“And what’s that?”
“The woman who will support you from the transition of college graduate to the next QB or wide receiver of the Connecticut Kings!” She gave a strong nod of confident finality. “Transitioning will be a difficult task, but I’ll be there making sure you’re taking something solid and dependable into the new life with no certainties, and I will remain by your side from then on.” She pushed the glasses up from over her eyes to her forehead. “My heart is still the same. It belongs to you, Ashton. Now, I hear yours isn’t with me, but I’ll take what I can get to buy the time needed to earn your trust again.”
“And what if that day doesn’t come, Aivery?”
“It will because it has to.” Her lips quivered. “I’m begging you.” Her eyes rolled. “Okay. To the two of us, we’re just working it out. To the campus, we’re the same Ashton and Aivery we used to be: solid. I don’t think I could finish this year with the stress of the campus knowing we weren’t together anymore. I barely lasted the summer, trying to keep up the façade that we were fine to my friends and family.”
I shook my head, not able to roll with the lies. “I don’t know about that, Aivery.”
“Your coaches will tell you the same. You can’t go this last year with the scrutiny of a breakup. Not one of our magnitude. We’re the king and queen of Blakewood! Let’s just get through these next two semesters with minimal damage.” She shoulder-bumped me, making me realize how close she’d scooted over since I sat down. “It’ll give me a chance to convince you to forget that reckless ass mistake I made.”
My eyes closed, irritated from how this turned around. It was so different from how I planned it. The sunglasses were a ploy to ease the blow. I knew she liked her assuages by way of top designer names. Maybe they gave her the impression of hope.
Fuck!
This was so not how I planned this. I thought it would be easy compared to the blow-up that discovery caused last spring. It was so bad, Aivery left for the airport with swollen eyes from crying all night. She called me days later, swearing a commitment of celibacy to help clear her head. As if I gave a shit. The last thing I was concerned about was fucking her again.
“And your celibacy pledge?”
She nodded fast and hard, fighting to assure me. “It’s still in effect.” She bit her bottom lip. “It’ll give us that fresh start I’ve been telling you we need.” Her arms folded around my shoulder. She tugged me, eyes turning puppy dog the way they did when she’d begged to have her way on yet another mindless issue. “Can I hug you again?”
I didn’t answer, but she pulled me into her chest anyway. Aivery was used to my temper. Whether she was the cause or football, she was good at deflecting my mood. It was one of many things about the girl I liked.
“I gotta go,” I murmured to break the embrace. “I told coach I’d meet with him before practice.”
When she released me, I stood to my feet and started down the hill. Aivery was on my heels the whole way down. “Looks like you did your summer slimdown well this year,” she observed out loud. I had. I’d trained since the first of July to be field-ready this season. It’s what I’d always done. “You look damn amazing.”
When we neared the walkway, scarce bodies came into view. Some girl called Aivery’s name from a distance, and thankfully. I caught the thickness in her cords in that last sentence.
“Hey, girl!” Aivery returned. “You know we’re meeting on the Wilma Rudolph track instead of the Joyner-Kersee one. Right?”
“Yeah. I was just getting a new key for my dorm,” the girl, Tameka Holden from Bridgeport, Connecticut, replied unnecessarily.
“And I was just greeting my man properly!” Aivery shouted back just as unnecessarily, peppering it with a pitchy giggle. She flipped her weave over her shoulder. “You know I don’t play about my Ashton Spencer!”
To avoid reacting to that bullshit, I decided on the target of my frustration. A leggy brown-skinned girl with the worst fucking weave job I’ve ever seen in my twenty-one years of living amongst Black women was intersecting our path. She kept her eyes low and lips touted while gripping the strap of her tattered red book bag. Her walk was stiff, shoulders high, and sneakers hardly had soles.
“Arrrrrrrrr!” I stopped and barked. “Arr-ru-ruuuuuuu!” I repeated.
Aivery, while clawed to my waist, howled, cracking the fuck up. “Ewwwwww! Who the fuck let that one onto our campus, babe?”
I continued my bark. “Arrrrr-arrrrr! Arr-ru-ruuuuuu!”
The girl never looked back. Her pace away from us increased, but other than that, she didn’t react at all.
When she was out of sight, I pulled away from Aivery. “Gotta go.”
My movement was swift to avoid the expectation of a kiss. But fuck, was I too slow. Aivery caught me at the sleeve of my shirt, pulling me into deep, pink-pouted lips.
“The fuck is you gone do then, huhn?” he screamed into the phone. My lips curled painfully into my teeth. “Fuck is you gone do then?”
“I’m gonna use one of them four plane tickets, fly home, and give the other three back to them.” My knees bounced from the balls of my feet, anger boiling through me.
“You sound stupid as hell, young girl! Stupid as all fuck,” Uppercut yelled. “The hell you gone do when you get back here? Fuck you gone do? Run back to that lil’ white trash town and pull up a chair in the damn trailer park?”
Since the first time Uppercut took me home to Millville, when he saw the white people on the ride in, he’s called my town white trash. If I didn’t hate the place so much for unrelated reasons, I would’ve called him out on it. Right now wasn’t the time: Cut was on one, and I had a point to prove.
Trisha shifted over me, likely uncomfortable while I sat behind her desk, speaking to my trainer from back home. Collin was across the small office pretending to not hear us. Shit. Everybody on this side of the building could.
“No. I’m coming back to North Jersey to train.”
“Train for what?”
“To fight!”
“Fight for pennies, foolish girl? For pennies?” Cut croaked. “That’s all I’ll be able to get you now. We talked about this. Until I can get us some opportunities out this way to make some type of money you can live off of, you need to be doing something productive.”
“Training is productive, Cut!”
“No the fuck it ain’t if you can’t pay to stitch the cuts in ya face you get from the occupation! What about food? Where the fuck you gone stay? You think about that, bright girl?”
“I can stay with Raj—”
“And don’t you say you’ll stay with that muthafucka! Where you gone be? In his grandmother’s basement? That fuckin’ house got more people than damn roaches! You don’t belong there! You need to be around other fighters, athletes, or kids ya age doing something positive, girl!”
But Raj was a fighter. He was Uppercut’s son who he used to half ass train. Raj was my best friend, the only person I could tell anything to…once I got over that stupid ass crush I called myself having on him. The one he now told people he had on me to soothe my embarrassment as an insider between the two of us. He used to come to the gym for work a lot, and was really good! He came every once in a while nowadays, preferring to train with someone else instead of his father. It confused me why Uppercut never acknowledged his skills. Raj was knocking out professional fighters—and he didn’t take competing seriously like me. When he started out, he just wanted to be under his father, I knew. But Cut rejected Raj. It wasn’t until recently Raj had given up, opting to pursue his music career, and only came through sparingly.