Rule #1

by T. A Richards Neville

  He makes it to halfway when it occurs to me to ask, “What did you lie about?”

  Jen. He lied about Jen.

  Roman glances back, looks me straight in the eyes.

  “I told you you could see whoever you wanted to, and I was lying through my teeth.”

  Life post-Roman is… different. There’s a wide-open space now that used to be filled by him, and if you count passing hellos in the cafeteria or when we walk by each other in the campus hallways, then yeah, we’re still friendly. Friendly, not friends, and that’s a huge difference right there.

  That’s what I miss the most. The easy laughter and my higher status when I could touch or talk to him whenever I wanted, without thinking first or having to stop myself.

  A text from an unsaved number came through on my phone a week ago: Whatever’s being said about me and Roman, it’s not true.

  That was it.

  I ran into Jennifer Dawson in the convenience store two days after receiving the message.

  “He threatened me,” she’d said with a stony look, mouth pursed tightly afterward. “Pretty much forced his way into my apartment and made me send that text.”

  “Well, are they just rumors?” I’d asked, because I still needed to know.

  “It might have been a rumor that night, but one night it won’t be.” And she’d shoved past me with a spiteful scoff and left the store without buying anything.

  It didn’t change anything between me and Roman.

  His ghost haunts me daily; and having to see him requires more energy than I’m capable of giving. My sad girl days are long behind me, though, and I teetered on the sharp edge of total self-destruction before I used my grief to help myself rather than continuing to destroy myself.

  And while I’m still taking scrupulously measured baby steps, I’m making healthy food choices one and a half out of three mealtimes, and my fingers only go down my throat when it’s a really, really bad day, and those aren’t as often anymore.

  My demons are always there, chasing me like a foul odor, mocking me every time I open the fridge door or bring a fork to my lips, but I’ve lost so much in the last six weeks, I’m not willing to lose the rest of what I’ve got left. I’m not cured or fixed, and I don’t know if I want to be, but I’m trying and learning and I’m setting my own pace, expecting nothing other than to get through one more day without my face going anywhere near a toilet bowl.

  My expectations are low, practically on the ground, but starting anywhere is further forward then I’ve ever been, and for each new day I shatter another eating goal, I’m secretly proud of myself.

  Oh, and do you want more good news? My comic platform has reached enough subscribers and readers I’ve quit my job at Champ’s, dedicating any spare hours to sketching and writing new material. I mightn’t have gained much else from not having Roman, but I’ve found time for myself, and it hasn’t been awful.

  “Brooke, are you ready?” Maddie shouts from our living room. “Colin’s already at the Barrel, and he’s waiting for us!”

  She says ‘us’ but she means her. And it’s still strange to me hearing his name being used in a familial way and not a longing, lovestruck one. It’s been a month of them dating and hanging out and I’m still wrapping my head around it.

  “Just putting my shoes on,” I call back. I pull up the gold zip over my ankle on my black suede booties and stand up off the bed to loosely tuck the front of my camisole into my jeans.

  Colin’s at the pool table when we walk downstairs in the Barrel, and him and Maddie do this weird stranger-act thing when they see each other because she’s still so shy and nervous around him.

  “Hi, Colin,” I say, since Maddie’s forgotten how to flex her vocal muscles to speak.

  “Hey, Brooke.” He reaches out his hand, brushing his fingers across Maddie’s as she walks past him to one of the booths.

  They’re so cute it’s disgusting.

  I sit next to Hunter Matthew, sipping on vodka and cranberry juice and doing my best to follow along with the joke he’s telling. He lost me somewhere around the middle, though, and I think he may have already gotten to the punch line and it breezed right over my head.

  His laughter stops, his gaze pouring into mine as he waits for me to catch on and join in. I make a noise that could be laughter or something else, smiling to make it look believable.

  “You don’t get it do you?”

  “I do. She swam all the way back to the boat, but it was sinking.”

  See? I was listening. Who knew?

