Page 7 of Cross Checked
That meant he wasn’t done.
Coach Little turned back to the board. “You want to enjoy the fact that this campus treats you like royalty, fine. Enjoy it. But understand something right now. The second you put on that jersey, every idiot thing you do becomes bigger than you. It becomes the program. It becomes Kimball Falls University. It becomes my blood pressure, and I am trying very hard to stayalive long enough to retire somewhere warm where none of you can find me.”
Rider raised his hand without changing expression. “Would we be invited to visit?”
“No.”
Briggs nodded. “That means yes.”
“It means I’d fake my own death,” Coach said.
I almost smiled, but Easton leaned in again before it had the chance to happen.
“Aura said she’d come.”
That got through.
Not visibly. I was better than that. My face stayed exactly where I left it, neutral and attentive, eyes still on Coach Little as he launched into a speech about leadership, campus conduct, and the fine line between confidence and stupidity.
But inside, something shifted with the precision of a lock turning.
Bliss did not go to Hockey House unless Aura and Charm dragged her there, and Bliss Bennett did not go anywhere alone if she could avoid it.
The thought arrived fully formed before I could stop it.
Bliss would probably come.
The film room sharpened around me in a way I hated. The rattle of the vent got louder. Briggs’s pen tapped twice, paused, tapped once. Coach Little’s marker squeaked against the board as he underlined accountability three times like the word had personally betrayed him. My pulse stayed even because I had spent my entire life learning how to keep my body from reporting on me, but my attention had already begun rearranging itself around a girl who wasn’t even in the building.
Bliss Bennett.
Sports media major. Junior. Warm smile. Sharp mouth. Always smelled faintly like vanilla, rain, and whatever expensivelotion girls pretended was casual. She laughed with her whole face when something genuinely caught her off guard, but most of the time she gave people a lighter version of it. Pretty. Practiced. Easy enough to satisfy anyone who wasn’t actually paying attention.
I had been paying attention for almost a year.
Not in a way anyone could accuse me of. Not openly. Not stupidly. I didn’t chase her around campus or crowd her at parties or make a spectacle of wanting her because I wasn’t Briggs and I had no interest in being obvious. I saw her through mutual friends, at games, at The Sin Bin, in the student media office when the team got dragged into interviews, at group hangouts where she was always somehow the brightest thing in the room without trying to be.
And every time, my brain kept her and details stuck when they usually didn’t.
The way she twisted rings around her fingers when conversations got too serious. The way she checked exits in crowded rooms so quickly most people would never catch it. The way she angled her body when men stepped too close, still smiling, still sweet, still performing okay so well that people believed her because people liked believing beautiful girls were uncomplicated. The way her real laugh hit lower than her fake one. The way she looked at hockey players like she’d already learned something about us she wasn’t interested in explaining.
That should have annoyed me when instead, it made me want to know why.
“See?” Easton murmured, smugness threading through his voice. “Now you’re interested.”
I turned my head just enough to look at him. “You’re throwing a party because Aura finally agreed to show up?”
“I’m throwing a preseason party because school starts Monday and our community deserves morale.”
“Our community.”
“The people need us, Mercer.”
“The people you invite need therapy.”
“Also true.”
I faced forward again. “Why did Aura agree?”
