Game Day Box Set: A College Football Romance

by Lily Cahill

  I strap on my ankle brace and pull a baggy pair of sweats over the brace. I check in the mirror, and you almost can’t tell at all that I’m wearing one.

  “Are you supposed to be walking on that without crutches or anything?” Ben is literally looking down his nose at my ankle.

  “It’s fine. It feels a lot better today, and we’re not going far. It’s probably good for me to work it out a little.”

  Downstairs, Ben still tagging along, I skip our own dining hall and head outside. I’m not exactly walking fast, but I make it to the little side parking lot and my scooter locked at the end of a bike rack.

  Ben freezes. “When you said we weren’t going far, I thought you meant to the dining hall, not to the parking lot. I am not getting on that thing.”

  “I thought scooters were crazy popular in Europe,” I say, swinging my bad foot over the seat and making room for Ben.

  Ben sniffs. “I’m British, not European.”

  I just raise an eyebrow at Duke Snottypants until he sighs.

  “It’s not the scooter, it’s the two of us riding it together.”

  “Well, I can’t walk all the way over there. It’s uphill. Megan will kill me.”

  “Megan?” He raises his eyebrow at me. “I saw her dashing out of here the other night.”

  “Yeah, she’s helping me through my, you know.” I don’t even want to say the words ankle sprain. Or injury. It’s not bad enough to put those words on it.

  “Right.”

  “Will you get on the fucking scooter already? You are going to make us miss the waffles.”

  With a put-upon sigh, he straddles the seat behind me. “I’m not putting my hands around your waist.”

  I squeeze down on the accelerator and peel out onto the road. I feel Ben’s weight shift wildly behind me.

  “Fuck you,” he yells in my ear, grabbing hold of my waist.

  I floor it harder and let loose a wild laugh.

  Practically the whole first-string is at the Pig Out. The real name is Pegout Hall, but everyone calls it the Pig Out.

  With my plate piled high with waffles, syrup, bacon, eggs, and a few slices of pizza—Pig Out always has pizza, no matter what time of day it is—I sit down at the table and dig into my food.

  I can feel Ben hesitate behind me, feel his eyes looking over the table. Everyone’s said hi to me, but practically ignored him. I mean, he’s an arrogant asshole, so he deserves it, but still … he’s my teammate. I shift down on the bench a bit to make room for him, and he settles at the table, dips his head, and starts eating without so much as a thank you.

  “Where’s Riley?” I ask between bites. Brulotte is the only one missing from the entourage, and he never misses breakfast. But it feels like he’s around less and less lately.

  “With that girl again. Lilah,” Dwayne Sheehan says.

  “He’s pretty head over heels, huh?” West adds. “It’s kind of sickeningly cute. She came to our game wearing his jersey and everything. I’d love to look at the sidelines and see my girl there, rooting me on.”

  “You have a girl?”

  “No,” West says, blushing. “But it’d be nice, is all I’m saying.”

  “You ever have a girl, Mayhew?” I ask it partly as a joke, partly to pull the guy into conversation.

  Ben freezes, sausage speared on the end of his fork. “That’s no one’s concern,” he finally says, his words jerking out of his mouth. It makes me frown, but Dwayne, a giant lineman, just rolls his eyes.

  “Riley’s missing bro time, and that’s not cool.” Dwayne says, so eloquent with words. No wonder people think all football players are dumb.

  “It’s not like it’s affecting his game. Lotto is still our best player. With the way the rest of our offense is playing, except for maybe Mayhew here, we’d probably have a losing record right now if it weren’t for him.” I know I’m being defensive, but I’m not going to let Dwayne shit on Riley when he isn’t even here to stick up for himself.

  West looks down at his plate of food, and I instantly regrets saying that. The last thing he needs is to doubt his skills any more than he already does.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s coming together.”

  That’s a stretch, to say the least. Ben might be a fast fucker, but he and West still don’t have any chemistry on the field. They can’t anticipate each other the way a quarterback and wide receiver should if you’re going to succeed as a team. You have to feel your teammates like parts of your body, knowing at all times where they’re going to be even if you’re not looking directly at them.

