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I tried to control the look of disgust on my face, but I didn’t manage to do that very well. “That’s gross.”
Glenn rolled his eyes. “If by gross you mean amazing and the perfect way to start a new decade, then I agree with you.”
I turned around and faced Frankie fully. “And you’re planning on doing this?”
Again, he shrugged. “It’s only a thing if you’re not married.”
“And what if you’re not married but still dating someone?”
“Tough shit,” Glenn said from behind me. “Besides, you should know Frankie, he’s the Angler. You remember how he was in high school? Always looking for the ‘bigger fish?’ He’s going to have women all over him. Hell, he already does.”
Frankie glared at Glenn. “Thanks for that. It’s just something we joked about as teenagers, it’s not a big deal.”
I took a deep breath, trying to formulate the words I wanted to say without exploding. “Making plans to fuck lots of women,” I use my hands to emphasize the words, “sounds like a pretty big deal to the woman you’re actually dating. And hearing that you have women all over you isn’t a small deal either, Frankie.”
“Calm down, Anna,” Glenn said. “You should be happy. It means your man is hot shit.”
I turned and stared at him. “You are no longer a part of this conversation. This is between Frankie and me.” I turned back to him. “Can I speak to you outside?”
He looked nervous, and the way that I was feeling right then he really should have been. It was a dark and misty night. That made it feel colder. Frankie’s hands were shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched over. It couldn’t have been clearer that he didn’t want to be having this conversation.
“Frankie, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I pointed back inside the bar. “With that, I want to know what’s going on with all that. I’ve heard them call you Angler before. Angler as in fishing? As in fishing for women? Is there something that you need to tell me?”
“It’s just a nickname. Don’t get freaked out about it.”
“It does freak me out,” I said. “It freaks me out that you seem to be fine making plans to go on a sex binge with your friends, and that you seem to have women coming after you that I didn’t know about, and that you’re all fine with this.”
“Anna,” he said, “this doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know why you’re mad right now.”
I couldn’t control the rise in my voice. “I’m mad because one of your best friends just basically said that you’ve been cheating. That you have women on top of you all the time.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s not what he said. And that’s not what it is. It’s just a football thing. You’ve seen them, the girls like the players, they hang around.”
I blushed because we’d done that. I’d pretended to be that for him. But I wondered now if I was the only one. “And what about that pledge? Are you really going to go through with that?”
He makes an annoyed sound. “How should I know, Anna, it’s years away. It’s a stupid thing we came up with, a fun bonding thing, you know? Like when girls talk about hot celebrities. It’s just fun to imagine who you might be with if you had the freedom to do something like that.”
“So if I walk into the bar right now and look at that list, under your name, I’m going to find only celebrities?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked away.
“And what about us?” I kept going. “I mean, I know we haven’t really talked about the long term, but I thought we were happy. Maybe going somewhere. But if you’re making plans like this then that’s obviously not the case.”
That made him snap. “Jesus Christ, Annabelle! You’re making a lot of assumptions about me.”
“I wouldn’t have to make assumptions if you would fucking say something, not just stand there with your hands in your pockets.”
“What exactly am I supposed to do? You dragged me out here and started attacking me, telling me you think that I’m fucking cheating on you. I don’t even know what to say to that. If you don’t trust me enough to know that, then you can do what you want.”
Those words knocked me back. “You want to break up?”
He rubbed a hand across his face. “That’s not what I said. At all. Jesus, you’re making a big deal over nothing.”
Suddenly, I felt that I had to know. I turned away from him and went into the bar, snatching the paper away from Glenn so fast that the pen left a streak. I glared at him to stop the protest that I knew was coming. And I looked, and it all sank in. Every one of those names was a girl I knew. Some of them I knew were those football groupies that hung around the football team wearing nothing but bikinis. Some of them had fucked half the team. We knew because they’d told us. And there were other names too. My best friend. Girls from my dorm. My fucking roommate. But the worst was the top of the page. It didn’t say the Dirty Thirty Pledge, it said Not Blue Twenty-Two.
