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SEVEN

SHANE

Something was going on, and it was my fault.

I stared at the smartwatch in my hand, and guilt rose to my mouth like bile. I knew exactly what I’d done, and I’d gotten all the confirmation I needed. I didn’t even need to read the data.

Something in the locker room made Patrick freak out every time. Something about this silence between us in the moments of weakness and exposure made his heart race and his mood sour. And after this, I was pretty sure I knew what was up.

You fucking creep , I told myself and tucked the watch into my backpack before storming out of the gym.

I’d gone too far with him for the sake of curiosity.

His behavior had made no sense. His physiological responses were scattered all over the place.

But here it was, out in the open, needing only one more glance at the data to confirm what I’d suspected.

Patrick wasn’t afraid. Those weren’t the heartbeats of someone who was scared or shy or experiencing panic. It was lust. Pure, primal lust. The kind of lust that could wreck you and leave you panting for more. The kind nobody had ever been recorded experiencing around me. Nobody except Patrick.

And even then, it was too egotistical of me to think that he’d actually responded that way because of some secret attraction to me .

I wasn’t attractive. I didn’t have a gravitational pull that everyone else was born with.

The fabled chemistry I had with people was very much on the charts.

Thinking the campus womanizer was into a lanky virgin with Doctor Who box sets filling up my shelves was the craziest hypothesis of the century.

I went to my room and unpacked. I tossed the smartwatch into the drawer and out of sight.

It was only causing me trouble, and seeing it tempted me too much.

Besides, the data was going to disappoint me.

There was no way his pulse corresponded with my failed attempts at being attractive.

And if somehow it did, then it was wrong.

My methodology was off somewhere. There was something that wasn’t accounted for.

The room felt tiny and suffocating. I left everything behind and hurried out.

The chill evening air greeted me like a healing kiss.

I walked off campus and in the direction of the lake.

My mind didn’t clear like I’d hoped. The fog didn’t lift.

But it was better than pacing around my little room and wanting to see if Patrick was horny for me—because he wasn’t.

Patrick’s cold goodbye chilled me more than the October evening in Chicago ever could. He didn’t need to drool all over what I’d exhibited tonight to become clearly aware of what I was doing. And it put him off. Anyone could have told me this would happen. On some level, I must have known.

I walked and thought about it. In the night air, it felt as though I had more space to reason and think. These things filled me to overflowing, but the open sky couldn’t be filled.

I had overstepped today. Patrick had allowed me into his life and his space, and I had used it to measure just how attractive I was to someone who wouldn’t notice me if I stood all by myself in the middle of nothing two feet in front of him without the excuse of my thesis. I had to stop doing that.

It had felt good, though. For the first time ever—or in however long I could remember—taking my clothes off in front of another person didn’t feel like taking a shield off before an enemy soldier wielding a sword.

It hadn’t felt like an admission of defeat.

It hadn’t felt like exposure to all the nastiest things that he could think of me.

Something about Patrick had given me confidence that I had lacked before.

I never would have undressed for a crowded beach. I never would have done it in a locker room right in front of another person. Normally, I changed quickly and faced away. But just the mere suspicion that Patrick might want to see what I had to show made me do it without hesitation.

And then he understood that I had done it for his benefit. And he disliked me for it.

Lessons had been taught and learned today. And when I returned to my room, I didn’t take the smartwatch out of the drawer.

He texted me like he promised. It was late morning, and I was listening to a lecture when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

He sent a single line of text: his place, two in the afternoon.

What had been an engaging lecture instantly turned into torture.

The professor droned on and on, and the seconds refused to tick away.

I knew what he was going to say to me. He was going to stop the project. I only hoped he would have the pity to say it’s just too time-consuming. If he told me I’d made him uncomfortable, I would die of embarrassment on the spot. It was what I deserved, but I still hoped he would be the better man.

Keeping my breaths even, I powered through the hours and dragged my guilty ass to Patrick’s dorm. When he opened the door, he was alone and wore a smile like it was any other day. “Come in,” he said.

I stepped inside warily, waiting for the snare to close, but he only walked over to his bed and crashed down.

“Elio’s out,” he explained. “He’s always out these days. Jaxon’s keeping him on a tight leash.”

“Yikes,” I said, looking around the room. Elio’s bed was perfectly made and had been every time I was here. Patrick’s was a cozy mess.

“Nah, it’s what he needs,” Patrick said. “Someone to control him a little.”

