Chapter 2 #2
By the next week it starts to feel like a pattern.
He waits after practice. Not every time. Often enough that I start expecting the low “Texas” when I come out. Often enough that it starts to feel like maybe this is just what we do now.
We drift into late-night study sessions almost by accident. The library has a dead zone on the third floor where athletes go when they’re too tired to flirt and too disciplined to quit. It smells like dust and old carpet and espresso.
I’m there with two textbooks open when Tristan drops into the chair across from me and slides a bottle of water across the table.
No greeting.
I look at it. Then at him. “You’re strange.”
“You’re dehydrated.”
“That is an aggressive assumption.”
“You’re chewing your lip and your highlighter cap is off. You only do both when you forget to drink water.”
I stare. He stares back. Not smug. Just right.
I take the bottle.
We study. Or pretend to. He works through Econ problem sets with tired male competence that should not be attractive and absolutely is. I rewrite the same sentence three times because a lock of his hair keeps falling over his forehead and every time he pushes it back my whole body has a moment.
Halfway through, Kane appears with a protein shake and a giant textbook. He looks between us slowly.
“Well. This feels intimate.”
I don’t look up. “You smell like a locker.”
“And you still sound like Texas money and judgment.” He grins, then turns to Tristan. “You stealing my study date?”
Tristan doesn’t grin back. He just sits there, pen stilled, watching Kane with that low, unreadable expression he gets when the joke lands somewhere older than the moment.
“You had a study date?” he asks.
Kane’s smile widens. “Not with her, prince. With the concept.” He looks at me. “You surviving him?”
“Barely.”
“That’s the correct amount.”
Then his gaze flicks over my shoulder. I turn.
Two tables over, half-hidden behind a pillar of criminology books, Stella stands with a stack of articles. She’s not looking at us directly. But I know the body language of a girl who knows she just entered somebody else’s atmosphere. She shifts the papers higher and moves on.
Tristan’s attention follows for one beat. Then he’s back in front of me. Too late.
Kane sees that I saw. His expression changes for one bare second. Knowing.
He taps the table twice. “Don’t let him get too poetic, Texas. He gets dangerous when he’s tired.”
Then he leaves.
I stare at my notes for three straight minutes and retain nothing.
Because there it is again. The almost-real thing I’m building with Tristan. And just underneath it, a fault line with Stella’s name on it.
Still—he’s here with me.
He leans over my notebook ten minutes later and circles the right answer with my own pen. “You’re overthinking it.”
And because hope is a vicious little animal, I let myself believe maybe the old wound doesn’t matter as much as the new thing growing right in front of him.
The postgame dinner is what really gets me.
He texted after a home win: Still awake?
I answered: Unfortunately.
Come outside.
When I get there he’s at the bottom of my dorm steps in sweats and a black jacket, hair still damp from the shower, duffel over one shoulder, looking tired in the way only athletes look good tired.
“You cannot keep appearing outside my dorm like this.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m developing expectations.”
That gets me a real look. Dark and still and too interested.
“Dangerous,” he says.
“Very.”
He lifts a finger, “Burgers.”
I stare. “You won and your celebration choice was ground beef?”
“Fries too.”
Twenty minutes later we’re in a diner off El Camino with sticky booths and bad lighting and milkshakes so thick they should count as architecture. No cameras. No legacy nonsense. Just Tristan across from me in a booth too small for his legs, postgame edge still in his body but softer now.
He watches me steal one of his fries. Then another.
“You always take mine.”
“You always order more than you need.”
“I’m six-four.”
“Tragic.”
He smiles around a bite of burger.
And there—in that stupid diner—is where it starts to feel less like a joke and more like a possibility.
Because he tells me things. Not everything. Never everything. But enough. About pressure. About Harvard. About transferring without using the word regret even though I can hear pieces of it. About how sometimes he misses the East Coast in ways that have nothing to do with weather.
I tell him about Texas. About pageants. About soccer camps in hundred-degree heat.
About how men have been underestimating me based on lip gloss since middle school and how I’ve turned it into a hobby.
How I hate that when guys look at me they see a pretty petite doll instead of a D 1 athlete.
That’s why I rarely dated… I didn’t want to be some guy’s arm candy or prom date for points.
He frowns, then touches my wrist. “You need a guy who sees you, Texas.”
By the time we walk back out into midnight air and he puts his hand lightly at the center of my back to steer me around a puddle without thinking, I am gone enough to know I should be more careful.
Instead I let him walk me all the way back to the dorm.
At the steps he pauses. Looks at me. Then reaches up—and this time his hand does touch my face. Just the side of it. Knuckles grazing lightly under my cheekbone like he’s checking whether I’m real or just another late-night bad idea.
My breath catches. His eyes drop to my mouth. Then lift again.
That same old almost. That same restraint.
The thing about Tristan is not that he comes close. It’s that he always stops close enough to leave an outline of what could have happened.
“You should go up,” he says.
I don’t move. “Probably.”
He doesn’t move either.
From somewhere across the quad a laugh drifts through the dark. A group of girls crosses under the path lights. One of them—tall, long-legged, still calibrated for competition even at midnight—turns her head briefly.
Stella.
Too far for details. Not too far for recognition.
I look at Tristan. Just for a second.
And there it is again. The pause. The shift. The tiny fracture line under everything warm we’ve built.
He doesn’t step away. But some part of him goes elsewhere for one heartbeat. Then he’s back. Too late. Always too late.
I smile anyway. Girls like me know how to bleed without ruining the dress.
“Goodnight, Vale.”
His gaze fixes fully on me again. “Night, Texas.”
I go upstairs. I do not look back until the second-floor landing.
He’s still there. Hands in his pockets. Head tipped up. Watching until I’m safely inside.
And that should be enough.
Maybe for someone else it would be.
For me—it’s almost enough.
And that almost is becoming its own kind of addiction.
I was already in my seat, notebook open, hoodie up, trying to disappear into the back row when the door opened and the air changed.
Wood soap. Pine. And something softer underneath—something sweet and powdery that didn’t belong on a six-foot-four football player.
I didn’t have to look up to know who it was.
Drew Travers.
Hoodie up, sleeves cut off at the shoulders so those ridiculous tan biceps were on full display. Shorts slung low. Sneakers untied. He moved down the aisle like the room belonged to him, then tried to drop into the empty seat beside me.
“There’s no room,” I said before he could even get comfortable. “I’m reserving that seat. Besides, you’re so big you’d take two anyway.”
He paused, one big hand braced on the back of the chair, and grinned plopping down anyway.