| |
––––––––
I FELT LIKE SHIT.
Not just because of the sickness that had been plaguing me the last couple of days, but now I had the weight of whatever was going on with Gavin hanging over me too. And as much as I wanted to not think about it and take Kevin’s advice, I couldn’t stop. The idea that I had either made him sick or worse, it made him sick to his stomach about what happened last night, kept rolling over my thoughts, steamrolling over them, in fact. I couldn’t think about anything for more than five minutes without a sense of guilt dropping down on my head all over again.
With all the games shoved in a drawer, all the other girls having a quiet night in after the wild night the night before, and also kind of avoiding me because I had been sick, there wasn’t much to do. I was stuck in a hotel room twiddling my fingers at eight in the evening.
Maybe I could sleep early. If I tried, I could probably get myself to sleep around nine if I lay down now. It would be difficult, sure, but if I took another one of my cold medicine pills, maybe I could convince myself to hit the sack.
Deciding to hold off on the over-the-counter anti-cold medicine until later if I really couldn’t sleep, I slid inside my bed and turned the television on. Thankfully, the hotel had one of the cooking channels, and I put it on with the volume low and lay back, trying to will myself to relax.
But the more I tried to relax, the more memories of the night before would flash through my mind. And then the guilt would come right after it. It was a losing effort. I knew it was a losing effort. And yet, I kept trying anyway.
Suddenly, my phone pinged with the notification sound for a text message. I reached over to the nightstand and pulled it toward me as it pinged again. And again. And again.
It was Star, speaking in her trademarked barrage of single-line thoughts. She typed like she spoke, one sentence at a time, always teetering on the edge of her thoughts going somewhere else and shooting off into a different tangent. It was like speaking with a drunken puppy. She was adorable, but hard to understand and easily distracted.
She was running down her day the day before, giving me a play-by-play of everything she’d done, starting with waking up to a breakfast of mostly cheese and bread and going to bed with wine, more bread, and more cheese. Secretly I kind of hoped it caught up with her and she would return to Georgia several pounds heavier, but I knew better. Star could eat an entire horse and somehow lose weight. She had a magical unicorn gift, and I resented it.
The pinging sound was constant, only spaced out by how long it took her to type them. I realized she was just ending her day in France, and even if she did recognize the time difference, likely assumed I was still going this early in the evening anyway. For her, it was two in the morning. She was crawling into bed half-drunk and excited to brag. I was somehow even sadder than just being in the States and not living her life by trying to get into bed and asleep before there were even two digits in the PM side of the clock.
I watched the messages come in, not clicking on them but seeing what the preview would allow me to see until I just couldn’t take it anymore. She was enjoying her time there, that was for sure. She kept mentioning people’s names, ones I didn’t recognize. Either they were friends of hers whose names I’d never bothered to commit to memory, which admittedly was most of them, or they were new friends she’d met in France. Several of the names could be boys or girls. Again, I felt a hint of protectiveness for Gavin that was wholly inappropriate.
Tapping the silent button, the pinging sound stopped, and I sighed as I set the phone down. I would wait a little while, until she was done and asleep before I would read her texts. Then maybe I would respond. In a few hours. When it would be the middle of the night for her.
That was probably mean of me. Part of me insisted it was just so she would wake up to a message from me, but another part, a darker part, knew full well that I would enjoy the thought of waking her from her perfect, stressless, half-drunken slumber. Even knowing she would probably just smile and put the phone back down, going back to sleep without a worry in her mostly empty mind, the fact that it would disrupt any sweet dreams gave me the tiniest bit of glee.
“I am an awful person,” I sighed at myself.
Sleeping wasn’t happening. Not yet, anyway. I was still a good half hour away from my self-imposed deadline of taking any more medicine that could help me sleep, so I slipped out of the bed and made my way to the window overlooking the beach, and less sexily, the parking lot.
The heavy curtains had been drawn since the daytime, but I opened them now, letting the last of the dying sunlight fill the room, along with the creeping darkness that made the sky a swirl of red and orange and purple and blue, like one of those cocktails they sold at clubs Star had dragged me to. Not often, mind. But once or twice.
I looked out over the beach and temporarily thought about going out and walking on it, letting the water wash over my feet and listening to the waves crash. It might be nice. Granted, the music was already blaring out of the clubs nearby, and there were lots of people down there too. It wouldn’t be as peaceful as I was probably thinking, but if I put in earbuds, maybe I could at least drown out the sound and just focus on the water.
Briefly, I wondered how silly it would be to stand at the edge of the ocean while listening to a streaming video of ocean sounds on my earbuds. I was about to go grab them and debate it on my way down to the water when I noticed something in the parking lot. Dark shapes were moving out there in the shadows created by the high wall that separated the parking lot and the beach.
