“Do I intimidate your teammates?” she asks quietly.
“No.”
“Should I?”
“Probably.”
She laughs again.
And I realize something uncomfortable.
This is easy.
No history.
No tension.
No five-year ghost standing between us.
On paper?
She makes sense.
D1 athlete.
Driven.
Focused.
Latina, too — a quarter Mexican, she’d mentioned casually once, like it was trivia. There’s a Spanish lilt that slips into her voice when she’s animated. Maybe, I have a type after all.
Her parents are oil and ranch money in Texas.
Old money meets new money.
It aligns.
I hate that my brain registers that.
Rumors begin.
They always do.
“Vale and the Texas striker.”
“Power couple.”
“Basketball and soccer royalty.”
We’re not even doing anything besides walking to class or studying together. She leans over my laptop to read a graph and her hair brushes my arm.
But perception is louder than truth.
She starts waiting for me outside lectures.
She texts memes about our professor.
She steals one of my fries just to prove she can.
