Chapter Three
GJ
Leah was not the girl I was expecting to approach me at a party, but I wasn’t complaining.
“Can I borrow GJ for a second?” she asked my friends, never short on confidence. Leah was the kind of girl who was so blunt with her communication that it was hard to bullshit her. I didn’t know her that well, but she was a Moretti, and that was all I needed to know.
She was also so blunt that it was hard to tell her no, so it wasn’t surprising that my friends didn’t put up much of a fight.
“Yeah, I mean…sure,” Tamia, one of my few friends who wasn’t on the basketball team, said and shrugged good-naturedly. She glanced over at me to make sure things were cool, and when I nodded, she headed off.
“I’ll catch you guys in a few,” I said as they walked off. I turned toward Leah, immediately intrigued. “How can I help you, Leah Moretti?”
She stepped closer to me, tilting her head up toward me.
She was somewhere around 5’10” so there wasn’t much of a height difference between us.
Her dark blonde hair fell down in shiny, perfectly maintained waves over her back and shoulders.
She used to bleach it, but I liked that she’d decided to stop last year.
There was a nice warmth to her natural color. “Did you come here with anyone?”
My eyebrows raised of their own volition.
It wasn’t exactly hot to be surprised when a girl was flirting, but Leah was catching me off guard.
I was rarely approached so directly, and it was never this early in the night.
But it made sense. She was the former student body president, the winner of various big-name scholarships, and was celebrated on campus all the time for one thing or another. She didn’t have time to waste.
And I wasn’t interested in wasting hers. If she wasn’t going to play coy, I didn’t have to either.
“I didn’t,” I said, because it was technically true. I’d invited the hostess from the restaurant, but I hadn’t seen her yet, and we’d never exchanged numbers. I wasn’t exactly waiting on her.
“Do you want to leave with someone?”
My lips turned up in a smile. “Isn’t your sister going to be pissed?”
“I don’t really give a fuck about Mags right now, to be honest.”
Fuck, she was so sexy.
I’d always acknowledged that she was good-looking—everyone knew it.
The Moretti genetics were categorically absurd.
Their parents were tall and rich, and Leah and Mags were athletically stacked and smart—if not just so incredibly driven that it didn’t matter whether they were smart or not, like Mags.
They were the kind of rich where it took time to piece it together because it was all so casual to them.
Mags would say things like My neighbor taught me how to throw a football and later, it’d be revealed that the neighbor happened to be Russell Wilson.
Mags was always considered the hot one of the Coyotes, probably because she was blonde and tall and built muscle like a supermodel instead of a regular person.
But with her sister standing in front of me, it was obvious that Leah was, without a doubt, the hotter of the two sisters.
Mags was lucky they didn’t both play basketball because Leah would’ve been the easy fan favorite.
“I have to say, I’m flattered by the sudden interest,” I said.
Leah bit her lip like she had something to confess.
“Are you about to tell me that Mags sent you here to test me? Are you a mole to see if I’d be willing to sleep with her sister despite warning us all you’re off-limits?” I teased. “You can tell her that I would if offered, whether she approves or not.”
Leah laughed. “No, oh my god. Nothing like that. I promise.” Earnest giggles bubbled out of her in a way that surprised but charmed me.
I’d never experienced this side of her directly, but I’d seen it in her at parties with her friends.
She always had a way of catching my eye.
She was expressive and social, talking freely with her hands and laughing.
I didn’t keep my distance because of Mags specifically—I wasn’t afraid of her—but mostly because it was a line that I didn’t want to cross without knowing Leah was mutually interested in crossing it. I wasn’t going to cause a problem for no reason.
But I would willingly cause a problem for a good reason. And the opportunity to have sex with Leah definitely fell under that category.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it my new shirt? You can be honest. I had a feeling when I ordered this that women would flock to me.”
Leah laughed again with her perfect, incredible laugh.
I’d been hearing it for years in passing at parties, but it sounded even better when it was directed at me.
“No. I mean, yes, the shirt is great. But honestly, someone I was seeing is here with someone else, and I’m…
” she waved her hands instead of finishing her sentence.
“Right,” I said, catching on immediately. “You want to make them jealous.”
“Is that petty and stupid?” she asked.
“Not even a little bit,” I answered honestly. “If it is, it doesn’t matter to me. I’d do the same thing.”
She scoffed, rolling her eyes with a smile. “As if you’ve ever been serious enough with anyone to have to be petty.”
I laughed. “Fair enough.” It was true—no one had ever made enough of an impact to be upset when we were no longer a thing.
Everything was always casual with me. I didn’t really want to involve feelings, didn’t have an interest in getting to know anyone that seriously.
College wasn’t meant for something like that.
“But it’s okay if you don’t want to be, like, a revenge fuck. I won’t be offended,” she said. I knew she meant it, too. One thing Theo and I had connected on was our love for women who radiated confidence. It was nice to be matched in that way, since both of us were so cocky.
