Tackled: A Sports Romance (21 page)

I
swear
to God I'm hallucinating.

I was almost sure I saw Cassie here, but I looked up where I thought she was standing and she was gone.

I've had too much beer.

This is not the place I want to be tonight, especially after I sat there for the last hour in a lawn chair reading Cassie's thesis. I understood about half of it, but my mom was right. There wasn't anything in there about me or the team. It was all just past studies.

She still avoided telling me about it for months. Who knows what else she's hiding?

The thoughts pop into my head and I banish them. I need to go to her and tell her I overreacted.

She loves you.

She's in love with you.

I don't know if I'm in love with her. I don't know if I
can
love someone. I don't know what the hell it feels like.

Fuck it.
I don't know what I'm going to say or what I even think. I just know that I need to see her.

I push my way through the crowd, stopping only when I see Tank and Sable. "Is Cassie with you?"

Sable shakes her head. "She said she was leaving."

"Is she upset?"

Sable nods. "She wasn't happy when she left," she yells. "We were trying to find you."

"Is she at your place? I need to talk to her."

Sable nods and points toward the front door. "Go, go, go."

I run up to my bedroom to grab my wallet. I'm too lit to drive. I'll walk. I take the stairs two at a time, flinging the door open and –

There's a naked girl sitting on my bed.

Once upon a time, that would have been a gift from the universe. Now, I exhale heavily, annoyed with the fact that getting rid of her is going to slow me down here. "Why are you in my room?"

I reach into my bottom desk drawer and pull out my wallet.

"One of your teammates sent me here," she says. "Said you were in… need. And coincidentally, so am I."

I narrow my eyes at her. None of my roommates would have sent a naked girl up to my room. "Who sent you up here?" I ask. "Did you take anything from this room?"

She cocks her head to the side and looks at me stupidly. "Where would I hide it?"

"Good point," I say. "The guy who sent you here. Name?"

She shrugs. "Big guy."

That describes most of the football team.

"Helpful," I grunt.

"If I'd have known you'd need a name, I'd have gotten it. Frankly, I'm slightly offended that you're still wearing clothes."

I reach down to the floor and toss the rumpled beach towel at her. "I'm offended that your bare ass is on my bed."

"I can put it on your face instead," she suggests. "Oh. Almost forgot. I did have a message for you."

"From who?"

"I don't know," she says, shrugging. "A girl came in here fifteen minutes ago. She said to tell you that your former tutor stopped by to wish you luck."

I cross the space between us. "What
exactly
did she say?"

"That's what she said," the girl says. "Exact words. She came by to wish you luck. I mean, that's dedication, stopping by on a Saturday night to wish a student luck, but –"

I stop her from talking. "And you were…
like this
… when she came by?"

"Well, I had the towel on and then I twirled around to surprise you," she says. "But it wasn't you."

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

"Ooh, yeah," she agrees. "I'm down for a little dirty talk."

"Get the hell out of my room," I bellow, my voice loud even with the music downstairs.

"Are you joking?"

"Get out. Now."

She huffs as she climbs off the bed. "You're going to turn this down?" she asks. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Out."

Outside the house, Dillon stands by the front door smoking a cigarette. "Tough break about your tutor," he mutters.

"You sent that chick up to my room?"

He shrugs. "Thought you might need some consoling. The tutor was really upset to hear the things you'd been saying about her."

I don't think. I rush him, driving my head into him with enough force that he slams back up against the side of the house, landing a fist on the side of his head. He gets enough space between us to hit me, and I reel backwards from the unexpected blow. Then he rushes me and we're on the ground, and people outside are chanting. "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

I lose my shit. When I pin him to the ground, I punch him – I don't know how many times – until Tank and Emmett grab my arms and literally drag me away from him.

Tank blocks my view of Dillon. "Jesus, Colt, you want to fucking kill him?"

"Are you really asking me that question?" I yell. "Because the answer is yes."

"Get a hold of yourself," Tank warns. "I know you're mad at Cassie, but you can't just kick the shit out of everyone in your way. Do you even want to play this fall? You know Coach's rules – you're fighting, you're done."

"Fuck!" I scream at the top of my lungs, running my hands through my hair. I think I'm crawling out of my damn skin right now, hopped up on anger and adrenaline. I don't want to explain to Tank what Dillon did, not right now. "Get away from me."

I push against Tank's chest.

"If I let you go, are you going to just go over there and beat on him?" Tank asks, talking to me like he'd speak to a small child.

"I'm getting out of here," I grumble.

"You should do that," Tank says.

I storm across the front yard without a second glance behind me. I don't care if Dillon lives or dies.

The only thing I care about right now is seeing her.

She's got to hate me right now.

