Riley wanted to earn respect… and damn, did she.
The next few days of practice, I watched the team embrace her like never before, arguing about who would get to sit with her in the cafeteria, and clamoring over the chance to hang out with her after practice. We had more guys in our dorm than we had all season — until the night before the Homecoming game, when Riley kicked them all out so we could study and get a good night’s sleep.
As if kicking Kyle’s ass wasn’t enough, she then went out and had a monster game against one of our biggest rivals, kicking not one, not two, but three field goals when our offense got close but not close enough to convert the touchdown. It was because of those three kicks that we won, and she was carried inside the locker room on the shoulders of players who acted like she didn’t exist just a week before.
I was proud of her — though on the night of the competition it was more rage than pride scorching through my chest. I’d never come so close to murdering someone in my entire life than when I saw Kyle shove Riley to the ground.
The image haunted me for a few nights after, how she went sideways, her body angling in an unnatural way until it slammed against the turf. I saw her hair splayed out around her, her body limp and lifeless as I sprinted toward her with the commotion of all the other players dulled in the background.
I’d never felt my heart beat like that before, never felt that… possessive.
It scared the shit out of me for more reasons than one, most of them too deep for me to face or try to untangle. But every night when I woke with that recurring nightmare, I’d be covered in sweat, panting, and I’d have to fight the urge to run next door to her room and crawl into bed behind her, hugging her to my chest.
I didn’t know what was coming over me.
All I knew was that something had changed.
I was in my head one evening after practice, packing up my shit in silence when Riley bumped me from behind.
“I need to study and work on an assignment that’s due in a couple days,” she said, not really looking at me as she shrugged on a loose t-shirt over her sports bra. “You should join. I know you have that test in Statistics coming up.”
I groaned. “Don’t remind me.”
“Well, someone has to or you’re going to show up unprepared,” she said with a laugh. She shrugged her duffel bag onto her shoulder. “Come on. I can help.”
I sighed, shoving the last of my stuff into my own bag before forcefully zipping it up.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she teased. “I’ll grab some pizza on the way home.”
I grumbled. “I still hate you.”
That earned me a laugh, and then she looked back at me with honey-green eyes, her damp hair falling over her shoulders.
“No, you don’t,” she said, sticking her tongue out.
But I couldn’t smile at the joke.
Because she was right.
I didn’t.
And it struck me in that moment how much of a problem that was.
Riley
“This is dumb and makes no sense.”
Zeke threw his pencil down, scooting back in his chair before slumping into it with his angry eyes focused on the textbook in front of him.
I gave him a sympathetic pat on the arm. “It’s not that bad. You just have to think of it in terms of betting, kind of. Like the odds of something happening.”
“That also makes no sense to me.”
I chuckled. “Well, then why did you sign up for this class?”
“Because Mrs. Pierson told me to?” He shrugged, as if that was obvious.
“Okay, but did you tell her what you want to major in?”
“I don’t care,” he said quickly. “Football is my real major.”
I rolled my lips together, setting my own pencil aside as I angled toward him. “Okay, just playing devil’s advocate here, because we both know you’ll go pro,” I prefaced. “But… what if you didn’t have football. What would you want to do?”
“Die.”
All emotion slipped off my face. “Don’t even joke like that.”
“Honestly?” He finally looked at me then. “I don’t know if that is a joke.”
I frowned, looking at the textbook in front of him for a long moment. “Look, I know that’s your plan A, B, and C. I’m just saying, rather than getting a business major because that’s what they said to do, what if you majored in something you like? Something that could be a fallback plan?”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “Sports management. Physical education. Sports psychology.” I brightened at that one. “Honestly, you’d be perfect at that. Look at how much you’ve already helped me.”
He smirked. “I think you kicking Kyle’s ass is what helped you.”
“I wouldn’t have had the balls to even make that bet if it weren’t for you.”
His brows shot up, and he leaned over, glancing between my legs. “You’ve got balls?”
I elbowed him hard in the ribs, earning me a satisfying grunt. “Anyway,” I said, bringing him back to the subject at hand. “I’m serious. Go see Mrs. Pierson and talk to her about what you really want to do, what you’re interested in.” I waited until he caught his breath and looked at me again. “You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for. And I bet you’d surprise even yourself if you had the right content in front of you.”
