Who's Fault?

Chapter Nine

"Do you think Eli's got any cute friends he can introduce me to?" Chloe asked me. She was laying down on my bed as I was finishing getting ready in my bathroom.

"I don't know. I've only seen him out with friends once when they came in while I was working," I tell her. I finished applying the Chapstick and then made my way towards my bed to grab my things. "You ready to go?"

She jumped up and excitedly said, "yes. Finally! You took forever!"

"Sorry! We still have plenty of time to get there before the game starts." I explained, but Chloe just shrugged her shoulders and followed me to the car.

We were headed to the college basketball game. Eli had been hinting that he wanted me to go to this game, so I was going with Chloe to support him. I hadn't been to any of his games before, or any basketball game ever, so this was a first for me. I knew the basics of the game though, so I'd be able to follow along.

It had been a little bit more than a month since our roller skating date, and we'd gone on several more dates since then. I enjoyed spending time with Eli a lot; he'd been so sweet to me and somehow knew how to keep me smiling. It was refreshing. It also helped that being around him was a distraction from my thoughts a lot of the time. But I was very worried. How long was it going to last? When was I going to completely mess things up and make him leave? How was I supposed know if he would hurt me?

Being around Eli, it was as if all logical thought shut off and my stupid, erratically beating heart took over. I couldn't seem to help it, and I hated it.

Chloe wasn't much help when it came to this struggle. She just didn't understand why this was such a big, terrible ordeal. She expected that I should be able to shove everything under the rug and thought that I was being dramatic, making something out of nothing, when that wasn't the case at all.

She was sat in the passenger seat of the Jeep going on and on about how she thought it was so cute that I was going to one of the games for the sole purpose of supporting him and that we were her top "ship."

I had no idea what that meant.

I tried my hardest to ignore what she said, rolling my eyes many times at her comments as I pulled into a parking spot and climbed out of the car. As we walked up to the gym, Chloe asked a question she had a few times before; it was one that I quickly came to hate. "What even are you guys anyway?"

I hated the question because each time she asked it, I was caught off guard and I began thinking about it more than I should have. I usually ended up tearing myself apart from it. Not wanting the same reaction that time, I told her what I repeated to myself every time it came up, "we're just friends."

"Just friends don't go out on dates, Wren."

She's right.

What are we? I shook my head at her and to rid myself of anymore thoughts on the topic. We walked into the gym as the game was about to start. I let Chloe lead the way to the bleachers to find us a seat. I held on to the back of her shirt while I looked to find where Eli was. When my eyes found him, he was standing off to the side of the court with someone that I assumed was a coach. The two of them were talking, probably about the game that was going to start in the next couple minutes.

Chloe and I found a place on the bleachers on our school teams side of the court towards the middle. We settled on the benches and waited for the game to begin. My eyes moved towards Eli again. This time he was standing there alone, scanning the crowd. When his eyes found mine, he stopped and the biggest smile appeared on his face. A memory from the date we had gone on the night before danced through my mind.