Sophie is gone when I wake up the next morning since she had to be at work at six, so I decide to exploit the fact that I now have a quick way to get in touch with her.
Me: Good morning
Trouble 💃: I'm gonna regret giving you this number, aren't I?
Me: 🤷🤷
Me: But yes
Trouble 💃: After sundown, Jay... It's an after sundown sort of arrangement
Me: What are you, a vampire?
Me: Do you sparkle in the sun?
Trouble 💃: If I were a vampire, I would at least be a cool one, that like, disintegrates in daylight
Me: That's cool? 🤨🤨
Trouble 💃: Cooler than Robert Pattinson, anyways
Me: I've lost track of what's happening
Trouble 💃: I can imagine it must be difficult for you. This is what we call a ✨conversation✨
Me: I'm gonna fuck you so hard for that one
Trouble 💃: Don't threaten me with a good time 😏
Trouble 💃: Wanna come over tonight?
Me: Swim practice 😔
Trouble 💃: 😒😒 Urgh, Jayden, then why did you even text me?
Me: Cause I miss you 😘😘😘
Trouble 💃: Imma block your number
Me: Byyee 👋👋
I doubt she'll actually do it. Sophie talks a good game, yet she's the one who voluntarily handed over her phone number after only very little pleading on my part.
She can deny it all she wants, but I think she's enjoying this, whatever it is, just as much as I am.
But as much as I like spending time with Sophie, my body is now punishing me for going out last night. My head is pounding, I feel heavy and slow in my movements, and my eyelids are practically glued shut.
It's nothing compared to Saltz, though.
As I enter the locker room, he's keeled over on the bench, head in his hands, groaning.
I clap him hard on the back twice. "Rough morning?"
He just groans in response. Mitch is sitting beside him, having the time of his life, apparently. There's a big, relaxed grin on his face as he passes a water bottle to the rookie. How he isn't dead on his feet, too, is an utter mystery to me.
Davis, at least, also looks tired. But he always does these days. It's no easy feat to be a professional swimmer and then add being a first-year law student too. I don't know how he does it all.
"Got one too many beers, huh?" Mitch asks.
Saltz leans back against the wall, looking pale and uncomfortable. "I guess you could say that."
"So this boyfriend...?" Davis asks, getting his stuff out from his locker.
It seems like a memory resurfaces for the kid, and he cringes in regret. "He's not my boyfriend."
"So you're not dating them all?" Mitch asks, a twinkle in his eyes.
"I didn't say that," Saltz answers with a shrug as he begins stripping down. "We're just not exclusive or anything."
"Well, good thing. All the hockey players are douches," I say. It's a well-known fact.
"Nick is okay," Saltz says quietly. "And he's cute."
Then he leans down to take off his pants, and another dying sound leaves him. Now his face is more green than gray.
"You know what is an amazing hangover cure?" Davis asks as he passes Saltz on the way to the showers, a grin on his face. "Physical exertion."
"I'm gonna vomit," Saltz moans.
At that, we all laugh because he just might.
🏊♂️
Saltz miraculously survives morning swim. Then he heads back to his dorm to get a nap instead of going to class, and when he shows up for dryland later, he seems almost human again.
I'm still tired as fuck, but I remember how quickly I used to bounce back at eighteen too.
Mitch uses the pull-up bar while I spot Davis on the bench press, and Saltz takes a break beside us, tapping away on his phone.
"It was nice of Sophie to invite us out last night," Mitch says, his voice not even the slightest bit strained. Like he could do this exercise in his sleep. He probably could. "I like her. She's fun."
I nod. "Yeah, she is." Maybe a little too much fun at times.
"And now that we're on the subject of Sophie," Mitch says, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was the one who brought her up in the first place.
"What about her?" I ask, looking away from him to avoid eye contact.
"Are you guys dating?"
I shake my head, glancing over at Mitch. "Nope."
He lowers himself down, relaxing against the side of the equipment and raising an eyebrow at me. "So if you aren't in a relationship, then what are you?" he continues.
I shrug. "I don't know. Like some kind of situationship, I suppose." This is actually something I've actively tried to avoid thinking about.
But Mitch's face breaks out into a big grin. "That's still a ship; I can board that shit."
