9. Athena
CHAPTER 9
Athena
SEPTEMBER 2021
M y brothers have been on campus for a grand total of forty-eight hours, and I’m already clutching a flyer for a party they’re hosting at the hockey house—that they don’t even live in.
Like me, they have their own apartments across town, but I suspect they’re going to spend more than a little of their time hanging out with their hockey brothers. The hockey players that live together, play together, party together, and never leave each other’s sides are the hockey players that are codependent as shit. But what the hell do I know?
They aren’t the types to rest on their laurels, whatever a laurel is, and nothing says, “know who we are,” better than a party sponsored by the hockey playing rookie twins who just got their stripes and came to college and joined the UCR Raccoons.
Go trash pandas?
It’s flashy, it’s crass, and I’ve heard at least three sophomores talking about the damn party in the last half hour.
I’m in the library; it’s turning out to be one of my favorite places to spend time, and I really wish those fuckers would shut the hell up about how delicious and charming my brothers are. There are two girls on the opposite side of the bookcase from me whispering loudly about how they want to bed my drop-dead-gorgeous and exotic twin brothers.
It’s gross. And distracting. But mostly gross. Very, very gross.
I’m not na?ve, I know my brothers have sex, but I don’t want to be actively thinking about it while I’m trying to do my homework.
Wow. I sound like such a friggin’ nerd. But it’s also true. While I didn’t think business admin and accounting would be a walk in the park, I underestimated how tough it would be. I mean, I’m doing alright, but there’s definitely the occasional moment where I have to smack myself in the face for selecting to study something so intellectually challenging.
I can’t deny that I love math, so it fits, but sometimes the math just maths too hard. You know?
“Like, oh my god, are we going to like, the hockey party tonight?” Vannah drops her bag onto the floor next to my feet and sits at my table with a wicked grin on her face. “I hear there’s these super-hot new hockey players we just have to flirt with.” She’s got the best Valley-girl accent as she tosses her locks over her shoulder.
“Actually, I should probably swing by to make sure they don’t do anything stupid.”
Her brows twitch. “Wow. I thought for sure you were going to say no.” She rocks toward me, catching me with her elbow. “Such a mother hen.”
A huge sigh leaves my body, rustling the pages on the desk in front of me. “It’s their first week at college. I don’t want them to get kicked out for being… you know…” I waft an arm toward her.
“Themselves?”
“Exactly. I just need to stop in and make sure no one needs activated charcoal for alcohol poisoning, no one’s passed out in a pool of their own puke, and no one’s peeing in their closet thinking it’s a bathroom.”
She slow-blinks at me.
“Yeah, all real-life scenarios I’ve lived through.”
She opens her mouth, but I hold up my hand. “Don’t ask. We aren’t unpacking that level of trauma in the library.”
She rolls her lips between her teeth to smother a laugh. “Okay, so, like drive-by big sister check in at like, what? Midnight? One?” She raises her brows in question.
“You do not have to come babysit my brothers with me.”
She shrugs. “Maybe I have a crush on one of them.” She quickly bursts into fits of giggles that gets us shushed by surrounding students. “Sorry,” she manages through her amusement. “I know I’m not allowed to even joke about that, but I couldn’t help it. I’ll totally go with. They might have snacks.”
I suppose that’s as good a reason as any to go to a hockey party in the middle of the night.
We don’t even make it till midnight before we’re heading to the hockey house. It’s ten thirty. If we didn’t know where it was, we’d have heard the music from a couple blocks away and simply followed the trail of college kids until we found the front door.
Inside the house, bodies are everywhere, the floors and walls are shaking with the thrumming bassline of whatever noise is playing.
“I challenge you to tic tac toe, Bright Eyes.” A very glassy-eyed Scott steps into view holding two small stacks of solo cups, red and yellow. He hands me the red stack, then picks up my hand and tugs me through the packed foyer into the kitchen.
On the floor, there’s a taped-out grid about ten feet away. Scott places his pile of plastic cups on a little card table between us before swaying. My dude has clearly had a few drinks. He smiles at me with the goofiest smile I’ve ever seen. “You look so pretty today.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen drunk Scott. A couple beers here and there, sure, but this whole underage drinking vibe could land the whole fucking lot of them on the bench, and the last thing any of them needs, is to be riding the pine right out of the gate.
