Chapter 14
JEALOUSY IS A BAD LOOK ON YOU
KNOX
Idon’t know what’s more embarrassing—the fact that Staten touched my dick on accident, or the fact that I was already hard from her striptease. She didn’t even show any nipple, and it took me negative two seconds to inflate like some virgin who’s never seen a pair of tits before.
God, and then I had to go and make things more awkward by running out of her house. It’s a normal bodily response, okay?
I haven’t heard a peep from her. Granted, it’s only been a few days, but still. Did she…like…touching my cock? Was it an acceptable size? Oh my God, what if she never knows how big it really is? An over-the-clothes sneak peek doesn’t possibly compare to the five-star fucking I’m capable of.
I think I’ve officially lost it. It’s eight p.m. on a Friday night, I’m sitting in Crew and Harlan’s apartment with the rest of the guys, and I haven’t even garnered the courage to indulge in the beers that they’ve so generously offered everyone.
Mine just sits before me, weeping condensation onto the varnished table, a solitary plinth with no other purpose than to aid the neuroses of others.
The thought of putting anything in my temperamental stomach makes me want to puke like a frat pledge drinking hunch punch for the first time.
“We hitting Sigma Chi’s party later?” Sutton asks, already getting started on his toxicity for the night with a swig from his beer.
I don’t look up from my phone—the phone that has Staten’s contact info blared across the screen.
I wonder what she’s doing tonight. She’s probably busy with schoolwork, right? Ugh, I don’t know whose ball is in whose court anymore.
The ghost of my anxiety wanders the dismal hallways of my gyri, my pulse like a racehorse bucking against its own paddock. Angry, impatient.
“Fuck yeah,” Crew replies from the kitchen, making a last-minute sandwich with all the fixings—pastrami, Swiss cheese, dill pickles, sauerkraut. A wise call if we’re going to spend the rest of the night facing down the barrel of a bottle.
“I need a break from school. Mrs. Moriarity has us doing polynomials at seven in the morning,” Foster groans, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and lolling his head back against the sofa.
Axel doesn’t hesitate to add his two cents. “Yeah, and Coach has been extra pissed off during practices.”
I haven’t really been all there for practices like the rest of my teammates. I should be—I should pummel these foreign feelings back into submission—but I could erase Staten’s entire existence from my memory and still have fleeting thoughts hoarded away in an underground vault.
“Let’s look on the bright side, guys,” Harlan intervenes, his optimism refreshing, like the first sip of ice-cold water during the dry bed of June. “We’ve won our last few games, and we’re getting closer and closer to the Frozen Four. Our hard work is paying off.”
That’s right. Making it to the Frozen Four will show my dad that I’m serious—and capable—of pursuing my hockey dream.
Although I haven’t, uh, made it through a lot of tutoring sessions with Staten, I’ve been researching literary analysis examples in my free time so I can really impress her when we meet up again. We started with my thesis, and I’m determined to have at least half of it written by our next session.
Needless to say, my schedule has changed drastically.
Seven a.m. wake-up time, hot-and-ready oats and a Monster Energy for breakfast, a speed-read through my worn-down copy of The Great Gatsby, hockey practice before my business management class, Pepto Bismol in between because caffeine was a terrible idea for my system, long-winded tangents about strategic marketing and human resources, a race over to the English building, a chance to admire Staten for a full hour and thirty minutes, no lunch, a fifteen-minute walk to my foreign language class, a lonely, silent drive back to my apartment as I think about all the schoolwork I have to tackle in exchange for my social life. Depressing, I know.
My teammates’ voices rumble in my ears, yet I can’t comprehend anything that they’re saying. Sometimes, in order to escape from the chaos of my life, I disappear through a veil in my own mind. A repose; a safe haven.
I’ve never been one for daydreaming—I always considered it too feminine given my father’s sexist dogma—but now my fantasies consist of one five-foot-nothing brunette with eyes the color of felled timber.
I’m malleable under her touch; she has the power to build and destroy me with a single lift of her pinky, and I yearn for such divine consecration.
“Yeah, and then she licked whipped cream off my junk,” someone says, resuscitating my awareness and snapping me from my reverie.
“What?” I croak through a shredded throat, my voice as rough as a fire rucking over a charcoal grill.
