I should have known my good mood from seeing Creek yesterday was going to change the moment I was in front of the kids again.
“You like dick, right, sir?”
I almost choked on my tongue. “I’m sorry. What did you just say to me?”
Amanda Grant put her hands up in surrender. “Sorry, sir. Penis?”
Slapping a hand over my face, I fought back a groan. I could hear faint giggles around me, but Amanda’s face remained sort of passively curious. “That is incredibly inappropriate.”
“Um. You’re the one who told us to use anatomically correct names for body parts,” she defended.
I rolled my gaze up to the ceiling and took a calming breath as I leaned my ass against the table serving as a poor excuse for a teacher’s desk. Health class was always a goddamn afterthought in spite of the fact that it was largely responsible for the drop in both teen pregnancies and STI rates. But fuck my job, right? Why should I have a nice chair?
“You should absolutely use the word ‘penis,’” I told her, my tone deadpan. “But you should never, ever ask your teacher about their genital preference.”
“It’s giving transphobia,” one of the kids called from the back of the room.
Amanda turned and glared. “Fuck you, Craig.”
His name was definitely not Craig, but he was new, and I couldn’t remember it.
“Please don’t make me give out referrals today,” I begged. “It’s been a really weird day.”
Amanda’s gaze zeroed in on me. “Is it because you like that guy’s”—she stopped, contemplating her words—“dimples?”
“He doesn’t have dimples,” I said swiftly, then froze. Did Creek have dimples? I could conjure his face in my mind almost perfectly. I could feel the ghost of his chapped lips. I could still taste him on my tongue even after all this time. But I couldn’t remember if he had dimples.
I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He so does,” someone else said.
I clapped my hands together. “Cool story, time for PE.”
There was a loud protest in the room, but I clapped my hands again, then gestured toward the door. “This attitude is giving I want to run the mile,” I called.
“Please don’t try to be cool,” Not-Craig said.
I shrugged and grinned, reaching for my cane as the kids all filed out of the classroom and headed for the gym. They were supposed to be taking a quiz, and I could see that most of them hadn’t gotten past question three, but I was in no mood to sit in a classroom and be grilled on the annoyingly hot Army sergeant who had crawled into my brain and was apparently making a home rent-free.
I was also pretty sure there were going to be some creepy TikToks of the two of us going up since, apparently, kids had noticed I’d been…well. Staring.
But it was impossible not to stare.
Creek looked good in ratty gym shorts, sweating bullets and grunting like a farm animal on the parallel bars in PT. But he’d looked like a damn god in his uniform, and it had done things to me. My attraction to straight men was bad enough, but apparently, it was volatile when the straight man kissed me and then showed up in his Army uniform to flirt with me.
Because he had been flirting.
That had definitely been flirting.
And then to make it worse, Creek had to go up in front of the entire junior and senior classes and bare his soul in ways I both hadn’t expected and hadn’t understood until now. I knew that being in the military had been part of his life. I just hadn’t realized what a huge piece of his whole identity it had been. It was like something had cracked open and all of his sharp edges had softened. He wasn’t the Creek I knew from PT. He was something else now. Something new.
It felt like my entire view of him had rearranged. And that was the worst thing in the world because the more he changed, the more I wanted him.
I hated my life. I had no idea if his feelings were real, and now I had no idea how to be around him because he was just so much…more than I’d thought. I needed a break. I needed something to give.
I followed the kids into the gym, then glanced around and spotted a rolling cart full of basketballs. Grabbing my whistle, I got their attention with two sharp sounds, then pointed. “Two teams.”
“Shirts and skins?” Not-Craig asked, smirking at a group of girls.