  “You don’t think that’s funny?” Hunter’s smile gradually recedes. I’m being horrible company, but my mind’s back at the apartment, where I could be researching my next comic and creating new characters, choosing a genre. This just feels like a waste of a Saturday night now my weekends are completely free to do what I love doing.

  I get a text from Booker asking where I’m at, and he turns up at the Barrel twenty minutes later, thankfully not with Luke, or then I’d have to strangle him and rip out all his teeth.

  “Torre, go claim that empty table while I get a beer. You want one?”

  “No thank you,” I say, standing up to do as I’m told.

  I stack the balls into the triangle and position it just right on the pool table. Booker brings me a bottle of beer anyway, and I take it with a roll of my eyes and put the bottle on the wooden table rail.

  “Are you letting me win?” I ask Booker with a gloating grin after I’ve taken him to the cleaners and back for the fourth time.

  “I was, but now I mean business.” Booker rolls up the sleeves of his white T-shirt to his shoulders, showing more tats and muscle than a girl deserves. “Say goodbye to your dignity, because you’re about to lose it.”

  I let my laughter speak for how funny I think that is. But I guess I’ll have to wait to find out if my suspicions that he’s bluffing his way out of another defeat are true because he gets a phone call from one of one thousand girls he probably knows and starts making promises to meet up with her in the next ten minutes.

  “You wanna come chill with us?” he asks, picking up his beer to drain what’s left of it.

  “I’ll pass. I don’t do threesomes.”

  “Pity. I’ll be thinking about that all night now. ‘Kay.” He plonks his empty bottle on the bar behind him, burps long and loud, and then grabs his sweater off the corner of the pool table along with his cell phone. “Text me if you change your mind, though.”

  I look up at him and smile. “Don’t wait around for that.”

  In a bar full of people, it feels too quiet after Booker leaves, and I shoot the only two balls left on the table into opposite pockets, the clean precision not in the least bit satisfying.

  “Who’ve you been hustling this time?”

  I turn around, matching the smooth notes of Roman’s voice to his face.

  I dig up a smile, and it’s harder than any facial expression should be now he’s here. “Booker, but no money was exchanged. I played fair.”

  Roman nods, a faint gesture, his gaze roaming contemplatively over my face. “I didn’t, though, did I?”

  I’m not sure I can do this here.

  “How about a rematch?”

  “Of pool?”

  “Sure,” Roman says, softly shrugging his shoulders. “Only this time, I want something different if I win.”

  “What?” I ask. My wavering voice betrays how him just standing in front of me has knocked me all off kilter.

  “I want another chance with you,” he says seriously.

  I’m instantly on my guard.

  “And if I win?”

  “You can have whatever you want. Just name it.”

  I want air. I need air. Roman stole every precious molecule when he came in here and dropped his demands on me when I’m so unprepared.

  I’m standing in a daze when he lifts his hand from his jeans pocket and starts to set up a game of eight-ball. He chooses a cue stick off the rack, his eyes only brie
fly leaving mine as he moves around the table, as though he expects me to bail at the first opportunity.

  Maddie’s anxiously glancing over here all the time is a glaring clue she’s the spy who told Roman where we’d be, and she looks as tense as I am. She’s pretending like she isn’t paying us a lot of attention, but she’s giving herself away with bells and whistles on.

  Roman motions to the pool table. “Your break.”

  He’s not handing the game to me. My competitive streak won’t allow me to lose or go down easy, and I won’t forgive Roman on his say so.

  “Flip a coin,” I say.

  Sighing audibly, Roman digs his hand into his front pocket, takes out a quarter, and flips it into the air off his thumbnail. He catches it in his palm. “Call it.”

  “Heads.”

  He opens his hand and looks down. “Tails.”

  Well, damn.

  Roman lifts the triangle, leans over the table and sights his shot. The cue ball hits the triangular formation and the balls fan out, the solid yellow sailing into the middle-right pocket. He continues his run and pockets two more solids before I get a look in the game.