A person that looked an awful lot like Gavin was down there. Or at least I thought it looked like him. It had his shape, for sure, and what colors I could make out looked like clothes I recognized him as wearing before. But there were also other shapes out there with him. Men. Large men.
They were huddled in the center of the parking lot, and the other men seemed to be surrounding the Gavin-figure. It looked highly intimidating. There was clearly an animated conversation happening. My window was capable of opening slightly, not enough to slip outside of, but enough to let the sounds of the ocean and the cool air in when that was applicable. Our school might have paid for hotel rooms for us, but they weren’t about to pay for rooms with luxuries like balconies.
At least, not for me.
I was tempted to roll the window open with the old-school tool that looked like a window opener from an old car when the men seemed to back off and disperse. I wasn’t sure what I would have yelled out of the window, especially since I didn’t actually know if it was Gavin, but part of me wanted to shout down there and break up whatever was going on anyway. It looked... weird.
But as the men backed up and disappeared past where I could see them, out toward the strip, I let go of the handle that I realized I was already gripping. The man who looked like Gavin seemed to watch them go, putting his hands on his hips for a moment, then one hand going up to the back of his neck. Then he turned smartly and began to head into the side-door of the hotel.
Maybe I should go check Gavin’s room one more time? If I gave him ten minutes or so, maybe I could drop by and just see if he was there. If that was Gavin down there, I was curious to know what had happened. They certainly hadn’t looked friendly.
I reached for the phone again and noticed that there were over a dozen other messages from Star. She had kept peppering my phone with more inane chatter about whatever it was Star thought was important enough to tell me about, and I again felt a little guilt about how jealous I was of her. She thought enough of me as a friend to message me when she was on this great vacation. I was being a jerk. I should probably read her messages and respond now.
But there was another message waiting for me. One that wasn’t from Star. It had been sent in just the last few seconds.
From Gavin.
I clicked it open eagerly, sitting down hard on the bed.
“Feeling any better?” the message said.
“I am,” I typed back. “Lots better. I took the day off of practice, but I’ll be good to go tomorrow, for sure.”
“Cool,” he typed back. “Good to hear.” There was a beat between messages, long enough for me to wonder if that was all there was going to be, and then another came in. “Have you eaten dinner yet?”
I stared at the message for a moment, unsure of what to do. Technically, yes, I had eaten dinner. If dinner was cereal and was eaten at four in the afternoon. I frankly hadn’t had much of an appetite, especially after I went to visit Gavin and he hadn’t been there. I might have munched through some crackers, but it would have been mindlessly. I saw empty wrappers in the room, but I was mystified as to when I’d eaten them. For all I knew, Gavin had eaten them the night before.
“No,” I typed, untyped, retyped, and then went through that cycle about six times before I finally sent.
“Are you hungry?” he typed back almost instantly.
“Starving,” I said, realizing as I hit the send button that I was. It had come out of nowhere, but yes, I was in fact really hungry.
“Well, I am down at the bar downstairs,” he typed back, then the little bubbles that delineated his typing seemed to go on forever before the next message came in. “Want to join me?”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I typed back.
As I put the phone down on the bed, I fought the urge to squeal.
Not only was he not at home, sick because of me, but he wasn’t seemingly upset with me either. He had, in fact, asked me to join him for dinner. A dinner that I was fairly sure was going to be sans-other members of the teams. I had been on their floor and knew most of them were already in their rooms, nursing hangovers and getting rest before tomorrow.
A dinner. With just us. At a hotel.
I took a deep breath. I needed to let all these nerves go. This was just a meal with a friend; the location was purely coincidental. He was still Star’s boyfriend, despite all the boys she was apparently meeting in France and hanging out with until all hours of the night. I presumed. He was my friend. My friend who had been worried about me and helped nurse me back to health.
I owed him a dinner to thank him.
Armed with an approach that was entirely detached from reality, I convinced myself that I was joining him not because I was fighting a crush that was becomingly wildly problematic, but because I owed him some company after he helped me out. That I was doing him a favor.
And if I was going to do him such a favor, the least I could do was look presentable.
Tearing my clothes off, I grabbed my makeup bag and started applying eyeliner and powder and lipstick faster than I ever had in my life. Then, when I had a face that looked marginally better than the one I had without the aid of Revlon, I pulled open the drawer that had only one thing in it and pulled it out. The sundress was going to have to do.
I slipped it on over top of a pair of leggings that I loved because they had three pockets, slipped the key card in my back pocket, and grabbed my phone, shoving it down in the tiny pocket on my hip.
As I shut the door behind me quietly, I could barely wipe the smile off my face.
