Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
IAN
“Is there a reason you’re smiling into your laptop?” Sabrina asks, waving her hand in front of my screen and snapping me out of my editing.
I force my face into a neutral expression. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Bullshit.”
There’s no escaping what’s about to come next. Sabrina and Nick are two of my best friends on campus, and they’re equally good at reading me.
“What’s their name?” She walks around to my side of the library table and plants herself next to me, giving me a knowing, side-eyed smirk.
“Callum,” I supply. “Group project partner.”
I’m in the middle of editing the video for the Human Movement project, which involves a lot of looking at Callum. Mostly the same close-ups of his toned forearm and listening to his deep, sultry voice pouring through my earbuds whenever I refine a section of the video.
And then there’s that pretty face of his right at the beginning when he’s introducing the project. I go back to that shot a lot, because I want to get the color grading right. Not because I need an excuse to look at him, not at all.
He’s a tough one—it’s taking more than twenty-four hours to be normal about him, but I’ll get there eventually. Not seeing him for almost a whole week helped, I think. Or hope.
Sabrina clasps her hands together when Callum reappears in the video. “Ooh, I didn’t know you went for the broody type.”
“Shut up. He’s, like, a hundred percent straight.” I keep my voice firm, with the hope of driving the point into my brain. “I’m not going there.”
“Yeah, straight until proven otherwise, right?” She pauses, shifting a strand of her light brown hair out of her eyes. “Is he nice, though?”
“Why? Do you want his number or something?” I reach for my phone, and she backhands me across the chest.
“Totally. Laura might have something to say about that.”
Laura is Sabrina’s girlfriend. Neither of them are into men.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says. “Is he nice, or just a pretty face for you to fawn over?”
Oh, yeah. I don’t know much about him, but that quiet shyness, coupled with how eagerly he got his part of the project done, speaks volumes. The guy’s endearing as hell, I’ll give him that.
“I think so,” I say. “Cal’s pretty quiet, though.”
Sabrina snickers. “You're already on a nickname basis with him? That's so cute!”
I shrug, taking a sip of my iced coffee that isn’t playing too nicely with my ADHD medication.
And what if we’ve only exchanged a few sentences here and there?
He was polite enough to put up with me and Nick’s petty bickering during our first official meeting, and he returned the filmed clips way before his self-imposed deadline.
All signs point to him being at least a decent person.
“He seems like a good guy,” Sabrina says. “He’s got kind eyes.”
“Pretty eyes,” I supply. “My god, and those eyelashes—”
She slaps my shoulder. “Ian, stop it. You’re gonna get a crush on him if you keep that up.”
“Yeah, well, crushes are fun,” I mutter.
“Only if you have a chance with the person. You’ve already written him off as straight.”
She’s got me there.
“Look, I don’t know him, but you said he’s nice.” Sabrina pauses, picking at a chip in her blue nail polish. “You could try being friends with him, normal friends, and then you can nip that crush in the bud.”
“Yeah, I know how to stop a straight crush. I'll, uh, bro it up with him.”
“Like what you did with Nick?”
“Exactly. Completely foolproof.” I cringe internally at how stupid I was for having a little crush on Nick when I was a freshman. Still, I got over him super quickly, and the fact that we’re teammates was more than enough to overpower him being tall, dark-haired, and—
Yup, I have a type, that’s for sure.
I just need to find someone who fits that type and is available for me. I haven’t had much success so far.
Whatever. I have time to deal with that.
Callum’s video was low-key shot in potato quality, so color grading it and applying filters to make the feed less grainy takes a while. I’m almost done and ready to move on to fine-tuning the audio, when a group, I’m assuming freshmen, annoys the whole library with obnoxious chattering.
I roll my eyes, and I’m about to make a whispered complaint to Sabrina when someone tells them to take their noise elsewhere.
Thank god—
Wait. That’s the same voice as the one in my earbuds.
I glance up, and sure enough, it’s Callum. The offending group is fleeing the library, and Callum turns around, depositing a stack of books on a cart before heading in our direction.
“Hey, that’s him, isn’t it?” Sabrina whispers.
I nod.
“Oh damn, he's so fucking tall.”
“Yeah, I know.” I’m not very fucking tall at five-seven, so I stand up and wave at Callum to say hi.
“Hey, man, what’s good?” I ask, reaching over to dap him up after he walks over.