  “I don’t care. He should be here with us,” says Dwayne. “Eating bacon and sausage together. Not snuggling in bed with some chick that doesn’t know the first thing about football.”

  My jaw tightens. I was snuggling in bed with some chick this morning, and now I’m wishing I’d never woken up from that perfect, improbable reality.

  “If you have a good woman, you don’t let her go just to eat soggy bacon with your teammates. We smell enough of each other jock straps as it is.” I shovel a bite of eggs into my mouth, trying to act nonchalant.

  “You’re being real defensive, Reg. You got something going on we should know about?”

  “Maybe.” I shouldn’t have said that.

  Dwayne’s little eyes pop wide and he laughs meanly. “Maybe? What’s that supposed to mean? There’s no maybe when I’ve got my fingers up a girl’s twat. Is the bitch holding out on you?”

  “Oy!” Ben interjects. “That’s enough.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I growl.

  “Oh, sorry,” Dwayne says, his voice more syrupy than his waffles. “Is the respectable young lady holding out on you?”

  I don’t have much of a temper. I’m a pretty affable guy, and I’d rather fool around than fight. But I’m not going to joke with Dwayne about this. I look him right in the eye. “First of all, you’re a real asshole. And second of all, it’s none of your business.”

  And suddenly, for the first time ever, I feel like I understand Ben a bit. Or, at least, why he responded exactly the same way to this question earlier, though sounding a lot fancier.

  “Christ,” Dwayne says, giving me a clear view of the waffles he’s chewing as he talks through his food. “Have the PC police gotten to you too? Since when is it illegal for a bro to talk about his ho?”

  “Don’t call her that.” The threat is very real in my voice. Next to me, Ben tenses.

  “Who?” Dwayne says, bobbing his eyebrows up and down like he’s caught me. “Wait, let me guess. Oh, please tell me it’s that girl from the cheerleading team. The one with the long legs and the big, red mouth and the top that barely fits.” Dwayne holds his hands in front of his chest and jiggles invisible tits. “Jess something.” Dwayne leers at Ben. “She already went after that British fucker, but maybe you’re sloppy seconds.”

  “Shut up, Dwayne,” West says, tossing his napkin down on his plate. “Don’t you know we can’t say shit like that?”

  “Jesus,” Dwayne says, rolling his eyes. “It’s just us. We’re not going to snitch on each other, right? Hell, we wouldn’t even be in this position if some bitch hadn’t posted that video of Jeremy and the rest of the guys.”

  I don’t even realize I’m on my feet until I feel a lance of pain in my ankle. “They were raping someone,” I say, aware that I’m parroting my conversation with Megan. “They were raping her. It wasn’t some good-time fuck-fest, it was a crime.”

  Dwayne gives me a sly look. “Jeremy and them had some very good times.”

  All the air sucks out of me.

  “What are you talking about?” West asks, his voice deadly.

  “I’m just saying …,” Dwayne shrugs. “It wasn’t the first time they pulled a train on a girl. Just the first time they decided to film it.”

  The blood drains from my face. The statistics that Megan spouted at me the other night come back to me—one in five women, ninety-five percent unreported. “Are you s
aying there were others? Other girls that they raped?”

  “Fucked,” Dwayne corrects me. “None of them ever complained.”

  The pizza and eggs I just gobbled down are threatening to come back up. I don’t know what to make of this feeling. My breath is short, my heart pounding, and a red haze seems to be taking over my vision. Dwayne’s smug face is looking up at me, and suddenly all I can imagine is bashing that face until he begs and bleeds.

  “Whoa, Reggie,” Ben says, suddenly entering my field of vision. “Let’s get going, okay, mate?”

  “I’m not done talking,” I say, my voice low and dangerous.

  That’s when I realize—what I’m feeling is uncontrollable rage.

  I’m not the only one who is angry. West’s hand is fisted on the table, but his voice is tightly controlled. “Are you telling me that you know about other women who were raped, and you kept quiet about it?”

  “I just told you, they weren’t raped. Drunk girls want to fuck football players, it’s like a law of nature.” Dwayne sits back, finally realizing that the tide of this conversation has turned against him. “What?”

