Consumed: A MMA Sports Romance (36 page)

Zack and I had broken up just when my mom
had started getting sicker. She had passed away from the cancer she had been
fighting throughout our relationship a couple of months before I started
college, only a few weeks after watching me graduate. I’d thrown myself into
work, taking extra shifts and saving up my money as much as possible. With her
death, it was even harder for dad to afford my college—there were all the
bills, and even though they’d had a life insurance policy starting from before
she’d been diagnosed with cancer, everything had been so expensive that there
just wasn’t anything much to spare for my education.

I couldn’t blame Zack for breaking up with
me when he had; he had his own life to lead, and I had told myself more than
once that I would rather deal with the heartache of a breakup than to find out
that he had given into temptation at college and cheated on me. One of my other
friends in high school had gone through that, and that would have hurt much
more than just him breaking up with me. But it would have been nice to have
even a few more months of emotional support to deal with the fact that we all
knew my mom only had a little while longer—that in spite of the fact that she
was fighting tooth and nail to outlive her cancer, there was only so much that
medicine could do for her.

I stood up, leaving my books and tray
behind at the table I had taken. When I went back to the entrance of the dining
hall to get into the serving area, where the silverware was, I looked around to
see if Jess had come in yet. I flashed my ID card—I didn’t have to scan it, not
when I’d already done that. The person at the entry had seen me go through
before and waved me into the line. It annoyed me, a little, that I had to get
back in line even though I didn’t want to get more food; but it was fair, I
supposed. I considered grabbing a small dessert—maybe a brownie or a
cookie—while I was up anyway. Even if the soup and sandwich filled me up, it
would be a good snack later while I was studying. They didn’t restrict what you
could take out of the dining hall very much—we weren’t supposed to take any
plates, cups, or silverware, but I knew that several people in the dorms had
quite the collection of dining hall crockery that they slipped back into
circulation rather than washing themselves, putting it on their trays and
pushing it into the dish chute on the other end of the hall.

As I looked around, hoping I would see
Jess, I instead spotted Zack. My heart pounded in my chest. I hadn’t been
avoiding him precisely, but the school was big enough that I didn’t really have
to try not to run into him. The next moment my stomach gave a lurch; he had his
arm around a girl. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t need to. It had only been
three days—he was already moving on? My stomach twisted itself in knots and
then I felt a hot rush of anger. I hadn’t spoken to him, but it wasn’t like I’d
told him I never wanted to see him again. It also wasn’t as though he had no
idea how to get in touch with me if he had wanted to. I pressed my lips
together, feeling my face burn, feeling the fire working its way through my
bones. I grabbed a spoon and took deep breaths, trying to decide how to deal
with the situation. I didn’t want to cut in line; I didn’t want to cause a huge
scene. I moved along with the line, keeping an eye on Zack a few people ahead
of me, talking to and laughing with the girl his arm was wrapped around. They
certainly looked chummy.

The girl grabbed the food she wanted and
broke away from Zack, and I spotted my chance. He was getting out of the line
too, moving to grab a drink before he went into the dining area proper. His
tray was loaded down and he had to set it on the ledge to fill his cup. No one
could accuse me of cutting the line with nothing but a spoon in my hands. I
walked over to Zack and called out his name, trying to keep my tone as neutral
as possible. Zack looked up and his eyes widened in recognition—but no sign of
guilt or shame.

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked him. I couldn’t
keep my anger out of my voice and I knew it; I was feeling it too strongly.

“What do you mean, what’s up?” Zack filled
his cup and put it on his tray. I took a deep breath as quietly as possible.

“I mean, who’s that? And why was your arm
all around her like that?”

Zack shrugged, looking at me as if I was
crazy. “It’s just a friend of mine,” he said, starting to look around. I knew
we were on the edge of creating a scene, but I didn’t care in the moment.

“Just a friend? Come on, Zack, I’m not an
idiot.” I crossed my arms over my chest, gripping the spoon tightly. I
swallowed against the lump that was forming in my throat, glancing around
quickly. The people closest to us were watching avidly. I heard someone say to
a friend that it was another blow up with Zack, and my face burned.

“She’s just a friend, Evie—come on! We
have a philosophy class together.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t see why you’re
acting like some kind of jealous bitch.”

I inhaled sharply. “Jealous bitch?”

“Jealous girlfriend, do you like that
better?”

I clenched my teeth. “What do you mean,
you can’t see why I’m acting jealous?”

Zack looked around and a haughty look came
over his face.

“I mean, it’s not like there’s anything
between us. It was just sex, Evie—no big deal.” The words hit me like ice water.
In my mind I heard Zack’s drunken frat brother saying he’d found his piece of
ass. I hadn’t exactly sought him out to talk to him about what had happened,
but Zack and I had history; it wasn’t like we were strangers who had hooked up.
I had dated him for two years before he had gone off to college—I had lost my
virginity to him.

“Just sex? Just sex?” I shook my head. My
anger was mounting, I felt it getting hotter and hotter inside of me. In spite
of how hungry I had been when I first came into the dining hall, my stomach was
roiling now—the smell of food all around me made me feel a little nauseated.
Zack shrugged. I looked around; we were the subject of intense interest in the
serving area, and I caught a few people laughing, some others smiling at the
spectacle. My face burned hotter. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the
cup off of Zack’s tray. I threw the contents into his face and let the cup drop
back onto the tray before I snatched up a piece of cake he had grabbed from the
dessert station, dripping with icing. I threw that in his face too, wanting to
scream. Instead I turned on my heel and charged through the entryway into the
dining area as everyone in the serving area started to laugh at Zack. I grabbed
up my books and didn’t even bother with my tray; I normally tried to be
considerate of the people who worked in the dining hall, but I was so angry—so
humiliated—that I didn’t care. I got out of the dining hall quickly as I could
and didn’t even look back as I walked as fast as my legs would move back to the
dorms.

