Page 2 of Under His Jersey

The music keeps going. A guy carrying a case of beer bumps me from behind, mutters, “Sorry,” and steps around me, because I’ve stopped in the middle of the hallway. I want to turn around and walk back into the living room and let this be something I didn’t see, but my eyes go to his hand and stay there. His fingers flex against her side. It’s on her, grabbing now, pulling her closer.

My face goes hot, and then all at once cold, like somebody opened a window behind my eyes. He tilts his head and kisses her again, and my feet are moving.

I’m three steps away when Evan opens his eyes.

His face empties so fast it would almost be funny if it were happening to anyone else. His needy hand drops from her waist. The girl feels it, pulls back, and follows his stare.

“Kylie,” he says. It comes out like a question he already knows the answer to.

“You’re tired,” I say.

Fuck this. I turn around.

“Kylie, wait—”

I storm back. “You said you were tired.”

The girl looks between us. “Evan?”

I look at her properly for the first time, and what I take in is that she’s horrified. Openly, genuinely horrified, one hand drifting up toward her mouth. I wanted to hate her, and she isn’t making it easy.

“Do you know about me?” I ask her.

She blinks. “What?”

I point at him. “Do you know he has a girlfriend?”

“Kylie.” Sharper now, a warning, like I’m the one making a scene.

Her face answers before she does. It crumples. “No.” She takes one big step away from him, like standing near him might count against her. “I didn’t know. He never said—”

“It’s fine,” I tell her, which it isn’t, but she’s not the one I can’t stop looking at.

She turns to Evan, and her voice goes thin. “You told me you were single.”

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat, but everything else in me stops. My lungs, my thoughts, like the whole room paused to let that sentence walk past slowly so I could get a good look at it. Not you didn’t mention it. Not it never came up. Told. He had to open his mouth and decide to say it.

Evan closes his eyes. It’s barely a second, but I see it, and I’ve seen it before, when his mom asks where he’s been, when a teacher asks where his assignment is. I’ve just never had it pointed at me.

“You told her you were single,” I repeat. My voice sounds like it’s drifting in from the next room.

“Kylie, can we go outside?”

“How long?”

“Not here.”

“How long, Evan?”

The room is noticing. I can hear it get quieter and feel eyes slide sideways, and the space around us gets a little wider. The girl backs up until a wall stops her. Evan reaches for me, and I step back, and his hand hangs in the air between us before it drops.

“That was—” He glances at the girl and lowers his voice. “It was stupid. Okay? I fucked up.”

“Just now?”

“Yes.”

He says it too fast, like the answer was already sitting there waiting, and his jaw goes tight, and my mind starts putting pieces together. Three weeks ago, he took forty minutes to answer a text after telling me he was lying in bed on his phone. When I asked, he said he’d fallen asleep, and I believed him. Last week, he flipped his phone facedown when I sat next to him, and thirty seconds later, he picked it back up to check the time and it buzzed in his hand, and buzzed again. When I asked who kept texting, he said it was the group chat and laughed at me for asking. Told me I was being weird. Kissed my forehead. There are more, little things that came with explanations already attached, neat and reasonable, the kind that make you feel silly for needing one. I took every single one.