Page 67 of The Golden Receiver

I still got twitchy every time I was away from him. Unfortunately, I had a class with Serena, and she noticed.

It wasn’t like it was hard to miss. The entire time I was in class, I was checking my phone. I was tapping my fingers on the desk. When Serena shushed me, I moved to tapping my foot instead. The moment the professor released us from class, I was off like a shot.

I wanted to get to Kieran’s class before he got out. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if someone hadn’t decided to follow me. “Can you slow down?” Serena demanded as she jogged to catch up with me. “I promise your boyfriend will still exist if you’re away from him for like five minutes.”

Her words stopped me dead in my tracks. “Kieran isn’t my boyfriend.”

“Isn’t he?”

“No,” I insisted. I started walking again, slower this time. That way Serena could keep up. I didn’t want to listen to her bitch, and besides, she was deceptively strong. She’d probably yank my arm and make me slow down. It wouldn’t be the first time. “We’re friends. Friends who hook up, but just friends.”

“And yet, you’re rushing to meet your friend at his classroom. You left the blood moon because you had a bad feeling about your friend. You refuse to leave your friend’s side because something bad happened to him,” she listed out. Every time she said friend, she seemed to add more emphasis to the word. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Why couldn’t she just believe me?

Instead, I decided to focus on one thing she said. “I wasn’t wrong. And it wasn’t just a bad feeling. I heard him. I could smell him across town, and he was hurt. I could smell his blood, and I heard him whimper. That’s not just a bad feeling.”

Serena laughed. “You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”

I stopped again, whipping around to face her. I was so confused. What was I supposed to figure out? I knew I had a crush on him, so that couldn’t be it. “I have,” I told her. I hated that she was going to make me say this out loud to her before I ever said it to him, but I knew that if I didn’t, she would never let it rest. “I know I like him.”

Serena blinked once, twice, three times. She looked at me like I was completely lacking in brain cells. “Oh my God, Evie, not that. That is just obvious to literally anyone who has ever seen you near Kieran.” No, it wasn’t. Was it? “You haven’t figured out the smell thing yet, have you?”

The smell thing? What was she talking about?

I shook my head.

“Did you ever pay attention to anything Kali and Luke said about werewolves?” she asked with a laugh. “Like some of the little idiosyncrasies of our species?”

I nodded. She didn’t look like she believed me. Probably because whatever she was talking about was something she’d learned from our pack leaders. It was probably something I should already know.

“When a werewolf meets someone that they’re really compatible with, they smell really good to them,” she explained. “Kali said she didn’t think it was any kind of mate thing, because there can be multiple people that smell really good. And they don’t always work out, you know?” I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway. “Luke thinks it has to do with the fact that we’re social animals by nature. Maybe it helps werewolves who don’t have a pack find someone that can be theirs, but Kali thinks that’s silly. Otherwise, it would always be another werewolf, and it’s not.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

Serena shrugged. “Never gave it much thought.”

I started walking again. Serena and I talked for a few more minutes, but then I saw Kieran. He was walking out of his building. My face split into a smile, and Serena nudged me with her arm. “Go get your boy. I’ll catch up with you later.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

The rest of the week passed quickly.

When I wasn’t in class, I was with Kieran. He insisted that we sleep in our own rooms the night before our game, but since it was an away game, it meant I got to sit with him on the bus instead of going to my boring science class. We sat at the front of the bus, and I noticed that a few people who normally sat further back chose to sit near us.

I wasn’t surprised to find Marlon sitting across the aisle from us. He had gotten close to Kieran, and I was even starting to trust him. Eric and Wes sat directly behind us. They’d figured out what had happened. Maybe not who was involved, but that our coaches’ speech before practice the week before had been about Kieran. Afterward, Eric had come up to make sure Kieran was okay and let him know that not everyone thought hazing new teammates was funny.

The game was amazing.

Unlike last week, our offense played like a well-oiled machine. Our defense was on fire, blocking and tackling like nobody’s business. It probably helped that the team we were playing did not have a winning record, but I was taking the positives where I could.

And the positives were that Willis and his lackeys could see that Kieran was the better player. Eric even helped with it by feeding Kieran a deep ball at the end of the game that resulted in a touchdown. It hadn’t been the game winner or anything, but it was highlight reel material. It was the kind of touchdown that our opponents would be watching in film study for the rest of the season.

I was beaming with pride the entire ride back to campus.

I was even more excited when I caught a whiff of my pack mates as we filed into the locker room. They were close by. Probably waiting to hear how the game went.

I think my excitement was the reason it happened. Somewhere between going into the locker room and leaving, I lost sight of Kieran. I didn’t realize he was gone until I grabbed my bag and went over to his locker so we could walk back to the dorm. I grumbled under my breath and left.