Page 85 of Touchdown, Tennessee

He locked eyes with me, his body language changing in an instant.

It was clear he wasn’t 100% sure if I’d seen the text.

Right now, we were in no-man’s land.

Or purgatory.

Every instinct that had been drilled into my brain for my whole life told me loud and clear:don’t let on that you know. Pretend you saw nothing. Just. Fucking. Act. Normal.

But another instinct was just as strong, and it was something… newer. An emotion I’d never really had before when it came to writing an article.

Protect him.

That one came from my heart, not my mind.

And what the fuck was I supposed to do with that?

“I need a glass of water,” Andrew said, clearly going intoflightmode and trying to run away from the situation.

“Hold the fuck up,” I said, reaching out to grab his hand as he tried to walk off. “Talk to me.”

I gave him a little tug, bringing him back over into the alcove with the pool table.

“I can’t,” he told me.

I’d never seen Peachel shut down like this before.

A complete 180 from how he’d been before, all drunk, warm, and fuzzy.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“Nothing fucking good.”

“What does that mean?”

“You need to know, don’t you?” he said suddenly, anger and hurt rising in his face. “You don’t tell me shit about your past, but now I’m forced to. Because I misplaced my phone, like I always do. God, I can’t handle anything?—”

“Andrew, it’sokay,” I said.

He met my gaze as he walked deeper into the alcove, leaning against a tall set of shelves behind the pool table.

People were still laughing, drinking, and dancing all across the bar, but Peachel was in a corner, looking like he’d just been deflated.

“He cheated on me,” Andrew said. “My… ex. If you can call him an ex. I thought we were exclusive, because one night, he told me helovedme, and said he didn’t want to be with anyone else. It was my mistake to believe him. And then I found himtongue-deep in a blond man’s mouth in a bar, just a few weeks later.”

He’d had his heart broken.

The heartbreaker himself.

Out and proud, able to have any gay guy he wanted, but this had happened to him.

“It was the dumbest thing I’d ever done, to begin with. Dating the one person I shouldn’t. Jeopardizing my fucking future. Mycareer. Which is gone now, I guess, anyway.”

“How is your futuregone?”

“Because I know you,” Andrew said, his eyes welling up as he looked at me. “You put a good article first. Before anything. And I know what you saw.”

I swallowed.