Play Dirty

Marlowe

The coffee maker in Grant’s apartment has been broken for two weeks, and I still haven’t said anything about it.

I stand at his counter in one of his practice shirts, watching the machine sputter and spit like it’s personally offended I asked it to work, and I think about how easy it would be to just buy him a new one. Twenty bucks at Target. Problem solved. But there’s something about fixing things in his space that feels like overstepping, even after a year together, even after half my clothes have quietly migrated into his bottom dresser drawer.

“It’s doing the thing again,” I call toward the bedroom.

“Just hit it,” Grant yells back. “Works every time.”

I hit it. It works every time.

He comes out a few minutes later, hair still damp from the shower, pulling a hoodie over his head, and my stomach does the same dumb flip it’s been doing since sophomore year. He’s got that face, the kind that made half my friend group lose their minds when we started dating, easy and open, like nothing bad has ever happened to him and nothing bad ever will. He crosses the kitchen and kisses my temple on his way to the fridge, already talking about practice, about how Coach is riding the offensive line hard this week, about how he might not be back until late.

“Again?” I ask, and I try to keep it light.

“Captain’s orders.” He grabs the orange juice and drinks straight from the carton, which I’ve given up fighting him on. “Knox wants us running extra routes before Saturday.”

I know the name. Everybody on campus knows the name. Knox Calloway is the kind of famous that doesn’t need a last name, the guy whose jersey number shows up on shirts in the campus bookstore, whose Instagram comments are a warzone of girls arguing over who gets to claim him next. I’ve never actually met him, just watched him from a distance the way you watch weather. Impressive. Not something you plan around.

“Tell your captain he’s cutting into our time,” I say.

Grant laughs and pulls me in by the waist, and for a second everything is exactly as easy as it’s supposed to be. He smells like his shampoo and the cold outside air still clinging to his hoodie, and he tips my chin up with one finger the way he’s done a hundred times before.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he says. “Promise.”

I want to believe him the way I did freshman year, uncomplicated, no static in the signal. Lately there’s been static. Small things. A phone he angles away from me now, when he never used to care. Plans that shift by an hour, then two, with an explanation that sounds rehearsed even when it probably isn’t. I tell myself it’s nothing. Senior year is chaos for him, scouts watching every game, his whole future riding on a season that hasn’t even started yet. He has every reason to be distracted that has nothing to do with me.

“You’d better,” I say, and I let it go, because that’s what you do when you love someone and you don’t have any actual evidence, just a feeling you can’t point to.

***

Talulah is already at our usual table when I get to the dining hall, picking the croutons out of her salad and lining them up like she’s building a tiny wall.

“You look like you’re plotting something,” I say, sliding into the seat across from her.

“I’m plotting against carbs and then eating them anyway.” She pops one in her mouth. “How’s Grant? Still alive? Still human?”

“Still running extra routes for his captain,” I say, and I hear the edge in my own voice before I decide to put it there.

Talulah’s eyebrows go up. She’s known me since our first week of freshman orientation, when we got assigned as roommates and somehow never grew out of it even after we moved into separate places, and she has this radar for me that I’ve never been able to jam.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. He’s just been weird lately.” I stab at my food instead of eating it. “Distant. I don’t know. Probably just football stress.”

“Probably,” she says, in a tone that means she’s not sure she agrees but isn’t going to push it right now. That’s the deal we have. She lets me talk myself into things, and I let her call me on it later if it turns out I was wrong. So far the system has worked out fine.

She changes the subject to a professor who assigned four hundred pages of reading over a weekend like that’s a reasonable thing to do to a person, and I let myself get pulled into it, grateful for something else to think about. It’s easy, this. Talulah and bad dining hall coffee and a Tuesday that doesn’t ask anything of me.

It doesn’t last. Nothing at this school ever does.

***

The party is Sabrina’s idea, technically, though everyone just calls it the team party because that’s what it turns into by ten o’clock, football players and their girlfriends and half the sorority row packed into a house two blocks off campus that smells like spilled beer and somebody’s expensive candle losing the fight. Grant wanted to go. I wanted to stay in. We compromised by both going and me telling myself I’d only stay an hour.

I lose him within twenty minutes to a cluster of teammates arguing about a game from three years ago like it’s still happening, and I end up on the back porch with a red cup I’m not really drinking from, watching my breath fog in the cold.

That’s where I see him.

Knox Calloway doesn’t walk into a room so much as the room rearranges itself around him. I notice it happening in real time, heads turning, conversations dropping half a register, and then he’s just there, leaning against the porch railing a few feet from me like he’s been standing there the whole night and I only just now noticed.

Up close he’s worse than the photos. Or better, depending on how you want to frame a problem.

“You’re the only person out here not freezing to death on purpose,” he says, and his voice is lower than I expected, easy in a way that makes it sound like he’s not trying at all.

“I like the cold.” I don’t know why I say it like a challenge. “Keeps me from having to talk to anyone inside.”

“Rough crowd in there?”

“Rough enough.”

He almost smiles at that. Not quite. Like he’s saving it for later.

“I’m Knox.”

“I know who you are.”

“Everybody knows who I am.” He says it without any weight to it, just a fact, the same way you’d state your height. “Doesn’t mean I know who you are.”

“Marlowe.”

“Marlowe.” He says my name like he’s testing the shape of it in his mouth, and something about that lands somewhere low in my chest that I immediately try to ignore. “You’re Ashford’s girl.”

“I’m Grant’s girlfriend,” I say, correcting the word without meaning to, and his eyes catch on that for half a second before he lets it go.

“Right.” He looks out at the yard, where somebody’s just knocked over a folding table to a chorus of drunk cheering. “Figures.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He looks back at me, and for the first time all night I feel like someone is actually seeing me instead of just looking in my direction. It’s unsettling. It’s also, if I’m honest with myself, the first interesting thing that’s happened to me all week.

“Means the good ones are always taken,” he says. “Never fails.”

I should laugh it off. I should make a joke and go find Grant and forget this ever happened, file it under things that don’t matter. Instead I stand there on that porch a beat too long, cold cup sweating in my hand, feeling the pull of him like gravity I didn’t sign up for.

“You should go back inside,” I tell him, and it comes out quieter than I mean it to. “Before somebody notices you’re not in there holding court.”

“I’m exactly where I want to be.” He pushes off the railing, unhurried, and for one second I think he’s going to close the distance between us. He doesn’t. He just tips his head, like he’s clocking something he plans on coming back to later. “See you around, Marlowe.”

He goes back inside, and the porch feels colder without him there, which makes no sense at all, and I stand alone in the dark trying to talk myself out of whatever that was.

I find Grant twenty minutes later, laughing with his arm slung around some guy from the team I don’t recognize, and when he spots me he waves me over like nothing in the world is wrong. I let him pull me into his side. I let myself believe, for the rest of the night, that nothing is.

It isn’t until much later, lying awake in his bed listening to him breathe, that I let myself think about the porch again. About a name I already knew and a face I’ll apparently be seeing around whether I want to or not.

I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything.

I’m getting good at telling myself things.