Something of a shadow passed over him, but he shook it off, leaning forward and grabbing his pencil. “Alright. Let’s get back to it.”
I let him drop the subject, focusing on my own study guide for a while before Zeke huffed again. He squared his shoulders, sitting up nice and tall before he began studying again.
Only to repeat the process.
“Why are you so agitated?”
“I’m always like this when it comes to schoolwork.”
“I know. But why?”
He blew out a long breath, grabbing the back of his neck with one hand. His eyes skated to mine before they fell back to his textbook. “It’s just different for me.”
“What is?”
“This,” he said, thrusting an open hand toward the textbook. “Studying. Reading. Writing. Anything related.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. I mean, I know it’s not exactly fun but—”
“I’m dyslexic, Riley.”
His words shocked me silent, and I frowned, tossing the word over in my mind like a coin. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it though. I knew of the learning disorder, had heard of it, but I didn’t personally know anyone with it.
At least… I didn’t know I knew someone with it.
“I… had no idea.”
“Not many do,” he said. “My parents. Teachers. Gavin.” He shrugged. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“What does it mean?” I balked. “Oh God, that was rude. You don’t have to answer that.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, dropping his pencil altogether and sitting back in this chair. He let out a long sigh, folding his arms over his chest. “It’s hard to explain. I just mix up words sometimes, get the letters in the wrong places. And then that messes with the whole sentence or paragraph. I have a hard time comprehending what I’m reading, in big part because it takes so much effort to read it correctly, let alone retain anything.”
I swallowed. “Jesus… that sounds…”
“Frustrating?” he finished for me. “It is. And now you understand why I avoid it at all costs.”
I nodded, thinking about how easy it was for me to just sit down with my laptop and study guide and get to work, how easy it was for me to follow along in lectures, how tests didn’t faze me.
I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes.
But there had to be a way. There had to be some sort of trick or hack to make it easier.
I made a mental note to do some research, but I knew that wouldn’t help in the meantime. And one look at Zeke’s defeated face made me want to do something.
So… I gave him a little motivation.
“What?” he asked suspiciously when he saw the mischievous gleam in my eyes.
“I have a proposition.”
“Oh, God.”
I laughed. “What if we quizzed each other?”
“Sounds thrilling.”
I smirked. “But with higher stakes.”
He arched a brow.
“If you get a question right, I take a piece of clothing off.”
His other brow snapped up to join the first, and he looked around like he was being pranked and there was a hidden camera somewhere.
“I mean, you see me in my boy shorts and sports bra all the time, anyway, so I don’t know that it’s much of a wager,” I added.
“Oh, trust me,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s wager enough.” He frowned then. “What’s your end game? There’s no way you’re offering this without wanting something in return.”
“Well, first of all, I’m not worried about taking more than my socks off,” I said, wiggling my toes to emphasize the point. “Because you won’t get more than one question right, if I had to guess.”
He feigned offense. “Now who is it of little faith?”
“And when I win and we get through this quiz without me being naked, you have to do my laundry.” I paused. “For a month.”
Zeke whistled. “Ouch. That’s harsh.”
“That’s the bet. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re all about bets lately, aren’t you?”
I just shrugged, waiting.
Zeke watched me for a long moment of debate, eyes flicking between me and his flashcards.
“What, you scared?”
“For a week,” he tried to argue.
“Well, now it’s for the rest of the semester,” I said, reaching out my hand for his flash cards. “And you get one chance to answer only.”
His lips curled up into a grin, and he handed me the cards, angling until we were facing each other head on instead of side by side.
And it was the first time in my life I’d seen Zeke look excited about anything school related.
“Alright,” I said, reading the scenario on the first card. When I finished, I moved on to the first question. “What kind of sampling design is this? Cluster, stratified, simple random, or systematic?”
Zeke looked at me like I had four heads.
I chuckled, but didn’t offer any help — not with our new arrangement.
He thought for a moment, chewing his bottom lip before he said, “Simple random?”
