Hating The Captain Who Broke Me

Chapter Six

I read the message eleven times before I let myself put the phone down.

Northgate Alumni Association: ‘Josie,long time. We're honoring the '23 roster at this year's banquet. We'd love for you to speak. Can we call you?’

Eleven times, and it still hit the same way it had the first like someone had reached years back and pulled a thread I thought I finally cut clean. I set the phone face-down on my desk like that would help, like the words would stop existing if I couldn't see them.

They didn't stop existing. I knew that. I left it face-down anyway.

I didn't answer it that night. I didn't answer it the next morning, either, or during my ten a.m. lecture, where I spent forty-five minutes staring at a slide about operant conditioning and absorbing none of it. By the time I got back to the dorm that afternoon, the message was still sitting there unread,technically unread, since I refused to let it change to ‘seen’, like if I never officially opened it, I could pretend I hadn't.

Harlow walked in, dropped her bag on the floor, and clocked me instantly.

"Why do you look like that," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like you're doing math you don't want the answer to." She flopped onto her bed, propping herself up on one elbow. "What's on your phone?"

"Nothing."

"You're holding it like it bit you."

I set it down on my nightstand, the screen still dark, and tried to look like a person who had nothing at all sitting unresolved in her chest. Harlow was not fooled. Harlow was never fooled. It was one of the things I loved most about her and one of the things that made her borderline unbearable to lie to.

"It's nothing," I said again. "Just…some old contacts reaching out. Reunion stuff. Alumni thing."

"Alumni thing for what?"

I hesitated half a second too long, and her eyebrows went up.

"Josie."

"It's fine."

"You've had your 'it's fine' face on since Saturday." She sat up fully now, giving me the full weight of her attention, which was somehow worse than if she just let it go. "This isn't about the party. This is something else. You've been weird about your phone all week."

She wasn't wrong. She was never wrong about this stuff, which was exactly why I spent years getting better at deflecting her instead of getting better at lying convincingly, because Harlow could smell a convincing lie from across a room and a bad one from across campus.

"It's an old team," I said finally, giving her the smallest true thing I could afford. "From before. They want me to come to a banquet."

Something in her face softened immediately, carefully, like she was handling glass. "Before" was the only word I ever used for it, and she learned a long time ago not to push past that word, not because she didn't want to know, but because she loved me enough to wait until I was ready to hand it to her myself.

"Do you want to go?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want to talk about why you don't know?"

I looked at her for a second,my best friend, sitting cross-legged on her bed in an oversized team hoodie, giving me every opening in the world to just say it, to finally say the guy who ended it is the guy I've been falling for all semester, Harlow, and I don't know how to carry both of those things at once and the words got right up to the back of my teeth and stopped there.

"Not really," I said instead. "Not yet."

"Okay." She didn't push. She never pushed, which somehow made me want to tell her more than if she had.

"But you know you can tell me anything, right? Whenever. I'm not going anywhere."

"I know."

I did know. That was almost the worst part.

By Thursday, I managed to shove the whole thing into a mental drawer and slam it shut long to function, which was its own kind of survival skill at this point. I got to room 214 early, same as always, claimed the corner table, same as always, and had my color-coded folders out and organized by the time Rhys walked in on time, for once, which threw me more than I expected.

He didn't say anything sharp when he sat down. No comment about my folders, no easy jab to open things up the way he usually did. He just dropped into his chair, quieter than I ever saw him, staring at the table like it owed him an explanation.

"You're on time," I said. "Should I be worried?"

"Ha." It wasn't really a laugh. He pulled his laptop out slower than usual, like his hands weren't fully cooperating with the rest of him.

"You okay?"

"Fine." He didn't look up. "Long week."

I let it sit for a second, unsure whether to push the way Harlow hadn't pushed me, and decided against it. We worked in something close to silence for a while, pulling sources, refining the outline, the easy mechanical rhythm of a project neither of us could afford to fumble and every few minutes I caught him somewhere else entirely, jaw tight, eyes fixed on nothing.

"You're doing the thing again," I said eventually.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you're technically in the room but your brain checked out twenty minutes ago."

That got a real smile out of him, small and tired. "Sorry. Head's somewhere else tonight."

"Draft stuff?"

"Something like that." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a second he looked younger than I had ever seen him, less like the guy who walked into rooms like he owned them and more like someone carrying something heavy he hadn't set down in a while. "Can I ask you something kind of random?"

"Depends how random."

He finally looked up at me, "What number did you wear? When you played?”