This was exactly what I was afraid of, finding them inebriated and getting themselves on the radar for being drunken assholes.
On the second day of school .
Scott tosses back a shot of what smells to be Fireball. Fucking hell.
“ThreeTwoOneGo!” He grabs a cup from the top of the stack and runs toward the taped grid on the floor. He drops his cup in the center tic tac toe box and dashes back toward me. And by dashes, I mean stumbles over his own feet.
He shoves me, probably a little harder than he means to because he gasps and steadies me with both his hands on my biceps. Face to face, a faint smell of cinnamon in the air between us, and that crooked, adorable smile staring straight at me. I admit, my heart skippety-dips a couple times. “You know how to play the game, right? You’re supposed to take a cup, run, and race against me. Or maybe you don’t know how to play tic tac toe.” His hand flies to his chest on a gasp.
“Is that it?” He drops his voice to a stage whisper. “You’ve never played tic tac toe? Athena de la Pena, say it ain’t so!”
Savannah appears with my two very lucid looking brothers who regard Scott with amusement. I give them my best big sister glare, swoop my index finger around in the air a couple times to tell them to wrap this party all the fucking way up, and the three of them nod in understanding and leave.
Scott chuckles, gesturing wildly at the lonely yellow solo cup in the middle of the game grid on the floor. When I don’t move, he tips his head to the side, urging me on. “Come on, Henny.”
Savannah calls me Hen, as in mother hen. A nickname my family and friends have taken to using, but never Scott. He’s most definitely drunk.
“One game.” He holds up a finger that sways back and forth as he hiccups.
With a heavy sigh and an eye roll, I pick a cup off my pile and stride to the game on the floor. I drop my cup onto the top right corner square and return to the card table where Scott’s leaning. He’s wearing sweatpants and a fucking t-shirt. Like he’s just so cool he didn’t need to make an effort to show up at a party in his own home. Grey sweatpants and a black, round neck tee stretched across his broad chest.
He stands with a knowing smile, like he’s aware of my eyes roaming over his body, but he doesn’t care. His arms are folded, muscly, bulging arms being all muscly in the dim, party ambient lighting.
As I stand next to him, he hands me another cup from the pile and picks one up from his own. “On three.”
Another eye roll. This is not what the plan was, but as long as my brothers and Vannah wind down the party, there’s no harm done.
Scott throws back another shot despite my glaring at him as he poured it. He winks at me, and a shimmer of butterflies erupt in my stomach sucking the breath from my body. I am not this girl, especially not with a drunk jock.
“Three.” He readies himself, but he’s swaying, and there’s every chance that my friend will fall right on his pretty boy face.
“Two,” I add, giving in to the game and offering him a smirk.
“One.” I take off toward the game board, but as predicted, my good friend Scott sways, grabs the card table, putting too much weight on it making it collapse.
I rush to catch him before he eats dirt, sliding my arm across his back and hauling him upright. He’s not dead weight, but he’s also like a slippery eel, sliding out of my grip.
“Let’s get you to bed.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. The air gets sucked out of the room as it starts to spin.
His deep chuckle rumbles through my entire body, settling right in my fucking crotch because of course it would.
His body pressed against my arm, my arm pulling him to me, his body heat radiating through his thin t-shirt makes for a very difficult time for me because the still-fluttering butterflies won’t shut the fuck up.
The crowd is thinning, the music switched off, and as I guide Scott to the stairs, my brothers are passing through the rooms with garbage bags picking up the debris and detritus around the space.
Apollo points to Scott in my arms, but I shake my head and mouth that I’ve got him. I’m not sure why. His arm is across my shoulders, and I’ve got his left hand clasped in mine. Part of me worries that if I were to try to pass him off to my brother, we’d both end up on our asses.
No thank you. This is faster, more efficient, and sure, maybe I like having an excuse to basically be cuddling him. He smells nice, so what?
He’s muttering to himself as we meander upstairs swaying from side to side but I’m too focused on making sure we keep going up and don’t end up falling backward to actually concentrate on the words.
“You’re a real dumbass, Scott Raine, you know that? Do you know how stupid it is to get drunk like this on your first week of school?”
He grins at me so wide my knees would go weak if they weren’t the only thing keeping us both upright. Shit, he’s a handsome man, and the closer I am to him the more he sets my soul on fire.
