Chapter 12
twelve
CASS
Saturday arrives like a fucking guillotine.
I’ve spent the last three days telling myself the text exchange with Ben was just damage control—crisis management between two people with a mutually beneficial arrangement—but the closer eight o’clock gets, the harder that lie becomes to sell to myself.
I’ve changed outfits twice, which is insane, because this isn’t a real date. I’ve checked my phone six times to see if he’s cancelled, which is equally insane, because I don’t want him to cancel. By 7:45, I’m pacing my dorm room in his oversized practice jersey, my stomach a tight knot of nerves.
And of course, the knock comes at exactly eight o’clock.
Ben probably set three alarms, then showed up five minutes early to pace in the hallway, terrified of being a bother. It’s one of those anxious-person moves I recognize, because I do the same thing before every important gig.
Arrive stupidly early, then kill time pretending I’m not there yet.
As I cross my chaotic dorm room to answer the door, I catch my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. Because after the disaster in his dorm room and the second chance offered by our texting, I’ve got a surprise that’s going to take his breath away.
Right now, his jersey hangs nearly to mid-thigh on my frame, the white fabric stark against my ripped black fishnets. His number, 24, is stretched across my back in bold letters, and I’ve paired it with my battered leather jacket and my usual combat boots.
Punk meets jock.
His world colliding with mine.
And when I open the door, his reaction is exactly what I hoped for.
His eyes go wide, his mouth opens, and for a second he just stands there, all six-foot-four of stunned hockey player frozen on my threshold, his gaze locked on the oversized practice jersey like I’ve just answered the door in his actual skin.
He swallows. “You’re wearing my—” he starts, a look of shock still playing out across his face.
“Got it from your buddy Schmidt yesterday.” I can’t keep the grin off my face as I interrupt. “Told him I wanted to surprise my boyfriend.”
His eyes widen. “You asked Schmidt?”
“Gotta sell the lie, right?” I shrug. “Relax. He was practically weeping with joy.”
I know Ben is anything but relaxed, but I can tell he’s grateful. No doubt, he’d built up a million-and-one scenarios about how this first meet-up post… incident… was going to go. It probably involved me telling him I regretted texting him and that I was done with our arrangement.
So I decided to shock him, in the hope of bringing his confidence to life.
It’s the next mission in my campaign to get him comfortable around me.
And now, he’s giving me this cute, shy look, at the same time as I can practically see his brain deleting the utterly catastrophic scenarios it had planned, and replacing them with new ones relating to my interaction with Schmidt.
“Did he—” Ben starts, then stops, his hand coming up to run through his curls in that anxious tell of his. “What exactly did you tell him?”
“That I’m going to the party with my boyfriend and that I thought it’d be cute. You know, normal girlfriend stuff.”
“Right,” he says faintly. “Normal.”
“Come on, Kellerman.” I reach out to tug gently on his sleeve. “Let’s not be late.”
We head out, and as we walk to the party, he’s quiet, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. The path cuts through the quad, the old streetlamps casting long pools of amber light across the frost-crisp grass. The air smells like dead leaves and distant wood smoke, sharp and clean.
“What’s stressing you out?” I ask, keeping my voice casual.
He glances at me, startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What?”
“You’re spiraling. I can tell. So what’s the catastrophic scenario?”
He lets out a breath, and I watch the tension in his shoulders ease just slightly, like I’ve given him permission to say it out loud. “It’s not—” He stops, then tries again. “Schmidt is going to tell the whole team you asked for my jersey. Which means Nash and Stiles—”
“You’re worried they’ll make fun of you,” I cut him off.
“No. I mean, yes. But also—” He runs a hand through his hair again, messing up the curls even more. “I’m just stressed.”
The honesty and pain in his voice does something to my chest I don’t want to examine. “Is it hockey? Will you tell me about it?”
His expression brightens, like he’s shocked I care about the things he cares about. “It’s not hockey,” he says slowly. “It’s Project Theseus.”
“Gesundheit.”
That gets a laugh out of him, and just like that, the spiral breaks. “It’s an autonomous maze-solving robot,” he says.
I smile, because this is another example of him relaxing and opening up. “Tell me about it.”
“The goal is to program it to navigate an unknown maze, map the environment in real-time, and find the optimal path to the exit.” His voice is steady now, the anxiety bleeding out of it. “But it keeps failing. It gets about halfway through the maze, and then it just… stops. Or worse…”
I smirk. “What’s worse?”
