S.M. ✦ Gin & Juice

V.

The bell tower struck 9 PM, muffled through the library floors of brick and mortar, when you finally threw down your pen, no longer able to pretend to concentrate. It had been like this all day. The harder you tried to focus on your assignments, the more violent the guilt roiling inside you would become. This was the exact opposite effect you hoped to achieve by lying to Shawn.

Lying to him was supposed to absolve you of any feeling of responsibility for his problems. You had your own problems to worry about and you really didn't need to add those of a maybe-alcoholic quarterback with the weight of the world on his shoulders. And yet.

You were here at the library avoiding him. Not that he was trying to contact you or anything, but it was game day. Now that you knew his name, knew who he was, he seemed to be everywhere. On the breath of the girls in your dorm, printed on posters across campus, shouted over the stadium's booming PA system. Shawn Mendes, Shawn Mendes, Shawn Mendes. Even if you never talked to him again, you could never escape him. He was a part of your life whether you liked it or not. So, you escaped the whispers and the posters and the announcements and came to the library with its beige walls and quiet hours.

Except, thanks to Shawn himself, this most sacred of spaces had been tainted. Tainted with the memory of your lies, with the memory of his blank face, with the sinking feeling that you had made a grave mistake. When he looked back at you, before he left you in that cold and empty study room, you could almost feel his disappointment. He had wanted you to tell him something different.

You told yourself that the lie was protecting him. If he didn't know that you knew his secret, he could live without that kind of liability hanging over his head. If it was true that only you knew, that he had never told anyone else, then you were a threat to him. A Heisman-hopeful with a binge drinking problem that bordered on alcoholism? That kind of information was a goldmine in a small college town with an elite football program. You'd heard about the other scandals—the sexual harassment, the academic fraud, the gambling—but none of those had included self-destructive, potentially harmful behavior. None of them had included the leading passer in the nation.

In the time between your fateful night in the bathroom and the library meeting, you had done some research on Shawn Mendes, first-team All-American. His record was impeccable. He started as a true freshman. The team only lost one game last year. Shawn had strained his thumb in practice and had devastated his passing technique, but they won out after that, bringing home a bowl series trophy. People talked about him like he could be the next Tom Brady, not that you knew what that meant but it sounded pretty fucking impressive.

Now, you could see what he meant when he talked about expectations, the weight of them, and the constant pressure. Everyone wanted a piece of him and he was only twenty years old. It was no wonder he'd turned to alcohol to numb that buzzing in the back of his mind—the constant screams that shouted his name. If it weren't for the blackness that tasted like gin and felt like hell in the morning, he might have tried to silence them in other, more sinister ways.

What if you had misread the situation? What if his blank stare and lack of charm yesterday were a signal that he didn't want to be placated but rather wanted you to hint that you knew something behind the mask, behind the layers of charming armor? You thought about all the women that must have thrown themselves at him in his life like you said you had, wanting sex or social gain or the promise of more. You thought of that night in the bathroom when he told you how all of those women weighed him down with everything else, like adding finger weights one by one until his hands were too heavy to lift off the ground.

You got up out of the chair you'd been occupying for several hours and escaped the air of confusion and simmering regret. It was time for caffeine.