Harlan snorts, slapping me on the shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Crew trains his gaze on me, dissecting the heart that I’ve recently decided to wear on my sleeve. His cerulean eyes are accusatory, and no facsimile of calm will ever be enough to upend his detective work.
“Jesus. You’re still thinking about Staten, aren’t you?”
Heart tumbling, the sound of her name is a crutch I don’t want to admit I have, and it feels as if my tongue has been pinned to the roof of my mouth. Denying it will only make me look worse, so, as my chest hefts a latent breath, I confirm what my friends suspect to be true.
“We’re, um, seeing each other,” I confess quietly, dragging my thumb up and down the side casing of my phone.
“Holy shit!” Foster shrieks, initiating a dog pile on top of me, whereupon my other un-housetrained friends squish the air out of my lungs.
I hate having to lie to them, but they just…they wouldn’t understand.
Unfortunately for me, their excitement is indisputable, and newborn guilt sows itself into the lining of my skull, elongating redwood roots into a woven quilt of pine needles that effuse terpenes and resinous sap.
I gently inch myself out from underneath them. “Yeah, it’s…it’s new.”
Foster’s lips draw into a grin, his eyes glistening with childlike merriment. “Dude, this is monumental. You’re the king of hookups. And Staten—she’s…she’s everything you stand against. How did this happen? We need all the details.”
Gulp. All the details?
Suddenly, this well-intentioned cross-examination has me feeling like a cow in a slaughterhouse with a bolt gun to the neck. One wrong move and everything goes up in flames. One wrong move and I not only put Staten at risk, but also the fate of my friendships.
Warmth combusts in my cheeks, my belly pitching up behind my ribs. “I…”
Crew, sweeping in after a hard shift of sandwich making, snatches my phone from me, unknowingly holding the six-inch truth in his very hands. “You should invite her to the party tonight. Make your big public debut, you know?”
There’s a paperweight on my chest that’s making it hard to breathe.
It’s not that I’m against the idea—I’d love nothing more than to have Staten hanging off my arm—but parading her around for everyone to see while we both know our chemistry is fake?
My carousel of nerves isn’t equipped to handle something of that magnitude.
“Tonight?”
“Tonight,” Crew insists.
I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t accompanied by some busty blonde or leggy brunette at a party. And as expected with my history of fuck ‘em and chuck ‘ems, my teammates clock my hesitation with their own expressions of confusion.
“You’re acting weird,” Sutton notes.
“Give him a break. It’s his first time going official with a girl,” Axel rebukes.
Foster and his proclivity for escalating situations jumpstarts a chant, goading me into spending a non-educational night with the girl who haunts every waking second of my day.
There’s absolutely no saying what could happen at a party.
The overflowing kegs, the countless bedrooms, the mind-altering substances that could lead to the fuck of a lifetime.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t need things to get physical with Staten to enjoy spending time with her, but I can’t promise that I’ll be able to control myself in such a… stimulating…environment.
Crew tosses my phone back, and I just narrowly catch it. “Text her.”
Panic freezes me like a snow-blown torpor waging war aboveground, razing through crops and painting the countryside in bleak shades of white. “And say?”
“Damn, she’s already done a number on you.”
No kidding.
Sutton is the second person to get out of his seat and go for my device, and his drive-by secures my phone, unchallenged by my once-appraised hockey reflexes. He begins typing something with his large, awkward thumbs, and realization lugs me into its undertow not a second later.
I bounce onto my feet so fast that my knees crack. “Wait, what are you—”
“Chill. I’m just getting the party started,” Sutton drawls, sending whatever world-ending message he fabricated in record time—and saving me from having to chase him around the house to repossess my phone.
Everyone scatters like a shoal of fish and congregates around the glowing screen, and I’m the last of my teammates to stumble into the huddle, my nervousness going hand in hand with the pyrexia that blooms inside my head.
ME
Come to Sig Chi’s party tonight. I want to see you.
Fuck. I need a paper bag to hyperventilate into.
STATEN
Are you asking me to go out with you?
Tongue prodding the tip of my canine, my eyes scroll down to the next speech bubble.
ME
That depends. Is it working?
No response. Two minutes since the last text. I’m going to decapitate Sutton and stick his head on a spike to warn off anyone else who wants to fuck around with my love life. There’s nothing worse than rejection, okay? But rejection by Staten is lethal.