“Are you serious? We beat the Golden Bears. We won the conference championship. You have to come out and party with us, Island Girl.” My voice sounded desperate to my own ears but damn. I was running on adrenaline and pure fucking excitement. I wanted—scratch that—I needed my girl with me to celebrate the biggest win of the season so far.
“I’m on call this weekend, Hotshot. I can’t leave the dorms.”
Even with the raucous party interfering with my hearing, something in her tone was off. In fact, her tone had been off since last Tuesday when she came over to work on our project—when she gave me the most incredible sex of my life. I swear, my body still hummed with what she did to me that night.
And hadn’t done since.
She’d made some lame-ass excuse for not studying with me at my place, so we worked on our presentation in the Union on Thursday night. Friday was a travel day. We kicked some ass on the field this afternoon and arrived home a few hours ago. The party at Fitzy’s was in full swing almost before the bus had rolled to a stop in the parking lot at the field house. It was the biggest night of the year, and my girl wasn’t spending it with me. What. The. Fuck?
Someone bumped my arm and almost jarred my phone from my hand.
“Whoops! Sorry.” Tory’s eyes glittered up at me, and she didn’t look the least bit sorry.
With a narrow-eyed sneer, I turned my back on her. Redirecting my attention to the most important girl in the world, I said, “Can’t you get someone to cover for you?”
“I already owed two of the other RAs for covering for me so I could see your games against the Trojans and the Miners. This weekend is me actually returning the favor. So, no. I can’t get anyone to cover for me.”
She was quiet for a minute.
Tory was not, her whine loud enough to be heard over the thumping bass of some hip-hop song the DJ played. “Callahan. Dance with me.”
“You should probably go celebrate. Sounds like you’re in demand.”
“Hey, hey! What’s going on, babe? Are you mad at me?” I stepped away from where Tory was grinding her ass against the back of my thighs.
The sigh on the other end of the call sounded exasperated. “It isn’t about you, Callahan. I’m working all weekend, all right? Go have fun with your team—and whoever.”
That last part came out so low I almost didn’t catch it.
“Do you think I’m cheating on you? What the hell?” I demanded.
“Callahan,” Tory sang my name from somewhere beside me. “Come play with me.” She tugged on my arm, and I jerked away. She let out a wail, her hand flying to her mouth. “Ouch! You split my lip! Look what you did!”
In horror, I saw a drop of blood on her mouth when she pulled her hand away.
“Shit. I have to go, Jamaica. I’ll call you back in a while.”
After pocketing my phone I clued in that the thumping music had suddenly stopped, and a crowd was surrounding Tory Miller and me. Massive crocodile tears dripped down her face as she stared at me. The corner of her bottom lip had turned puffy, and a weight the size of California dropped into the pit of my stomach.
“I can’t believe you punched me,” she said through sniffles.
“I didn’t punch you. I was doing everything I could to move away from you.”
“Then how do you explain this?” She pointed to her swelling lip.
“I might have accidentally caught you with my elbow when I tried to shrug you off me.”
On the edge of the circle I clocked the grim expression on Fitzy’s face as he shook his head, and I shut my mouth hard enough to crack a few teeth.
A calculating gleam hid behind her tears. “If you don’t want my dad to find out about this, you should probably drive me home now,” she said.
Finn and Bax stood beside Fitzy, twin expressions of horror on their faces. Fitzy frantically waved his hand beneath his chin in the universal gesture for “Cut!”
I stared hard into the viper’s eyes. “The last thing I want is to be alone with you, Tory. Especially not in the cab of my truck.”
“You hit me. Everyone saw it,” she accused with slitted and suddenly dry eyes.
Two of the members of her girl group nodded enthusiastically when she turned her stare on them. The rest of the crowd around us wavered between prurient interest and worry depending on whether they were players or not.
“After ruining my night you need to be a gentleman and take me home.”
My hands came up in front of me, warding her off when she took a step in my direction. “That makes no sense. Why would you want the guy you’re accusing of hitting you to take you home?”
Her hands flexed at her sides, and her face assumed a mottled red hue. Then she stomped her feet in a classic tantrum. “You wait until I tell my dad how you hurt me and humiliated me in front of all these people. You had your chance. Now, you’re gonna be sorry, Callahan O’Reilly.”
Turning on her heel, she flounced out of the middle of the crowd as her entourage parted to allow her dramatic exit. As if on cue, the music cranked up again, and with the end of Tory’s scene, everyone resumed dancing and drinking and laughing. Except for my friends and me.
Finn slung an arm over my shoulders and hauled me to the kitchen. Bax and Fitzy followed in our wake. We didn’t stop until Finn handed me a beer.
“Looks like you dodged a bullet there, ’Han,” he said.
Bax shook his head. “I don’t think so, bro. I think the ugly is only about to begin.”
Fitz clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, man. She wasn’t invited. I didn’t even know she was here until she started screamin’ about you hitting her.”
“I didn’t hit her.” Scrubbing a hand down my face, I blew a breath at the ceiling. “I was trying to talk to Jamaica on the phone, and Tory kept buzzing around me like a damn mosquito. When she grabbed my arm, I just reacted.”
Bax’s speculative stare made my skin crawl. His inappropriate T-shirts and lack of finesse with the ladies aside, the guy was brilliant, one of the smartest people I knew. Whatever he was thinking, I wasn’t going to like hearing it.
“She set you up.”
“What?”
