Page 47 of Campus Crush
I stayed back for a minute, sitting in the quiet.
I didn’t know what Abby was thinking.
But I knew exactly how I felt.
And I wasn’t ready to let her go.
TWENTY-SIX
If there was one thing I didn’t like about being the captain of CFU’s hockey team, it was coming up with fundraising ideas.
As a club team, we weren’t given athletic funds like recognized sports, and instead had to put on fundraisers or pay for everything ourselves. Our campus government had a certain allotment for clubs, but hockey was a fucking expensive sport, and it barely made a dent. We basically used it to pay for our coach.
On top of the cost of uniforms and equipment, we also had to pay for travel and the use of the local rink, although the owner had given us a deal because he was an alumnus and a huge Lumberjacks hockey fan.
For once, I was grateful for all the admin tasks my dad had made me do—organizing, reaching out to businesses, negotiating—because they helped me land better contracts and cut down our travel costs.
But we still had to come up with the funds to do it, which was why we were trying to figure out a new fundraising venture that would last a while.
So after our hockey practice on Wednesday, Drew, Liam, Gordy, and I went back to our house, which had been given the unoriginal name of “the hockey house.”
It was in between the Den—best known for the killer parties the football guys hosted—and the music house, which never seemed to party at all.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got it,” Liam said, standing up with his hands spread out like he was trying to captivate the whole room.
“Spit it out already,” Gordy said.
Liam had spent the last five minutes saying he had a genius idea, and our patience was all running thin.
We’d already tried the usual fundraiser avenues—restaurant takeovers, car washes, etc.
“We should have a hockey player auction or dance revue like that one Christmas movie that came out on Netflix.”
Drew turned to him. “Merry Gentleman? You actually watched that?”
Liam shrugged off his best friend’s disbelief. “The girl I wanted to hook up with wanted to watch it, okay?”
Why was I not surprised that this idea stemmed from an experience with a girl? Every time Liam had a story or idea, it had something to do with a girl. Liam was the biggest playboy of anyone I’d ever met, and had a new girl practically every week.
Our campus was big, but notthatbig.
I didn’t know how any girl still put up with his antics.
“Okay, movie aside, a guy auction probably isn’t a bad idea,” Drew said.
I shook my head. “No way. We won’t be able to get approval for that.”
Not to mention I couldn’t stand the thought of spendingtime with any woman besides Abby—even if she was currently freezing me out.
“I’m not taking my shirt off in front of an audience,” Gordy added. He was more reserved and upper-crust than the rest of us. His family was very well-off and had a summer home in Big Sky, while they spent the rest of the year either in New York or Connecticut or wherever rich folks lived on the East Coast. Gordy had been kind of stingy on the details.
He’d come to CFU because his grandpa had grown up in Montana, and he loved it here and wanted to get as far away from his parents and city life as he could.
I rubbed my forehead. “Okay, we need serious ideas that we can run through the club board.”
All club activities had to be pre-approved by the university’s club board. A couple of years ago, one club threw a kegger and called it “Kegs for a Cure” claiming all the money went to cancer research. The money had in fact gone to support breast cancer research, but the university had fielded tons of calls from locals who’d been pissed when word got out. So the student government had created the club board to oversee club fundraisers. Any club who ran a fundraiser without pre-approval faced getting shut down.
We couldn’t afford that risk when we were still a relatively new club after a fifteen-year hiatus that ended my freshman year. Maybe that was why I felt so much pressure to see our team find roots on campus. I’d been integral in building this program into what it was, and I didn’t want to see it fail.
