Page 18 of Faking the Play

“Well, I mean, he’s not ugly,” Ryan said.

“We all know she’s not that shallow,” I said. “I just don’t get how an asshole like that got a woman like her.”

“Maybe because, when she was younger, some guys made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for them.” Sarcasm dripped from Ethan’s words.

“You’re saying this is our fault?” I asked, surprised.

He shrugged. “Just saying that us ghosting her must’ve seriously fucked with her self-esteem. Seems to me this Jason guy is good at charming people and manipulating them.”

“I told Amelia she can stay with us if things get weirder with her roommate,” Ryan said as he picked up the controller. “The way those two were acting, I wouldn’t put it past them to go back to Amelia’s dorm room and make out there, even if Amelia’s there.”

“And that has nothing to do with you kissing Amelia last night?” Ethan asked.

Ryan casually flipped Ethan off and then started to kick my ass in the game.

Ethan wasn’t usually the kind of guy to poke at something, especially something important to one of us. I got it though.

He was jealous that Ryan had kissed Amelia, and he hadn’t. I was jealous too. It fucking ate at my insides. Not because I didn’t want Ryan to have her, but because I wanted to have her too.

That might sound weird to anyone else, but these guys got it. We didn’t exactly put a label on it, but if we did, we’d call ourselves poly. We weren’t just horny frat guys who watched gangbang porn and saw women as objects to fuck. We’d talkedabout it before, what we’d do if we found a woman who’d be open to a relationship with all three of us…

And I shouldn’t have been thinking those thoughts about Amelia. We were supposed to be helping her, not seducing her.

“We need to get her side of the story out there,” I said.

“We can’t flat-out accuse Jason of being behind it, because it’ll just look like she’s making shit up to get back at him for dumping her,” Ethan pointed out.

“So we do it a little more subtle,” Ryan said. “When we talk her up, we make it about what type of person she is. How she never lies. That we’ve always trusted her.”

Ryan might struggle in school, but he was a hell of a lot smarter than he gave himself credit for.

“We could even tell people how she’s not the revenge type,” Ethan said. Mention how we ghosted her as kids, but she never tried to get back at us.”

I winced. “We should probably hold back on those details, or people might think she’s hanging out with us now because she’s plotting something, or because we’re popular. Hell, Jason would probably make up some shit about her trying to seduce us so we knock her up and she makes a shitload of money when we make it to the NFL.”

“Okay,” Ethan said. “So she’s kind and smart and a good friend and rescues puppies from ditches.”

I huffed out a breath as I lost to Ryan, and then handed my controller to Ethan.

“I forgot she did that,” I said. “And then she went all Nancy Drew to figure out who’d done it.”

“And we let the air out of Old Man MacGregor’s truck tires when we heard he told her to mind her own damn business,” Ryan said.

“I might’ve snuck back and slashed his tractor tires too,” Ethan confessed.

“I put sugar in the gas tank of that old beat-up pick-up he had,” I said with a grin.

“I overheard him at the hardware store telling anyone who’d listen that he’d ‘slap that little bitch’s mouth if she backtalked him again.’” Ryan’s expression was dark. “I might’ve cornered him when he was loading up some lumber in the alley and told him if he ever laid a finger on Amelia or even talked about her like that again, I’d break his jaw and set fire to one of his fields.”

Ethan and I stared at Ryan.

“You’d never set a fire,” I said finally. “Not when it’d risk other people.”

Ryan shrugged. “I would’ve broken his jaw though, and since he saw I was telling the truth about that, he thought I’d do the other one, too.”

Like I said. Smart.

“Now that we know what we’re saying or not saying,” Ethan said, “can we get to where we’ll be doing all this?”

---