I frown at him, a little lost, but Davis lowers the weight bar and sits up, shooting Mitch a look. "Dude."
"What shall we call you? Jayphie? Soden? Sooks?" The giant swimmer puzzles, ignoring us completely.
"What is he on about?" I ask Davis since he seems to be the only one in the loop.
"It's your ship name," he explains. I stare at him, still fucking confused. What the fuck does that mean? Davis rolls his eyes. "Some dumb Gen Z thing. Mitch, it's not happening."
Mitch looks up indignantly. "A captain goes down with his ship."
"This isn't Titanic," Davis shoots back while I just stand by, feeling like a giant question mark.
"Good thing, we can't have our J-man dying." Mitch winks at me, and I'm yet again floored by how much younger he looks when he's joking around.
"He could totally have fit on that door."
We all pause, slowly turning towards Saltz, who still has his head bent over his phone. I forgot he was here for a second.
At our silence, he glances up, noticing us staring at him. "All I'm saying is they could have traded places once in a while. Kept moving. The dumbest thing you can do in sub-zero temperature water is staying still." He sends us a duh kind of look.
He has a point there, but I am so beyond lost in how we ended up discussing freezing water. Davis looks exasperated, but Mitch sends the kid an amused grin.
"What?" Saltz says, shuffling a bit under our gazes. He shrugs. "Leonardo DiCaprio is hot."
"He's way too old for you," Davis says, shaking his head, but I can see the smile lingering on his lips too.
"Not in Titanic, he's not," Saltz replies smugly. He sets his phone down and stands up, heading towards the bench press for his turn.
"Why don't you just stick to the two people you're already juggling," I comment, ruffling his hair as he passes, despite him being almost as tall as me.
Saltz rolls his eyes. "It's called playing the field."
"Yeah, it is!" Mitch hollers, bumping his fist with Saltz.
Davis and I share bemused looks. Both of us a little surprised by the unexpected alliance of Archer Salisbury and Zeke Mitchell.
🏊♂️
After dryland, we head out for a cup of coffee. Normally I would be taking Ollie to the skatepark, but he's hanging out with a friend after school, so I have a few hours of downtime before evening swim. Should I be studying? Yes. What do I do instead? Text Sophie again, but no answer. I guess she's probably working.
Boring.
After we've all purchased a hot beverage at the campus Starbucks, we sit down, sipping our drinks. Davis and Saltz are talking; I keep checking my phone for a reply from Sophie while Mitch flips through a magazine someone left.
It's one of those tabloids that just loves sharing potentially compromising pictures of professional athletes. The only perk of still being relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things is that those kinds of magazines don't give a fuck about me.
I'm engrossed in my phone, so it takes me a few moments to notice that the others have stopped talking. I glance up, instantly feeling the loaded silence that has fallen over our table. Saltz looks everywhere but at me, while Mitch is wearing an expression, I can best explain as yikes. Davis' eyes are flickering from the magazine to me.
"What's going on?" I ask slowly, a feeling of dread creeping up on me slowly.
"You should see this..." Davis pushes the magazine towards me. I turn it the right way up, instantly noticing pictures of Mitch with girls hanging all over him.
Well, that makes sense. He is an Olympic legend; I'm not surprised they're interested in dirt on him. The headlines are generic, hinting that he's continuing his player ways.
"What?" I ask, raising an eyebrow at Davis before looking down again.
That's when I notice the background of the pictures.
The little pool bar we went to last night.
I try to swallow, but my throat is suddenly dry as I look at the next page, and there it is.
Mitchell's teammate, Jayden Sennels, is seen arriving with two women but leaving with someone else, looking rather cozy.
Trouble in paradise?
The wording jerks me out of my daze, and I scan the pictures. Yeah, they have pictures of me exiting the bar with my arm around a dark-haired woman. Her face is turned, but it's clearly Sophie.
However, the other pictures show me arriving with the guys, my arms around two of the fans we met out front. We're posing, but the angle of the photo, and the moment it was taken, as I glance down at one of them with a smirk amidst a sentence, makes it seem much more relaxed. Real.
Like I might actually have known them, dragged them along with me to the bar, and then ditched them for Sophie once we came inside.
Fuck.
