Like he didn’t have tothinkabout how girls just orbited around him. It was as if it were some form of gravity, and he was the sun.
Gross.
I hadn’t noticed that he’d come back to the bar earlier. He and the linebacker had run away from me so fast that it had been amusing.
I’d come back into the bar after my littleconfrontationwith them. The social culture piece wasn’t going to write itself, unfortunately.
Melanie — third year, communications major, member of approximately four social committees if her Instagram was anything to go by — had agreed to talk to me about the bar scene on campus. Specifically, how students balanced social life with academic pressure. It was exactly the kind of safe, palatable, deeply uninteresting story my professor had steered me toward. I was doing it with a smile because I’d caused him enough trauma, and Iwouldneed his recommendation.
The problem with this piece, apart from how boring it was, was Melanie.
She’d been uncomfortable since she sat down, answering in short, careful sentences, her eyes constantly flicking to the door. I wasn’t sure if she was waiting for someone to come in and save her, or if she was contemplating just running.
I’d tried every angle — open questions, long pauses, and sympathy about how much work she did. Nothing. She gave me enough for two paragraphs. Nothing more.
I’d been losing her, and I knew it.
“So what would you say is the biggest social pressure students face in—”
“I think it’s just like, you know, finding balance? Everyone’s stressed.”
Groundbreaking stuff. My professor was definitely giving me an A for this.
I smiled, nodded encouragingly, and reminded myself that not every interview was a revelation. Some would be like Melanie, mentally preparing herself to run away from me, while telling me that balance was important.
But then his laugh carried over the music— warm, effortless... unfair. I’d turned and met that dark stare, and I was instantly back to the other night when he’d been kissing me, still wondering how I’d gotten wrapped around a guy I hadn’t been formally introduced to.
He’d been watching me, and then his attention had turned to the door. Once again, he’d confused me, because at first, he looked pissed off that she was there. Maybe it was because, while she was gorgeous, she was obviously younger than us. And then the three of them had gone outside. She’d leaned into him, smiling like he’d told her something funny.
I doubted it. He didn’t have ‘joker’ on his list of many talents — that I knew of, anyway.
I watched QB10 walk back inside with Noah Matthews, the linebacker, and then I saw the STD on legs walk away withthe girl. He looked at me, and I hadn’t hidden the fact that he repulsed me.
Manwhore.
Total cliché.
“Hey, Melanie, thanks for this.”
As predicted, she picked up her stuff and fled.
I finished my soda, sucking the straw so hard it made that obnoxious empty-cup noise. When I looked back up, Dante Spence was watching me. Shit. I didn’t wanthisattention.
His reputation for being cold had been blown out of the water the other week when he had a beatdown with his teammates. But still, that icy stare unnerved me. He’d lost privileges, apparently; he needed to lose more than that in my opinion, but what did you expect from the beloved quarterback of a program so rotten they should physically stink as a warning.
I dipped my head, not to look demure, but as if I hadn’t been aware the asshat had been watching me. I should leave. I had things to do. Like... well, actually nothing pressing, because I was stillsort ofsuspended.
Academic probation.
No official write-up. Just the Dean’s Watch List, which was basically the university’s polite way of saying, “We’re not kicking you out, but we’re definitely waiting for you to slip up.”
I’d written one investigative blog post about suspicious spending in the athletics department, and suddenly I was Public Enemy Number One. Dean Cole had called it “defamatory,” demanded that I remove it, then smiled for a photo next to the head coach at a fundraiser two days later.
So yeah, that wasn’t suspicious at all.
After that, every question I asked was met with silence. The few sources I thought I could count on stopped returning messages. My professor advised me to “focus on lesscontroversial stories if I wanted recommendations from anyone other than him.”
Because apparently, asking where the money went on a social platform counted as controversial and didn’t “fit in with a school of this character.”