#Score (10 page)

And she turns around and leaves, just like every other goodbye we've had so far. One of these days I'm going to be the one who walks away.

* * *

T
he instant my
head hits the pillow, I should've fallen asleep. But no, I'm still awake even though I know I'll have to get right back up first thing in the morning to get everything packed for our flight to Denver. I should be sleeping right now.

First it's her dark freckles, then it's that sly smile she gives me only after I smile at one of her sarcastic comments. Then I think about her lips, the way they tasted before . . . my hands in her hair, the way she parts her mouth to let in my tongue, hearing that noise bubble up from the back of her throat . . .

But then I'm thinking about all the things that don't make sense about her. She's cute to be sure, beautiful in her own different way. But she’s so different from the usual parade of girls I have around me. And it's kind of hurting the little bit of game I do have left with said girls when I can't get her off my mind in the little bit of downtime I have. To say it's confusing is an understatement.

Have I changed? Nah. I don't really think so. I mean I have to work harder, but that's pretty much it. So why is Ramona the only thing I can think about besides the soccer ball? I'm here in L.A. to become a star, to get my name across Sports Illustrated and more. I've always been about that life, about those goals. And I'm here now, I should be living it up like I've always wanted to. Not sitting here moping around thinking about some girl. I turn over, pissed off at myself for thinking too deeply about these things.

Something has got to give.

R
amona

I
t’s
my third night shift this week at the Laundromat, and as much as I don’t mind helping out my parents and genuinely care about making sure everything’s in order on their behalf, there are about three million and one other places I’d rather be right now. It’s so quiet, with only two different people switching out their loads of laundry, and the bell to the front door hasn’t chimed in at least an hour. Some nights it gets like this, leading my mind to greener pastures. Usually I think about my painting, my artwork and that kind of thing, but something else has been replacing the usual thoughts . . . a something else with killer calves and a stupid dimple in his cheek.

I’m so busy thinking about the angles of his face that I don’t even realize my mom is sitting next to me, flipping through some receipts, until she’s shaking my shoulder. I jump at the contact, quickly smoothing over my hair and turning to smile at her as if I wasn’t just staring off into the distance and mooning over some guy.

Oh she caught me, she definitely caught me. But my mom has always been kindhearted, never one to embarrass anyone, and keeps quiet about the weird look on my face. “Another slow night. It’ll pick up tomorrow, I’m sure. Thank you for covering for us again, child
.
I know you still have your paintings to do.”

She presses her hand to my cheek, lightly tapping it and giving me a quick kiss on the forehead as she gathers up the cash from the register. I pretend not to notice the crestfallen look on her face when she realizes just how little there is for her to collect.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Ramy?” The tired, fine lines on her face mark her exhaustion for the evening. I hate to leave her and let her take my place. In fact, I even want to ask her to shut it down for the night even though they run a 24-hour laundry service, but I already know the answer and decide against it. “We’re still on for dinner tomorrow night, right?”

She winks at me and nods her head. “Of course. Now get out of here and get some sleep.”

I shove my phone in my pocket and lean in to kiss her cheek, pausing so I can inhale the scent of her hair, something that has always kept me grounded. “Okay. G’night.”

The bus ride home is dark, lonely. Even though there’s a dozen others sitting around me, they’re all in their own thoughts, in their own loneliness it seems. Isn’t that how life is, though? Trying to keep yourself above your own level of loneliness? I shake my head at myself, pushing back on those damned emo thoughts of mine that keep breaking through the surface.

It does explain my interest in Benji though, to some point at least. As soon as he took interest in me, even buying me a drink the first night we met, I was trying to escape from my humdrum that had been plaguing me for forever, the way my muse had all but shriveled up and died somewhere in the desert. But I can’t let myself think that Benji is some sort of a waste for my creativity. My creativity is strictly that—my own.

I’ve been daydreaming about him like a girl over some boy band poster, thinking about how it might feel to have him touch me again. And all the time that I spend with him . . . am I just playing myself by thinking that it’s all friendly? Because the thoughts that I have about him at night, they’re not exactly
friendly
. They’re more XXX-rated than anything else. Yet I keep telling myself
no
,
Ramona, you’re just friends. That’s all you’ll ever be, so just accept it now while you still can.

This is not the way to get Benji Lundgren off my mind. I know that the minute I get home and stand in front of that goddamn canvas—half filled with partial garbage and partial genius, the other half blank as the day I bought it— nothing will happen. Or everything will happen. There’s no in-between with me anymore, not when it comes to Benji. Not when it comes to my art.

