Chapter 2
Backpack Menace
Everyone on campus had an opinion about Beckett Callahan before they'd ever spoken a single word to him, and most of those opinions were true.
He was a junior, Kingston hockey's leading scorer, a near-lock for team captain, with scouts already showing up to his games.
He was also infamous — the guy who didn't date, who left parties with a different girl every few weeks and never called back.
Fun for a night. Don't get attached. He doesn't do attached.
Nobody expected anything from a boy everyone had already decided couldn't give it.
He met Tessa Marchetti on a Thursday, six days into the semester, because he tripped over her backpack.
Not dramatically. He just caught his foot on the strap, stumbled half a step, and turned around already smirking at himself.
He was tall, dirty blond hair pushed back, green eyes with a lazy, unbothered confidence, the kind of easy handsomeness that turned heads — and unlike most guys, he noticed the heads turning.
He just didn't particularly care anymore.
Tessa, five foot five and curvy, looked up from her sad dining hall salad, and he noticed, before he could stop himself, the swell of her chest against her sweater, the curve of it he immediately, guiltily made himself look away from, and then her eyes — enormous, dark brown, startled — and a smile that flickered at the corner of her mouth before she caught it and smoothed it back into something more careful.
Natural. Not performed for him, not yet, which somehow made it worse.
She found herself looking, first, at all of him, and second, at the fact that he was still standing there, clearly expecting her to say something back.
"That's a menace," he said, nodding at the bag. "You should really put a warning label on that thing."
"Sorry," she said, caught off guard. "I didn't realize it had opinions about where I put it."
"Oh, it's got opinions. Strong ones." He crouched down and moved the bag six inches, unhurried. "There. Fixed."
She almost smiled. She caught herself right before it happened — don't, guys like this collect reactions like trophies — and settled for a flat "thanks.
" He didn't push. He just looked at her a beat too long, something flickering behind the easy confidence, and said, "I'm Beck," and walked off toward a table of guys in matching hoodies.
She watched him go for exactly one second too long.
"Okay, who was that," Nina said, sliding into the seat across from her.
"Nobody. He tripped over my backpack."
"That's Beckett Callahan. Half the girls in my hall have a story about him, and none of the stories end well. He's basically a legend. A cautionary one."
"He's a hockey player. Guys like that flirt with everyone."
"He didn't even flirt with you, that's the weird part. He just talked to you. Normally. I've never seen him do that before."
Across the dining hall, at the table of matching hoodies, Beck was already being interrogated by his roommate, a broad-shouldered goalie named Jax who had watched the entire exchange with the delighted attention of someone who lived for exactly this kind of drama.
"Who was that," Jax said, not even bothering to look up from his tray of what appeared to be four separate entrées.
"Girl with the backpack."
"You talked to her for like ninety seconds. No line, no exit strategy, nothing. You just — talked. That's not a thing you do."
"I don't know what happened." Beck frowned slightly, turning his water glass on the table, genuinely a little unsettled by his own behavior. "I saw her and every single line I usually use just kind of evaporated. Felt stupid trying to run the routine on her. Don't know why."
"That's either really bad news or the most interesting thing that's happened to you in two years."
"Don't read into it. I'm not going to see her again." He said it with the flat certainty of a man who'd said some version of that sentence a hundred times before and always meant it. "She's not really my thing anyway."
"Sure," Jax said, unconvinced, watching his roommate's eyes drift back across the dining hall despite himself. "Not your thing at all. That's why you're still staring."
Beck didn't have an answer for that. He looked away, annoyed at himself for a reason he couldn't fully name, and told himself, with the same practiced ease he told himself most things about girls, that it didn't matter, that it wouldn't go anywhere, that he already knew exactly how this story went because he was the one who always wrote the ending.
He didn't expect to still be thinking about her three days later.
