Chapter 21 — Timestamps （Nora）
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I shook the sleet out of my ponytail all over Priya's rug and dripped straight onto the printed Kennel transcript, and my wet sleeves stuck cold to my wrists while I stared at Kip's quoted lines like they'd rearrange themselves if I blinked hard enough.
On the bus to Priya's, I'd rehearsed how to prove Beck innocent without sounding like a girlfriend making excuses.
Priya sat cross-legged at her desk with her second laptop open beside mine, scrolling cloud metadata with her hair falling out of its clip, and she didn't look up when the sleet hissed harder against our window.
Her corkboard loomed over us, pinned thick with pre-med flashcards and a takeout menu and the photo strip from the fall carnival, and my damp tote leaked a puddle onto her rug that neither of us bothered to mop.
Wet wool from my scarf mixed with cinnamon, and the radiator hissed under the sill, and both laptop fans whirred while the gray light outside died by inches into lamp yellow.
I'd spread the transcript pages and my copied decoy sheets across her rug, and my hands shook the whole time, and melt dripped off my jacket hem onto Kip's grinning logo where I'd printed it biggest.
“Talk to me,” I said, hugging my elbows because my fingertips had gone numb on the ride over. “Tell me there's something in the file guts and I'm not just spiraling.”
Priya clicked between two windows, frowning. “You're not crazy, I've got the file open and it's lying.”
“Lying how?” I asked, and crawled closer on my knees, dripping. “Priya, use small words, I'm running on dining-hall coffee and spite.”
“Posted time versus made time,” she said, tapping her screen. “The episode went up yesterday evening, but the audio file was created hours before that. Somebody sat on it.”
My stomach flipped. “Sat on it? Like, edited it first?”
“Like, uploaded it somewhere first,” she said, and pulled up the share history on the second laptop. “Look. Cloud copy, shared link, two hits before the post ever went live.”
I stared at the rows of stamps until they blurred. “Okay, but could Kip have just, I don't know, scheduled it? Don't podcast people schedule posts?”
“Scheduled posts don't backdate file creation,” she said, shaking her head. “And they sure don't explain a share link opened twice by somebody who isn't Kip. The account name's blurred, but the timing's right there.”
“Read me the times,” I said, grabbing my phone to type them into my notes. “Slow. I want every digit.”
She read them off, and I typed with thumbs gone clumsy from cold, and the radiator hissed louder like it approved. “First share, evening. Second share, late night. Post goes live the next day.”
“Somebody gave him the rope,” Priya said quietly. “Question is whether that somebody's dumb enough to leave the receipt.”
“So Kip didn't just record and post,” I said, yanking my phone out to photograph her screen. “Somebody handed him audio, and they left fingerprints.”
“Somebody with the file early,” she said grimly. “Somebody who wanted it out there.”
I grabbed her red pen and the printed screenshot, and my hand shook so bad the first circle came out wobbly. “That's not public, I'd know if he'd ever said it aloud.”
There it was, halfway down page two of the transcript, quoted word for word off Kip's smug tongue: Ghost Texas, switch on two.
A fake audible. A joke check he'd scribbled only in the locker decoy, the notebook that lived in his locker for other eyes to find.
He'd never called it in a huddle. Never said it on film. Never breathed it anywhere but those decoy pages.
My throat closed. “I'd know,” I whispered. “Priya, I'd know if he'd ever said it aloud, and he hasn't. Not once. Not in tutoring, not on the field, nowhere.”
“Could he have written it somewhere else?” she asked gently. “Another page? A text?”
“No,” I said, too fast, then forced myself to breathe. “I've read every real page he gave me. That phrase lives in the locker copy only. I'd swear it on anything.”
Priya circled the second upload timestamp on the printout with her red pen, hard enough to dent the paper. “Then that's our proof sitting right there. Notebook-only phrase, on air. Somebody read the decoy.”
Relief hit first. Anger followed so fast it made my hands steadier.