I don't want to imagine what the hell Dillon made her think I was saying. Or the look on her face when she walked into my room and saw the naked girl.

She thinks I'm scum. I know she does.

When I get to Cassie's apartment, I pause at the door. I didn't plan what to say. I have no idea what to say. Anything I say is going to sound like I’m trying to explain away my guilt.

I knock on the door and wait. She doesn't answer.

I do it again. No answer.

Fuck, she's probably not home. Or she's inside wishing I'll just go away. I briefly consider kicking the door down.

I knock again.

The deadbolt turns and Cassie pulls the door open, just a few inches. I push gently against it, but she puts her foot behind it to stop it from opening further.

"I need to talk to you," I insist.

"I only came out here to tell you that if you pound on my door one more time, I'm going to call the cops."

"Cassie. You need to listen to me, just for five minutes."

"I don't need to do anything, Mr. King," she says coolly. "You were so offended because I didn't tell you about my thesis, because you're such an honest guy, huh?"

"I
am
honest. If you give me a minute to explain what happened, you'd see that everything is just a big misunderstanding."

"I'm sure it's a big fucking misunderstanding that you've been bragging about doing me, right? Talking about nailing the nerdy little tutor to your teammates. That makes you feel like a big man, doesn't it?"

I clench my fists by my side. I hope Dillon has to have his jaw wired shut. If he doesn't, I'm going to fix that the next time I see him. "I didn't say anything, Cassie," I protest. "That's the guy who was talking about nailing you before, the one I beat up that night I came here. Remember?"

She laughs bitterly. "He knew I was a virgin, Colton," she says. "Explain how he knew I was a virgin if you weren't bragging about bagging the virgin tutor, huh?"

Fuck. How did he know that?

Then, it hits me.
"She's a virgin, you stupid fuck."
I said it right before I hit him that night.

"Okay, that
I
did
tell him, but not in the way he told you I told him. And not in the way you think I told him."

She shakes her head and looks at me. She doesn't even look angry. She looks… disappointed. And betrayed.

In that moment, I feel like the wind is totally knocked out of me.

"I have to go, Colton," she says. "Don't come back here. If you do, I swear I will call the cops."

She slams the door in my face and the deadbolt turns.

Shutting me out.

"
I
'm not
sure if it went down the way you think it went down, Cass, that's all I'm saying." Sable dips her chip into queso and shovels it into her mouth.

"And I already told you that I don't want to talk about That Asshole," I huff over the noise on the restaurant patio. New house rule: we refer to Colton King as
That Asshole
. I take a sip of my margarita. Okay, I take a giant gulp. You'd think I'd have learned after the tequila shots, but what can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment.

Obviously, since I was fucking around with Colton King.

I should have known better.

"I'm just saying that he and one of the guys on the team really got into it that night," she says. "I mean, Colt –
That Asshole
— was crazy pissed. Tank thought he was going to kill the guy."

I flash to the image of Colton at my door, his lip bloody and a bruise along the side of his jaw, then force it out of my head.

I wonder if it was the guy from the party. It might have been. Colton probably pounded the shit out of him for telling me that he was running his mouth about us. It was probably supposed to be the team's secret.

I shudder at the thought of him telling stories – our stories, goddamn it – in the fucking locker room. Heat surges to my face. It's humiliating. I haven't even told Sable that part of it. Just the part about the girl in his bedroom.

The waiter comes by and I order a second margarita.

Sable raises her eyebrows. "Maybe there's more to the story than you think," she says.

"I said I don't want to talk about it," I spit back. "Can we just sit here on the deck in the sunshine and drink margaritas and talk about celebrities or something?"

"Fine," Sable mutters, crossing her arms over her chest.

We sit in silence.

"You're not talking about celebrities," I complain finally.

"Neither are you."

"Yeah, because I'm sitting here wallowing in self-pity and you're the one who's supposed to be distracting me."

"Fine," Sable grumbles. "Kardashian gossip?"

I shrug.

"Royal family gossip?"

"Boring." I'm being petulant and pissy and bitchy and horrible.

"That Asshole gossip?"

"Screw you, Sable."

"He
is
a celebrity," she points out. "He's been in gossip magazines. And I think you're being ridiculous, not even willing to consider alternative explanations for what happened."

My new margarita arrives and I suck down half of it while glaring at Sable. "I can't believe you're sitting here defending him."

"Whoa, whoa," she says. "I'm not defending him. If he was screwing around, he's an ass."

"You
are
defending him. What other possible explanation could there be for a naked girl in his bedroom who was clearly waiting for –" My voice drops to a whisper. "Colton King to crown her?"

"Crown her?" the corners of Sable's mouth turn up. "At least heartbreak hasn't ruined your sense of humor. How long have you been waiting to use that one?"