He didn't expect, standing in line for coffee on a Sunday morning, to find himself pulling up her Instagram — found through a tagged move-in day photo, Nina's carousel captioned we're back together and it's DIVINE — and staring at it longer than he'd stared at anyone's profile in longer than he wanted to admit.
He told himself he was just curious. He told himself a lot of things that week that turned out, eventually, not to be true.
? ? ?
The three of them had a standing Wednesday ritual by the second week of the semester — Toni's tiny off-campus apartment, wine, terrible reality television, and whatever gossip had accumulated over the week.
"So," Toni said, curling up on her couch, "Nina tells me a hockey player tripped over your backpack and now follows you on Instagram."
"It's not a whole thing."
"He liked six of her old photos within an hour," Nina said, stealing popcorn. "That's due diligence, Toni."
"Ooh, a scholar. What's his name?"
"Beckett Callahan," Nina supplied. "Right wing. Objectively very attractive. I looked him up."
"You looked him up on the team roster?"
"Of course I did. Basic best-friend procedure."
Toni laughed so hard she nearly spilled her wine. "This is the most protective I've seen you since that boy tried to cut the eighth grade dance line."
"He deserved exactly what he got."
Tessa let the conversation wash over her, the specific relief of being surrounded by people who'd known her long enough to tease her without it feeling like a weapon.
"For the record," Toni said, more serious now, "I'm glad someone's trying. It's been almost six months since Tyler, and you've barely let yourself talk about a boy without assuming the worst."
"Because the worst is usually true. That's been my sample size."
"It was true about Tyler. That doesn't make it true about everyone who walks into your life."
Tessa didn't answer right away. She thought about the way Beck had crouched down to move her backpack like it genuinely mattered.
"I don't know how to just believe someone anymore," she admitted. "I used to let people in without doing the math first. I don't know when that stopped."
"You'll get there again," Nina said, squeezing her hand. "You don't have to get there tonight. But you will."
"Look at me for proof it's possible," Toni said, waving a hand at herself. "I am a hopeless, dedicated romantic for literally everyone else on this planet. I cried at Jenna's engagement. I cried at a Hallmark commercial in October. I fully believe in love, as a concept, passionately."
"You have not been on a single date in the entire time I've known you at this school."
"That's different. I don't want it for me.
I'm too busy, I don't have the bandwidth, and frankly most guys are exhausting.
" Toni shrugged, entirely unbothered by her own contradiction.
"But I want it for you. Desperately. I'll cheer for your love story from the sidelines forever, I just have zero interest in starring in my own. "
"That's a very specific policy."
"I contain multitudes too, apparently. Must run in the family."
Toni raised her wine glass. "To getting there. While your sister and Nina judge every boy who tries it in the meantime."
"That's not a toast, that's a threat."
"Same thing, in this family," Toni said, grinning, and for the first time since March, Tessa laughed without feeling the weight of everything she'd lost sitting right behind it.
? ? ?
He told himself he wasn't going to text her.
He told himself that for three straight days, watching her Instagram like it might explain the strange, unfamiliar pull he couldn't quite shake, and on the fourth day he broke his own rule anyway, typing out a text before he'd fully decided to send it.
He never found out how he got her number -- later she'd learn it was Nina, bribed with a single casual question about whether Tessa was single, answered honestly and without a shred of guilt or hesitation, Nina having decided approximately four minutes into knowing Beck existed that he seemed like a solid investment on Tessa's behalf.
Beck: hey it's beck. the backpack guy. figured I'd skip the whole slow-follow-back-eventually thing and just say hi like a functioning human being
She stared at that text for eleven full minutes before responding, phone propped against her pillow, chewing the inside of her cheek, drafting and deleting three different versions of a reply that all felt too eager or too cold.
Tessa: hi
Beck: groundbreaking opener. truly a masterclass. I respect the economy of words though, very efficient
Tessa: i'm not very interesting, fair warning
Beck: strong disagree but ok, we'll workshop that theory over time. I'm patient