Beautiful Player (35 page)

With coffee and snacks for the road in hand, I made the rounds and said my goodbyes. My family was scattered all over the house, but the only two I couldn’t seem to find were my brother and my ride.

I headed out front to check the car, the gravel path crunching beneath my feet. I neared the garage and stopped as voices filtered out through the cool morning air, above the birds and the creaking of the trees overhead.

“I’m just wondering what’s going on between you two,” I heard my brother say.

“Nothing,” Will said. “We’re just hanging out. Per your request, I might add.”

I frowned, remembering that old saying about not eavesdropping because you probably won’t like what you hear.

“Is ‘hanging out’ code for something?” Jensen asked. “You seem awfully familiar with her.”

Will started to speak but paused, and I stepped back a bit to make sure my long shadow wouldn’t be visible to anyone standing in the garage.

“I am seeing a few people,” Will started, and I could just picture him scratching his jaw. “But no, Ziggy isn’t one of them. She’s just a good friend.”

I felt like I’d been dropped in ice water, goose bumps spreading along my skin and despite knowing he was just following the rules we’d agreed on, my stomach dropped.

Will went on: “Actually, I am . . . interested in exploring something more with one of the women I’m seeing.” My heart started to hammer, and I was tempted to step forward, and keep him from saying too much. But then he added, “So I feel like I should end it with the other women I’m seeing. I think for the first time I might want more . . . but this girl has been cagey, and it’s been hard to take that extra step and just cut off the old routine, you know?”

My arms felt like limp noodles and I leaned against the gate, steadying myself. My brother said something in reply, but I wasn’t really listening anymore.

To say the atmosphere in the car was merely tense was laughable. We’d been on the road for almost an hour and I’d barely strung together more than two words at a time.

Are you hungry?

No.

Temperature okay? Too warm? Too cold?

It’s fine.

Could you put this into the GPS?

Sure.

Mind if we stop for a bathroom break?

Okay.

The worst part was that I was pretty sure I was being bratty and unfair. With what Will said to Jensen, he was only following the rules that I’d put out there. I’d never really expected him to be exclusive before last night.

Open your mouth, Hanna. Tell him what you want.

“You okay over there?” he asked, ducking briefly to catch my eyes. “You’re being awfully monosyllabic.”

I turned and watched his profile as he drove: his stubbly jaw, his lips curled up in a smile just knowing I was staring at him. He let his eyes dart my way a couple of times, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. It was so much more than sex. He was my best friend. He was the one I wanted to call
boyfriend
.

The idea of him being with other women this whole time made me faintly nauseous. I was pretty sure that, after this weekend, he wouldn’t be with them again since—
Jesus
—we’d had sex without a condom. If that didn’t warrant a serious discussion, I didn’t know what did.

I felt so close to him; I really felt like we had become something much more than friends.

I pressed my hands to my eyes, feeling jealous and nervous
and . . .
God,
just so impatient for us to figure it out
now
. Why was it easy to talk to Will about every feeling I had but the ones we needed to declare between us?

When we stopped at a gas station to refuel, I distracted myself by going through the music on his phone, building the proper sequence of words in my head. Finding a song I was pretty sure he hated, I smiled, watching him hang up the pump, walk back to his side of the car.

He climbed back in, his hand hovering with the key perched in the ignition. “Garth
Brooks
?”

“If you don’t like it, then why is it on your phone?” I teased. This was good, this was a start, I thought. Actual words were a step in the right direction. Ease into the conversation; prepare a soft landing and then jump.

He gave me a playful sour look, as if he’d tasted something gross, and started the engine to pull away. The words cycled through my head:
I want to be yours. I want you to be mine. Please tell me you haven’t been with anyone else in the past couple of weeks, when things seemed so good with us. Please tell me that hadn’t all been in my mind.

I opened his iTunes and started scrolling through his music again, looking for something better, something that made my mood lighter and more sure of myself, when a text message flashed across his screen.

Sorry I missed this yesterday! Yes! I’m free Tuesday night and I can’t wait to see you. My place? xoxox

Kitty.

I don’t think I took a breath for an entire minute.