  Roman messes up on his next shot, and I’m faced with the last stripe and the eight ball. I won’t be able to make a double shot, so I aim for the blue stripe, mildly surprised when it hits both edges of the pocket and drops in.

  And now it’s just the eight ball, and I’m one shot from winning.

  I put my cue stick on the red felt surface and look from the eight ball to Roman standing at the foot of the table.

  “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

  Roman walks toward me. “Whose playing?”

  I don’t know where the hell to look. “I’m done. You win.”

  The conversation at the booth where Maddie and Colin are sitting dies down. Roman picks up my cue stick and pushes it into my hand. “Take your shot, Brooke. Either pocket the eight or miss, but at least try.”

  I curl my fingers around the smooth wood, discreetly snatching the pool stick from Roman’s hand. I walk around to the other side of the table for the best angle. Narrowing my eyes, I glance at the pocket I want to aim for, then slide the cue stick forward between my thumb and finger. The cue ball knocks the eight ball into the rail cushion, deflecting it to the bottom right pocket where it rolls in easily.

  I tell Maddie I’ll see her at home and then promptly abandon the game and Roman.

  I burst out from the bar into the parking lot, a glacial blast of wind sucking my hair into my face and temporarily blinding me. I wrap my arms around myself to ward off the cold, but it’s a poor form of armor, and my teeth chatter as I cross the empty parking spaces with no goal in mind.

  “Brooke, wait! Where are you going?”

  Roman jogs in front of me, barricading me between a parked car and a lamppost.

  “You stood in there and you asked me not to give up, but isn’t that what you did?” I let loose like a grenade, the emotions I’ve been holding in exploding out of me and all over Roman. “What did I not do right? Didn’t I laugh on command? Give you all the space you demanded and always try to be no clingier than just another one of your friends? Well guess what? I’m a human being and I need things. I have things I want.”

  A frown slices between Roman’s eyebrows. “I had noticed. I didn’t think you were a fucking house plant.”

  “Jerk.” I flatten my hand on his chest and throw my weight into pushing him away.

  He goes nowhere, circling my wrist and keeping my hand pinned over his hooded jacket.

  “What do you want?” he asks, the sharp edge of his gaze smoothing out.

  I blink. Inhale and breathe out, because even that’s a chore. “To know what it felt like. Tell me why was it so inconceivable for you to love someone like me?”

  “Inconceivable?” Roman echoes. “It was fucking impossible, because then I’d lose you, too. Because everything good I find a way to turn it bad.”

  “So you pushed me away instead?” I snatch my hand away, nearly falling backward on my heel. “Time would have run out on us eventually, all you did was speed it up.”

  Roman gives a short laugh, his jaw cut like steel. “Okay, Brooke. Say the words and I’ll leave you alone.”

  He leaps on my hesitation.

  “You can’t, can you? If you’ve thought about me half as much as I’ve been thinking about you, you’ll give me one more chance to try again. I haven’t wanted anyone as badly as I want you. So maybe it doesn’t work out, maybe we don’t last. I don’t care, but I want to find out. I fucking hate not knowing, constantly wondering.”

  “You scare so easily. You can’t just drop me next time the shadow of us creeps up on you. I’m not a toy you can wind up and play with when you’re bored.” Even as I’m quietly raging and saying all of this, I’m perfectly still as Roman creeps toward me, and that wide-open space? he slowly starts to close it, and my heart’s so full my ribcage feels like it’s shrinking around the tender muscle.

  “Because you scare me so easily. I stand by everything I said, and I meant every word. I don’t do relationships and my priorities with the hockey season still going are all over the place. But that was before you, and life can’t go back to normal now I’ve felt what it’s like with you in it. In all the time we were fooling around, there was no one else, doesn’t that count for anything? Doesn’t that tell you I’m not messing around?”

  Roman moves closer still, every inch shaving off another layer of ice surrounding me. “Was I your first, Brooke?”

  I give him a defiant look, daring his fear of commitment to blow my virginity way out of proportion. “Will knowing that freak you out?”

