Chapter 02
Someone is watching me.
The realization seeps slowly into my consciousness, the weight of a gaze caressing over my warm skin, gently tickling my brain.
Then the awareness of another presence hits me harder and faster than reality can catch up.
I sit up straight in bed, gasping like a bucket of cold water has been emptied above my head.
“Whoa, easy there, big boy,” a soft voice coos, followed by a giggle.
I need a moment to orient myself, expecting the half-darkness of a mobile home.
Instead, I have to shield my eyes from the morning light flooding the room.
It’s already stuffy under the roof, too hot for the early morning hours.
I faintly remember our landlord promising to install an AC up here before summer.
He didn’t specify which summer, though, and I never asked.
“Morning,” I rumble once I’ve rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
My head throbs from sitting up too fast, so I let myself fall back into the sheets.
My stomach lurches from the movement, and I try to remember how much I drank last night.
I’m not a practiced drinker because that shit can drain a wallet fast.
“Bad dreams?” the voice next to me inquires, finally triggering the memory of the past night: the party, the bathroom, Seb, Mia. And Linden. Someone brought a keg, which also explains a lot.
“No,” I croak out because I’m fifty percent sure I didn’t dream. “I just don’t like being watched while sleeping.”
“Ugh, the hardships of being pretty.” Mia laughs beside me, her warm breath tickling my naked skin.
I smile at her words, blinking my eyes open again.
This time, I turn my head to face her. She must know a thing or two about this kind of hardship—even with tousled hair and smeared mascara, Mia is gorgeous.
She’s wearing one of my training shirts, which looks like a dress on her.
I crane my neck to peer down. My chest is bare, but I’m still in last night’s jeans and boxers. Thank God. Drunk sex is scary. I can’t afford a surprise pregnancy next semester—or ever.
Next to me, Mia chortles. “Don’t worry, big boy; nothing happened here after your friend left us high and dry.
I mean, you had plans for the night, but then you told me that I had, and I’m quoting here, the ‘most comfortable thighs,’ put your head down on them and skipped right into dreamland afterward. ”
“Oh God, I’m sorry.” I laugh. “I would have followed through if they hadn’t made me drink a quarter of that keg.”
“And while doing so in a handstand! I was really impressed, handsome.” She winks, then reaches out to cross the small gap between our bodies to pet my head. I roll my eyes, but let her be. It’s not the first time we’ve woken up in the same bed together over the past years.
The beautiful cheerleader and the football captain—it sounds like taken straight out of a sports romance novel. But Mia is not one to be contained in a relationship, and I’m glad we never tried to develop our occasional one-night stands into anything more.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I promise, but she waves me off.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m more bummed about how your roommate scared off Davenport.” She sighs, her mouth turning into a pout.
I smile weakly in response, not having the heart to tell her that Seb would have fled the scene at some point anyway. Linden’s appearance was just a convenient excuse.
“There’ll be other chances,” I promise as I tap her nose with my index finger. “Not like there’s a shortage of guys wanting to get in bed with you.”
“True. But there is a shortage of guys wanting to get in bed with each other,” she points out, and I have to snort at that.
“Don’t laugh! I’ve been trying to cross this off my bucket list for years now!
Do you know how hard it is to find two guys—pretty guys with at least half a brain cell each, not desperate Neanderthals—willing to hop in bed with not only me but also each other?
They’re all for it until it’s time to get naked with other men outside of a locker room.
Then they suddenly think their manliness will evaporate the second their elbows touch. ”
“Oh, poor Mia, that sounds like a terrible problem to have!”
“Stop making fun of me, Micah! We’ll be out of Bonham in less than a year.
College is for all the wild experiments!
The ones my future husband—or your future wife—will never hear about!
If I don't complete my bucket list now, I can pick it up again when I’m sixty, and I already know I won’t look half as good then. ”
“You’ll look amazing, even at eighty.”
“True. But I won’t have the energy for threesomes with eighty—or even sixty! I’ll be busy making the world a better place by that time. I'll have had my fill of men, earned all the money, and won’t give a fuck about anyone but my five cats.”
Okay, that does sound like Mia.
“Don’t you have a list like that? Stuff you want to experience before you move on to the NFL, start dating a famous country singer, and get criticized by fat old men on their couches for running 0.2 seconds too slow?”
“Actually, right now, making it to the NFL is pretty much the only thing on that list.”
“Aw, you’re so cute when you act all humble and shit.”
I roll my eyes at that, not wanting to argue over my career prospects first thing in the morning.
I know I have talent. People keep telling me that since Dad signed me up for my first 7-on-7 flag football team when I was eight.
What everyone conveniently skips over is that talent isn’t enough.
Hard work isn’t enough, either. You also need luck. And connections.
I have neither.
“So there’s nothing else on your list?” Mia steers our conversation back on track.
“What else would there be?” I yawn. So far, I have successfully avoided thinking about my last year at college.
I could live like this forever, caught somewhere between early mornings on the training field and late nights at the library, always a full house of other people to return to, always someone to watch a show with on the couch, always a party to visit: no agents, no drafts, no contracts.
I’m not a fan of bucket lists because the thought of ticking off the final point always gives me anxiety about turning the page and finding the next one empty.
“I dunno? Sex in the locker room showers, maybe? Or sex with two girls?”
I can’t help myself; I have to laugh at that. “Sex with two girls? Sounds stressful. I only have one dick and one tongue, and I’m shockingly bad at multitasking.”
“Men.” She sighs dramatically, rolling her green eyes to the ceiling before they land back on me, a hint of mischief in them. “What if the two girls multitask with each other?”
I raise a brow at that, tilting my head at her curiously. “Could it be we’re talking about your bucket list here?”
