Chapter 26
twenty-six
BEN
A week after the hotel, and I’m walking on corny-as-hell sunshine.
As I walk across the campus quad, I catch myself humming under my breath—some obscure punk track Cass played for me last Tuesday, the melody lodged in my brain like a splinter I don’t want removed—and the realization that I’m that guy makes me laugh out loud.
But I don’t care.
I’m too busy being deliriously, stupidly happy to care.
I’m just a normal person.
A normal person who happens to have an incredible girlfriend who fell asleep in his bed last night while he read about signal processing, her blonde head heavy on his shoulder, her breathing deep and even and trusting.
That word keeps circling back.
Trusting.
She trusts me. After everything, she trusts me enough to fall asleep beside me. Vulnerable and soft and completely herself. And so I held her, and I read my textbook one-handed for an hour because I couldn’t bear to wake her, my arm going numb under the warm weight of her head.
I’d never been happier to lose circulation in my entire life.
So, yeah, I’m grinning. And I’m still grinning when I reach her dorm.
The plan crystallized yesterday in the engineering lab. Cass had helped to solve my robot problem weeks ago with nothing but her ear, and since then I’d rebuilt Project Theseus into a lean, mean, maze-dominating machine.
Now I’m going to deliver for her.
Her amp—that battered, sticker-covered mess with the persistent hum that drives her crazy—has been calling to me since the first time I heard it. I’ve been designing the circuit in my head for months, sketching schematics in the margins of my class notes.
The transformer finally arrived yesterday.
The voltage regulator this morning.
Everything is ready.
I use the spare key she gave me last week—gave me, like it was nothing, like sharing access to her private space was as casual as lending someone a pen—and let myself into her room. The familiar chaos greets me, and I’m used to it now, but there’s something new on her wall.
A photo is tacked above her bed that wasn’t there three days ago.
I step closer.
It’s us.
The shot is from the hotel in Boston, clearly taken by Cass at arm’s length, her face pressed close to mine, both of us grinning like idiots who just got away with something. My hair is wrecked, her mascara is smudged, and I’m pretty sure that’s a hickey visible on my collarbone.
It’s objectively terrible photography.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Feeling doubly motivated to fix her amp now, I find it tucked in the corner behind her guitar case, half-buried under a pile of clothes. It’s heavier than it looks—thirty pounds of vintage circuitry—but I lift it carefully and examine the exterior.
The chassis is covered in peeling stickers—The Misfits, Dead Kennedys, a bright pink one that just says FUCK THE PATRIARCHY—and there’s a scratch along one side that looks like someone dragged it across a stage without sufficient care.
This isn’t a piece of gear. It’s a survivor.
It’s been through the wars with her—every sticky-floored bar, every hostile crowd, every triumphant night, every disaster. It’s a sacred artifact, the vessel through which her talent screams out into the world, and I’m going to make it better.
This is it, I think, settling the weight against my hip. This is what my two worlds were always meant to do. Work together. For her.
I head for the door, and the hallway is quiet as I pull her door shut behind me. My footsteps echo against the linoleum, and I’m already mentally mapping out the project—isolate the ground loop, filter the AC line noise, add a discrete regulator stage—
“Yo, Kellerman!”
My stomach drops through the floor, because I know that voice. It has a particular brand of aggressive jocularity that always precedes something awful. It’s the sound of a predator barreling through the underbrush while you’re frozen mid-step, hoping it’ll pass you by.
I turn.
Nash. And Stiles. And two other guys from the team, all of them sweaty and enormous, fresh from the weight room. They’re walking toward me, Nash in front, looking for entertainment. Stiles flanking right, already smirking, and the other two bringing up the tail.
Nash’s eyes zero in on the amp in my hands. His smirk spreads slow. “The fuck is that?”
“It’s…” My voice comes out thin. I clear my throat, desperate to find the words. “It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.” He steps closer. “We’ve got the biggest game of the year on Saturday, and you’re... what is that? Audio equipment?”
Stiles barks out that high, hyena laugh he makes when he scents blood. “Dude, you’re really leaning into this pawn shop garbage collecting, right?”
Garbage.
The word hits me like a slap, triggering a reflex I thought I’d buried—that instinctive, pathetic flinch I developed at sixteen when I realized my passions were punchlines to everyone else—and my grip on the amp handle tightens until my knuckles ache.
“It’s not gar—” I start, nervous heat rising in my neck.
But Nash steps into my personal space, blocking my path to the exit. “I don’t care, Ben. I don’t want you running errands instead of locking in…”
The accusation hits home. He’s right. I have been distracted. The robot. The amp. Her. And in the binary world of elite athletics, distraction is a sin. Even though I could rightly point out that they’re distracted by parties and drinking and fucking anything with two legs and XX chromosomes.
“It’s not a distraction,” I lie, grip tightening on the handle.
“Isn’t it?” Nash’s eyes narrow. “You’re jeopardizing your focus—and our championship—to be a roadie for a girl you’ve been seeing for a month?”
The pressure clamps down on my chest like a vise. It’s not just mockery now; it’s an accusation of treason. If the guys think I’m not committed, or that I’m prioritizing a girlfriend over the title, I lose the brotherhood I’ve wanted to be a part of for so long.
