Page 17

MAYA

I rode the very scary, very fragile high of talking to Theo for the rest of the day.

I thought about her while I was in the coffee line getting another cup mid-study session.

I thought about her during my walk home, during my shower, while I was cooking myself dinner.

I thought about her while I was getting ready for my night out with Iris.

Iris knew Theo and I had seen each other, but nothing else other than me insisting that it was strictly platonic.

If anyone was going to understand my obsession with Theo McCall, it was Iris.

Theo was undeniably hot. She was tall, muscular.

Just thinking about her half-crooked smile nearly brought me to my knees.

And her voice was so smooth and impossibly sexy.

Whenever she spoke, I could practically hear how she would sound whispering in my ear.

But there was something holding me back from saying anything more to Iris, even playfully.

I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t going to keep Theo a secret by any means, but I couldn’t actually tell Iris how I was feeling.

She would know in a second that something was going on with me.

I’d never, ever talked about anyone that way before.

I’d never even thought about someone else that way before in private.

I was down bad in a way never before experienced and all I’d done was see Theo play basketball and flirt with her a little.

And even then, I had no way of knowing if the flirting was actually reciprocated.

We hadn’t established anything between us and had barely even talked about the photo.

All I knew was that Theo had lightly offered to hang out again in the future, but hadn’t given me a definitive date or time.

It felt like an expert move from a well-trained player.

It was a way to keep me on my toes and keep me waiting for her.

I knew the move well because I’d also done it: yeah, let’s do coffee.

I’ll text you later to figure it out. Not sure what my schedule looks like, but I’ll let you know .

But my gut feeling was telling me that she was flirting back, even if it was just a little bit.

“You are literally walking on air,” Iris said as I walked from my bedroom into our living room. She glanced up at me from the kitchen as she poured out a shot for herself.

I stopped and blinked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking about, but it’s all over your face. You look like you’re on a completely different planet. If you’re not having the best sex flashback of your life right now, I don’t know what else you could possibly be thinking about.”

I frowned, leaning over the kitchen counter to look at her. I popped a pretzel into my mouth, our favorite pregame snack for the quick carbs. “What do you mean? ”

“Dude, look at you,” she said. “I’m guessing hanging out with Theo went really well.”

“Stop,” I moaned, dragging out the vowel. I ducked my head into my hands. “It was nothing. We were just hanging out. She asked me to DM her, and then she asked to get coffee.”

“And then you went back to her place and you fucked for, like, six hours straight,” Iris said and then sighed dreamily. “I know her stamina must be insane.”

It had to be; no one could work out that much and get tired in bed. “Not the point,” I said, shaking away my own thoughts about Theo that were very much not appropriate. “Nothing happened. I didn’t go home with her. We talked and then she left because she had to eat and change before practice.”

“You saying the words before practice is hilarious to me. I love this sports era for you, but it’s going to take me a second to get used to,” Iris said and then threw back her shot, grimacing as it went down.

“There is no sports era for me. Theo and I are just…” I waved my hands around in the air as if that was going to answer things.

“She literally asked you to slide into her DMs. You guys then proceeded to hang out. I don’t see what could possibly be confusing about that.”

“It’s a lesbian thing. I don’t know. Like, we were probably flirting. But we also probably weren’t. Nothing happened. People will kiss as friends so nothing is really off the table. You have to, like, actually talk about it to get any kind of real answers. ”

“So just talk to her,” Iris said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“I can’t talk to her because I don’t even know what I would want, if I want anything at all,” I said, more trying to convince myself than Iris.

My plan of not talking about Theo was quickly disintegrating.

I should’ve known Iris was going to see right through me.

She’d always been able to tell when I was bullshitting.

Sometimes, she let it go and let me talk when I was ready.

Other times, she prodded until my entire story collapsed and the truth came out.

“You have a hot basketball player—arguably, like, the female college basketball player of the moment—going after you.”