“And what if we are?” Mia sticks her tongue out at me before rolling onto her stomach. My shirt gets rumpled in the process, the material bunching up under her stomach so that it’s now just barely covering her ass. We both know she’s putting on a show, but I don’t mind the view.
“Didn’t know that’s something you’d be into,” I hum.
“As I said, college is for experimenting,” she points out, then sighs, her face losing some of that playful cheekiness as she fixates me with her gaze again.
“It’s really something I want to experience, and I meant it when I said there won’t be many chances for it once we leave college.
My mom always said some things you can only do while you’re still young and—”
“I doubt she thought of a threesome when she said that,” I interject, but she doesn’t pay me any attention.
“—and I think she’s right. I will never get the chance again to experience something like that once I start working for my dad, and everyone suddenly calls me Ms. Beaumont. It’s now or never, Micah.”
I can see her point there. We always promise ourselves not to get old and boring, to keep that spark alive, and yet, in the steady flow of life, we lose it.
There’s a point in our childhood when most of us sit on a swingset for the last time, not knowing that we will never experience it again.
We could, but we don’t, because there’s no time left in our hectic routines, or we suddenly care what others will think of us.
And then, one day down the road, we won’t be able to do it anymore.
Because it doesn’t feel the same, or because we don’t fit.
We’ve outgrown our last chance without noticing it.
“And I’m involved in this, how?” I laugh, although I already know the answer. There’s a reputation Seb and I have cultivated over the past years—and very intentionally so.
“Oh, stop pretending, Micah!” Mia groans, then pouts at me again. It’s more real this time, not as pretentious as before. “Promise me we will repeat that?”
“You know, that’s not just my decision,” I hum.
“Yes, yes, but you will talk to Davenport about it, right? We can plan better next time, go over to his place—” That’s definitely not going to happen, but I don’t have the heart to tell her so. “—or mine. No interruptions from your boring roommates!”
I groan as I rub both hands over my eyes, then sigh. “Fine, I’ll talk to him about it,” I agree. “But I need a coffee first.”
We don’t have coffee first. Instead, we fall asleep again, Mia’s head on my chest, my arm around her.
I feel worse after the thirty-minute nap, like it gave the hangover time to fully unfold.
My throat is parched, and a dull pain fills my head when we finally climb out of bed and make our way down the narrow, creaking stairs from my attic room to the first floor.
Mia disappears into our bathroom, swatting my ass on her way in, right as Linden steps out of his bedroom. He raises a blond brow at me, and I duck, scratching the back of my head with an apologetic grin.
“Morning,” I offer as I follow him downstairs to the kitchen. “And…uh, sorry again about last night.”
Pink blooms across his pale cheeks. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m sorry for interrupting. It’s just…I had a really shit day, and I needed that shower like nothing else,” he explains like he has to justify wanting to use the bathroom in his own home. “I…uhm…hope you still had a fun night?”
The way he awkwardly emphasizes “fun,” as if we’re talking in some sort of secret code, has me laughing for a second before the pain in my head makes me wince.
“Well,” I groan as I massage my temples with both hands, “not the kind of fun you are thinking of right now.”
Linden gives me a tight-lipped smile at that. I don’t think he’s the party type, which applies to most of my roommates.
“I know it’s my own fault,” I throw in as I lean over the kitchen sink to fill a glass, then down it in one go. The cool water soothes my raw throat.
“Didn’t say anything.” Linden laughs, then proceeds to take two mugs from the cabinets to get the coffee started. It’s Nicko’s machine, and I’m already dreading the day he packs it up and takes it to New York with him.
“Can you do a third one for Mia?” I ask, turning just in time to see a shadow flicker across Linden’s face, there and gone in the blink of an eye.
He nods.
“Oh no, don’t bother; I’m ready to get going. I have a flight to catch tonight,” Mia chimes from behind us, turning both our heads. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes again, tossing me my shirt, which I catch just before it can hit me in the face.
“Uh, nice reflexes, handsome. Now, can you drive me home?”
I cringe at that question, giving her an apologetic smile.
“I would love to, but my car broke down last week, and I’m still waiting to get it squeezed in with a mechanic.
But I can call you an Uber!” The lie slides out smoothly, and I can feel Linden looking at me.
He knows just as well as I do that my crappy metal ball has been sitting untouched in our yard for the past two months.
It’s not a scheduling issue. He could call me out, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he turns to the coffee machine again.
“Oh…well, that’s okay, too.” Mia shrugs just as Linden murmurs, “Could call yourself an Uber. It’s not that hard.”
“Sorry, what was that?” Mia blinks, only to be interrupted the next moment.
“I could take you with me if you’re ready to go right now.”
We all blink when Sasha barrels into the kitchen, dressed in sweats and a loose shirt, a snapback covering most of her blonde hair, and a huge duffel bag slung over her shoulder.
“Oh…” Mia’s pink lips form a perfect circle. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”
“No? Do you meet your Uber drivers before you get into a car with them?” Sasha gives her a confused look, and I have to bite back a grin. I’m ninety percent sure she knows who Mia is. Everyone does.
“Mia, this is Sasha, my roommate. Sasha, this is Mia, my…” I gesture vaguely, but Sasha has neither time nor patience to wait for me to find the right word. Instead, she grabs her giant water bottle off the counter, then gives Mia an expectant look.
“Great. Nice to meet you then, Mia. Ready now? I have a date with a Smith Machine.”
Mia blinks again but then hurries to pick up her purse, turning back just before she reaches the door to call over her shoulder, “Think about what I said, Micah!”
Linden and I stay quiet until we hear Sasha’s car roll out of the driveway, then he presses a cup of coffee into my hands.
“Still waiting to get your car squeezed in with a mechanic, huh?”