“He wants to know if he can come over to hang.” I turn the phone again so Lucy can read his message, knowing she’ll appreciate it. I’m available to meet with my new fan club. Tell me when and where.
“Sure, why not?”
“Tell him to bring us something,” Sutton declares. “What do we want?”
“We’re out of microwave popcorn,”
“On it,” I tell them.
Me: Price of admission is popcorn. There are five of us.
Hammer: Make that six. Masters is bored now that Ellie is at work.
“Okay if my buddy Masters comes over? His wife is working.”
“Sure. The more the merrier, but someone will have to sit on the floor.”
“Hammer can. He’s used to it. He has three sisters.”
I don’t know if he’s used to sitting on the floor, but he’ll do it and he’ll like it because I’m not moving my ass from Lucy’s sofa until she physically hoists me out of here.
I’m part of her life now. She’s not getting rid of me.
21
Lucy
Matty is too damn charming for his own good, I decide the following morning.
And it isn’t his size or body or face that turns me on. It’s him. His easygoing nature, his willingness to answer anything put in front of him, the way he makes fun of himself. It’s so easy to be around him. He brought me sugar-free treats last night, watched four episodes of Say Yes to the Dress, and we laughed ourselves silly over Hammer’s list.
He left with his friends but not before giving me a long hug—one that left me in no doubt whether he’d have liked to stay the night. Both Charity and Sutton gave me a hard time, saying I was a fool not to take what was being offered to me on a silver platter.
I open my can of soup and consider the whole risk assessment thing. Sutton’s right. He doesn’t appear to be much of a risk at all, or no greater risk than any other guy I’ve gone out with before. And the rewards? Holy hell, the rewards are like having a million dollars at the bottom of a bungee jump. My stomach’s in my throat, but it’s totally worth it.
As I dump the can into the bowl, the wall phone rings. I pick it up, hoping it’s Matty. If it is, I know what I’m having right after lunch. I grin to myself.
My happiness fades when I hear the voice.
“It’s me. Let me up,” Ace says impatiently.
He texted a few times since the Tuesday night debacle, but I haven’t completely forgiven him. It was an asshole thing to do, and none of his texts have been apologies. I suppose he thinks I’m going to that movie with him tonight. I’m not. I scheduled a practice with Heather and Randall.
I feel a twinge of guilt that I broke my pact with Ace: he’d stay away from my roommates and I’d stay away from the football team.
It was easy up until I met Matty. After all, I lasted nearly three years unimpressed and unmoved by the entire team. And it’s not like there weren’t opportunities, but none of them interested me. If I’m going to date Matt, I’ll need to tell Ace. He deserves it.
However, Ace acting like an asshole doesn’t really mean we aren’t friends anymore. At some point, we’re going to have to hammer this issue out so we can go on being friends. I press ‘9’ on the phone for a few seconds to release the lobby door and let him in. “Hey, Sutton. Ace is here and I think he wants to talk about something.”
“Want me to disappear into the bedroom?” she asks from the couch where she’s been vegging out the past forty-five minutes.
“Do you mind?”
“Nah, I can work on my Roman history paper. Should I pop out and save you in say, twenty minutes?” She flicks the television off and pushes up off the sofa.
“Hopefully not.”
A knock on the door signals his arrival. Sutton mouths that I should yell if I need her.
I pull the door open to find Ace bracing himself with one hand against the wall. He looks worn and tired.
“Are you still drunk from last week?”
“I wish.” He raises his sunglasses so I get a good look at his bloodshot eyes. “Sorry about the other night.”
Finally, an apology. I forgive him immediately. No point in holding grudges, but hopefully he’ll tell me what’s wrong. Still, I tell him exactly what I thought of his behavior. “It was a shitty thing to do, but you’re forgiven.”
After all, I got to spend the night with Matt, no matter how chaste it was. And since then I’ve had my “spa day” with him. No, spa day does not work. The night spent with Matty was not full of zen moments and tinkling wind chimes but of hot, needy, sweaty excitement. I’ll need to report to Hammer that spa day as a euphemism for sex has to go. “Come on in.”
Ace sort of slumps in, walking heavily as if his joints hurt. He drops into a kitchen chair with a thud and leans back on two legs.
The kitchen set is my favorite piece of furniture in the whole apartment. Charity, Sutton, and I had driven to Chicago over Spring Break because that’s all Sutton and I could afford. Halfway there we stopped for lunch at a small-town diner and discovered they were renovating the place, getting rid of their old metal-rimmed tables and vinyl-covered chairs—the ones with the sparkly fabric underneath the plastic coating. We fell in love with them immediately and Charity’s parents paid to ship them back to our apartment.
The set will be Charity’s when we graduate, and I don’t want Ace breaking a chair leg before then. I hit him on the back of his head on my way to the microwave.