“She set you up.” Bax sipped his beer, ran his tongue over his foam mustache, and tipped his cup in my direction. “You said she was buzzing around you while you talked on the phone. Then she grabbed you and you reacted.” Crossing his arms over his massive chest, he downed another pull from his beer. “She wanted you to push her off. Didn’t her sister do something kinda like that with Freeman when she yelled assault and caused his draft stock to drop like a bomb?”
That weight in my stomach gained about a hundred pounds. “Yeah.”
“Her dad is already threatening you with your sponsorship, so why would Tory pull this stunt?” Finn asked, his face a mask of confusion.
I shot him a “shut your fucking mouth” glare, and he hunched his shoulders and downed his beer.
“Her dad is threatening your sponsorship?” Fitz’s tone was pure thunder. “What the fuck?”
“It’s nothing. I’m handling it,” I said through my teeth, my words directed at my loudmouth roommate who retreated a little further into his beer.
Speculation shone in the depths of Fitz’s dark brown eyes. “That guy thinks his shit don’t stink. It’s about time someone proved to him that it does.”
“I’m not starting anything with Buzz Miller,” I warned.
“You don’t have to. From the sounds of it, he started it with you,” Fitz pointed out.
From the second Jamaica told me she wasn’t coming out, my night had gone from sugar to shit. Though I had a plan for my sponsorship, it came with its own set of perils. Tipping my cup to my lips, I drained my beer and held it out to Bax for a refill. I couldn’t do anything about anything tonight. Might as well get shit-faced and worry about it in the morning.
Something in my expression must have tipped him off to my mood. “Come on. Let’s drink some beer, play some games, and celebrate kicking the shit out of the Bears,” Bax said, refilling my cup. “Remind ourselves we’re college athletes and fuckin’ conference champs.”
Beer sloshed over the rims of our cups as we toasted each other and downed them in one go. By some unspoken agreement, for the rest of the night, my roommates made sure my cup never ran dry. They also made sure I woke up alone in my own bed the next morning with no idea of how that had happened. Flashes of losing at beer pong then at cornhole in Fitz’s back yard interplayed with off-color toasts and general fuckery. Judging from the wrecked state of my clothes—and the stench—I’d had one hell of a time.
Unfortunately, my stomach wasn’t impressed. I should have known what to expect when I started my day praying to the porcelain god.
At film Coach rode our asses over how hungover we all were, which did nothing for my pounding head. Afterward, when I called Jamaica to invite her over for the afternoon—and hopefully the evening—she passed. She was still on call and had dorm meetings. Something about the way she turned me down sounded off, but she wouldn’t stay on the phone long enough for me to pry it out of her. All of which meant Sunday sucked.
One would have thought that earning a by-week in the playoffs with our conference championship would mean a lighter day in the weight room Monday morning. One would have thought wrong. From the second we stepped into the gym, Coach Larkin barked at us to stop being candy asses and push that iron in the air, making it clear we were being punished for tying one on after our big win. Guess our idea of celebrating didn’t mesh with his, though rumor had it, the coaching staff threw quite a rager after the game too.
When I arrived in class, Jamaica was already there, coffee in hand, and sitting between Axel and Jory. What. The. Fuck?
I stood beside Axel’s seat. “Trade me.”
He glanced up for a second and back down at his desk where it appeared he’d dumped out everything in his backpack—notebooks, pens, iPad. “I’m kinda settled in here, Callahan.” His coffee balanced precariously at the edge of the tiny work space, almost daring me to knock it off out of spite.
“Jamaica?” I asked.
Sparing me a nanosecond of her attention, she shrugged. “Class is starting.”
Dr. Dair’s dry delivery interrupted our standoff. “Is there a debate back there, Mr. O’Reilly?”
“No, sir.” I threw myself into the seat next to Axel, forcing him to scramble to grab his coffee before it spilled all over his jeans.
While Dair droned on for the next hour, I kept stealing glances at Jamaica who studiously avoided eye contact. When class ended, she lagged behind Axel until we were outside. Then she kicked it into gear, speed-walking away from me at a clip that would have grabbed the attention of every track coach in a five-hundred-mile radius.
Unfortunately for her, that foot difference in our heights favored me, and I caught her easily. “You mind telling me what’s going on? Why have you been avoiding me since last week?”
“I don’t normally have much time for social media.”
“Which I like.”
“Until it’s shoved in my face. I couldn’t go to the party so you were grinding on Tory Miller? What the hell, Callahan?” She stared hard at my hand where it lightly rested in the crook of her elbow.
When I let her go, she took off again and was halfway up the sidewalk before I caught her a second time.
“Are you going to believe what you think you saw on some blurry video or what I tell you is true?”
In seconds we’d reached the fork in the sidewalk where I went to the gym and she went to Huffine. “I don’t want to be late for class.”
“Jamaica.”
“Please, Hotshot.” The pain in those gorgeous green eyes gutted me. Then she ripped my heart right out of my chest. “Maybe we should take a break. You have so much going on with the team, your sponsorship. Tory Miller.” The way she swallowed told me it hurt. “I need to step out of your way, give you a chance to do what you need to do to make sure you go high in the draft next year.” For a second she closed her eyes tight, then she turned on her heel and ran to class.
Though the casual passerby probably wouldn’t notice, I was bleeding out right there on the sidewalk. I had no idea how long I stared at the empty space where the woman who’d stolen my heart, torn it in half, and stomped on it had stood. A shout drew my attention to the doors of the gym where Finn was waving at me. Only then did it dawn on me that for once, Tory Miller and her giggling girl gang hadn’t been waiting to interrupt me giving Jamaica her have-a-good-day kiss.
It was all I could do to drag my ass to film as the stone that dropped into my belly at Fitz’s party Saturday night became a boulder.