Turning off the screen, I sank lower into my seat, feeling like someone had reached down my throat and pulled my stomach inside out. My veins flushed hot with adrenaline, with embarrassment, with anger. Sometime between fucking me without a condom at my parents’ house yesterday afternoon and kissing my neck this morning, Will had messaged Kitty about getting together on Tuesday.

I looked out the window as we pulled away from the gas station and got back on the road, dropping the phone gently into his lap.

A few minutes later he glanced at his phone before wordlessly putting it back down.

He had clearly seen Kitty’s message, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look
surprised
.

I wanted to climb into a hole.

We arrived at my apartment but he made no attempt to come upstairs. I carried my bag to the door and we stood there awkwardly.

He pulled a stray hair from my cheek and then quickly dropped his hand when I winced. “You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded. “Just tired.”

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked. “The race is Saturday so we should probably do a couple of longer runs early in the week and then rest.”

“That sounds good.”

“So I’ll see you in the morning?”

I was suddenly desperate to hold on, to give him one last chance, a way to come clean and maybe clear up a huge misunderstanding.

“Yeah, and . . . I was wondering if you wanted to come over Tuesday night,” I said, reaching out to place my hand on his forearm. “I feel like we should talk, you know? About everything that happened this weekend?”

He looked down at my hand, moved so his fingers could twist with mine. “You can’t talk to me now?” he asked, brow furrowed and clearly confused. It was, after all, only seven at night on a Sunday. “Hanna, what’s going on? I feel like I’m missing something.”

“It was just a long drive and I’m tired. Tomorrow I have a late night in the lab, but Tuesday is open. Can you make it?” I wondered if my eyes were pleading as much as the voice inside my head was.
Please say yes. Please say yes.

He licked his lips, glanced at his feet and up to where his hand was holding mine. It felt like I could see the actual seconds tick by and the air felt thick, almost solid, and so heavy I could hardly breathe.

“Actually,” he said, and paused as if he was still considering, “I have a late . . . thing, for work. I have a late meeting on Tuesday,” he babbled.
He lied.
“But I could make it during the day or—”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll just see you tomorrow morning.”

“You sure?” he asked.

My heart felt like it had frozen over. “Yeah.”

“Okay well, I’ll just”—he motioned to the door over his shoulder—“go now. You sure everything’s fine?”

When I didn’t answer, and just stared at his shoes, he kissed my cheek before leaving and I locked up, heading straight for my room. I wouldn’t think of another thing until morning.

I slept like the dead, not waking until my alarm went off at five forty-five. I reached over to hit the snooze button and lay there, staring at the illuminated blue dial. Will had lied to me.

I tried to rationalize it, tried to pretend it didn’t matter because maybe things weren’t official with us, maybe we weren’t
together
yet . . . but somehow, that didn’t feel true, either. Because as much as I’d tried to convince myself that Will was a player and couldn’t be trusted, deep down . . . I must have believed that Saturday night changed everything. I wouldn’t feel like this otherwise. Still, apparently he was fine hooking up with other women until we sat down and made it
officially
official. I could never be that cavalier about separating emotion from sex. The simple realization that I wanted to be only with Will was enough to make me faithful.

We were entirely different creatures.

The numbers in front of me blurred and I blinked back the sting of tears as the snooze alarm broke through the silence. It was time to get up and run. Will would be waiting for me.

I didn’t care.

I sat up long enough to unplug the clock from the wall and then rolled over. I was going back to sleep.

I spent the majority of Monday at work with my phone off, not heading home until long after the sun had gone down.

Tuesday I was up before my alarm and down at the local gym, running on the treadmill. It wasn’t the same as the trails at the park with Will, but at this point, I didn’t care. The exercise helped me breathe. It helped me think and clear my head, and gave me a brief moment of peace from thoughts of Will and whatever—
whoever
—he was doing tonight. I think I ran harder than I ever had. And later, in the lab, when I had barely came up for air all day, I had to leave early, around five, because I hadn’t eaten anything other than a yogurt and felt like I was going to fall flat on my face.

When I got home, Will was waiting at my door.

“Hi,” I said, slowing as I neared him. He turned around, shoved his hands in his pockets, and spent a long time just looking at me.

“Is there something wrong with your phone, Hanna?” he asked finally.

I felt a brief pang of guilt before I straightened, meeting his eyes. “No.”