Page 57 of Campus Muscle

“Why do you even care?” he finally asked, his tone quieter but also more dangerous.

The words died in my mouth because even though the answer sat right there at the tip of my tongue, I could never admit it to someone like him. It was far too close to my heart for a football player to trample right over it.

“Because it’s wrong,” I said, giving him the easy, uncomplicated version.

“That’s not good enough, and you know it. If you want me to answer your questions, why don’t you do the same with mine? Why does this whole situation feel so personal?”

“My mom was a journalist,” I whispered, my throat tightening. “She didn’t ignore things because they were inconvenient. And she didn’t let people get away with things just because it was easier. She believed the truth mattered.”

“So you’re trying to follow in her footsteps by proving this is something that it isn’t?” His tone was harsher than I had expected.

He wasn’t wrong. This could be nothing at all, but I wasn’t going to walk away because it made people uncomfortable. That wasn’t who I was, and if people couldn’t accept that, it wasn’t my problem.

Silence stretched between us, but it wasn’t empty or meaningless. It was charged with a current I couldn’t quite place until Trace stepped closer. He closed the distance between us until his closeness became impossible to ignore, but I didn’t move away. My pulse had kicked into a higher gear, and my breath caught just enough to be noticeable.

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to risk,” he breathed.

“You’re already risking it. I’m just trying to stop you from making things worse.”

The air rushed from my lungs as he put his hands on my hips. We were so close that neither of us could pretend we were still arguing. The anger that had settled between us not too long ago had turned into something else, and this was far more deceiving.

“Stay out of it.”

“Make me.”

The words were a dare, a thin thread stretched to the breaking point. I looked up at him, my pulse jumping in the hollow of my throat. The whole gym shrank down to the scent of sweat and cooling rubber, the distance between us closing until I could feel the radiated heat of his skin. I blinked, and that was all it took.

A slip.

One moment we were standing on the edge of a cliff, and the next, his mouth was pressed firmly against mine.

It was a quiet, concentrated burst of friction. We were standing in the middle of the floor, visible to anyone who cared to look, and that knowledge forced a brutal kind of restraint into the kiss. It was hard and sudden, a physical manifestation of every biting comment and every “off the record” threat we’d traded.

My hand fisted into the damp cotton of his shirt, pulling him an inch closer, while his fingers locked onto my hips. His grip was unyielding, as if he were trying to keep us both from causing too much of a scene. Even so, it wasn’t enough to make him stop.

Not that I wanted him to.

There was no softness in it. His tongue rolled over mine with a chaotic mix of frustration and hunger. The same that felt like it’d been around this whole time, but we didn’t know it.

Common sense finally punctured the haze, and I pulled back.

“No,” I said under my breath, my palms flat on his broad chest as I held him back.

It wasn’t directed at him but at myself. Trace didn’t try to rectify the situation or reach out. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. I turned on my heel and stormed out before I could change my mind.

20

Trace

I don’t know what bothered me more. Was it the fact that it happened? Or was it how clearly I remembered it?

Or maybe it was just how good it felt in the moment and the thought of what else I could do to her.

Usually, things blur with time, and I had hoped it would happen with this too. But it didn’t. I’d spent so much time thinking about it that it burned into my mind.

I could clearly remember the taste of oranges that assaulted my tastebuds when she opened for me. The angle of her jaw as she pulled back, and the way her breath caught in her throat right before she did.

And I could never forget the feeling of emptiness that lingered long after she’d walked away.