Chapter 15
After four rings, my thumb was already moving toward the end-call icon when the line clicked.
“Yeah.” Evan’s voice came through, muffled.
“Hey. It’s me, Tommy.” Stupid. He had caller ID.
“I know who it is.” There was something careful in his tone, a measured quality that didn’t belong to the guy who’d once screamed while I tongue-fucked him into oblivion. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you about something. In person.” I gripped the phone harder, pacing the length of my dorm room. “Can you meet me at The Grind in an hour?”
Another muffled exchange on his end. “I can be there in thirty.”
“Thirty—yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’ll be there.”
The line went dead, and I stood there with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to nothing. Evan Brock agreed to meet me at The Grind, where half the student body rotated through on any given afternoon.
I changed my shirt twice, which was pathetic. I settled on a vintage Talking Heads tee that Hunter had once said made my shoulders look good, then hated myself for the careful calculus of it all. I grabbed my bag—sketchpad inside, a solid weight against my hip—and headed out.
I pushed through The Grind’s front door, the bell overhead announcing my arrival to no one who cared.
The afternoon rush had thinned to a handful of students with laptops and a barista wiping down the espresso machine.
I ordered a cold brew, found a table near the back wall—two chairs, enough distance from the windows that we wouldn’t be on display—and sat down.
Five minutes later, the door opened again. My eyes lifted, and my lungs forgot what they were doing.
Evan walked in first. Six-foot-three, dirty blond hair spiked from running his hands through it. He wore a plain gray T-shirt stretched across his chest and jeans that left nothing to the imagination.
Behind him, filling the door frame with stocky, broad-shouldered authority, was my father.
The cold brew in my hand went sideways. I caught it before it spilled.
No. No, no, no.
Richard Jenkins adjusted his Wildbrook cap as he scanned the room, his penetrating hazel eyes landing on me. “Thomas.” He said my name the way he said everything. A statement. A summoning.
Evan slid into the chair across from me, his expression giving away nothing.
“Dad.” I tried to rearrange my face into something that didn’t scream terror. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Brock was in my office when you called.” My father grabbed a chair from an adjacent table and dragged it over, the legs scraping against the floor. He sat down heavily, his forearms landing on the table, taking up space the way he took up every room he’d ever entered. “Figured I’d tag along.”
“Great. That’s…great.”
Evan’s knee bumped mine under the table. A quick, firm press that lasted half a second. I’m here. Breathe.
I breathed.
My father flagged down the barista and ordered a black coffee.
The silence while we waited was excruciating.
Evan sat with his arms crossed, his posture loose but alert.
I gripped my cold brew, the condensation slick against my palm, and focused on a single, impossible task: Do not think about the tooth marks you left on his thigh. Not while your father is watching you.
The coffee arrived. My dad wrapped his thick hand around the mug and took a sip, his eyes moving between Evan and me over the rim.
“Look,” he said, setting the mug down with a definitive clink.
“I’m not going to take up your whole afternoon.
I know you two have things to discuss.” His gaze lingered on me for a beat, and I felt the familiar weight of his scrutiny. “But I wanted to say something first.”
I waited, the pulse in my neck kicking against my collar.
“This arrangement.” He gestured between us with one thick finger. “The rooming situation on the road. I know neither of you was thrilled about it when I set it up.”
Evan shifted in his chair, uncrossing his arms. “Coach—”
“Let me finish.” My father held up a hand, and Evan’s mouth closed.
The deference was immediate—the same respect every player gave Richard Jenkins when he used that tone.
“I put you two together because Brock needed someone who wasn’t going to enable his bullshit. ” His eyes cut to Evan. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Evan said evenly.
“And Thomas.” My father turned to me. “You stepped up. You kept him in the room, focused and out of trouble. Whatever you two have been doing in those hotel rooms—”
The cold brew turned to cement in my stomach.
“—it’s working.” He tapped the table, punctuating the point. “Brock’s numbers are the best they’ve been all season. His head’s on straight. Scouts are talking. And I credit part of that to you.”
I waited for the ‘but’ that always followed, the drop of the other shoe. But it never came. A weird sensation floated up in my chest.
“So.” He cleared his throat, and his expression reset to business, the brief warmth gone. “Thank you, Thomas. For taking this seriously.”
“I—” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Of course, Dad.”
Evan’s knee pressed against mine again. Longer this time. Warm and steady.
My father took another sip of coffee, then set the mug down with finality.
“Rutgers is the final away series. Three games, three nights. After that, the regular season’s done, and whatever happens in the postseason is a different conversation.
” He leaned forward, his eyes sharpening.
“I need you both to understand something. We are this close”—he held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart—“to locking up an at-large bid. Everything we’ve built this season comes down to these last few games. ”
“I understand,” Evan said.
“No funny business.” My father’s gaze moved between us, and the words carried weight. He’d spent his entire career managing risk; he wasn’t going to let us fuck it up now. “Not this close to the end. Whatever routine you’ve established, you stick to the routine.”
No funny business. The phrase echoed in my skull, and I had to physically stop myself from reaching for Evan. Because the funny business—the mouths and hands and tongues—was the routine. “Got it, Dad.”
“Good.” He drained the last of his coffee and pushed back from the table. He stood, adjusting his cap, and pulled his phone from his pocket to check the time. “I’ve gotta run. Meeting Petrie at his place in ten.”
