Page 2 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

The thoughts tugged on the corners of my lips.

It was as inevitable as needing to inhale that I would fast-forward to the coming fall and all the things it would bring. And my smile only grew wider.

“Huh?” Cam muttered next to me and I realized I had lost myself in thoughts again.

“Nothing,” I said softly.

Cam snorted. “If nothing can get you grinning like that, I’d love to see what something could do to you.”

I lifted my arms and slipped my hands under my head, twining fingers. Maybe I could ask him while he played Fallen Order. It was true we never talked about big things, this one was too big to ignore. We were finally leaving Holland, Michigan. We were finally getting away from the prying eyes of our families. Well, my family had prying eyes. Cam’s only shouted, as far as I knew.

It was weird that we hadn’t talked about it yet, though. The huge elephant in the room. And I was nervous about bringing it up first because it could make me look needy and I didn’t want that. I wasn’t needy. I just knew what a good deal was. I’d known it instantly; as soon as we had received our acceptance letters, I had known what the ideal arrangement would be.

We should be roommates at Northwood University.

It only made sense. We had been friends — I’d even say best friends — for half our lives, and we’d been having sex for months. We had been teammates throughout high school and we would continue to be teammates at Northwood. Arctic Titans for the win. We were both going on a hockey scholarship, so it was obvious we wouldn’t be parting ways any time soon.

Not that I wanted to rush things.

We had a good thing here. I could keep this going for ages. We didn’t need to make it official. Hell, we didn’t need to have sex every week, either. I could totally go on like this and have my best friend with me when we embarked on the next chapter of our lives.

But when I looked at Cam, my heart throbbed softly and a fear of something changing clawed at my guts. Talking about anything important had gotten harder the longer we had been intimate. Or talking about anything at all. My tongue was tied and my palms were sweating. The sneaky little voice inside my head kept telling me he would just scoff and shake his head if I said something stupid or sentimental.

I scanned his face. He seemed so peaceful, gazing at the fluorescent stars glued to my ceiling. It was nearly noon and they weren’t glowing, but he’d slept over enough times our entire lives, long before we’d turned our sleepovers into something better, that he knew what they looked like at night.

He was all sharp lines and angles. There were no curves on his handsome face. Straight nose, pronounced Cupid’s bow, thin lips with sharp outlines. Even his eyes were narrow and his eyebrows flat when he wasn’t frowning. Everything about him whispered of caution and alertness. He was deadly elegant like a young tiger.

Cam looked around, then spotted his underwear on the floor where he had thrown them over his shoulder. It had been a dorky move that had made me laugh. He was swift in getting out of the bed and picking them up, then putting them on. When that was done, I fully expected him to fire up my PlayStation, but he hesitated. “Your folks are coming home soon,” he said.

I checked the time on my phone. “Yup.”

He nodded, still hesitating, but I wasn’t sure what was up. He knew my folks wouldn’t mind it if they found him here, playing games. They’d pretty much made it clear they had given up on me. In their eyes, I had chosen to chase a rubber disk on ice. It was far from a noble profession like my brother, a doctor, pursued. If I spent my Sunday morning gaming, it wouldn’t faze them. So long as they didn’t know what sort of sinful bliss had preceded it, we were good. And I was very careful that they would never find that out. That was why I got up and dressed too, then made a round to clean up all the evidence from my room.

“Riley,” Cam said so quietly I almost thought I had imagined it.

A creeping sense of foreboding tickled the inside of my stomach. “Huh?” I asked without looking over. I was in the middle of wrapping up the used condom in toilet paper. Why wasn’t he playing the game already? That was how our Sundays were supposed to go.

“Can you stop doing that?” he asked.

“I gotta clean this up before they return,” I muttered flatly. Why was he acting strange? He knew the drill.

“It can wait a minute,” he said.

I held my breath and tucked the wrapped up condom inside the nightstand’s drawer. “What’s up?” I asked as I turned around. Cam was wearing his shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, his sculpted arms making me drool. His hair was messy in a stylish way, making him look like a bad boy through and through.

“We should talk,” he said, his tone impossible to decipher.

I swallowed. He must have figured out that I had been forging plans for us. “Er…yeah,” I said, mentally running through my options. Honesty. That was the best way to go. “I’ve been thinking,” I started, hesitating a moment, then remembering to grow a pair. I lifted my chin. Facing against a dozen beefy guys on ice never scared me. Looking Cam in the eyes rendered me a disintegrating mess. “Since we’re both going to Detroit, I think we should be roommates. I’ll bring my PS.” I tacked on that last part without thinking. It sounded like I was bribing him with my gaming console.

Cam’s jaw stiffened.

I knew that look. It was usually the look with which he arrived, not the one he wore after sex. It was the look that followed his parents shouting the roof off the house. “Riley…”

“I mean, they have a team house, right? We’ll be living in the same house anyway. It’s not like we can afford a place to rent.” I snorted. My heart rate was quickening. “And we already know each other. It’s better than having to get used to someone else’s routines.” I was deliberately avoiding the very thing I wanted the most.

I wanted to be there when he exited the shower, skin flushed and hair tousled. I wanted to be there when he studied so hard his eyes turned red and he pushed himself away from the desk with a tired sigh. I wanted to witness the moment his breathing changed when he fell asleep, then again when he woke up. Most of all, I wanted to be the thing he saw first every day, even if I slept across the room.

We’d been dancing this careful little dance for the better part of the year. I never brought up what I wanted next because we had the same destination in mind. There was always time for that kind of talk later. We first needed to get away from our families and settle in at Northwood.