Hoax in One

| 05 |

I'd spent the previous year wishing I could expel Tate from every memory I had in college, but now all I could do was wish he was physically there with me.

I couldn't help it. Something about knowing that he was likely within a fifty mile radius of me most of the days of the week was messing with my mind. I could run into him anywhere on campus. I was going to be taking pictures of him during his tournaments. He could be watching me from afar and I would have had no idea. That thought excited me.

I was attempting to take action shots of the women's team at the driving range, but I kept distracting myself looking at the tee where Tate and I first met.

It still looked exactly the same—square patches of turf in between two-foot-tall metal dividers.

So, I debated with myself for at least ten minutes before I put my camera down and took a big breath.

Someone needed to break the ice.

We were about to spend two whole days together, and it couldn't be obvious that we were being weird around each other. Otherwise, this whole farce would be exposed, and I'd look like the biggest dumbass. I didn't need Matt looking down on me for being a dumbass any more than he already did.

When I finally found the matching men's shirt to the amazing pineapple shirt I'd been wearing when we first met, I texted Tate a picture of it along with: Ordered you an early birthday present.

After seventeen minutes, I was convinced he wasn't going to respond, but on minute nineteen, my phone buzzed.

Joke's on you. I already own it. It's been sitting in my closet between my twenty black polos and my fifty gray polos since the first week I met you.

I smiled at the thought, happy that he remembered where it was from. No love for your white polos? Or has that become too colorful for you?

A minute later Tate sent me a photo of his closet. Among his many, many boring and monotone polos, he had one colorful section on the end with one yellow, one red, one salmon, one pink, and one baby blue shirt grouped together.

You've rubbed off on me a little, he replied.

For some reason, my heart muscles gave out momentarily. I want to see you in the salmon one.

There's the demanding Devin I know.

Some of Tate rubbing off on me, no doubt, but I felt like if I had said it, I would've been flirting with him. And then I questioned myself on why the hell I found myself even wanting to flirt with him?

If I did, would he flirt back or would he cut the conversation short?

Maybe the nostalgia of standing where we'd first met—where I'd hoped for a fleeting moment that there could be something more between us—was stronger than I had realized.

"Who? Tate?"

My head whipped up at the sound of his name, my brain thinking he was somehow there even though he'd just sent me a picture from inside his house. I was in the most likely place for me to run into him, and maybe a teeny part of me had been hoping I would.

Thankfully, the three girls didn't notice. I thought they were sophomores but couldn't remember their names. I pretended to be super interested in my camera as I flipped through the pictures I'd taken in the last hour.

"Yeah. He's been out at the putting green every afternoon for hours for the last few weeks. Maybe I could casually practice out there and wait for him to show up. What do you think?" The girl's voice sounded hopeful. I wasn't sure which one was talking.