he spoke, first letting out a huge sigh that
put my mind on edge. “Nolan, I did something stupid.”

Oh my god. This is the second
time my body went into shock in less than two weeks. I shut my eyes tightly,
trying to battle the images of Reed and some girl he met at the bar last night
rolling around with one another. It was impossible, though, since in the
nanoseconds after he uttered that single sentence I had already visualized his
hands touching someone else’s face, his lips biting at some stranger’s shoulder
and his bare chest pressed up against hers, whoever
she
was—hoping
she wasn’t Dylan. Unable to speak, I let my mouth fall open and somehow
squeaked out a pained “Oh.”

“Shit, no,” Reed yelled into the
phone, almost angry and frustrated. “God, Nolan, no!  Not that…shit. I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean anything that you’re thinking. I swear…I would never.
Ever!”

I was still frozen. I was having
a hard time bringing my mind back from the dark place it was. I was able to
muster an “Okay,” just so he could continue.

“Noles, it’s the draft. I made a
verbal commitment to work with Dylan and her dad,” he waited a minute, letting
me take this much in.

“Can you even do that, Reed?” I
was new to a lot of this draft business, but I was pretty sure committing to an
agent took away Reed’s amateur status.

He just let out another huge
sigh. “Noles, I fucked up. Thankfully the Nichols are family friends, and they
are keeping a tight lid on everything.”

“How did you get to this?” I
asked, a little taken aback from his instant decision and the fact that he did
something he knew better than to do.

“I was fucking drunk, Nolan,” he
exasperated. “I was so pissed after I dropped you off. I know, I know. But I
haven’t done anything like that in a really long time, so spare me the lecture,
okay?”

He sounded pissed, and I was
still trying to sort through everything in my mind, so I just kept an even
tone. “I’m not lecturing, Reed. Just trying to understand what this all means,”
I said.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he
continued. “I was drinking with Trig and got worked up about not being able to
make a decision, not understanding our fight and then everything just got all
crossed and messed up. I called Brent, and Dylan answered the line. She put me
on speaker, and then the next thing I know I was making a verbal commitment to
work with them. They told me some shit about me missing out on important
opportunities,
tying their hands
when every other quarterback looking at
the market was already working with someone. It was all a little fuzzy, but
Dylan brought over a file with paperwork tonight, which made it all way too
real. She saw the panic in my eyes and talked me down. She said she and her dad
work with a lot of people under the radar and that they will be very discrete
and will work with me on a press conference as soon as our last game is
finished.”