He’s so close to me it would be easy to close the distance and kiss him. He’s likely so far gone he wouldn’t remember it either.
As though he’s feeling the undeniable pull toward me too, his spaced-out gaze flickers to my lips as he licks his.
“Fuck, Bright Eyes.” He tries to push back from me, stumbling through his door, and I rush to catch him right as he clips his elbow on a set of drawers. “You need to leave.”
I shake my head. “I will once you’re safely in bed and no longer a danger to yourself or others.” I force my voice to stay light and make myself smile while my insides turn to molten lava.
He waggles his brows at me. “You really want me to get into bed?” He’s already kicking his shoes off, but he catches the hem of his shirt and drags it up the length of his very, very, clearly defined torso.
The torture doesn’t stop because his hands get tangled in the shirt above his head, so I get a few bonus seconds to commit every valley of his abs to memory before he wins the battle with the fabric and the item of clothing falls to the floor.
I suck in a sharp breath we both hear because his smile falters and something flickers in his eyes, something dangerous, a yearning, a need, a deeply buried desire to act on the impulse that’s tenting his sweats.
Fuck.
This was a bad, bad plan.
He’s standing in his room, heart racing, breath heavy, and his chest bare, an almost entirely blank canvas for me to drag my nails down and make him hiss.
He shimmies the sweats off revealing a very naked semi-hard cock. Someone’s brave when he’s drunk.
Brave, stupid, there’s a fine line.
He gives me a wicked grin, wild want simmering in his eyes as he kicks his pants off his bare feet and turns to open the blankets of his bed.
Something catches my eye on his sculpted pec, over his heart, a tattoo. I take two steps toward him to see if I can make out what it is. I had no idea he had ink and now I want to trace my fingers around whatever it is.
Within seconds, he’s in bed and covered with the blanket, but I’ve already seen that he’s naked under there. The image is seared into my brain forever. Scott Raine has a beautiful dick—well, as pretty as trouser snakes go anyway. Sculptors should turn him into a marble statue.
I sit on the edge of his bed, brushing his wayward hair from his forehead, soaking up every single last second of being in his space like this. It feels unfair, unbalanced. There’s every chance he won’t remember this intimate moment between us, and all I want is for it to stretch out between us forever.
A peaceful sigh heaves out of his body as he relaxes into the mattress. He blinks slow, heavy blinks as his eyes struggle to focus on me.
“Not quite what I thought having you in my bedroom would be like, Bright Eyes.” He’s whispering like he’s afraid if he speaks louder, the bubble will burst. In truth, so am I. I cast a glimpse at the door to make sure no one has realized I’m missing and comes to find me.
“Shhhhh.” I trace my fingers down the side of his face, making him hum. “Get some sleep, Gizmo. I’ll bring you some water for the morning before I leave, okay?”
He blinks up at me again. It’s taking every ounce of strength in my body not to kiss this man where he lies. The only thing stopping me is the fact he’s fucked. He’s so drunk he can’t really consent to anything. Otherwise, I’d have kissed him senseless the second we got up the stairs.
The flare of danger flickers again between us, and he stares at my lips. Reaching out his hand his thumb brushes across my bottom lip. “Athena.” My name’s a prayer on his lips, a word so precious, so cherished and revered.
“I’m here, Scott.”
His face contorts into a thousand splinters of pain as he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t be. I’m not good.”
I snort, shushing him again. “I call bullshit,” I whisper.
When his eyes snap open again, he pins me with a look so full of the deepest, raw agony I’ve ever seen on someone’s face. “It’s so hard, Bright Eyes.”
His eyes fill with tears like he’s struggling in physical pain.
“What’s wrong?” I check his face, his head, his arms for any sign of injury.
His heavy eyelids fall closed and for a moment I think he’s fallen asleep until he grunts, a pained sound echoing around the quiet space. “Having to pretend I’m not in love with you.”
White noise fills my ears as my heart speeds up so fast it might explode from exertion. Did he just say he l?—?
“You ready?” Vannah appears in the doorway whispering, an angel of mercy, or an angel of terrible timing, I’m not sure which.
I look back down to Scott who seems to have settled and is snoring softly. I wait just a beat longer before I nod to my bestie across the room and pry myself away from the bed of my friend, my brothers’ best friend, and the man who’s just told me he loves me.
And who I’ve loved since the first day I met him.