Chapter 28
twenty-eight
ROOK
The room still smells like sex and Morgan and I’m standing here with my zipper stuck, trying to process what just happened. One second she was coming apart with me, my name gasping from her lips. The next, she’s bolting like she's on fire and I’m the accelerant.
My fingers smell like her. My cock is still covered in her. My mouth tastes like her. It was perfect, until it wasn't, and the worst thing is I've got no fucking idea why she ran. I replay it again, searching for the moment it went wrong, but I come up blank.
There was the paper breakthrough… her eyes lighting up when we cracked Tolbert’s impossible prompt. Then there was the kiss… soft at first, almost hesitant, then hungry. Then the fucking… her legs wrapping around me, pulling me closer. Then the explosion… finishing together, her whole body arching…
Nope, all that seems fine.
So was it me?
How can it be?
I didn't make any jokes. I didn't minimize the seriousness of the situation.
There was no deflection or performance. It was just me—us—raw and real and fucking perfect.
In that final moment before she'd bailed, my mind had just started to consider what came next, and the thought filled me with excitement.
But now?
Well… let's just say the quiet she left behind is as familiar as breathing, pressing against my eardrums, thick and accusing. It’s the exact frequency of disaster that used to fill our house in the seconds before everything exploded in catastrophe.
My mom would go statue-still at the kitchen counter, her shoulders set for war, and then a cabinet door would slam hard enough to rattle the dishes.
Dad would clear his throat in that specific way that meant someone was about to get filleted.
Sure, there were differences each time, but it had a rhythm and beat.
And there I’d be, fourteen and desperate, launching into my dinner-table comedy hour about anything—the neighbor’s terrible driving skills, my chemistry teacher’s obvious hangover—anything to defuse the bomb, even if it meant I was the one who was grounded, punished, or yelled at.
I finally get my jeans buttoned, movements mechanical and feeling empty.
The desk still has a damp spot where she was sitting, and I have to look away because the memory hits like a knife to the gut…
the heat of her, how wet she was before I even touched her properly, how she felt when I plunged into her…
Fuck it, I sigh.
The walk back to my apartment stretches out. The campus is a ghost town, just me and the maintenance crews. My paper is due in a handful of hours, but all I want to do is slump into my bed, pull the covers over my head, and forget about the world for a while.
But I can't forget about her.
I don’t understand. I was there. Present. Real. I didn’t make jokes. I didn’t deflect when she opened up about her past. I didn’t run. And it wasn't just about the sex, either. I've been trying my damn hardest to be dependable and real and to live up to my end of the bargain.
But she just changed the game.
I finally reach my apartment and decide, what the fuck, I may as well put the finishing touches on the paper now and then submit it. I slump to my desk, the chair creaking, and open my laptop. The screen burns too bright, but I press on anyway because fuck knows I won't be able to get to sleep.
The paper stares back at me, every paragraph a collaboration. Her intelligence threads through my chaotic ideas, making them structurally sound instead of ambitious rubble. The words are all mine, but laced with the insights she'd helped me find.
She’d taken my scrambled observations and helped me translate them into something serious, and I’d made her laugh with my terrible sociology puns.
“Bourdieu? More like Bored-ieu, am I right?” God, I’m an idiot.
But she’d snorted coffee through her nose, and for a second her whole face had transformed.
It had made sense.
Until it didn't.
I do one final proofread, but the text swims in front of me.
All I can see is her bent over her notebook, that little crease between her eyebrows when she concentrated.
The way she’d tap her pen against her lips when thinking.
How she looked at me, not like I was a project, but like I was someone worth believing in.
The submission portal loads slowly. I attach the file, my finger hovering over the submit button.
This should feel like victory, because it's three thousand words of academic competence, enough to get a solid grade and set me up for the exam.
Instead, it feels like evidence of what we could have been.
I click submit.
The confirmation screen appears: Assignment Successfully Submitted.
I stare at it, waiting to feel something besides hollow.
Nope. Nothing.
With a sigh, I decide to try to catch some sleep, but before I close the laptop a small icon in the bottom corner catches my attention. It's telling me I have an email in my university inbox, and that usually means hockey stuff. Given I'm the captain, I can't ignore it, so I click it open.
The subject line alone makes my blood crystallize: Official Notice: Academic Performance Review
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,
Following a comprehensive review of your academic performance and in accordance with newly re-implemented standards, this letter serves as official notification of your Academic Warning status.
The coffee in my stomach turns to battery acid.
Due to your precarious academic standing (current GPA: 1.9) and the university’s commitment to maintaining excellence both on and off the ice, your minimum required GPA for continued athletic eligibility has been provisionally re-evaluated.
Effective immediately, you must achieve and maintain a 2.5 cumulative average for the current semester to remain eligible for athletic participation next semester. This elevated standard reflects PBU’s dedication to athlete academic achievement.
What the fuck?
I read it three times, my brain refusing to process. Pearson told me a month ago that me and the other guys needed to reach the old standard: 2.0—"just don't fail". That’s been the deal since they invented college sports, and what's been enforced for the other programs at PBU forever.
But there it is in black-and-white: 2.5 GPA or no second semester hockey.
I frantically Google and do some calculations.
Even if I somehow got an A or a high B on the paper I just submitted, I’d need an excellent score on the sociology final, or that exam will tank my average below the new threshold. And no 2.5 GPA now means no second semester hockey, which in my senior year basically means no future.
The goalposts haven’t just moved. They’ve been launched into orbit.
And right there in the CC: line: Galloway.
I stare at the screen until my eyes burn. The paper submission confirmation sits in the tab next to it, mocking me with its timestamp. I've just been royally fucked by the athletic director, meaning all that work and all those late nights with Morgan might not even matter.
Morgan, who’s gone.
Morgan, who ran.
The weight of it all—her rejection, Galloway’s trap, the impossible academic mountain I have to climb—crashes down at once. My chest gets tight, each breath shorter than the last, and for the first time since freshman year, I genuinely don’t know if I can handle this.
I don't know if all my noise and chaos can fill this much empty space.
The realization sits cold and heavy: Morgan looked scared when she ran—not angry, not disappointed, not even regretful—actually scared. Of me, of us, of what we’d just done. Because fear is the one thing I’ve spent my whole life trying to prevent, the emotion I’d do anything to chase away.
And now I’m the cause of it in the one person whose walls I desperately wanted to scale, not to conquer but just to sit beside her and tell her it’s OK.
But she ran before I could, and now I’m alone with Galloway’s trap and the memory of Morgan’s face in that last second—terrified and beautiful and gone.
I don’t have a joke for this.
I don’t have noise loud enough to drown it out.
All I have is the terrible certainty that I’ve lost something special.
And I'll do anything—anything—to get it back.