“That's the receipt,” I said. “Decoy-only phrase, shared before publication, from a staff account. We can clear him.”
Priya circled the second timestamp hard enough to dent the page. “We can do better than clear him. We can point the investigation at the person who moved the file.”
My phone buzzed across the desk. Jessa's name lit the screen.
“Answer before she calls campus police,” Priya said.
I swiped. “Hi. I'm wet, furious, and I think we found the rat.”
“That is the most Quinn sentence you've ever spoken,” Jessa said over Chicago traffic. “Start at the top.”
I gave her the short version: decoy phrase, early upload, staff access, Beck benched, and the terrible order he'd given me outside Whitmore.
“He told you to stay away?” Jessa's voice sharpened. “Oh, football boy is about to learn a relationship is not a one-man huddle.”
“He thought he was protecting me.”
“Then make him learn the difference between protecting you and choosing for you. You know it. He needs to know it.”
The truth landed clean. “I do.”
“Good. Take the proof. Take your scary psych-major stare. Make him apologize properly.”
Priya pointed at the door. “Exactly what I've been saying with my face.”
I laughed, snort and all, for the first time since the benching. “Both of you are bossy.”
“Runs in the family,” Jessa said. “Call me after you save the quarterback.”
I hung up and packed the timestamp printouts, the decoy transcript, and Beck's real notebook into my tote. Priya caught my sleeve before I left.
“You are not begging him to let you help,” she said. “You are bringing the play that clears him. Make him meet you at the line.”
“He will.”
“He'd better.”
Sleet needled my cheeks all the way home. By the time I locked my apartment door, my sleeves were soaked and my anger had burned down to something colder and more useful.
Three knocks landed soft against the wood.
Through the peephole I saw Beck's wet black jacket, rain-dark hair, and the navy wristband held up where I could see the green thread.
I opened the door but did not move aside. “Why are you here?”
His gray-green eyes held mine. Shadows sat beneath them. “To apologize without defending myself.”
Good answer. Not enough yet.
“Go on.”
Sleet melted from his shoulders onto the hall carpet. He kept both hands visible at his sides.
“I was wrong,” he said. “Keeping you safe doesn't mean choosing for you. I made your decision, called it protection, and walked away before you could answer. I won't make that call for you again.”
My throat tightened. “Even when being with you costs me?”
“Especially then. The cost is yours to weigh. My job is to stand beside you while you do it.”
“And if you're scared?”
“I tell you. I don't cut you out. No solo protecting.”
The sentence I had needed cracked the last ice in my chest. I stepped aside.
“Come in. You're dripping on everything.”
He crossed the threshold. I locked the door behind him, then turned before he could retreat into the careful space near the mat.
“I'm still mad.”
“You should be.”
“I cried so hard Priya threatened to fight you with a biology textbook.”
“Fair. Hardcover?”
The laugh-snort escaped me. His whole face softened, but he did not reach for me yet.
“Don't use my laugh to get out of trouble,” I warned.
“Wouldn't dare.”
I pulled the printouts from my tote and spread them over the kitchen table. “Now look. This is how we win.”
He read every timestamp twice. I showed him the staff-account access, the decoy-only phrase, and the file shared before Kip's post.
“Somebody handed him the audio,” Beck said. “And somebody inside the facility opened the bait.”
“Priya is tracing the login. You found your old cards in Cole's locker. Trey keeps hovering around both of you. We take all of it to Pruitt together.”
“Together,” he said immediately.
I set the real notebook in front of him. “Ninety-six pages. Safe the whole time.”
His hands covered mine on the black grid cover. “You kept my head when mine got loud.”
“And you don't get to tell me to drop it again.”
“Never.”
I searched his face for the part that might still think love meant leaving first. I found fear. I also found him standing inside it.
“Say the apology one more time,” I whispered. “The middle part.”
“I won't choose for you.”