"A while," I admit.

I don't tell her the rest, which is that if I don't joke about it, I'm going to lose my shit. And there's nothing more pathetic than a tipsy girl crying into her margarita in the middle of a restaurant. Unless it's a tipsy girl crying into her margarita at a restaurant because she thought she was in love with the school's most notorious player and believed he felt the same about her.

That would just make her a
stupid
tipsy girl.

"There could be lots of explanations," Sable reasons.

"Name one."

"She… got lost."

"Naked. Asking about That Asshole's cock."

"She could have been trying to screw another player on the team."

"Again, saying she was waiting for his cock."

"It could have been a joke," Sable says. "Those guys are basically all overgrown adolescents."

"Yeah, hilarious."

"Maybe someone sent her up there. Like… an end-of-finals prize. One of his teammates."

"
Like a prize
?" I ask. "Not helping at all, Sable."

"It could have had to do with the guy he beat up."

I exhale heavily. "Why are you, of all people, trying to justify what he did?" I ask. "You're the one who warned me that he was probably hooking up with someone at the party before we even went. And you were right."

"I didn't say
probably
," she says. "I said it was
possible
. And… I don't really think that anymore."

"Are you high? Because your perception of reality is significantly impaired. You think he might hook up with someone before we go to the party, but when he actually does have a naked girl in his bedroom, you think he's pure and innocent."

I turn to reach for a chip and see the couple at the table beside us staring at us. The guy leans over. "Guy with a girl naked in his room?" he asks. "Don't go back to that."

"You shouldn't stay with a guy who hurts you," the girl across from him agrees.

I almost tell them to shut up and stop eavesdropping, but I don't. "See? I blurt instead, gesturing to them while talking to Sable. "Complete strangers think there's no justification for it.
Total strangers.
Meanwhile my best friend is trying to reason away what happened."

Sable gives the couple the nastiest stink-eye I've ever seen. "Will you two mind your own fucking business?"

Their heads snap down and they huddle over their food.

Sable leans forward and speaks in a hushed tone. "You didn't see the look on his face, Cassie," she says. "When we told him you left. It was – I don't know how to explain it. It was like he just watched his dog get put down."

I know that look.

I know it because it was the look he gave me through the barely-open door. The one that pulled at my heartstrings and gave me a brief moment of pause… a second of thought that maybe I was getting things wrong.

I shove that image aside and clench my jaw. Then I grab a chip and bury that feeling under more queso.

"You're a sucker for strays, Sable," I tell her. "I'm not."

"I'm going to write that comment off to you being heartbroken," Sable says, "and not that you're being a big ol' bitch right now."

I sulk in the chair and finish off my margarita, shutting up.

Then, I don't shut up. "It's not just the girl, okay?" I blurt out, my tongue loosened by the alcohol. I can feel a flush moving up my neck even thinking about what that guy told me. I should actually stop thinking of him as a creep. At least he was honest.

"What do you mean?"

I shake my head. "I don't want to say it here."

Sable scoots her chair around the circular table until she's next to me, looking over her shoulder at the couple next to us. "Seriously," she says loudly to them. "Is this what happens when you get in a relationship? You have nothing to talk about, so you listen to other people's conversations?"

The girl shrugs and gives us a sheepish look.

I close my eyes, hardly wanting to think about it, let alone speak the words.

"What happened?"

"This guy – on the team – I was trying to find That Asshole," I explain, "and he told me what That Asshole had been saying about me."

"What do you mean?"

"Talking about 'nailing the virgin'," I spit out bitterly. "Telling stories to the guys in the locker room about… all the things we did."

"What?" Sable exclaims, her brow furrowed. "That does not sound right, Cassie."

"Yeah, well, it is what it is, right? He's a jock. I should have expected it."

"No, no, no." Sable shakes her head. "None of this is right, Cass. I – he wouldn't do that."

"I'm not a dumbass," I say, my words clipped. "It's what happened and I'm not going to be one of those girls who looks the other way when shit like that happens."

"Jonathan would know if he did that," Sable explains, her expression puzzled. Her voice hesitates for a split second when she speaks the word
know
, and I can see it in her eyes; she's wondering if Tank knew. "Jonathan would tell me."

I lean close to her, my voice a loud whisper. "The guy – the one from his team – he knew I was a virgin," I hiss. "Now, who knew about that, besides you and me and That Asshole? You tell me. It's not like I'm walking around campus with a giant V painted on my forehead."

Sable sinks back in her chair, looking thoughtful. "There's a reasonable explanation, Cass," she says. "I'm sure of it."

"Whatever you say, Sable."

She doesn't look so sure anymore.