I nodded, trying to see how this connected to us.

“To be honest, I sometimes envy them,” Patrick said. “Write this stuff down,” he added with a grin.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What do you envy?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I’ve never been in a relationship?” Patrick asked.

I shrugged. “I’m assuming you’re totally transparent when you talk to me, so yeah.”

“Right,” he said, and sarcasm was impossible to miss. “Well, I haven’t. Not once.”

“Only because you didn’t want to, I’m sure,” I said.

He shrugged. “Maybe. But it makes me wonder why I’m avoiding it.”

I licked my lips. Was this some kind of bait? I decided to bite it. “Maybe you can’t imagine settling down for a while when the single lifestyle is good to you.”

He cracked a smile again, laughing a little. “It’s good, alright. But it gets boring, too. Wash, rinse, repeat.”

I swallowed the growing knot in my throat and looked into his eyes. “Why did you invite me?”

“Easton, Jace, Elio, and Jaxon are going out for drinks,” Patrick said. “I’d hate to be the only single. Wanna come?”

A date? I thought. All this circling around and distant taunting to invite me to a triple date? “I don’t…”

“…think it’s appropriate?” Patrick asked, and his voice only had a slight edge to it.

Maybe it wasn’t even there and real. Are you seriously going to talk about what’s appropriate?

You? After undressing me with your virgin little gaze and dropping your pants to test me?

The words may have been from my own conscience, but they were just as true as if he’d spoken them aloud.

“Why not? It’s just drinks. Pretend you’re shadowing me. ”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Patrick laughed out loud and crossed the room in a hop and two long paces. He slapped my shoulder way too fondly, his fingers lingering too close to my neck for a moment too long. “You look like I just sentenced you to hanging.”

“I’m not good in groups,” I admitted. “But I should observe you.”

“We can’t miss a chance to observe,” Patrick teased, his hand on my shoulder, shaking me a little.

I shot him a look that was a plea for mercy, but he only threw his arm around my shoulders while telling me the details of this get-together.

I held my breath for a moment or two, then nodded. “Sure, alright.” He had plenty of people to choose from. He could have invited any teammate, and they would have felt honored. He could have picked up a girl at a bar, and she would have been hearing the wedding bells.

I slipped from under his arm. The unpredictable shift from cold to warm jarred me enough that I didn’t want to be in this spot at all. I’d rather he picked one, even the cold one, and stuck with it. Anything else was way too confusing.

For no discernible reason under the sun, Patrick’s fingers dug into my rib cage, stabbing a yelp out of me. He laughed. “Fuck, sorry. I didn’t think you’d scream.”

“Er, that’s fine,” I said tightly. “Do you have drills today?”

“You know it,” Patrick said.

I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

“Oh.” He blanked for a moment, then shrugged like it was nothing. “Sure. Later.”

“Yeah,” I said, a frown creasing my brow as I walked out of his room.

What the hell did he want? My heart raced as I returned to my room.

Jokes, teasing, random touches, an arm around my shoulders, and so much grinning was unlike him.

I didn’t know what to do with this attention.

Especially not after he had practically run away from me.

I shut the door and walked over to the desk, pulling the drawer open and staring at the undisturbed smartwatch lying on top of notebooks. I snatched it grudgingly and transferred the data to my laptop.

There it was…

My mouth went dry, lips parting, as I stared at the screen, cross-matching the timestamps.

A steady pulse as he ran on the treadmill, increasing within the reasonable range the faster he went.

I was certain that my heart had been pounding far quicker at that level of straining, but that was irrelevant.

It was much later, just two minutes after I had noted us descending down to the locker room, that Patrick’s heart exploded into a drum solo.

His pulse was off the charts then, calming down momentarily and rebounding with fury. And it went on and on, long after I had undressed and left him by the lockers. The graph went on with panic-like inputs to the very moment Patrick had taken the watch off.

Maybe he had been angry that I had tried to be so provocative, but I didn’t think that was it. Why would he then invite me today to come over? And for a meeting that could have been a text message? Yeah, I wasn’t buying it.

If it annoyed him, fine, but Patrick’s body responded in a way that was too clear to keep ignoring.

I stared at the screen, letting this realization sink in. I was attractive. To one unlikely, impossible person’s heart, I did this . And I knew it now. I knew it because I was dishonest and in a massive breach of trust.

What a goddamn victory for me.