Page 3 of Blitz

“Do you want to—”

“No.” I want nothing she’s offering.

Her face falls. “Right. Yeah.”

I turn to go.

“See you tomorrow,” she yells at my back.

I raise my middle finger in goodbye. I can hear her scoff behind me. I don’t care.

I never wanted to see Mason Prince again. I never wanted to spend another moment in her presence. And now we’re stuck together.

It’s only five o’clock. There’s plenty of time for me to hit the football gym across campus. I grab a new set of workout clothes from my locker and change before I can talk myself out of it. The gym is nearly deserted. There are two rookies deadlifting in the center of the room. I nod to them and head to the treadmill. At my size, I can’t run very fast or very far without my knees and ankles protesting. Still, I set the machine to a punishing pace and prepare to get my ass handed to me.

She’s here. She’s at Newton.

Did she follow me here?

I never wanted to see her again. I never wanted to think about her ever again. I can’t go down that road. Once that box is opened, I’ll never be able to close it again. I loved her. She destroyed everything good about my life. Now all the memories of the best moments in my life are tainted.

She loved me, but she didn’t love me enough to want to make it work.

My hips ache. My knees throb. My ankles sting. Still, I keep going, running through the pain. It reminds me that I’m alive. I have breath in my lungs. My heart beats a thousand beats a minute. I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.

I can live without her. I’ve been doing just fine for the last two and a half years. I can survive with her being back in town. I can get through this. I let out a roar of—I don’t know, triumph? Frustration?

“That’s right, man,” one of the rookies says. “You tell ‘em.”

I hit the five-mile mark, and the machine decides it’s had enough of my brutal strides. It powers down into a cool down automatically. Hands on my hips, I try to catch my breath. I don’t feel better.

But I don’t feel worse, and sometimes, that has to be enough.

Chapter two

Tucker

The guys are sitting at our usual table in the back of the dining hall when I roll up. I take my usual seat with a grunt. Maybe a five-mile run with no warm-up wasn’t the best idea.

“Oh, honey,” Sam says, her small hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She looks me over, then my plate. “If you want to talk, I’m here for you.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine. Nothing to talk about.”

My plate is laden with three servings of spaghetti and meat sauce and two portions of garlic bread. No vegetables, no salad. I’m not interested in health today. I don’t care if the school nutritionist yells at me for ditching my macros. My whole world is falling apart at the seams. I can eat a little bit of pasta if I want to.

The guys talk around me. Well, Amir, Greg, and Barrett talk. Wes reads his book. Miles and Sam play footsie under the table, lost in each other’s eyes. It should be sickening. It’s not.

I miss the days when Mason and I used to be like that. We had the world at our fingertips, our whole life ahead of us. And she decided going to frat parties and hooking up with strangers was more important than our life together. So, no, I don’t miss her. I miss the idea of what we had, the lie I believed.

I need a peanut butter sandwich. That will make everything better. I push back my seat, and Sam scrambles to her feet.

“I want ice cream,” she announces loudly. “You coming with me?”

I don’t trust my voice, so I nod. She wraps her arm around my elbow and leads me through the dining hall.