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THREE

SHANE

The final preparation for my study took two days. It was mostly an administrative task, aligning my schedule with Patrick’s. A lot of our lectures overlapped in the timetable, giving us a lot of free time for interviews and shadowing.

Once Patrick approved it, we were good to go.

That was how I found myself stepping out of the shower and looking at the mirror while a knot was twisting and tightening inside my chest. I held my breath as I stared at the thing in the mirror.

I had a strong hunch I was looking at the sole responsible person for all my woes.

I could go on blaming Professor Halden for pressuring me into this research, but the guy in the mirror was the one who pitched the idea so well.

I had imagined it as a sort of academic commitment that would put me on the map.

If I picked an interesting subject and dug deep into his psychology, my paper would be far ahead of anyone else’s this semester.

I’d be given the green light to go really big for my final thesis in my senior year.

These things mattered when academia was all that was left to you.

Liar , I thought to myself. That wasn’t all I’d been thinking of.

I had once been an athlete, too, but the course of my life had diverged from it.

I had withdrawn into myself over the years, avoiding all the typically popular social circles.

I didn’t go where hockey players went. I didn’t hang out with football players.

I crossed the street when I saw a swimmer walking.

They intimidated me, but they also attracted me.

That was the crux of it: they attracted me so much that it scared me.

Why couldn’t I be into regular people? Why couldn’t I just meet a nice guy and like him?

For a psychologist in the making, this was an interesting question to ponder.

Was I attracted to them or to the idea of what I could have been?

And what was that idea, after all? To be a good player or to be a bad player ?

Patrick was both; not that I should have had that opinion so early, but he was.

He was a great hockey player and a notorious campus flirt, exactly the type I had dreamed of being.

The very worst part of it all was this nagging thought I’d had underneath the surface from the start. If I had an excuse to be around a fiery ice demon for a long time, he would notice me.

Not that I was so delusional to think he would notice me in that way.

Patrick was a devil off the ice, flirtatious to a fault if the few passing encounters were anything to judge by, and with a temper that somehow went from zero to a hundred as soon as he laced his skates.

I’d be crazy if I wanted that kind of attention.

But as I sprayed my cologne along my neck, I pumped out more than I strictly needed.

I dressed quickly, piling layers over layers, from an undershirt to a checkered shirt and a loose sweater over it.

The Saints had drills in an hour, so I packed my blue and red notebooks, enough different-colored pens to last a lifetime, and only the three most important psychology textbooks that I might want to consult during the drills.

I made my way to Patrick’s place, pressure rising on my chest as I neared it.

No wonder I was still a damn virgin. Despite dying to be social, I was terrified of people.

Especially cool, successful people like Patrick and his friends.

One evening with them had made my hands sweat so much that I didn’t need any workout.

I was melting around them. The other two were gay, but you could trust me not to even have a passing interest in openly gay guys who might have an interest in me.

Oh no. I was the type who went all in on the least likely ones to have a sliver of interest in me. The less they wanted me, the better.

I crossed the campus space on my way to Patrick’s dorm, then worked up the courage to knock on his door.

And holy fucking shit, he opened it after two heartbeats, steam still rising from his honey-tanned skin, droplets of water-like constellations scattered over his bare shoulders, a fluffy white towel wrapped low around his waist, leaving his Apollo’s belt in the open to feast my eyes on.

His chest was broad and lifted like he was proud of his appearance, while his waist was trim and narrow, his abs cut and defined like he was made of marble come to life.

“Come in,” Patrick said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“I can wait outside,” I said, my mouth dry and my gaze wandering down the hills and valleys of his torso. Blue veins ran down his swollen biceps, barely under his skin.

“Don’t be stupid,” Patrick said conversationally and stepped away from the door.

I stepped into his room. One bed was a mess of sheets and clothes, a backpack lying open in the middle, stuffed with approximately everything that had ever been made.

Next to it, a cheap desk typical of dormitories was cluttered with pristine, unopened books with intact spines and a near-mythical absence of dogears.