“It starts making the same wrong turns over and over.”
“Sounds like my love life…” I laugh. “Why?”
He lets out a frustrated sigh. “My partner, Anya, thinks it’s a software issue, but I’m pretty sure it’s hardware. Torque sensor, probably. I think the sensor’s calibration is out, creating noise in the signal that the algorithm can’t filter out.”
I don’t fully understand the technical details, but I’m listening anyway, genuinely interested in the way his voice steadies when he talks about tracking down the source of a problem no one else can see. It’s the same thing he’d done when excitedly talking about my amp or the cassette deck.
“So you’re basically a detective.”
He glances at me, surprised. “What?”
“You’re hunting down the thing that’s broken,” I say. “Like with my amp.”
“I… guess…?”
I pat him on the back. “It’s CSI: Ben.”
“I never thought about it that way.”
“Well, now you can tell Anya you’ve got a punk rock girl on your side.”
“That’ll really boost my credibility in the lab.”
He laughs again, and the ease of the conversation feels dangerously natural, like this isn’t fake at all, or like we’re really nailing the friends thing. It’s like we’re just two people walking across campus, talking about robots and the messy act of fixing broken things.
It should feel safe.
Instead, it feels like standing too close to the edge of something I can’t see the bottom of. But thankfully, before I can think through the ramifications, the hockey house materializes ahead. It’s a massive, three-story beast of a building thumping with bass and male voices.
Ben stops dead at the bottom of the porch steps. “It’s so big,” he says.
I turn to look at him. “You sound surprised…”
“I am,” he says. “It’s new. Previously all the guys stayed in dorms or off-campus apartments, but as of about two weeks ago, a bunch of them moved in here. It’s not an official university arrangement or anything—not like a frat house or whatever—but a bunch of the guys are pooling rent…”
“And renting a mansion,” I snort with derision. “You didn’t want to join?”
“No,” he says, with all the seriousness of a guilty murder verdict.
The color has drained from his face, and I can see the panic flooding back into his eyes, erasing all the calm we’d built on the walk over. It’s clear he’s once again thinking about doomsday scenarios of what’s going to happen inside.
I step closer. “We walk in together. Your hand goes on my back. We say hi to your teammates. That’s it.”
He swallows hard. “Right. Simple.”
“You’ve got this.”
He nods, takes a deep breath, and then we’re climbing the steps together. The moment we step through the door, every head in the room turns. The bass is still thumping and voices are still overlapping in a chaotic din, but there’s a sudden focus on us that makes my skin prickle with awareness.
Ben’s hand finds the small of my back, trembling but holding his ground.
It’s a start.
We move inside, and the party goes on.
Around us, bodies are crammed into every available space—guys in caps and PBU hoodies, a few girls in tight jeans and cropped tops, all of them radiating the kind of loud, aggressive confidence that comes from being attractive and completely sure of your place in the world.
This is the kingdom I’ve been watching through chain-link my entire life. The jocks hold court like they own gravity itself. The girls calibrate their laughter to the perfect frequency of “available but not desperate.” In a bar, with a guitar, I’m fine. Here, I’m a fish out of water.
But I square my shoulders, tilt my chin up, and let them look.
Rook materializes out of the crowd first, his wide grin unmistakable. “Kell! You made it!” His voice booms, then he turns to me. “Love the jersey.”
“Schmidt hooked me up,” I say.
He nods. “Welcome to the madhouse.”
Before I can respond, Nash and Stiles swagger over, drinks in hand, their eyes bright with the kind of predatory amusement that sets my teeth on edge. As always, Nash’s gaze does a slow, deliberate sweep of my body, lingering on the jersey before finally meeting my eyes.
His smirk is the kind that makes my hands curl into fists. “Nice jersey. Really commits to the bit.”
The casual dismissal—the implication that I’m just playing dress-up in Ben’s world—sends a wave of cold fury through me. But I don’t flinch. I let a slow smirk spread across my face, the kind I use on stage when some drunk asshole yells something stupid during a quiet song.
“Well, it was the only thing clean in Ben’s room after… you know…”
The surrounding guys erupt.
Nash’s jaw actually drops before he lets out a huge bark of laughter, his head thrown back. Stiles chokes on his beer, coughing and pounding his chest, his face going red. Even Rook looks momentarily stunned before he starts laughing too, giving a slight shake of his head in disbelief.
“Oh, I like her!” Nash points at me with his beer, his grin wide and genuine now. “Kell, you’ve been holding out on us, man.”