“Nope. Cluster.”
He cursed as I shuffled through to the next card.
“Okay. ‘Number of visits per week’ is what kind of data?”
“Quantitative-discrete.”
I’m pretty sure my jaw actually hit the floor with how fast he spouted that answer off, and Zeke smiled at my reaction.
“I got it right, didn’t I?”
I glared at him in lieu of answering, kicking my sneakers off under the table as he waggled his brows.
“In a survey, one question asks students whether they plan to attend this week’s football game. Fifty percent of them answer yes. That fifty percent is… A, a parameter. B, a statistic. C, a variable, or D, data?”
Zeke closed his eyes, pupils dashing this way and that under his lids like he was visualizing something. His fingers did little scoops in the air, and then…
“Um… B?”
My face flooded with heat, and I glared at his stupid smiling face again before peeling off one sock and hitting him in the face with it.
“Come on! I get at least two socks for that. You counted both shoes as one.”
I ripped the other one off and threw it at him, too.
He answered the next three questions in a row wrong, which gave me my confidence back, and I was teasing him until he got the next one right and I had to lose my hair tie. He tried to argue that that didn’t count, but I said since I was the one stripping, I got to make the rules.
I had to admit, it was the most fun I’d ever had studying, the two of us laughing and making jokes at the other’s expense. We were running low on flash cards when he got me to strip my t-shirt overhead.
And that’s when the mood shifted.
Zeke was still laughing about some joke he had made about mutually exclusive events when I rolled my eyes and reached for the hem of my shirt. It was loose and baggy, one I’d thrown on after practice, and I ripped it overhead without a second thought, flinging it behind me.
“Alright, let’s see what’s next,” I said, shuffling to the next card.
But then I glanced up and found Zeke’s eyes blazing a trail from my collarbone down to my hip bone.
All humor had left him, his eyes hooded as they slowly skated across my skin. It was the same look he’d given me on the field when Kyle had knocked me to the ground, when I’d come to and found myself cradled in his arms.
He swallowed, the muscle in his jaw popping with the motion.
And then his eyes snapped to mine.
It was a rush of fire that came with that gaze, one that charred my insides and had me reaching for my water before I cleared my throat and focused on the next question.
My voice sounded far away, muffled — like I was under water and someone else was reading the question about the Poisson distribution. All I heard clear and steady was the chaotic rhythm of my heart beating, and I focused on that as I finished the question and my eyes found Zeke’s.
“A Poisson distribution models the number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space,” he answered, his voice lower, softer.
I swallowed. “What else?”
He frowned. “The events have to be… like… independent of each other. And the average rate of the events has to be already known.”
Fuck.
I couldn’t look at him as I nodded, and I dropped the cards to the table, standing slowly. I hooked my thumbs in the band of my shorts, peeling them over each hip, over my ass and my thighs before letting them slide the rest of the way down my legs.
I kicked them to the side, but I didn’t move to sit again.
I just stood there, a chill breaking out over my skin until I glanced up at Zeke.
The breath he loosened was deep and long, his eyes burning a path from my ankles all the way up to the gap between my thighs. He wet his lips, running a hand over his face that muffled whatever slipped from his mouth next.
When his eyes met mine, he swallowed.
And then he whispered my name.
That’s all it was, a slight, husky, “Riley,” that sent another wave of goosebumps parading over my skin. I shivered, eyelids fluttering at the sound, at how it felt to have him watch me like that.
Like he thought I was beautiful.
Like he couldn’t tear his gaze away.
Like he wanted to touch me.
I blinked, once at first and then rapidly as I immediately bent and swiped my shirt off the floor. I pulled it on quickly, gathering my laptop and study guide off our little dining table next.
“I need to…” I muttered, but didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t so much as glance at Zeke again as I gathered everything into my arms and made a beeline for my bedroom. I shut the door as soon as I was inside, dropping everything onto my desk before I fell to the floor, scooting back on my heels.
My back hit the door with a soft thump, my breaths erratic, heart hammering as I covered my mouth as if that could quiet my breathing.
On the other side of the door, I heard a soft curse from Zeke.
Then, he retreated to his room, too.
