Page 17 of Halftime

“I guess that’s a yes. He didn’t say much. He told us he had a girlfriend back home, so he wasn’t interested in girls at that first party we had. He said his girlfriend couldn’t make it that weekend, so he’d just drink a bit, since he was lonely.”

I snorted. I didn’t know what he’d told his teammates, and I really didn’t care. Actions reveal the person inside. Words are just the coverup people use to impress others.

“He did get pretty drunk. He said he’d been hardcore training all summer and hadn’t been drinking. I was a little embarrassed for him. The beer we have at parties isn’t that strong.”

“I don’t care.”

It didn’t excuse him. If he was sober enough to have sex, he was sober enough to know what he was doing. That he was fucking someone else.

“His room was up on the third floor last year, so I helped him get up there. Guy couldn’t judge where the steps were. I thought he was gone for the night.”

I wanted to leave. I didn’t need to hear the details about my boyfriend cheating. But part of me was fascinated. Something screwed up inside me made me want to know what had happened. I wasn’t surprised the long-distance thing hadn’t worked. I’d told him it wouldn’t. I just hadn’t thought he’d cheat before the first month was out.

“We didn’t hear him yelling until a couple of hours later.”

I made myself stay still, unmoving. Cooper was relaxed, leaning against the fence, but I saw how he was watching me. He wanted to see my response. He was one sick bastard. Like I wanted to know what Seb had been doing during sex? Cheating sex?

I wasn’t going to blink first. Now it was a competition. Would I break before he finished his story? I put up my mental blockers, the ones that had gotten me through those first weeks after I’d cut off all contact with Seb. This fucker was not going to see me flinch.

“We done?”

“I got to his room first, since I was in mine on the second floor. I thought he’d had a nightmare. I remember thinking I hope he doesn’t scream like that all the time, because that would get old fast.

“Guy looked terrified, and I couldn’t figure out why. There was a hot chick in bed with him, and we could see they’d been making out. Her top was off, but she still had on the rest of her clothes.”

Like I really needed that visual in my memory bank.

“She was freaked out, too. Seb started babbling about Faith, and it was supposed to be Faith, and why did the girl ask for a condom. He was pretty much in tears.

“I picked up her top, passed it to her, and she put in on. I asked her what the fuck had happened. Seb wasn’t making any sense, and she seemed fine. She said she’d gone upstairs, found Seb sleeping there, and slid in beside him. She was obviously a puck bunny hoping to nail one of the freshmen. She said it had been going great, but then she’d asked him if he had a condom, and he’d freaked and started shouting.”

Cooper was watching me closely, and I was doing my best to not show any expression.

“I passed her off to someone and tried to figure out what the hell Seb’s problem was. I’ve never found a hot chick in bed wanting to fuck something to scream about.”

My mind was racing now. I was trying to remember what Seb had said on that call, and how it lined up with this story Cooper was spinning, and why he’d be covering for Seb. Was Seb afraid I’d tell the story around campus and women wouldn’t want to date him? As if. I’d already seen how the hockey team was treated here. The men’s team. A bit of infidelity wouldn’t stop some people.

“Seb said cheating was a total deal-breaker for his girlfriend, and he had to call her to explain.” Cooper came to stand in front of me. “We could all see that was a bad idea. I didn’t know why he was so determined to call and confess he’d made out with a chick. He said he’d thought it was her, the girlfriend. That she’d changed her mind and come to stay with him. And something about grandmothers and condoms, and that he had to tell her before anyone else did.

“He wasn’t making any sense, and we convinced him to wait until he was sober to call. I took his phone because I didn’t trust him. I thought we’d sober him up in the morning, talk it through, and persuade him not to say anything to you.”

He paused in his story, and I forgot Cooper was standing in front of me. I was revisiting the past, trying to take these two contradictory realities and see if they could coexist. Cooper’s story was that Seb had gone to bed drunk, made out with a girl in his bed who he’d thought was me. I got the part about the condom and the grandmother. I had planned to visit campus that weekend. We’d been looking forward to spending a whole weekend together. But my grandmother had a stroke, so I’d cancelled.

Seb had been my first, and I’d been his. We’d gone from friends, to kissing, to working around all the bases. When we’d decided to sleep together, I’d made sure I did everything right. I’d started taking the pill, and we’d bought condoms. Putting that condom on for the first time had been awkward, but we’d laughed together. Then, well, we hadn’t been laughing. We’d both become fans of sex. We were young and horny and got together every chance we had.

I’d had a reaction to latex condoms. I got itchy, scabby skin in a part of the body nobody wants to have itchy and scabby. We’d done some online research and found out about latex allergies. We’d decided we could trust each other for STD’s since we’d both been virgins, and I was on the pill to take care of a pregnancy. I’d been too embarrassed to talk to my doctor back then about my irritated girl parts.

Now I knew more about it and had non-latex condoms. But yeah, that part of Cooper’s story made sense. If Seb had thought it was me with him, asking about a condom would have been a wakeup call that it wasn’t.

I tried to remember his exact words, but I couldn’t. I’d heard sorry, girl, bed, and condom. That was a cheating narrative. Except maybe it wasn’t. And I didn’t know how to feel. There was a little zing of what might be hope, and a heavy zap of grief for what I might have missed. And through it all was a lot of suspicion.

I needed time to work this through. First, I had to figure out if anything Cooper was telling me was true. Then I had to figure out what it meant if he wasn’t lying. It was like the ice had shifted beneath my feet, and I wasn’t sure of my footing anymore.

Could it be the truth? In either case, I had questions.

“Why are you telling me this?”

It didn’t change things. Seb and I weren’t together. He had a girlfriend. Had he asked Cooper to tell me this story to see if he could get back with me? Was he going to cheat on this new girl, too? Had he cheated on me? He might not have. It was hard to change that fact in my memory banks.

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