The old panic overrides the new confidence.
Protect your status. Don’t be the outlier. Blend in or bleed out.
“She got you whipped already?” Nash pushes, relentless. “Is that it? You can’t say no to her, so you screw us over?”
My palm is slick on the amp handle. Panic overrides logic. I need to defuse this. “It’s not hers,” I say, the lie tasting like ash.
Nash looks unimpressed. “No?”
“No.” I shrug, forcing a casualness that makes my stomach churn. “It’s just junk I’m fixing for cash.”
The tension breaks slightly. Stiles snorts, losing interest immediately. One of the other guys is already checking his phone. But Nash is still watching me, head tilted, that smirk not quite gone, like he’s grading a test I never even knew I was taking.
“Huh,” he says. “Thought you two were getting serious after that whole ‘defending your woman’s honor’ thing. But if she’s distracting you...”
He lets the threat hang there. If she’s the problem, we cut the problem.
My heart hammers so hard I’m amazed they can’t hear it. I need to protect my spot. I need to protect her from their scrutiny.
Say her name, my mind is screaming. Tell them she’s everything. Be the man she thinks you are.
But the fear wins. The terror of losing everything—the team, the status, the approval—wins out.
I force a laugh I don’t feel inside. “It’s not even serious between us anyway.”
The lie works perfectly.
Nash laughs, already turning away, satisfied that the hierarchy is restored. “Called it. Come on, let’s hit the dining hall.”
They’re leaving. The crisis is over. I’m still one of them.
But something breaks through—my mind’s suggestions turning into shouts turning into a desperate alarm screaming at me that this is wrong, that I have to fix it now, and that by not speaking up I’m betraying her and throwing away the only real thing I’ve ever had.
Actually, wait—
The correction burns in my throat. I open my mouth to call them back, to destroy the lie, to tell them it is serious, that she’s the most important—
Thud.
The sound is soft. Sickening. Something hitting the floor behind me.
I turn.
Cass is standing at the end of the hallway, a takeout container at her feet, its contents spilling across the linoleum. Her face is a mask I’ve never seen before. Not the snarling stage persona. Not the soft, vulnerable woman who falls asleep in my arms. Something else entirely.
Cold.
Crystalline.
Absolutely still.
“Cass—” My voice comes out strangled. “That’s not—I was about to—”
But Cass isn’t moving. She’s just standing there, staring at me, and I can see the exact moment she replays what she heard. I watch it all play out. Her jaw tightens. Her hands curl into fists. And then, worse, so much worse, I see the fury warp into something else.
Hurt.
Raw, naked hurt, the kind she spent her whole life building walls to hide. The kind she only showed me once, when she was drunk and broken and trusting me not to run. The kind that every guy she’s ever let close has caused. And the kind I’ve now inflicted upon her.
I’ve become exactly what she always feared.
“Cass, please—” I take a step toward her, the amp heavy and useless in my hands. “I was about to take it back. I was going to tell them—”
“Tell them what?” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Go ahead. Chase them down. Correct the record. I’ll wait.”
I don’t move.
I can’t move.
Because she’s right. The correction never came, and those two seconds I hesitated make all the difference. I’d been about to choose her, about to be the man she deserves, but I was too slow, too weak, too fucking afraid to overcome my fears to be with her when she already had to be with me.
“That’s what I thought.” She nods once, sharp and decisive. Her face has gone blank now, all emotion locked away behind walls I can’t scale. “You know what the worst part is? It’s not even the lie. Guys lie. I know that. It’s that you were holding my amp.”
“Cass, please, I—”
Her voice cracks before she forces it steady. “You were holding my amp, Ben. And you stood there and told them it was garbage.”
The word lands like a killing blow.
I’d called her sacred artifact trash to buy myself three seconds of approval from men who’ll probably forget I exist the moment they graduate from Pine Barren, who matter less than nothing compared to the woman standing in front of me.
“I didn’t mean—” I start.
“Yeah.” She walks toward the spilled takeout, crouches down, and starts scooping noodles back into the container. “You never do.”
“Cass—”
“Don’t.”
She stands, the ruined container in her hands, and finally meets my eyes. The hurt is buried now. In its place is that feral, defensive fury she’s perfected. She just looks at me—really looks, for one long, searching moment—and then nods, as if confirming something she always suspected.
“I knew it,” she says quietly. “I fucking knew it.”
And she walks away.
I swallow hard. “Wait, your amp—”
“Keep it,” she says without turning back. “It’s fucked now.”
She’s gone, and the amp feels different now. Less like a sacred artifact and more like a monument to everything I just destroyed. It slips from my fingers and hits the linoleum with a dull thud. Something rattles loose inside—a tube, maybe, knocked free by the impact.
I should pick it up—assess the damage, protect the thing I promised to fix—but I don’t move. Instead, I sink down against the wall, my back sliding against painted cinder blocks until I’m sitting on the cold floor, alone and despondent.
I am a system that failed under load—input from two worlds, output to neither. But the real me is this: a coward on a hallway floor, surrounded by the wreckage of the only good thing he’s ever had, who knows, with absolute certainty, that this time, there’s no fixing it.