Page 32 of Blueline Baby

The third night it rings while I’m at my desk. When I pick up, there’s a wall of noise behind him. Music, a lot of voices, somebody laughing right next to the phone.

“Chlo? Can you even hear me?”

“Barely. Where are you?”

“Out at dinner, our curfew is 11—” A voice cuts across his and he laughs at it, away from the phone. Then a door opens on his end and the background gets louder instead of quieter. “Hang on. It’s insane in here, let me call you right back. Two minutes.”

“Okay,” I say.

He doesn’t call back.

Britt comes home and finds me at my desk with the phone sitting next to my textbook. She raises her eyebrows.

“Waiting for him to call you?”

“He’s on the road.”

“Right.” She leans in my doorway. “Can I be honest, since nobody else is going to be? You know what he actually is, don’t you? He’s not a boyfriend. He’s a hockey player. There’s a girl in every city he lands in and a nicer one back home to feel bad about. Lucky you, you’re the one he feels bad about. I’d rather you heard from me now instead of him in six months.”

I put my pen down on the desk. “You’ve been trying to talk me out of him since the day the pens showed up. This isn’t you looking out for me.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“Okay.” I go back to my notes. “If that’s the excuse you can live with.”

She stands there a second. Then she goes into her room and shuts the door a little harder than she has to.

I don’t chase her. I’m not going to invent some girl in some hotel just because Britt wants me to. What I’ve actually got is a phone that rang last night and hasn’t rung since. Statistically, that isn’t proof of anything.

It doesn’t ring the next day either. They’ll be flying home soon. I stop leaving the phone face-up on the desk, because logically, watching it not ring is significantly worse than just not looking at it. I go to class. I study. I keep trying to calculate a reasonable excuse for why he’s gone completely quiet. The only answer the math keeps landing on is the one Britt already handed me.

He got exactly what he wanted, and then he got on a plane.

That night, somebody knocks. I open the door and Jack is standing there in travel clothes with his team bag still on his shoulder. He's straight off the plane by the look of him, and he looks awful. The second he sees my face, he’s talking before I can even get a word out.

“My phone fell into a toilet three days ago and every number I have is gone. There was no way to reach you. None.” He’s breathing like he took the stairs two at a time. “I’ve spent this whole trip sure I blew the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Please tell me I didn’t. Please tell me you’re not looking at me like that because it’s already over.”

“So your phone’s dead,” I say.

He drags a hand down his face. “I know exactly how it sounds. That’s why I told Smitty to get word to you through Britt. She said she would.”

I don’t say anything.

“…She didn’t.” He says it slowly. “Did she.”

I don't answer. My brain is already running the timeline, snapping the pieces together. Britt came home that night. She leaned in my doorway and told me there was a girl in every city, and that I was the fool sitting at home waiting.

And she already had the message from Jack. She knew exactly why he’d gone dark. She looked me in the eye and deliberately let me sit in the worst of it.

“Chloe. I didn’t come down here to blow up your living situation. I just needed you to know I wasn’t cheating on you.”

“I know.” I look at him standing there in his travel clothes, and everything else can wait. “Do you want to stay the night?”

He drops the bag. He has me up off the floor before I’ve even finished the sentence, kissing me before my feet leave the ground.

“Is that a yes,” I say against his mouth.

He carries me toward my room and kicks the door shut behind us. “Yeah, baby. That’s a yes.”