He’d gone into the year ambitiously, but it was yet to be realized.

Patrick walked into the small bathroom on the other side of the room. His deodorant created a cloud of pine and seaside scents that shot into the room like Cupid’s arrows, striking me everywhere. Had the arrows been real, I would have walked out a hedgehog.

The bathroom door was slightly ajar, concealing Patrick but providing a direct view of a mirror.

Patrick’s back was turned to it when he untied the towel from around his waist, and I knew— I knew —I had to look away.

It was the only decent thing to do. Anything else would be gross overstepping of the trust he was placing in me.

I was here to observe him more intimately than most people ever would.

It had to be clinical, detached, and built on his trust that I wouldn’t abuse this privilege and place of power.

But the towel swooshed away, and strong legs made for ice devilry he was known for were in my view, bare and smooth, spread apart and rising to a perfectly shaped ass several shades paler than the rest of his body.

Patrick Callahan sunbathed in Speedos, and I didn’t know what to do with that information other than fight the creeping flush of heat it caused.

Then he looked over his shoulder into the mirror, where he undoubtedly found my reflection.

Could he see how glassy my eyes were from seeing him naked?

Did it please the attention seeker within him?

He looked into my eyes in the mirror, and my heart stopped between one beat and the next. All of time stopped.

The door shut. I had been so absorbed in the intensity of his gaze that I never noticed him move.

There. The show was over, folks, and I’d revealed myself as a peeping creep and a lousy researcher.

Was a glimpse of a cream, smooth ass worth it?

Hardly. But I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, which was awkward because Patrick would step out any minute, and I really needed to get my body under control.

I directed my thoughts to the fact that I was absolutely terrified of this project and lurking around the Saints all semester.

It felt like dragging a cat with zoomies from a scratching post, but my attention ripped away from Patrick’s naked figure to the pit of despair that sat in the center of my being.

In a minute, Patrick was done. The door flew open, and he stormed around the room with a cheerful grin on his face and a gaze that jumped from one thing to another, never landing on my face.

“We should probably get going,” he rambled.

“The drills never start on time, but you should see some locker room time if you want to get a real sense of psychology and dynamics and whatnot. Not sure what happens later. Sometimes, we go out for drinks. It’ll be late enough to drink, right? Do you drink, anyway?”

I shrugged, guilt filling my chest like I was about to be sick. It rose so high I could taste it in the back of my throat. “Occasionally.”

“Right, the pink stuff,” Patrick said.

“The cleaning paste?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Patrick zipped up his backpack and faced me, his gaze lagging by a heartbeat before meeting my eyes. “Ready?”

“One more thing,” I said and dug through my backpack. “The smartwatch. If you don’t mind.”

“Nope. I signed up for this, didn’t I? Use me however you like.” He shot another grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He must have heard the words that had just left his lips. After the mirror incident, it was hard not to have wild and sweaty images fill my mind. My skull was going to shatter.

I turned the watch in my hand. “And it won’t bother you while you play?”

“Not at all,” he said.

I tapped the screen before fastening the watch to Patrick’s wrist and made sure everything was set to default.

“This is going to record your heartbeat and measure the distance you cross, the speed at which you do it, and add a timestamp to the dataset.” I pressed the watch to Patrick’s wrist and forced my fingers to be calm and quick about strapping it.

Touching his skin was unavoidable. “I’m the only person with access to your data. ”

“It’s safe with you,” Patrick said.

I wondered if this was subtle sarcasm. I said nothing.

We’d already established I was too easily distracted from the ethics of it all.

When the silence stretched too long, I tucked my hands into my pockets.

“I’ll download the data at the end of every day, reset the watch, and hand it back the next day. ”

“Not gonna track me in my sleep?” Patrick asked.

I forced a laugh. “I considered it, but it will have to be a self-assessment.”

He nodded, then gestured at the door with his head. “Let’s get going.”

So we did.