“You know me. I don’t do…serious. Or feelings.

Or relationships. Or whatever. I don’t want to talk to her unless I’m totally sure, and the odds are that in, like, two weeks I’ll be over this and move on.

It’s way too early to even get a suggestion on what she’s feeling, anyway.

I know lesbians are stereotyped to U-Haul, but we’re also stereotyped to have painstakingly slow friends-to-lovers arcs. ”

“The latter of which you’re holding out for?” Iris asked cutely, tilting her head and fluttering her eyelashes at me.

“I’m just having some fun. We’ll hang out and like…whatever. I don’t know.”

“I mean, how would you feel if she suddenly popped out with some new girl in, like, two weeks? Honestly? ”

My stomach knotted up at the thought. I’d kept everything so logical, purely focusing on what I could see and what the facts were.

From what I could tell, she wasn’t seeing anyone because no one else had gone to her season opener and waited for her.

She also didn’t seem to date much because there was nothing online about a previous girlfriend—no pictures, no long-lost posts. Nothing.

Not that I’d been looking.

But Iris proposing that question brought me face-to-face with the thing I hadn’t wanted to address, which was that anything could be going on in secret. Girls not showing up to her games just meant that she didn’t have a girlfriend; it didn’t tell me anything else.

The thought stirred up something weird in me that I didn’t like. My insides knotted up.

Jealousy. That was what that feeling was. It was new to me, but I already didn’t like it.

“I mean, it’d be…whatever,” I lied, as if the thought of Theo looking at someone else like she looked at me didn’t make me want to vomit.

Iris raised her eyebrows at me slightly, and I knew she didn’t believe me. I rolled my eyes in response.

“You know me, I’ll be over it in a week,” I said. It was true—I loved a fling with character. DJs, international students, graduate students in town for a conference. I got to experience something new for a fleeting moment and then moved on. Theo fit the same exact formula. It would be fine .

But even as I thought it, my gut was telling me it wasn’t true. Theo was different; it was undeniable.

Iris and I opted for Stephen’s instead of a house party.

Drinks were pretty cheap because it was a dive bar, but it was really only fun to show up already pretty plastered.

Otherwise, we started thinking too much about how the floors looked like they’d never been cleaned, and the tables were always sticky.

When we arrived, we realized Stephen’s was doing some kind of discount night for a Lakeside Green football game they were playing in California. It was busier than either of us expected it to be, but the crowd was lively and a lot of fun.

“You really are trying to turn me into a sports girl,” I teased as we walked in. The game was playing on a huge projector. We were there for the very tail end of it but the score was close, so the crowd at Stephen’s was still going nuts.

“You know I wouldn’t drag you to football without a heads up,” Iris said. She’d always been more of a basketball girl than a football one; she only went to football games when she was invited by other people.

“Find us a place to sit, I’ll get us drinks,” I said. With the specials the bar was offering, I was happy to pay.

Iris headed off to find an open seat, and I went to the bar to get us drinks.

As I waited for a space at the counter to order, I glanced around to see who was here.

I was surprised Iris and I had never accidentally overlapped with a sporting event here before; I didn’t even realize they hosted nights like this here, even though it made sense.

But we tended to bounce between house parties—it was a huge thing on our campus—and only went to bars when we wanted a change of scenery.

As I looked around the room, taking in the green jerseys and face paint and spray-on hair dye, I felt the same way I had during the basketball game.

Before Iris had introduced me to a game, I’d seen all of it as a nuisance and kind of overdramatic.

But now, I could see the sense of community that came from sports like this.

It was hard for me to ever imagine going as hard as even owning sports merchandise, but I could appreciate it for what it was now.

I smiled a little bit, thinking about how there were people who got this excited about Theo playing.

I imagined people sitting around their TVs and going to bars just like these to see her play.

So many of them were probably wearing her name and number, too.

I was sure it was exactly what she’d always dreamed of for herself.

“Didn’t realize there was a game going on?”