Still scared.
Good.
Because fear meant she hadn’t forgotten me yet.
And she never would.
1
Bliss Bennett
The lecture hall smelled faintly like burnt espresso, wet denim, and whatever industrial cleaner KFU used on the floors before the semester started. Rain streaked the tall windows along the back wall, turning the entire campus outside silver and blurred beneath heavy northern Michigan clouds that had rolled in sometime before sunrise. Students kept filtering through the hallway outside carrying iced coffees and overloaded backpacks while construction noises echoed from somewhere across campus because apparently Kimball Falls University planned to spend the next fifty years renovating buildings nobody asked them to touch.
I slid lower into my seat near the middle of the lecture hall, balancing my iced coffee against my thigh while flipping through the syllabus Professor Simpson had handed out fifteen minutes earlier. Beside me, Aura was already highlighting important dates with the kind of terrifying intensity that made complete sense for someone planning to become a lawyer someday.
“You highlight like somebody’s life depends on this class,” I muttered.
Without even glancing up, she said, “And you approach college like a raccoon that accidentally gained access to financial aid.”
I snorted hard enough to nearly choke on my coffee.
At the front of the room, Professor Simpson fought aggressively with the projector remote while muttering under his breath. The man looked exactly the same as he had last year. Mid-fifties. Permanent caffeine dependency. Corduroyblazer that probably smelled like old books and stress. The entire communications department at Kimball Falls University had this same exhausted-documentary-professor energy like the university built them in a lab somewhere beneath the journalism building.
Finally, the projector flickered to life behind him.
PUBLIC IDENTITY VS PRIVATE IDENTITY
The room quieted almost immediately.
Simpson adjusted his glasses before pacing slowly across the front of the lecture hall. “Your assignment this year is not another lazy athlete profile where you ask somebody what adversity taught them and pretend journalism happened.”
A few people laughed nervously.
“You are creating a year-long human-interest documentary centered around identity construction,” he continued. “I want contradiction. I want humanity. I want the version of people they hide when cameras stop rolling.”
He folded his arms, scanning the lecture hall. “And by documentary, I don’t mean the latestNetflixseries about some terrible mom secretly cyberbullying her own kid.”
The class laughed.
“I want a real deep dive into somebody with an incredible story. I want raw human emotion outside of the version people perform for everyone else.”
Something sparked low in my chest instantly.
Not nerves exactly.
More like that weird electric click that happened right before an idea locked into place so perfectly you could physically feel it settling there.
Around the room, keyboards started clacking faster while Simpson pulled examples onto the screen—Olympic athletes, influencers, politicians, former KFU alumni—but I barely registered any of them because one face had already pusheditself into my head before he even finished explaining the assignment.
Cade Mercer.
Oh, that was dangerous, not because it was a bad idea. Honestly, it was probably too good.
Everybody at KFU already acted like Cade belonged in the NHL instead of college anyway. Captain of the Fury. Future draft pick. Rich Manhattan hockey royalty with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and the kind of effortless confidence people usually only had after spending their entire lives being told they mattered.
But none of that was actually what interested me. I wanted the other version of him. The one that slipped out when he forgot people were looking. Because every once in a while, usually in quieter moments, Cade’s entire demeanor changed. He’d go still in this strange hyper-focused way that made him feel less like some campus celebrity and more like somebody constantly studying the room around him.
Most girls saw the obvious stuff first—the hockey captain thing, the interviews, the money, the way half the female population at KFU practically short-circuited every time he walked into a party—but I’d been around him enough through our friends to notice the cracks underneath all of that polished charm.
