“Always.”
“Good,” he says. “My treat.”
We end up at a burger shack off the freeway, the kind with neon that flickers and grease you can smell from the parking lot. It’s perfect.
He orders double everything like he hasn’t just run drills all week. I stick with a single burger and fries, but he slides his milkshake across the table anyway.
“Chocolate,” he says.
“You gonna share with everyone else you dunk on too?”
He smirks around a mouthful of fries. “Depends how good they taste.”
I damn near choke on my Coke. “Did you just?—”
“What?” His expression is all wide-eyed innocence.
I kick him under the table. He doesn’t even flinch, just steals another fry from my basket.
We talk about nothing for a while. Fries, bad music on the speakers, the couple making out two booths over. But eventually he asks, “How’s the band?”
My chest swells. “We’re ready for this weekend at The Lantern. Friday night.” When the call had come in, the guys and I had all but jizzed in our pants.
Something flickers across his face—pride, maybe. He doesn’t say it, but I see it. He’s proud of me.
“Setlist ready?”
“Mostly. I’ve got a couple of new lyrics I want to try, but we’ll see if the guys don’t mutiny first.”
He chuckles, shaking his head. “You make it sound like war.”
“Sometimes it is. Creative war.”
He hums, sipping from the shake he stole back. And for a second, the noise of the place drops away. It’s just us, sitting in a cracked booth, our knees brushing under the table. It feels dangerously close to domestic, to something bigger than either of us signed up for.
We linger over cold fries until the place thins out, Ollie pushing crumbs around his tray like he’s avoiding the clock. When he finally checks his phone, his mouth twists.
“Coach,” he mutters.
“You in trouble?”
“No. Just a reminder about tomorrow’s lift.” He sets the phone down like it weighs too much. “Feels like I haven’t stopped since the season started.”
“You haven’t,” I say.
He huffs a laugh, no humor in it. “Yeah.”
We walk back to the car in the kind of silence that isn’t empty, just weighted. The air’s cooler now that the sun’s dipping, enough to bite when the breeze slides under my hoodie. His shoulder brushes mine once, twice, like he doesn’t notice he’s doing it.
By the time we get back to campus, it’s full dark, dorm windows glowing, voices carrying on the quad. He parks in his usual spot, cuts the engine, and just sits there.
“Long day,” I say.
“Yeah.” His fingers drum the steering wheel. Then he glances at me, eyes unreadable in the dash light. “Thanks for going out there.”
“You make it sound like I had better plans.”
“You could’ve.”
