I tilted my head, letting my voice go quiet and thoughtful. “Hmm. Should I sleep under her bed instead? Maybe put atracker in her neck? Or get her kicked out of her dorm room so she has to move in with me?”
The group went silent for half a beat.
Jace froze mid-smirk. “You?—”
Garrett’s gaze flicked between us. “That sounds…oddly specific.”
Parker didn’t even try to hide his grin. “It does, doesn’t it?”
I smirked at him. “Should I make another list for you?”
That earned a low laugh from Parker, the kind that said he was both amused and absolutely unbothered. “Go ahead. I could use a refresher.”
I groaned, dragging a hand over my face. “I need to remind myself not to take romantic advice from the two of you.”
Parker’s grin widened. “You say that now, but give it a week, and you’ll be calling us for tips.”
Jace nodded. “You can’t deny that we’re experts in getting the girl.”
I snorted. “I guess that’s one way to describe felony-level courtship.”
Parker didn’t even flinch. “I prefer to call iteffective-levelcourtship.”
“Y’all are hilarious,” I muttered.
I was giving them a hard time, but I couldn’t deny my mind was going to some crazy places.
Not the pillow thing. I wasn’t that far gone.
But other things…
Like how I wanted to know the exact brand of perfume she wore, what time she went to bed, what she looked like sleeping.
I wanted her routine mapped out in my head like a playbook—every move, every breath, every fucking heartbeat.
I wanted to know what her face would look like if I slipped a note under her door that saidI miss you, even though she didn’t know she was mine to miss yet.
I wanted to steal a strand of her hair, twist it around my finger like a ring until it was part of me.
I wanted to hack into her phone’s location data, watch that little dot pulse across campus, knowing I could be there in seconds if she strayed too far.
I wanted to leave my jersey in her dorm closet, folded neat with a drop of my blood on the collar from a fresh cut, just to mark the space as mine.
I wanted to carve our initials into the goalpost at the stadium, deep enough that they’d have to tear the whole thing down to erase it.
Holy shit.
Why did none of those things actually feel crazy? Why did they instead feel…inevitable?
Maybe not the hacking her location thing…I’d probably never be able to figure out how to dothat.
But the rest…They all didn’t seem like things completely out of the realm of possibility.
Shit.
“You’re thinking about her right now, aren’t you? I can practically hear the obsessive narration forming in your head,” teased Jace.
“Go to hell,” I said mildly.