There are even pictures of us entering the bar together. And then there's a small, pixelated photo from inside. It looks like it was taken with a cellphone. It shows the lot of us at the booth, Sophie leaning against my side and my lips pressed to her temple.
It's clear that we are much more familiar than I was with the two women outside.
I don't bother reading the rest of the text. A picture says more than a thousand words, right?
And I know what these are saying; that I'm a sleazebag. A disgusting, cheating sleazebag.
Crap.
I shoot up. The other three stares at me, slight pity mingled in their worried expressions.
What if Sophie saw these?
I have to talk to her. I leave my coffee and hurry outside, heading for my car. It's parked close to my dorm. On the way, I try calling her.
She doesn't pick up.
We're not exclusive, I know that, but jumping from one hook-up to another, the way these pictures make it seem like I did would still be pretty slimy.
Also, Sophie came to me for help last night, and it feels like something might be shifting between us. These pictures would not help that.
They want to paint me as a two-faced liar.
Sophie promised me she wouldn't lie to me, but I never gave her the same promise cause it didn't feel necessary. I figured she knew I would never do that. But if she's seen this? Maybe not.
I know she's at work, so I storm into the lobby of The Michigan Lakefront hotel, my eyes scanning the room and landing on Sophie, sitting behind the front desk.
She leaned in over the table, looking at something hidden behind the counter. Her hair is up in the usual bun, as it always is at work. Seeing her causes a myriad of emotions to break out. The usual ease and contentment I get around her are battled by nerves and a little bit of fear.
I try to calm my beating heart as I approach her slowly. She has yet to see me, totally engrossed in whatever she's looking at. I halt on the other side of the desk, peaking over it, and what I see makes my blood run cold.
She's looking at that magazine.
"I swear, nothing happened," I rush out. Sophie freezes for a split second, and then she's looking up at me, a polite smile on her lips, no emotions to detect in her face.
"Hmm?" she asks, blinking twice as she cocks her head to the side.
"It's not what you think." An uneasy feeling is settling inside me, warning me that this won't end well.
"What isn't?" she questions, no hint of resentment in her tone, but that poker face of hers is making it completely impossible for me to detect how she's feeling.
"The magazine."
Her eyes widen in a bewildered expression, but it's faux. "This isn't a magazine?" her tone is laced with astonishment as she glances from the magazine to my face.
"What?" I frown, confused and slightly aggravated.
"Well, you said it's not what I think, then what is it?" she asks me, a twinkle in her eyes.
"That's not what I meant. I was talking about the pictures."
"What pictures?" She lifts an eyebrow, smiling at me.
"From last night..." I say slowly, pointedly looking down at the magazine in front of her.
She flips to the next page, the photos of me with those women and then with Sophie pop up, staring back at us. "Oh, these?"
"Yeah. I swear, it's not what it looks like-" I try to hurry out my explanation.
"What might that be?" she interrupts me, leaning back in her seat and crossing her legs. She looks relaxed, and there is something almost like amusement in her expression.
I swallow, before speaking in a low voice, suddenly uncomfortable that we are having this conversation at her job. "That I was with two other women before I came to the bar to see you last night."
She nods, pursing her lips a bit. The fake niceness is gone. "Yes, that's what I thought as well."
"I promise you; nothing happened," I say, my voice sounding pleading as I lean towards her.
"Then why are you telling me this?"
"Because you're the only woman I want. Please, Fie. Trust me." My heart is hammering against my chest, awaiting her response. I didn't realize how true those words were before I spoke them. We're not exclusive, but I haven't thought about anyone else since meeting her.
Sophie leans forward, her nails drumming against the wooden surface in a slow, purposeful move, a slight smirk on her lips. "No, I mean, why would I care?"
"What?" I ask, dumbfounded.
"Why would I care whether or not you hooked up with these women?"
My heart stops beating for a second as I blink at her, slowly, not comprehending.
I came straight here because I feared her feelings would be hurt by what these pictures implied. Because I thought, after last night, I might mean more to her than just a random hook-up.
But I was wrong. All along, this has simply been a game to Sophie, and I just showed my hand.
A/N:
But for real, what is their ship-name? Cuz I'm partial to Jayphie 🚢
Also, I don't know what I think about this chapter, but it's here, so 🤷
- Hanna 💙