  West is on his feet as well. “I can’t kick you off the team. But that doesn’t mean I have to spend my personal time with a misogynistic sack of shit like you. Guys like you are the reason the Mustangs have a shitty reputation. And if I find out ….” His voice shakes slightly before he gets ahold of himself. “If I find out that any other girl was raped and you knew about it, I’ll go straight to the police myself.”

  “What the fuck?” Dwayne says as the other guys at the table stand up as well. “Guys, I didn’t mean anything. I was just giving Reggie a hard time.”

  “That’s my job, mate,” Ben says, still standing between me and Dwayne. He stares at Dwayne for a long moment before shaking his head. “Americans are mad. Come on, Reg, let’s go.”

  My feet feel planted to the ground. I’m still so angry. How could anyone talk about a woman that way?

  “Reg.” Ben claps me on the back. “Let’s go.”

  I look into Dwayne’s shocked face, and a memory rises up. It wasn’t so long ago that I was talking to Riley about the girl he was into. The heat of my anger is washed with cold shame when I realize that I wasn’t any better than Dwayne. I looked at Lilah and only saw her sexy body, not the person inside. But it isn’t until this moment that I realize how my offhand comments about her body are part of a larger culture that makes guys think that they can do and say whatever they want. Guys like Dwayne, who can’t wrap his head around the idea that flirting with a football player doesn’t mean you want to have sex him and three of his friends.

  “Reg,” Ben says again. “It’s not worth it.”

  Slowly, I unclench my hands. As I step away, I put a bit too much weight on my bad leg and nearly stumble. Before I can fall, Ben’s there, propping me up with his shoulder. I look at him, surprised. “What a wanker,” he says, shaking his head. “I would have let you punch him if I didn’t think it would get you kicked off the team.”

  He surprises a laugh out of me. “You worried about me, roomie? Am I your new best friend?” I laugh harder. “Have you ever had a real friend?”

  He shifts away from me, leaving me to walk on my own. “You’re my teammate, not my friend. I need you on that team so we actually win and don’t embarrass ourselves on the pitch.”

  “Fuck you,” I growl, the anger still boiling just under the surface. “And it’s called a field, not a pitch.”

  “I’ll call it whatever I like,” Ben says, back to his normal prickly self. “And stay out of my food. If you think this cafeteria lives up to the prosciutto you stole from me, you’re the wanker.”

  He walks away, leaving me to hobble out into the quad where I left my scooter. For a second there, I thought Ben might be a normal human being, but nope, he went right back to being a total dick. But then it occurs to me—he knows Megan was in my room the other night. He could have said something about it to Dwayne, but he didn’t.

  I find West in the quad, staring angrily into space. “Where’d everybody go?” I ask, referring to the rest of the players who left with him.

  “Class, or whatever,” West says. “I didn’t expect them to follow me, to be honest.”

  “You’re our fearless leader,” I say, trying not to notice when West cringes. “Seriously, though, thanks for saying something. We’re already getting enough shit for what happened last year. We don’t need to give the school extra reasons to shut down the program.”

  “I don’t think Coach would kick Dwayne off the team just for saying shit.”

  “He was pretty pissed when he found out I peed in public. Indecent exposure,” I explained when West cocked his head. “At that party? When I was showing Megan my bruise and took my pants off? Thanks for covering for me, by the way.”

  “Huh?”

  “Coach said he got a report that I was peeing in public. I figured … you guys didn’t tell him that?”

  “No, man. You got busted peeing on a lightpost by the campus cops when we were on the way back to the dorm. We told you to wait, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Oh.” I try to find that moment in my memory, but it’s a complete blank. “I guess I was pretty hammered.”

  “To say the least,” West says with an arch look.

  “So I didn’t … I thought I remembered ….”

  “You tried to show the physical therapy girl—Megan, I guess? You tried to show her your bruise, but we stopped you before you dropped your pants.”

  “Really?” I’m glad to hear that I didn’t expose myself to Megan, but the fact I was so drunk that I can’t remember any of it goes a long way to temper my pleasure.

