Page 5 of Catch and Cradle
I’d probably be jealous if I wasn’t so obsessed with thinking about kissing her.
Among other things.
I set the whiskey bottle down and wait for the alcohol to take the edge off my pounding heartbeat.
That’s all Becca is: a little obsession. A fun, forbidden fantasy.
Emphasis on the forbidden. Our team takes its unofficial ‘no banging your teammates’ policy more seriously than some of the codified rules of the sport. The team has always been super queer-friendly, but from tryouts onwards, not dating each other is something of a social contract. Apparently there was some drama in the past, and now that we’re the first maritime university to play for the Eastern Canada Lacrosse League, keeping our love lives out of the locker room is essential.
That’s still never stopped me from imagining pushing Becca up against a wall in said locker room.
“Yo, Hastings!” Iz snaps me out of my trance and motions for me to join them and Paulina. “Come dance!”
I take advantage of the distraction and push myself to my feet. The room spins again but straightens itself after a second. I stumble on my way past the coffee table, but Paulina catches me and starts spinning me around to the Little Mix song Iz has playing.
It’s not enough to chase the images of Becca out of my mind, but it does ease some of the tension that took up residence in my shoulders as soon as Jane said her name. I twirl around, thinking back on the last time I saw her.
After years of struggling with my sexuality in a small town, I finally started coming to terms with being bi after coming to UNS. I also made out with a lot of girls in the dorms, but nobody drove me crazy quite like Becca.
It helped that she didn’t seem to notice me at all. She eats, sleeps, and breathes lacrosse, and as a freshman, I doubted I even registered as a human to her off the field. That made it easier to see her as nothing more than an off-limits crush who showed up in my head when I was in bed at night.
Or in the shower in the morning.
Or basically anytime I was alone.
Then I met my ex, Ethan, about halfway through my first year. I clicked with him in a way I never had with anyone else before. I realized I wanted something real, not a fantasy with somebody who knew my lacrosse number better than my name. I’d never even been sure I was the kind of person who could handle a relationship, but Ethan made me feel like it was possible, like we’d figure it out together.
Only I got it wrong. I got it all wrong, and when Becca was the person I bumped into after I ran out of that party so the entire team wouldn’t see me sob, she knew way more than my name.
Maybe it was the few beers I’d had or just the emotional turmoil, but when I looked at her after she’d pulled me into a hug, I knew she saw me. I knew I saw her.
It knocked all the breath out of my body and arranged new constellations in the sky.
But the term was over. Half the campus was heading home, and one possibly-didn’t-even-happen moment with Becca wasn’t enough to stitch up every piece of me Ethan had ripped apart, so I went home too. I went home and patched myself up.
One step at a time. First thing’s first.
“Eat wasabi! Drink some coffee!” Paulina shouts, totally butchering the words to the song. I let her keep spinning me around until the track ends, and then she, Iz, and I collapse onto the couch in a dog pile that makes Jane give us a disgruntled glare as she goes in for another piece of pizza.
“Aww, you guys, look at our little lobsters!” Paulina wiggles her foot in the air next to mine. We’ve all got tiny, black ink outlines of lobsters tattooed on our ankles. The whole lacrosse team has matching ones.
Why the founders of the University of Nova Scotia decided to name their athletics department after a crustacean will always be beyond me. They couldn’t have picked anything more stereotypical. Seafood was one of the only things I knew about Halifax before coming to school here. The other teams in the league give us a lot of shit about our name—that is, until they get on the field with us.
Then they quickly learn some respect.
“That reminds me of Jim,” Iz says. “I miss Jim.”
Jim is our team mascot who gets brought out for games and special occasions. He’s a six foot long inflatable lobster. Why anyone would need a six foot long inflatable lobster other than to use as a UNS team mascot, I will never know, but apparently he was found on Amazon.
“Oh my god! Jim!” I shout as I wave my foot in the air alongside Paulina’s. “We need Jim!”
The whiskey is still making me get very excited about everything.
“We do!” Iz agrees. “I wonder where he lives during the summer.”
“In the ocean,” Jane deadpans before attacking her pizza again.
Jane is a hungry drunk.