SLAMMED #2

CHAPTER
ONE

I told myself that I shouldn’t be
surprised. Just because Zack had been my first, real boyfriend, and I had lost
my virginity to him, didn’t make him any different from any other guy. I curled
up on the dorm room couch, watching TV instead of studying, alternating between
wanting to cry and wanting to track Zack down again and scream in his face. I
wished—useless as it was—that my mom was around, that I could call her and tell
her how awful I felt. The thought of my mom plunged me into a deeper sadness; I
missed her. I had thought I was finished grieving for her loss after a year,
but every time something big happened in my life—when I graduated, when I moved
into the dorms, and now, the situation with Zack—I thought about her, and
wondered what she would say.

“Sweetie,
some guys are just jerks.”

Mom had told me that more than once when
I’d come to her—after Zack and I had broken up and I had started dating other
guys; guys who hadn’t been as loveable as Zack had been when we were both in
high school. I could hear her voice in my head telling me that; I could feel
her weak hand stroking my hair.

“You
shouldn’t take any guy too seriously until he’s proven he’s worth your time.”

My eyes stung and burned and I buried my
face against a throw pillow, sniffling. I had thought that Zack had proven he
was worth my time in high school; I had never thought he’d turn out to be like
the other guys I had dated. I tried to think back to what he had been like.
When mom had first started getting sick, he’d seemed so supportive—showing up
in the middle of the night to comfort me, or grabbing my lunch from the
cafeteria so I could spend the whole break studying to make up for what I
hadn’t been able to do during mom’s appointments.

It was hard not to think about the last,
bad months of my mom’s fight with cancer whenever I tried to think of her
advice. It had been horrifying for her, I knew; she had lost her hair and she
thought she was hideous. As she wasted away, I had frantically tried to tear
myself in two, to do twice the living—rushing through my assignments so I could
spend just a few more minutes with her. She had been so strong right up until
the end, she had kept giving me advice and love, and I had felt so incredibly
helpless as Dad and I watched her not get better but instead get worse. I had
missed Zack, but in the face of my mom’s declining health and long descent into
death, it seemed not to matter at all. My mom had always been my biggest
cheerleader, the person I could turn to with anything—and the biggest problem
in my life, that she was dying, gave me no one to talk to about it. I couldn’t
tell her how horrible I felt, how much pain it gave me to see her hurting,
fighting and struggling against the disease that would claim her life—it
wouldn’t be fair to her. She was dealing with so much already.

I knew that she was worried about how I
was taking the breakup with Zack, but I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to
her about that—it seemed so trivial in comparison. I put a cheerful face on and
tried to stay as positive as possible whenever I was in the room with her,
telling her about how my English teacher wanted me to try publishing some of
the stories I’d written, and how the high school newspaper had featured me in
the Superlatives section as
Most Likely
to Win a Pulitzer
. I sneaked her favorite foods into the hospital in spite
of the rules against it, even though she had almost no appetite. She managed to
eat a few bites here and there, and I would devour the snacks with her more to
keep her from feeling guilty for not being able to eat than because I wanted
them.

“Sweetheart,
you have a kind and loving heart,”
she told me once, close
to the end.
“It’s a good companion for
your active brain. Let them work together—don’t ever let one take over
completely. Use your sense and use your compassion. I know you’re going to have
a good life, and I’ll be watching you always.”

Normally the show on the TV would have
completely taken up my attention, but as I lay there on the couch, I found
myself thinking more and more about Zack. Had he really changed, or had he
always been a jerk? It was hard for me to say. The guys I had dated after Zack
and I broke up had made me start to largely distrust men in general; Mom’s
advice to me whenever I would come to her depressed or frustrated with someone
I was dating had made me think that I just shouldn’t trust any guy I hadn’t
already vetted, who I didn’t already have experience with. But I had experience
with Zack. He was nothing like Braden, the guy I’d dated a couple of weeks
after Zack and I had broken up, who had just been using me to get to my friend
Lisa—and who had called me a frigid bitch when I wouldn’t “put out.” He wasn’t
anything like Tony either; Tony had been dating a girl at another school the
entire time we saw each other, and I didn’t find out until someone told me they
had seen him at the other school’s dance.

Zack had been so sweet when we had been
together in high school. Even the first time we had had sex, he had been so
careful, so gentle, making sure that I was ready for it, making sure that there
wasn’t too much pain. I didn’t even bleed—we’d made out and teased each other
until I was soaking wet. The fact that the sex itself had been a little
disappointing had nothing to do with Zack being a bad guy; I’d kept having sex
with him after that not because of any pressure from him, but because I kept
hoping that we’d have that magic moment when everything came together and it
felt amazing, the way I’d read about in books that I kept hidden from my
parents. It didn’t become that way, but at least Zack had never tried to force
me; and to the best of my knowledge, he’d never cheated on me.

The sex I’d had with him the other night
was totally different. I felt myself burning up from the inside as I remembered
it—how good Zack had been at touching me, at getting me off. How good he had
felt inside of me. It had been like night and day compared to our high school
years, and I had to assume that the reason why he was so much better at sex was
that he had been with other women in between. Had he broken up with me purely
so he’d be free to sleep around? I wanted to know and dreaded the possibility
at the same time. I wavered between wanting to be mad at him again for possibly
breaking up with me right before I would have to deal with the most difficult
thing in my life—losing my mom—and thinking about how incredibly hot our tryst
together had been.

“It
was just sex,”
I heard him saying in my mind, blowing me
off as if we had no history, as if I was just another freshman girl who’d gone
to a party and ended up with him in bed. I heard his frat brother in my mind
referring to me as Zack’s “
piece of ass
”
for the night.