I huff, pushing off the locker and running both hands through my sweat-dampened hair. The arena is silent around me. The ice machine hums in the distance. The fluorescent lights buzz with their institutional monotone. And I am standing alone in a locker room, half-dressed, fully hard, and profoundly aware that the cold shower protocol I established at home is about to become a campus tradition.
I turn toward the showers.
Because I am most definitely going to need a cold one now.
CHAPTER 13
The Tank
~SAGE~
"WHOSE SMELLY-ASS MASCULINE TANK IS THIS?!"
Jace's voice arrives from the hallway with the indignant volume of a man who has discovered biological warfare being conducted within his living space. The sound carries through the dorm's thin walls, bounces off the kitchenette tile, and reaches me on the couch where I am engaged in the very serious business of reading a hockey analytics report while inverted.
My body is upside down.
Spine draped over the seat cushion, shoulder blades pressed against the backrest, legs extended vertically and resting against the wall behind the couch. My head hangs off the front edge of the seat, my navy-and-emerald hair pooling on the floor beneath me in a dark, tangled puddle. The analytics report is clutched in both hands above my face, which is technically below my face given the current orientation, the pages held at an angle that requires my arms to defy gravity but provides the optimalreading position for a brain that processes information more efficiently when the blood is rushing to it.
I tilt my head back to look at Jace, who has materialized in the common room doorway holding the offending garment between his thumb and forefinger like a forensic investigator presenting contaminated evidence.
Archie's tank top. The fitted black one he stripped off in the arena and tossed at me as a substitute for carrying his gear bag, which weighed approximately the same as a deceased farm animal and contained enough training equipment to stock a moderate-sized gym.
The tank has been draped over the arm of the couch for the better part of a week, occupying its position with the passive territorial claim of laundry that has been neither washed nor returned and has therefore established residency through inaction. Its scent has been gradually permeating the common room's atmosphere in increments so subtle that my nose stopped registering it as foreign three days ago and started filing it underambient environment, which is a classification my hindbrain assigned without consulting my conscious mind and which I am choosing not to examine.
Jace observes my position. His dark eyes travel from my inverted face to my elevated legs to the analytics report suspended above my chest with the careful assessment of a man cataloguing evidence for a future intervention.
"Are you going through a crisis?" He tilts his head. "I can come back?"
I roll my eyes, the motion inverted and therefore visually confusing for both of us.
"This is how I read! It's comfortable."
"You look like you're plotting a man's murder." He walks toward the kitchen, his sock-covered feet padding across the floor with the quiet efficiency I have come to associate with hispresence in shared spaces. "Particularly that nerd who I swear stalks you, by the way."
I pause mid-sentence in the analytics report, the words blurring as my focus shifts from power play efficiency metrics to the accusation that just landed in my living room.
"Archie?" I crane my neck to track Jace's movement toward the refrigerator, my inverted perspective making him appear to walk across the ceiling. "He does not stalk me."
Jace arches an eyebrow as he opens the fridge, the interior light casting his angular features in a cold glow that emphasizes his skepticism.
"That man with those ugly glasses literally watches every move you make in class. For the last week. Every lecture, every lab, every hallway transition. I swear, if you breathed oddly compared to your normal pattern, he would notice." He retrieves a carton of orange juice and pours a glass with the measured pace of a man delivering a closing argument. "I sit three rows behind him in Literature. I have a direct line of sight to his head. And his head is aimed at you approximately ninety-seven percent of the time the professor is speaking."
I pout, the expression feeling particularly absurd given that it is being performed upside down.
"He's just obsessed with grinding my gears."
Jace laughs. The sound is warm and knowing, the specific register he uses when he is about to say the quiet part out loud.
"Yeah, clearly. He's obsessed with you the same way you're obsessed with that tank."
I huff with the full force of my diaphragm, which, inverted, produces a sound more reminiscent of a distressed seal than the indignant protest I intended.
"I am NOT obsessed. Besides, is it bothering you?"
He takes a long sip of his juice, his expression shifting from amused to aggrieved with the smooth transition of a man whohas been tolerating an olfactory assault for seven days and has reached his diplomatic limit.
"It REEKS, Sage. Our entire common room smells like a gym locker had a baby with a cedar forest and the baby has been fermenting in our living space for a week. I thought you owned a dead animal. I checked behind the couch. I checked under the cushions. I was about to call maintenance before I realized the source of the biohazard is a garment that does not belong to either of us hanging off the furniture like a territorial flag."