Hearing the confirmation from Leah so plainly that she wanted to have sex was a high like nothing else.
I could listen to her say revenge fuck all day on repeat, shamelessly.
I was open to anything Leah wanted to do—we could’ve left the party together and left it at that, just giving everyone here enough to talk about, without actually following through.
But she was serious. She really wanted to move on from her ex, and she wanted to do that by having sex with me. And I wasn’t about to say no to something like that.
A rush of desire flooded through me at the thought.
I imagined my fingers in Leah’s hair, her brown eyes squeezed tight as she moaned out my name.
Her sleeveless black top was tight to her body, and her jeans fell perfectly on the curve of her hips.
I liked how they looked on her, but wouldn’t hate getting her out of them, either.
“I don’t care what reason you give me if it means I get to have sex with you,” I said.
Leah’s eyes flashed, her cheeks pink. Even though we’d been flirting the entire time, the way we’d been discussing sex was so practical, like a business deal.
But the air between us had changed in an instant.
Leah might’ve been attracted enough to me to initially offer, but the look in her eye suggested she was really thinking about it now.
“I can walk you home,” I offered, because I was suddenly now very eager to get out of here.
She nodded, and we cut through the crowd, careful to maintain distance.
We had a weird line we had to toe—she wanted to show off to her ex and make sure they knew she was still getting laid, but her sister would be pissed at us if she knew we were alone together.
My team knew me well enough to know what my talking one-on-one with another woman at a party meant.
“I’m walking her back,” I said when I saw Leah’s friends staring at us. I could see from their expressions that they had no idea what to make of the two of us together.
“Okay,” Soph, who I knew from the cheer squad, said. She squeezed Leah’s arm and then looked back at me with a warning in her eyes. “Let me know if you need anything. We’ll come get you if you need it.” She turned her attention back to me. “On your absolute best behavior.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a mock salute. “Always.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Leah said with a partial eye roll.
We continued through the crowd. I placed my hand on Leah’s lower back to guide her through, keeping an eye out for Mags.
I was less worried about the rest of the players on the team—everyone tended to mind their own business.
And I wasn’t sure any of the Coyotes, other than Gemma, really liked Mags enough to intentionally go out of their way to give updates on her sister.
I also kept an eye out for whoever it was that Leah had been seeing.
I didn’t have a name or face, so anyone at the party could’ve been them.
I almost asked her, mostly because I wanted an opportunity to stare down the competition.
But I didn’t want to risk making her uncomfortable by pushing it too far.
“I’m going to walk her home,” I repeated, this time to my friends.
They expressed much less concern than Leah’s friends, mostly just waving before we went on our way.
All of them knew better than to ask questions.
Mags was nowhere to be seen, which was a relief.
She was probably off somewhere with Gemma.
Outside, the cold air felt good on my skin. It’d been about a thousand degrees inside The 151 like it always was.
“Where’s your apartment?” I asked as we headed down the driveway.
The bass from inside was so loud I could still hear it from out here.
Despite the suburban appearance of the neighborhood, the rest of the houses were also lit up and bustling with students.
Lakeside Green had expanded pretty dramatically over the years, the family-owned homes turning into rentals as more and more students enrolled with each passing semester.
It wasn’t just the housing that had been taken over by students.
Pretty much all of the restaurants and bars were dedicated to us for a minimum three-mile radius.
It didn’t sound like much until I was actually standing on campus, when it felt like we were floating in a weird island away from all other civilization.
I spent all day, every day, surrounded by college students and professors.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a child out in the wild here, outside of the occasional baby brought to a game.
“About that,” Leah said. She crossed her arms over her chest and shivered, and I wished I had a heavier coat to offer her.
My lips turned up in a smile. “Another secret? You live with an ex or something?”
“Not an ex. My sister,” she said. “I think an alarm would go off if you stepped within even ten feet of the front door.”
I nodded. “I totally forgot about that.”
“But…your place?” Leah offered.
I ran through a mental image of my somewhat pathetic bachelor pad studio near the main campus.
I’d moved into one of the new-build apartment complexes after deciding I didn’t want to live with any of my other friends on campus.
I liked my non-basketball friends, but my schedule was particular and intense to a degree that it made it hard to cohabitate peacefully with non-athletes, and Theo was confidently the only person I could handle living with and playing basketball with.
I didn’t feel weird about giving up our old house to some other student athletes on campus—it felt like the right time—but it did feel weird moving from there to being on my own.
Maybe calling it pathetic wasn’t fair—it was just depressing compared to where I’d been living. It was a nice apartment and clean enough to bring someone back to, nothing to be embarrassed about. A few clothes on the ground never hurt anybody.
I shook my thoughts away. What the fuck was wrong with me? I’d never been the kind of person who was weird about inviting girls over. I’d only ever been ego-first, so certain that a girl would only care about sleeping with me that I never thought twice about it.
“Yeah, that works,” I said, doing the best impression of myself from last year that I could muster. “I’ll lead the way.”