  “Really. Look, man, I know we all party and whatever, but maybe cut back on the whiskey bongs? At least until the end of the season. We need you healthy, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The truth is, I haven’t felt much urge to party since I hurt my ankle. Which is weird, because the urge to party is as basic for me as food and water. But if I had a choice, I’d rather spend the night curled up with Megan than drinking until I’m blind.

  “Cool. And … I’m glad to hear you calling out Dwayne for all the shit that happened last year.” West’s eyes are serious and still angry. “I don’t just want us to act better, I want us to be better, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Or at least I’m starting to. I’ve been so caught up in how the sex scandal—rape scandal—screwed up the team, I haven’t thought as much as I should about how it screwed up the whole school. Including, or especially, the women on campus. Who are now so afraid that they carry mace and skip parties.

  I climb back on my scooter and motor back to the dorm. Though Ben isn’t there to weigh down the scooter, I feel twice as heavy as I did when we were coming over here this morning.

  Chapter Ten

  Megan

  I SCRAPE BURNED EGGS FROM the bottom of the pan and flip them onto the plates with toast. It’s not much of a dinner, but I’m craving an egg sandwich.

  “This is what we’re having?” Chloe looks at her breakfast-for-dinner with disdain.

  “We’re basically out of food.”

  Chloe grimaces. “Let’s call for Chinese.”

  “No, I’m craving an egg sandwich. It will be good. Just wait a second.” I rifle through the fridge and find a bag of iceberg lettuce with a few wilty leaves on the bottom. I grab the salt and pepper for good measure.

  “Lettuce? Soggy lettuce is how you’re going to fix this sandwich?”

  I crinkle my forehead. “Reggie put lettuce—”

  Chloe butts in with her eyebrows raised high. “Reggie? He made you breakfast after you spent the night?”

  “No, he made me lunch, or dinner, I guess, since we didn’t eat anything else after that.”

  “Oh. My. God. You said nothing happened!”

  Another frown crawls across my face. “It didn’t,” I say, feeling weirdly shy. “We ju
st studied and fell asleep, that’s it.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Megan. He cooked for you. That’s, like, as serious as a diamond ring.”

  “It was just eggs,” I say, biting into my sandwich to prove my point. It’s got nothing on the sandwich Reggie made me. “I just cooked for you, does that mean we’re in a committed relationship?”

  She ignores me and the eggs I cooked for her. “Tell me everything. He is so fucking gorgeous. Those eyes. And forget those eyes, that body!” She wiggles a little in excitement. “Is this going to be it? Are you going to, you know? Let him in your treasure trove?”

  “Ugh.” My mouth turns down, the words giving me an actual physical reaction.

  “You haven’t yet, right? I mean, you would have told me if you lost your virginity.”

  I push the hard eggs that’ve escaped the sandwich around on my plate. “We’re not dating. It was just…,” I don’t finish the sentence. It was just lunch, physical therapy, a study date?

  “A man made you dinner, you slept at his place. He apparently helped you study? I didn’t even know he knew how to do that. Are you sure you’re not dating?”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding my head even though I am definitely not sure.

  “Well, you could still let him in your … secret cave.”

  “Jesus, Chloe. Enough with the euphemisms.”

  “What? You made it pretty clear you didn’t like treasure trove. Would you prefer if I called it your flower?” She draws out the word and lowers her voice in a false serious tone.

  “No. Just say vagina.”

  Chloe screws her face up. “That’s so clinical.”

  “Whatever, we don’t need to talk about it. Nothing is going on.”

  “Well, I think it could be. If you wanted. And from the amount of buzzing I hear though the wall, I think you want it.”

  I groan and drop my head in my hands. I can feel my face turning new and exotic shades of red that haven’t even been discovered yet.

  The chair scrapes over cheap linoleum as Chloe gets up and comes over to me. She rubs my back and ignores my embarrassment. “It’s natural. Nothing to be embarrassed about.” The worst part is that she’s right. If I keep going like this, I’m going to have to start buying batteries in bulk. And more than that, I don’t want to be a virgin anymore. It’s not like I’m waiting until marriage or anything. It just hasn’t happened for me yet.