I was supposed to essentially hit it and quit it, even if hit it didn’t exactly mean fucking him. I was supposed to be over him and let my creativity finally regain its balance in my life and take over on the painting. Something keeps happening between him and me though, and it keeps pulling me back to him over and over again. Every time I leave his house I think this is it, this is the last time, until it’s the next day and I’m picking up my phone to text him, or smiling over a text I just received from him.

I can’t let Benji be what motivates me, what pushes me to be more than what I am now. That’s what my art is for. I’m supposed to be someone independent of anyone else, never having to look back on the terrible shit and always moving forward. Benji, as much as he is in constant motion, has me stuck on a one-track line, gravitating around him as if he were the sun and I some lonely planet. This is not where I should be, and if I were the smart intellectual I pretend that I am, then I would be kicking whatever this is between us to the curb immediately.

I haven’t said anything to Jasmine about Benji since he and I have really started hanging out, and truth be told, I’m sort of scared of what she might say. She knows what I’ve been through before, everything I had to deal with, and although part of me wants her to tell me no, stay away from this guy, a bigger part of me is worried that she
will
say it and I’ll actually have to consider the thought. I can almost imagine Jas standing in front of me, her hands on my arms talking to me in hushed tones just like before, just like when I fell to pieces over and over again.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Ramona. No one’s making you stay. Only you get to control what you do, not anyone else.”

The bus lets me off at my stop and I hurry up the block to my apartment building, glad to see I don’t have to beat off the crazy people or potential rapists, at least not tonight. I pull my coat off as I get inside the apartment, giving a quick wave to both Brie and her new boyfriend, who are canoodling on the couch. Yeah, maybe it’s a pizza and sketching kind of night. Clearly Brie doesn’t want a third wheel attached to her date.

I slip my shoes off and wiggle my toes around as I sit down on the edge of the bed, sighing with relief as the air finally hits the skin of my feet. After a long day at Doubleday, then the night shift only an hour later at the Laundromat, I could seriously use some down time without shoes on. Like, for the rest of my life even. I’m no hippie, well not really anyway, but if I could get away with never having to wear smart black tennis shoes again, I totally would.

Across the room the painting taunts me, calling out for me, as if it knows my weakness. I frown at it, this time thinking maybe I should change the brushstroke, debating on whether a sketch would help group my ideas together better. Or who knows, a break from it might do me wonders too.

The buzzer to our apartment goes off, and I hear it even over the loud TV from the living room where Brie and her boyfriend are camped out, probably already at second base. I pause, wondering if she’s invited more people over and just forgot I existed. Unfortunately, it’s been known to happen. Brie will throw a little party without mentioning it to me, her actual roommate. Then when everyone shows up, she acts all surprised that I didn’t know. I love Brie in her own way, but that shit seriously aggravates the crap out of me. So whoever it is at the door, I hope for their own sake that they just stay out of my way.

There’s a loud knock at my door a minute later, and I pull out my phone subconsciously, thinking maybe Jasmine texted me and brought some food over to surprise me and I just didn’t hear it. But when I open the door, my jaw nearly unhinges itself and I’m left fiddling with the doorknob.

It’s Benji, and for some reason he is soaking wet and holding up a large bag of what smells like Chinese takeout in one hand and a gallon of brown liquid in the other. “You hungry? I just so
happened
to be in the neighborhood and picked up some Chinese food. They gave me way too much, and oddly enough I just happened to find this gallon of sweet tea that I know you have never drank before in your life, and I thought, what the hell?”

There goes my dopey aspirin again, ruining my slightly irritated curiosity. I want to ask Benji what the hell he’s doing here, or maybe even joke about these coincidences, but instead I say “hey,” all breathy like. Total fail.

He walks right into my room without waiting for me to move away, brushing up against me with his wet clothes. “I hope you like pork wontons. Oh, and I got some pork fried rice and beef lo mein too, in case you actually took me up on the offer.”

I shut the door behind us, torn between asking him five different types of questions. “Why are you so wet?”

“It’s a funny story. Here,” he says as he hands me the carton of fried rice. “Sit down and I’ll tell you my tale of woe. Also known as how I got completely soaked on the way to your apartment.”

I take a seat in my wobbly office chair, pulling my legs up until they’re crossed, and start in on the rice, happy that I don’t have to order dinner tonight. “All right, this better be a good one.”

