Beautiful Player
Page 72

“Well, you know Jens suggested I go out more.” I paused, running my finger around a swirling pattern carved into the antique hutch in the dining room. I closed my eyes, wincing as I said, “He suggested I call Will.”
“Will?” she asked, and a beat of silence passed in which I wondered if she was remembering the same tall, gorgeous college-aged lad that I was. “Wait—Will Sumner?”
“That’s the one,” I said. Even talking about him made my stomach twist.
“Wow. Was not expecting that.”
“Neither was I,” I mumbled.
“So did you?”
“Did I what?” I asked, instantly regretting the way it came out.
“Call him,” she said, laughing.
“Yeah. Which is sort of why I’m calling you today.”
“That sounds deliciously ominous,” she said.
I had no idea how to do this, so I started with the simplest, most innocuous detail there was. “Well, he lives here in New York.”
“I thought I remembered that. And? I haven’t seen him in ages, sort of dying to know what he’s been doing. How’s he look?”
“Oh, he looks . . . good,” I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. “We’ve been hanging out.”
There was a pause on the line, a moment where I could almost see the way Liv’s forehead would furrow, her eyes narrowing as she tried to find the hidden meaning in what I’d said.
“?‘Hanging out’?” she repeated.
I groaned, rubbing my face.
“Oh my God, Ziggy! Are you banging Will?”
I groaned, and laughter filled the line. Pulling back, I looked at the phone in my hand. “This isn’t funny, Liv.”
I heard her exhale. “Yes, it totally is.”
“He was your . . . boyfriend.”
“Oh, no, he wasn’t. Not even a little. I think we made out for like ten minutes.”
“But—girl code!”
“Yes, but there’s some sort of time limit. Or base limit. Like, I think we barely shanked it down the first base line. Though, at the time, I was completely prepared to let him enter the batter’s box, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I thought you were devastated after that holiday.”
She started cracking up. “Take it down a notch there. First of all, we were never together. It was a horny fumble behind Mom’s gardening tools. Jesus, I barely remember.”
“But you were so upset, you didn’t even come home the summer he worked with Dad.”
“I didn’t come home because I’d f**ked around all year and needed to catch up on credits over the summer,” she said. “And I didn’t tell you because Mom and Dad would have found out and killed me.”
I pressed my hand to my face. “I am so confused.”
“Don’t be,” she said, her tone changing to concerned. “Just tell me, what’s actually going on with you guys?”
“We’ve been hanging out a lot. I really like him, Liv. I mean he’s probably my best friend here. We hooked up and then he was weird the next day. Then he started talking about feelings, and it just seemed like he was using me as a test subject in some sort of weird emotional-expression experiment. He didn’t exactly have the best track record with Bergstrom girls.”
“So you ripped him a new one because in your twelve-year-old memories he was the man of my dreams and left me, brokenhearted and alone.”
I sighed. “That was part of it.”
“What was the rest of it?”
“That he’s a whore? That he doesn’t remember a fraction of the women he’s been with and less than twenty-four hours after brushing me off, he’s telling me he wants more than just sex?”
“Okay,” she said, considering. “Does he? Do you?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, Liv. But even if he did—if I did—how could I trust him?”
“I don’t want you to be an idiot, so I’m going to do a little overshare here. Ready?”
“Not even a little bit,” I said.
She went on anyway: “Before I met Rob he was a giant slut. I swear to God his penis had been everywhere. But now? Different man. Worships the ground I walk on.”
“Yes, but he wanted to get married,” I said. “You weren’t just banging him.”
“When we first got together it was definitely just banging. Look, Ziggy, a lot of stuff happens to a person between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one. A lot changes.”