I inhaled a mouthful of cold brew. A violent, full-body hack sent me forward over the table, my eyes watering, my fist pounding against my chest. The liquid burned in my sinuses, and I gasped for air between spasms.
“Jesus, Thomas.” My father’s hand landed on my shoulder.
“Wrong—” I wheezed. “Wrong pipe.”
Evan’s hand appeared with a napkin. I grabbed it, pressing it to my mouth, and willed my lungs to stop betraying me. My father watched for another second, shook his head, and gave my shoulder one more pat.
“Drink slower.” He nodded at Evan. “Brock. I’ll see you at practice tomorrow. Six a.m. sharp.”
“Yes, sir.”
And then he was gone. The bell above the door chimed his exit, and I watched through streaming eyes as my father’s stocky frame crossed the sidewalk and disappeared around the corner.
In the vacuum he left, the clink of a spoon against ceramic and the low hum of the espresso machine sounded impossibly loud.
I pressed the napkin to my face, still coughing, and tried to reassemble my dignity from the wreckage scattered across the table. Petrie. My brain briefly flashed the image from Walgreens before I shoved it back into the recesses of my mind.
Evan waited until my coughing fit subsided. His mouth was a flat line, his eyes tracking my movements without giving anything away, but his head was tilted slightly. A question mark. “You okay?”
I dabbed at my eyes with the napkin, my throat raw. “Totally fine.”
He leaned back in his chair, one arm draped over the back, his legs spread wide under the table. The posture of a man with nowhere to be and all the time in the world. “So. You called me.”
Right. The reason I was here. The thing I’d rehearsed on the walk over, all of which had evaporated the second my father sat down.
I reached for my bag, pulling it onto my lap. The weight of the sketchpad inside grounded me. “Yeah. I did.”
Evan’s blue eyes tracked the movement, then came back to my face. He didn’t rush me. Didn’t fill the silence with small talk. He waited, his jaw relaxed, his attention fully locked on me.
I pulled the sketchpad out, sliding it across the surface between us, my fingers resting on the cardboard cover. “I have this final project. For my figure drawing class.”
“Okay.”
“I have to draw someone I know. My professor kept talking about ‘the moment the mask cracks.’ She wants us to create that unguarded second where you can see everything.”
Evan’s posture didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eyes. A flicker of awareness, maybe. Recognition of where this was heading.
“I want to draw you,” I said.
The neutral mask he wore in public didn’t slip. But his thumb, hooked over the table’s edge, bore down until the nail blanched white against the wood. “Draw me,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“For a class.”
“For my final. It’s worth forty percent of my grade.”
His jaw shifted to the side, the muscle bunching once before releasing. “What kind of drawing are we talking about?”
I opened the sketchpad, flipping past pages of gesture studies and still lifes until I reached a blank page. My fingers wanted to keep going, to flip to the back section where fourteen pages of him lived in graphite and charcoal. I didn’t.
“It doesn’t have to be nude,” I said quickly. “The point is to capture something honest.” I met his eyes, holding steady even though my pulse was jackhammering against my wrists. “The way you look when nobody’s watching. When you’re not performing for scouts or teammates or my dad.”
Evan’s gaze dropped to the sketchpad, then back up to me. “You’re asking me to let you put that on paper. For other people to see.”
“I know what I’m asking,” I said. “And I know it’s a lot. But, Evan”—I pressed my palms flat against the table, steadying myself—“you’re the only person I want to draw. You’re the only person who makes me feel something worth putting on a page.”
His throat moved. A hard swallow that traveled the full length of his neck. He turned away, his gaze drifting toward the window. He watched a girl outside laugh and bump shoulders with her friend. A casual, public affection that we’d never shared.
I had a dozen different rejection scenarios filed away. The angry refusal, the dismissive laugh, the cold walk-out. But what I had not prepared for was—
“Let me think about it.”
I blinked. “What?”
“I said let me think about it.” His expression was open in a way I rarely saw outside of hotel rooms. This wasn’t a reflexive answer.
“You’re not saying no,” I said, the words tumbling out before I could stop them.
“I’m not saying no.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m not saying yes either. I’m saying give me some time to sit with it.”
My hands were shaking. I pulled them off the table and into my lap, gripping my own thighs to stop the tremor. “How much time?” I asked.
“Rutgers is this weekend.” He picked up my cold brew and took a sip, completely unbothered by the fact that it was mine. “Let me get through the series. I’ll give you an answer after.”
I nodded, unable to speak around the sudden thickness in my throat. It was as if I’d been holding my breath all season and had only now realized I could let it go.
Evan set my coffee back down and leaned forward on his elbows, closing the distance between us.
His voice dropped low enough that only I could hear it.
“For the record, the fact that you want to draw me? That I’m the one you think of when someone asks for vulnerability? That means something, Tommy.”
My heart was his for the taking.
He checked his phone, glanced at the door, and pushed back from the table. “I gotta go. Film session with the guys at four.” He stood, his height filling the space between us as he peered down at me. “Rutgers. Then we talk.”
“Yeah.” My voice was hoarse. “Okay.”
He turned toward the door, took two steps, and stopped. Without looking back, he said, “Tommy?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever you’d draw…” A pause. His shoulders rose and fell with a breath. “I know it’d be great.”
Then he was gone.
My fingers were trembling, but the nervous energy had given way to something new.
Anticipation.