Page 54 of Lucky Sucker

—Please do. I don’t want any of these freshmen thinking they can replace me when I leave.He sent back minutes later.

—If you score and win the next game, then I’ll do something special for you.I was bad at thinking on the fly. I should’ve said something sexual, but I didn’t know if he was going to be into that if it wasn’t right there in front of him.

—How about when I win the next game, you invite me into your world so I can see you play?

I did a giddy little stomp of excitement. I was ready to invite him into it, but I didn’t know how he’d react because when I was there, I liked to play.

—Ok! Deal!I replied with a kissing emoji.

He replied with a kiss.

Inviting Luke into my little world was something I had to prepare for. I knew he was going to win, there was just something about him, somethingluckythat made me know it was going to be a winning game.

It spurred me on to keep reading my media theory textbook and work hard to get the article written before it went to the college press on Monday night. I’d made meticulous notes about the plays they took and how they’d beaten the other team with a freshmen out on the ice.

Interests pulled me in all directions as I exhausted myself on a little bit of everything. I’d barely had change to regress and solo play before the day turned to the evening, and my roommates were asking whose clothes were in the washing machine. Oops.

* * *

Almost eleven at night and I’d been on the phone to Luke for forty minutes.

“I read over the report, I have no notes, although maybe a couple ‘my boyfriend, the captain’would look good in it,” he said.

Laid in bed, staring at the ceiling imagining the swirling constellations that he had played on a projector in his room, I kept a big smile on my face, just picturing it. “I don’t think they’d let me,” I said. “How was everyone when I left earlier? I don’t want to overstay my welcome at all.”

“Don’t even think that,” he said. “If anything, they’re probably staying quiet because you’ve got their careers at your fingertips. Not literally, but you know what I mean, nobody wants to be branded difficult.”

I scoffed and hugged Bloo harder. “I’d never do that. Well, only to the person who was mean to you.”

“Who?”

“The person responsible for that nasty post.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Except them, but I wouldn’t write it for the sports section. That would be breaking news, although I sometimes find that a bit like gossip, and gossip makes me nervous.” It was freeing to speak my mind to him. There was never any element of judgement to him. I could speak what was on my mind, and he would offer me those reassuring mouth sounds, the type that were between a hum and a coo. “Do you think there’s going to be anything done about that?”

“Nope. Nobody knows anything. I’m not going to let it eat at me though. There’s far too much I’ve got to do as captain, and if people don’t want to respect me, then there’s not much I can do, except work harder, and I am.”

“I know, you’re working the hardest out of anyone,” I told him. “It’s why you’re the captain.”

“That why I love you.”

We both fell silent. He’d said it.

I wasn’t hearing things. Was I?

“Uh. I—” Luke began, his voice turned to a mumble on the phone. “Thats’s not how I intended on revealing that. It’s—”

“I love you too,” I replied. “It’s not like it’s new information. I feel it from you.” Although I knew I fell in love easy, and I often fell hard and fast, it’s why falling to my knees on the ice hadn’t really been too much of a surprise. I always seemed to fall in front of the hot guy.

“Ok,” he said, his voice filled with a soft rasp to it. “You should get some sleep. So should I. And, I found one of your small teddies.”

I gasped, rolling around on the bed. It was going to be impossible to know which one I’d left behind. There was Bloo in my arms, but then there were so many of the smaller ones scattered around. “Which one?”

“It’s one of the octopus ones,” he said. “At least, I think it’s an octopus. It’s—oh, wow, it reverses, purple and blue.”

I’d gone through a phase of making so many of those. Most of them I’d sold online when I needed the extra cash for more yarn and to cover some of my expenses coming back to college. “You can keep it,” I told him. “I’ll make more. In fact, if you want me to make one for you, I will.”

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