Benji holds up his hands, slurping up the last bit of lo mein noodle into his mouth. “Hey, I’m not exactly a troubadour, you know. It’s a pretty simple story.”

I lean back in my chair. “It’s a funny story, it’s a simple story. Is it really a story? Or are you just going to keep standing there chowing down on Chinese food?” Even I have to smile at my own cheekiness sometimes.

He rolls his eyes at me playfully and scoops up another bite to swallow down whole. I have to physically look away because I know that if I stare too long at him, he’ll get the wrong idea. I’m not going to let myself fall into that trap again. And I’m not going to whine about how unfair life is that Benji is so infuriatingly handsome and charming that I have to squeeze my legs together to remain calm. No, I’m definitely not going to do that.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he begins as he kicks his shoes off. Nice to know he feels right at home.

“Wrong story, I’m afraid. Unless this one begins with two cities . . .”

He nods his head solemnly. “You’re right, the story’s not about two cities but about two neighborhoods. A turf war, bodies lying all over the street . . . total chaos.”

This is taking a turn for the worst. “What, did you suddenly teleport to the Middle East or something? If you know something I don’t know about the science of traveling through space and time, let a sister know. Any way I can shave off the time I have to spend getting ready in the morning for work would be much appreciated.”

“No, but I did walk through this huge water balloon fight between the kids on Church Street and the kids on Mayhew Street. I don’t know how I made it out alive.”

I giggle. Picturing Benji tiptoeing through a practical minefield between two sets of kids chucking huge water balloons at each other is oddly satisfying. “And the bodies lying all over the street? I didn’t realize water balloons were so lethal.”

He waves me off. “Oh, they had some dumb rule where if you got attacked by a water balloon you had to lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead. That’s why I kept getting hit by them, I wouldn’t lie down and play. And then this big kid comes out of nowhere and just hoses me with his giant super soaker. I’m lucky the food didn’t get wet.”

“Agreed,” I say around a mouth full of rice.

“Care for some tea? I can’t guarantee it’s half as good as my aunt Mel’s, but it’s at least worth a try.”

I look at the gallon of sweet tea sitting on my dresser, knowing it would please him if he got me to try something different, but still not sure if I want to give into that quite yet. Shrugging my shoulders, I dig back into the carton. “Thanks for the food by the way, I was starting to get pretty hungry myself.”

“Anytime.”

Sitting there in a comfortable kind of silence, I let my thoughts wander like they tend to, trying to keep the dirtier ones at bay. But when Benji Lundgren is sitting on your floor looking like he belongs there, it’s kind of hard not to.

I track the way Benji looks around my room, a small wave of panic rising in my chest each time he stares at one thing longer than the last. What is he thinking?

I look around my room too, trying to see it from an outsider’s perspective. It’s clean, mostly tidy with a few sketches strewn about, pretty typical for an artist I would say. The walls aren’t bare but they’re not covered with crap, with the exception of the one wall that one could effectually say is covered in crap. My bed is made, or at least the covers are pulled up right under the pillows. I don’t have any dirty laundry hanging around . . . not hanging around in plain sight anyway.

Does looking at my room make him think of me as boring? Because when I look around my room, I don’t see a whole lot that says much about me minus the fact that I like to keep things organized and also am shit at art. I mean I think I am shit at art, but my room would suggest otherwise.

There’s a small knock at the door and Brie pops her head in, aggravating the hell out of me by not even giving me a moment to answer. What if we had been naked? I know without a doubt that she was hoping we might be. She’s such an exhibitionist sometimes, I swear.

“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”

I raise a brow at her but shrug my shoulders, putting down my food and following her back out into the hallway. “What’s up?”

Brie looks so serious, but then her face delves deeper into what can only be described as pure gossip. “Well? Tell me everything.”

Oh. Here we go. “What’s to tell? My friend Benji came over and there you go. He brought some food, we’re hanging out, not much else to tell really. Can I get back to my food now?”

It’s not a lie, and I see the disappointment and slight hurt behind her fluttering eyes but I pay it no mind. She’ll be quick to nag me for details as soon as Benji leaves, even if she has to stay up all night to find them out. I know her too well.

“Whatever you say. But just know I don’t believe you, not even for a second. And be careful, of course. If you need any condoms —”

I hold my hand up because holy crap, I am not getting into this with her right now. “Thank you for the advice, Brie. But we won’t be needing anything, nothing’s going to happen. I’ll talk to you in the morning. Good night.” And with that, I turn around on my heel and go back inside my room, shutting the door behind me.