He freezes for a second before giving me a stiff kind of sideways high-five. It’s gentle, but I still feel how soft those big hands are.
“Are you studying too?” I continue.
He shakes his head. “No, I work here.”
Wait, he works in the library? What are they making him do to give him guns like that, move all the shelves across the building by hand?
“Mostly shelving and telling people to be quiet,” he adds.
That makes sense. That group of freshmen are nowhere to be seen, and peace has been restored, thanks to Callum’s bouncer-like intimidation skills.
“Cool, cool,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other. “Well, I’ll let you get back to work, but it was nice to see you.”
“Yeah, nice seeing you too.” He leaves.
“You could have fooled me,” Sabrina says, and I turn to face her, raising an eyebrow and prompting her to clarify. “Total bro moment. No crushy vibes at all.”
My stomach settles. “Really?”
“Ha, no.”
Shit.
“Your voice didn’t give anything away, but your eyes?” She makes a dramatic, wistful sigh. “It was like you caught the first glimpse of your husband coming back after a decade at sea.”
“It sure feels like a decade since I touched someone else,” I mutter.
“Bro, you should think about changing that,” she says, causing my face to burn. At least she has the decency to keep her voice low so the whole library doesn’t know I’m not getting any action.
“We’ve been through this,” I reply. “That’s a terrible idea. All I’m gonna do is catch feelings after making eye contact and then get ghosted.”
Sabrina blinks, her expression softening. “Again, Ian, those guys were dicks. That doesn’t mean you need to take yourself off the market.”
Sighing, I run a hand over my face. “I get that, but I need time to recover.” That’s the truth—I don’t have it in me to get thrown aside again, not so soon.
“Alright. Just take care of yourself, okay?” Sabrina offers me a sympathetic smile before returning to her biology notes, leaving me to keep plugging away at the video.
The edits don’t take too much longer, and I upload the video to our group drive for Nick and Callum to review, or at least I try to.
The upload fails thanks to the spotty internet in the library.
Whatever. I'll upload it once I'm back home.
It’s not even noon yet, so I scarf a protein bar and head to the campus gym for a workout. I scan in through the separate entrance reserved for varsity athletes, get changed into my leg day outfit, including a fun pair of shorts that are a bit too short to wear outside, and stick my headphones in.
Then, after a few warmup sets, I take them out again because Nick is here, too.
Hell yeah, I can make him spot me. I send an upward nod at him, and he lumbers over, clearly hurting somewhere.
Probably his legs; he's a sick bastard who does cardio in the middle of leg day.
He's sweating like it's a hundred degrees outside, and he daps me up with a tired, boneless swing of his arm.
The dap doesn't crack. No surprise there.
“You got enough energy to spot me?” I ask him.
“Always,” he wheezes, lifting his shirt up to wipe his face. For a second, I consider asking Nick to put a towel between us, but that'd be weird. We'll just…share sweat. Not like that's any less weird, but we're teammates and bros. It's whatever.
I line up my shoulders, and Nick takes his position behind me, grabbing my waist.
Wait.
“Oh yeah, take Daddy's big cock,” he says, leaning down to get close to my ear.
I scoff, not turning around. “Behave yourself. We’re in public.”
“Ooh, someone could catch us. That sounds so hot.”
Jesus. I bend my knee to kick Nick in the nuts, and he dodges me, chuckling, before taking his actual spotter position and letting me get on with my workout.
For someone who's hooked up maybe three times in total, he sure is fluent in sex jokes. His ex must have done some heavy lifting in that department, but I can’t know for sure, and I’m not gonna ask.
I bang out a few brutal sets before calling it quits on the squats.
Nick leaves to shower, and I head for the public area of the gym.
The athlete section is well-stocked, but the one thing it doesn't have is a hip thrust machine.
That exercise isn't technically in my program—I added them to my leg days because I want to rock a total dump truck of an ass.
Sue me for trying to look good in my uniform.
One glance at the public area has me pressing pause on my quest for a callipygian figure. It's packed. There's even a line for a broken treadmill. Holy shit, this school needs to build another gym.
Right as I’m about to retreat to the athlete section and hit some split squats instead, something in my peripheral vision makes me pause.
I turn, and it’s Callum. He’s changed, of course, wearing black sweatpants and a faded tee that, like the rest of his clothes, gently hugs his arms. His vibe?
Focused, knows his stuff, and…perturbed.