She gave me a flat stare. “Not every girl in your arms loses her common sense just because you’re trying to distract her with your BS.” Her hands smoothed over my pecs. “Is he out?”
I shrugged.
She looked disappointed, but sighed. “I get it,” she murmured. She rose on her tiptoes and kissed me lightly and then frowned. “I can do that, right?”
“Peterson, you can do whatever you want.” I kissed her back. “I mean, you already sucked me off in my parents’ house, I think a kiss on my lips in my dorm room is pretty tame after that.”
She punched my shoulder. I barely felt it.
“You’re an asshole.” She pointed at me, her glare stern. “You never get to tell that story.”
I laughed. “Who would I tell?”
We left my room together, and Dante was already waiting. Savvy was at the sink washing dishes.
“Savvy?” I looked at Dante, who just gave a kind of careless shrug. “We have a cleaner and a dishwasher.”
“Keeps me busy,” she said lightly. “Wasn’t sure how long you’d be with Hadley.”
Noah was at the door, foot tapping, and I wisely said nothing as we left. I kissed Hadley briefly one more time, and then we headed to the stadium.
We walked in silence. I don’t think we’d ever walked in silence. I knew I didn’t like it, but I also knew it was better to say nothing; we didn’t need this to be more of a thing than it was. At the doors leading to the locker room, I glanced at both of them.
“And if he loses his shit?” I asked quietly.
“Then the team doesn’t see thatwedidn’t try,” Dante murmured.
Noah nodded. “And we sit on the sidelines so anyone in the stadium will see we turned up.”
The locker room was almost empty. We timed it so we wouldn’t be late, but we also wouldn’t walk in when he was most likely there. We relied on the fact that our coaches would already be on the field. Afternoon training meant staggered drills, with position groups rotating through — the usual controlled chaos — but when we walked back in, it felt like the air itself thickened.
Noah slowed first. Dante didn’t.
I followed them down the hallway toward the locker room, the sound of whistles and shouting bleeding in from the field beyond the doors. Every step felt deliberate. Not defiant exactly — but not apologetic either.
The three of us changed quickly into practice clothes and then hit the field at the same time. Coach spotted us the moment we walked out of the tunnel.
He was standing near the entrance to the field, clipboard tucked under his arm, talking to an assistant. He stopped midsentence when he saw us, his expression flattening into something hard and unimpressed.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Dante stopped a few feet away. Noah and I flanked him without thinking about it.
“Training,” Dante said.
Coach laughed, short and sharp. “I told you I’d see you tomorrow atsix.”
“You told us to leave this morning,” Dante replied calmly. “We heard you, but we train in the afternoon.”
Coach’s eyes flicked to me, then to Noah, then back to Dante. Measuring. Calculating.
“I told youtomorrow,” he said. “Because I need you to stay out of my way.”
“With respect, Coach,” I said, keeping my voice even, “we missed reps. Spring game is coming up, do you think it’s best for us to miss training right now? I was late. My friends covered for me. In over three years, I’ve never missed training. Neither has Dante. And neither has Noah since he got here. I was late for the first time,ever, today. Not like some on the field behind you, who have never been sent away, even when they’re serial offenders.”
That got his attention. “You don’t get to decide that, Slater.”
“No,” I agreed. “But we do get to show up.”