Not because I had an idea, or a plan, or anything worth saying, but because I needed to move my hand, needed to keep it busy before it betrayed me by knocking on his bedroom door. Forgiving him. Or worse, touching myself to the memory of him.
I don’t even know what I drew. It came out in dark, frantic lines, more pressure than art. Angled edges, sharp corners. Smudges where I pressed too hard and snapped the tip of my pencil. When I finally pulled my hand back, I realized I’d sketched him.
Not the Dare that laughed in my face.
The other one. The one from before. The one who used to look at me because I mattered. The one who used toseeme. I stared at it until my eyes blurred. Then I ripped the page from the pad and tore it in half. And then into fourths. And then into shreds.
I dropped them in the trash and curled up on my side in bed, pulling the blanket up over my head even though it was too hot, even though I couldn’t breathe under there.
I needed the dark.
Because everything else hurt too much to look at.
CHAPTER 16
DARE
I always thought he'd be mine in some secret, silent way. Watching him give that away broke something I didn’t know was holding me together.
Practice had becomea kind of purgatory lately. The one place where I could pretend I was too busy to feel anything. Drills. Laps. Header practice. The rhythmic whistle of Coach barking orders. My body moving on autopilot, lungs burning in all the right ways.
It kept me just distracted enough. Because the second I stopped—when I hit the showers, when I walked to class, when I lay down at night—the noise came rushing in. Unfiltered. Untamed. All of it, the guilt, the anger, and the memories.
Him.
So I threw myself harder into it today. More aggressive. More clipped passes. More fake smiles slapped across my facewhen my teammates called me “savage” or “relentless” as a compliment. It wasn’t.
I wasn’t playing for the win. I was playing to bleed.
The field was half-mud from yesterday’s rain, and the sky hung heavy with clouds that hadn’t made up their minds. My cleats slid with every pivot, and Coach had been barking plays nonstop since kickoff. I was everywhere—midfield, backline, back up again—killing myself to prove something I couldn’t name.
Halfway through a scrimmage, I felt that buzz under my skin, the unmistakable energy that saysyou’re being watched. My foot nearly missed the ball on the next pass.
I scanned the field, assuming Coach was glaring at me again, but his attention was on someone else. Someone standing at the edge of the chain-link fence.
My breath froze in my lungs.
Tru.
He stood there, an apparition pulled straight out of the past, wearing jeans and that goddamn pink shirt with the sleeves pushed up. His hands were shoved in his pockets, head tilted slightly to one side like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to be there. He had that shit in his hair again. He’d stood in front of our bathroom mirror and sculpted it with purpose.
The late afternoon sun hit him at a weird angle. Too bright. Too beautiful. Tru was something I couldn’t touch. And for the briefest second, my chest lit up with hope that had dared to spark inside it.
Maybe… maybe he came to see me.Maybe he missed me.
My heart curled tight as a fist in my chest.
And then the taught wire fucking snapped. Andre Vargas,my teammate,jogged toward the fence, his shirt slung over one shoulder as if he thought he was hot shit. He stopped right next to Tru, said something just for him, and grinned.
Trusmiledback.
And the match inside me was snuffed out.
They talked too easily, like there was history there. Maybe they’d kissed. Maybe worse. Maybe he’d told Vargas the things he used to tell me. Laughed at his jokes. Touched his arm. Stared up at him with those trusting blue eyes, seeing the most interesting person in the world—and it wasn’t me.
I wanted to scream.What the fuck is this?
“Yo, Carter!” someone shouted. “Focus!”