  He stares at me for a moment. “Before, yeah, it would have. But not now. Why didn’t you sleep with him? I called you that night. I asked you not to do it and you hung up on me. Let me believe something else, something that never happened.”

  My hands are trembling. “Because he wasn’t you. I wanted it to be you.” I can’t lie, not about that. Roman’s looking at me like he sees my truth, no words necessary. “I hate that you weren’t sure about me.”

  “Wasn’t sure about you? I put on the brakes because of how fucking sure I was. I’m an idiot and you can remind me I’m one every day.”

  “I intend to,” I say stiffly.

  A thin smile curves one side of Roman’s mouth. Just a flicker of hope. “We can start over?”

  I nod, and Roman’s hands cup my face, his body sheltering me from the wind. I can touch him freely again, and he feels like he was always mine, even when all I could do was look from a distance.

  He touches his lips to mine, his hands leaving my face to coast down my back and over my jeans. He pecks me once, twice, and then parts my lips with his, his tongue invading my mouth, and I’m dizzy on his fresh cologne and the minty taste of whatever gum he’s been chewing. He’s an overload of sensations, and I slip completely into him, losing my heart all over again. I don’t want it back. He can keep it.

  He laughs against my lips when a wolf-whistle shrills from the other side of the parking lot.

  I peek around Roman, at Maddie, Colin, West, and a bunch of other people gathered in the doorway of the Barrel’s bright lights.

  Roman slings his arm around my shoulders, and I lean into him, slipping one arm around his waist and one across his stomach to remain in his heat, and because I don’t want to let him go yet.

  “Should we go back in there?” I ask.

  Roman turns his head a fraction, eases me a downward look and cocks one eyebrow. “Fuck no. They’ve had you all night. I’m taking you home.”

  We only make it as far as the semi-finals in the postseason tournament. My junior year isn’t the year for a Frozen Four championship, but that was last spring, and now I’m Hockey East’s Player of the Year, capping off my senior year at Northvale on my way to the Xcel Energy Center to battle it out against Notre Dame in front of a sellout crowd.

  One team’s leaving St.
Paul national champions and, I’ll admit, we’re not on this bus without a handy stroke of luck as well as day-to-day grinding, but we’re going to be that team or I’m not getting off that ice. We’ve worked too hard to let it slip through our fingers now.

  It was snatched from us too early last time, and there are no more shots after today. This is the final banner on my NCAA career. We win now or I don’t win at all. You can study game tape until your retinas are bleeding and you know what size skate the other guy’s wearing, but anything can happen on the day—giving up penalties, turning pucks over because you’re a bit too excited—and that puts me in an edgy sort of mood. I’ve got it all to play for.

  The team’s happy to be here, adrenaline flowing like bursting rivers, but a bunch of us are quiet. Me, West, Breezy, Quinny. This is it for us.

  New York’s so close I’ve practically got an accent. Eight hours south down the coast from Brooke, who’s still got a year left at NU, but I’ll worry more about that when I’m packing up to leave and the ink on my three-year contract with the Islanders is dry. It’s a short flight; around an hour-thirty, so it’s not like I’m moving across the country.

  Honestly, it’s been a whirlwind. Overwhelming at times. Yesterday, I was awarded the Hobey Baker Memorial Award. Travis Leonard won it the year before. It was an emotional moment, mainly for Steph, who cried from the get-go once my name was announced from the hattrick finalists.

  I don’t know about those other guys’ academic records or what extra commitments they’re pulling off when they’re not on the ice, but no doubt I was sitting with the best. I would know, I’ve played against them enough times.

  A rare spear of pale sunlight glints off the mammoth X’s windows in a mirror-like effect before the clouds regather in the overcast downtown Minnesota sky. The bus turns into the arena, and every inch of pavement is crawling with Northvale and Notre Dame jerseys, other college jerseys dotted between that didn’t even make it to the postseason. This entire weekend’s been madness, and I’ll spend all next week still processing it.