“Or smelled his gym bag,” someone adds.
“Pretty sure just being near him after practice is enough to make you go blind.”
“You’re definitely the superior James,” Jacques assures me.
“I appreciate what you’re doing, but?—”
“Way better looking,” Bennett insists.
“And Bennet swings both ways, so that means something,” Parker whispers to me.
I laugh out loud, which gets me a look from the librarian, but she’s distracted when a flash goes off from the table next to us.
“We value silence and privacy in our libraries,” she warns.
None of my notes are up to my standards, but I’ve laughed way more than I have in ages. Professors keep looking at us in ways that would normally make me panic, but someone says something under their breath, and it’s so much easier to just be happy.
Bennet and Parker walk me to my last class. The first time someone points in our direction, Parker wraps his arm around me, as if to shield me, but it has the opposite effect. People who weren’t looking at us a second ago now seem confused.
“…thought you said a hockey player,” are the only words I make out.
“I don’t think this is helping,” I tell him, assuming he’ll let me go so I can walk the rest of the way on my own, but he looks around, assessing the situation, then nods like he has everything figured out, which is more concerning than reassuring.
He walks over to Bennet and slips his hand in his. Phones that were on me quickly turn onto them, so I hurry over to the closest building, only getting stopped twice, and nearly collide with Noah.
“I’m so sorry,” I say before realizing it’s him. We’re still outside, but it feels like all the air is sucked away and all I can breathe in is him.
“It’s my fault, I wasn’t looking.” His eyes are focused on me. If I didn’t know any better, I would assume he’d watched me run into him.
There are so many things I want to say, so much I want to do, but none of it matters anymore. He’s not my Noah. He never was.
“Are you headed to Macroeconomics?” Mike asks me. It takes me longer than I’d care to admit to nod. “Perfect, I have Micro. I’ll walk you.”
“I’m sorry the world found out,” Noah tells me.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t the one who told you,” I say under my breath, but he hears and looks at me sadly, like it wouldn’t have made a difference. And that breaks my heart all over again.
The only thing I want to do after my last class is hide out in my dorm room, but our door is open, and I can hear voices inside. This usually happens when Anna has her study groups, but those aren’t on Mondays. I take a step closer to see if she maybe forgot to put a sock on the handle, because I never even thought to come up with that kind of a system, but just like no one is discussing academics, it doesn’t sound like a date.
It sounds like they’re talking about me.
“My dad cried after that touchdown, Anna. That’s how good he is.”
“She never brought him in here?”
“I didn’t even know they were related.”
“They have the same last name, and his picture is literally right here. Fuck, they’re all there. Clayton James was the starting pitcher when they won the world series.”
“How much do you think this would fetch on eBay? Is that where you sell stuff like this now?”
“It’s a picture of a child, no one is getting off on that,” Anna argues.
I freeze outside the door, tears burning as I refuse to let them fall. The football team has been overly protective, yes, but everyone we’ve encountered has been nothing but nice. Smiles, hellos, compliments on my outfit, on my hair, on my brothers’ stats and previous games…but this is not nice.
I shouldn’t hold it against her, because it’s behind my back, not meant for me to hear, but it’s in my space, where I am supposed to be safe.
“Savannah.” The sound of my name snaps me out of my mini panic attack, but it’s the tone really, the kind that implies it isn’t the first time she says it.