“Good.” I caught his jacket and pulled him into me. “Because I choose you in the blast.”
His breath broke against my mouth. “Nora.”
“Kiss me. Then we take the whole file to Pruitt. In that order.”
He kissed me like two nights of restraint had teeth. One hand cupped my jaw; the other locked around my waist and pulled me flush to him. Cold sleet soaked through his jacket, but beneath it he was furnace-hot.
I shoved the jacket off his shoulders. “Bedroom.”
“Proof first?”
“I said the order, Hale. Trust the tutor.”
His laugh came rough and startled as I dragged him down the short hall. At the bed, I pushed him to sit and climbed over his lap, knees bracketing his hips.
“Color?” he asked, forehead against mine.
“Green. If it changes, I will tell you. Right now I need you to stop holding yourself three paces away from me.”
His hands slid beneath my wet sweater. “Done.”
He peeled the sweater over my head and kissed every inch the cold had touched—shoulders, throat, the tops of my breasts—until my skin burned beneath his mouth.
I opened his jeans and wrapped my hand around his cock. He groaned into my neck, hips jerking once against my fist.
“I missed this,” I whispered. “I missed having every honest part of you.”
“Take it.”
I stroked him slowly, then sank to my knees and took him into my mouth. His fingers threaded through my hair, holding without steering while I sucked him deep enough to make his breathing fracture.
“Nora, God. I need inside you before I lose it.”
I released him with a wet smile. “Then earn your way back up here.”
He lifted me onto the bed and opened my jeans with hands that still shook. His mouth found my pussy the second he got my panties down, tongue sliding through my wetness before circling my clit.
I cried out and grabbed the quilt. “Yes. There. Don't stop.”
He didn't. Two fingers pushed inside me and curled while his tongue held the rhythm. The orgasm climbed hard and fast, sharpened by every hour I had spent missing him.
I came against his mouth with his name torn out of me. He stayed between my thighs until the shaking eased, then kissed his way back up my body.
I tasted myself on his lips and pulled him closer. “Condom. Nightstand.”
He found one, tore it open, and rolled it down his cock. I watched every movement, no secrets, no distance.
“On your back,” I said.
He obeyed. I straddled him and sank down, taking his cock slowly until he filled me completely.
His hands gripped my hips. “Look at me.”
“I am.”
I rode him with my palms planted on his chest, watching the fear leave his face one thrust at a time. He met me from beneath, deep and controlled at first, then harder when I asked for it.
“This is my choice,” I told him, breath breaking. “You. The noise. All of it.”
“And I stand with you,” he said. “I don't send you away.”
His thumb found my clit. Pleasure gathered low and fierce while his cock drove deep inside me.
“Say I'm yours,” he rasped.
“Mine first.”
Something wild crossed his face. “Yours. Every route. Every hard part.”
“Then yes,” I gasped. “I'm yours.”
I came around him, body clenching hard, and he followed with my name breaking open in his throat, the condom catching his release while his hands held me steady above him.
I folded over his chest. For a minute we only breathed.
“I love you,” he said into my hair. No stutter. No shield. “I should have said it before I tried to leave.”
Tears burned hot behind my eyes. “I love you too. Enough to stay mad when you deserve it.”
“Good. Keep doing that.”
He tied off the condom, brought me a warm washcloth, and returned with cinnamon tea in the two chipped mugs. Then he took the draft-side of the bed and wrapped the quilt around my shoulders.
“Still mad?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Still here?”
I put my cold feet beneath his calves. “Very.”
He kissed my knuckles. “Best answer I've heard all week.”
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Priya's name flashed above an attachment.
Check your phone. I have the staff login. We finally have him cold.
Beck sat up beside me, tea forgotten. I opened the file, and the name on the access record glowed black against white.
Trey Satterfield.
Beck stared at Trey's name on the access record, then looked at me.
“Tomorrow we take this to Pruitt,” he said.
“Together.”
The word felt stronger than proof.