Chapter 10
The thing about sucking a man’s soul out through his dick is that you expect a certain level of acknowledgment the next time you see him on campus.
My expectations fell somewhere between a public spectacle and a generic fruit basket.
Some microscopic signal that said, Hey, you swallowed about a gallon of my cum four days ago, and I haven’t forgotten.
“The man was obsessed with their roundness, their fleshiness,” I told Hunter.
Hunter snorted. “They’re apples, dude. Sometimes fruit is fruit.”
We were cutting through the athletic quad, and I was fully prepared to die on the hill of erotic still lifes when I spotted Evan. He was flanked by two outfielders I could never keep straight: the tall one and the taller one.
They moved as one unit, a wall of rolling shoulders that forced a girl in a sundress to step onto the grass to avoid them.
A single hard kick against my ribs nearly bowled me over. I straightened my spine, lifted my chin half an inch, and waited.
Evan’s gaze swept the path ahead. It passed over the girl. Over a professor hauling a stack of papers. Over Hunter.
Over me.
The three of them kept walking, their conversation unbroken. Something about a weight room schedule and whether Reed was going to pitch Saturday. Evan’s voice was relaxed, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of jeans that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.
I was another part of the landscape he was moving through.
They got close enough that I caught the pleasing smell of his body wash, the same scent that had been inches from my face while I kneeled between his legs. My body responded before my brain could intervene—my mouth went dry, and I became suddenly, stupidly aware of my hands.
Hunter glanced at me sideways. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I unclenched my jaw. “Why?”
“You went rigid. And a little pink.”
“It’s warm out.”
“It’s sixty-two degrees, Tommy.”
I pulled my phone from my back pocket and pretended to check the time. “I need to go to the studio. I’ve gotta get shit done before tomorrow.”
Hunter knew when to push and when to leave it alone. He steered us toward the arts building with an easy pivot into a story about his roommate’s girlfriend clogging their shower drain with her hair extensions.
I laughed in the right places, nodded when required. But in my head, I was zooming in on Evan’s eyes as they scanned the path, the set of his jaw, the complete, unwavering blankness as his gaze slid over my face.
The familiar sting of being ignored was there, but this time it was different. Hotter.
Evan Brock once had his hand in my hair and my name on his lips. Now, under the open sky of the quad, I was a ghost.
But then the part of my brain that wasn’t controlled by my dick kicked in.
No one on the team can know about this. I mean it, Tommy.
I understood the cold, hard math. Evan Brock acknowledging my existence would be a red flag. People would ask questions, and the answers would torpedo his draft stock. Worse, his reputation.
He was doing exactly what he’d said he’d do—keeping it inconspicuous. The logic was sound. It was also infuriating. I was going to have to be okay with it, because the alternative was going back to watching him from the dugout with my hands empty.
I exhaled slowly through my nose, focusing on the shapeshifting clouds until the tightness in my chest finally eased.
Hunter and I parted ways outside the Caldwell Fine Arts building—no relation to Caldwell the pitcher, though I’d checked. I headed for the second-floor studio where my easel was set up. The hallway smelled of turpentine and fixative, and as I inhaled, my shoulders dropped an inch from my ears.
My phone buzzed with trash talk from the team group chat. I ignored it and spent two hours working on a still life of a cracked ceramic pitcher.
But the curve of the handle kept turning into the line of a shoulder, the shadow of the spout into the hollow of a throat. I pressed harder, channeling my frustration into hard lines and deep shadows until the pitcher was nothing more than an abstract mess of anger.
Five-thirty rolled around, and I packed up my supplies, washed my hands in the paint-splattered sink until the water ran mostly clear, and headed back across campus toward my dorm.
The waning sun cast long shadows across the brick pathways. Students gathered on benches and blankets, squeezing out the last of the daylight. I had my earbuds in, the volume low, when I saw him again.
Evan was ahead of me on the path, walking with two different guys—freshmen, eager and loud in the way newbies always were. They were talking over each other, gesturing broadly, and Evan was nodding along halfheartedly.
I slowed my pace, creating distance. But the path narrowed near the library, funneling foot traffic into a single lane between the building and a row of hedges.
My stomach tightened. There was no avoiding it.
We were going to pass each other—or rather, I was going to pass them, because Evan’s group had stopped at the intersection, one of the freshmen pulling out his phone to show him something.
I walked by with my head down. And then Evan’s voice cut through the low hum of my music. “—nah, it was a pretty clean play. Pretty textbook, honestly. The prettiest double play I’ve seen this season.”
Three prettys in one breath. Dropped into a sentence about baseball as if he were discussing the weather. His voice was pitched slightly louder than the conversation required.
I kept my stride even, my eyes locked on the ground.
Pretty.
I was suddenly back in the hotel room, remembering his voice, rough and raspy, telling me I was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen while his thumb dragged through the mess on my cheek.
He’d seen me coming down the path, tracked me in his peripheral vision the same way I’d tracked him. And because a glance in my direction was too dangerous, he gave me a word instead. Tucked into a sentence about baseball.
The second I rounded the corner of the library, a grin split across my face. I pressed my hand over my mouth, trying to contain it, and failed completely. A laugh escaped—short, breathless, ridiculous—and I tipped my head back to stare at the pink sky.
That absolute bastard.
I floated the rest of the way to my dorm. Through the door, up the stairs, into my room, and onto my bed with my backpack still on. Every time I tried to relax my mouth, the word echoed back—pretty—and my cheeks pulled up again.
I grabbed my phone and opened my texts with Hunter, thumbs hovering. I could picture his reaction—a string of all-caps messages. He’d make it a spectacle, a shared win. But I didn’t want to share. I wanted to keep this for myself. At least for a little while.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling as a giddy weightlessness spread beneath my skin. UNC Wilmington was coming up fast. But that was okay. Because it all made sense now.
The invisibility was a fortress wall built for two. On the other side was private territory, a place that existed in hotel rooms after midnight and in single words tucked into baseball chatter. A place with its own language, where pretty meant I see you. A place no one else could touch.
I spent the rest of my evening with that stupid grin on my face, sketching spirals on a fresh page. Humming to myself and replaying that one heavenly word on a loop until I fell asleep with the pencil still in my hand.
Pretty.