Sure enough, Danny had to have the last word.
Danny: I could quiz you.
Danny: T? Where’d you go?
Danny: Sorry. I’ll stop bugging you. Good night, T.
“Good night, Danny,” I whispered to my phone screen.
Argh! Wasn’t it enough that I’d spent most of the day thinking about him and part of my precious study time texting with him? Now I was talking out loud to his texts!
Pathetic.
Why, oh why did he have to attend Mountain State? Knowing he was close enough to run into at any time was going to be the kind of distraction that could derail all my carefully built plans. My grad-school goals demanded straight A’s this year after I’d had a couple of hiccups in my GPA during last semester. I had absolutely no business thinking about, let alone spending time with, someone who stole my thoughts as easily as Danny did without even trying.
I had no delusions that I could be cool and not look for him whenever I was on campus. From the second I’d laid eyes on him on the sidelines of a football field a lifetime ago, my lizard brain had warned me he was my kryptonite. With the way my stomach bottomed out and my heart whipped into a sprint at the mere sight of him stepping out of his car in front of my parents’ house last night, I couldn’t lie to myself that I’d changed. Grown up. Moved on from my high-school crush on my best friend.
Though we’d spent most of the past four years apart, I was still tuned in to him as if he were the only available frequency. That was the problem: I couldn’t seem to stop myself from paying attention to him, caring about his latest setback in his relationship with his dad, worrying with him about becoming part of the team, trying to steel my heart against seeing him with women who attracted him in a way I never would.
The true problem was that terrible, awful emotion called hope. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to quench that teeny-tiny flame that one day he’d wake up and see me as more than a friend. Maybe what I needed to do was sign up as one of the test cases for the psychology students—have one of them practice rewiring my brain so I could see Danny the way he saw me: as only ever a friend. With him insisting on enrolling at Mountain State, I needed to figure out something to retain my sanity.
?Chapter Six
?Danny
Taryn came homefor about a minute and a half over the Fourth of July. She stayed in town long enough to watch the parade with me, let me horn in on her family’s annual park picnic, and drive me to distraction with her pure delight at the fireworks. Good thing those shows take place in the dark so she didn’t catch me adjusting the front of my jeans more than once. Her sexy oohs and aahs made me wonder what she sounded like during other activities people liked doing in the dark...
The next day she left town again almost before I’d rolled out of bed. When I dropped by the house to discover her gone, Mrs.Hamilton’s unhappiness with T’s choices told me this behavior was new. I had to wonder if T’s need to return to campus was truly about a job and a class or possibly about something—orsomeone—else. The thought soured my stomach.
I’d had the idea of talking to her about arriving at fall football camp a day or two early, having her show me around campus, maybe casually easing her into a date or two. Instead, we’d spent the entire Fourth with her family. Her actions had implied she was deliberately making sure I didn’t have any one-on-one time with her. Then she’d skyed out of town without even saying goodbye. Something was off, but damned if I could figure out what.
When I arrived on campus the day before fall camp, I reported to the men’s dorm where freshmen and transfer players had been assigned until we found permanent living arrangements. With limited exceptions, freshmen were required to live in the dorms for at least the first semester.
As I dropped my gear in my assigned room—one I was sharing with a junior college transfer player, thank Christ—I wondered if there was any chance I’d connect with an upperclassman on the team who was living in a house or an apartment and open to taking in a roommate. The idea of spending even a semester in the cramped quarters of a shared bedroom, even with a Wildcats teammate, set my teeth on edge. Plus, Coach had said he’d help me with an exception to the living-in-the-dorms rule.
Of course the first thing I did after dropping my duffel on the bed next to the wall, staking a claim to it, was text Taryn.
Me: Got a minute to grab a coffee? Maybe show me around campus?
Crickets.
I mindlessly scrolled through social media, watched a couple of videos on YouTube, and—
Crickets.
I tried again.
Me: Hey, T? You around?
Stretching my legs, I stared out the window at the gorgeous summer day and wondered where she could be, who she could be doing.
“Fuck!” I hissed. This was Taryn I was thinking about. Beautiful, sweet, innocent Taryn. The fact my mind kept straying to thoughts of her with someone else only proved how much I wanted her. How much I had always wanted her.
We weren’t in high school anymore. When I left the Air Force, I’d seen to it that the two of us would not only be in the same time zone but on the same campus. Both of us were single—I hoped. If she was seeing someone else, I wasn’t making the mistake of being supportive again. Not after what went down this past spring. No way was I taking a chance on losing her again.
After an hour without a response to my texts, I gave in to my growling stomach. Along with my room key, the desk clerk had given me a campus map and pointed out the cafeteria directly across the quad from the dorm. With it being summer, not too many people were enjoying dinner in the sprawling space. While the selection was decent, I knew from experience the test was their hamburgers. If they could make a decent burger, the rest of the food would probably be passable. Admittedly, Air Force chow halls had spoiled me. Tina wasn’t wrong when she said my branch of the military had the best reputation for taking care of its service members.
I ordered a burger and slid my tray over to the condiments station where I loaded it how I liked it with jalapenos, tomatoes, bacon, lettuce, and aioli. The fact the cook had fried up my burger fresh in front of me with a thick slice of Swiss on top gave me confidence the food on campus would be good at least. It needed to be to make up for the three-inch piece of foam masquerading as a mattress I was expected to sleep on in the dorm.
