Page 22 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

“No,” Cameron answered for himself. “You’re not mad.”

I shook my head. “You could have asked.”

“Then you’d definitely say no.” He laughed mirthlessly and pushed himself away from the soccer table, crossing the distance between us like he had something to prove. “I might play some right now.”

“Aren’t you on your way out?” I asked, pointing at his attire as he passed by me, leaving me lost in a cloud of smoke and sandalwood.

Double fuck.

“Outside won’t go anywhere,” he said, not really paying attention to me at all, now. He lifted the controller and glanced at me over his shoulder as if daring me to stop him. “And you might lock this thing up by the time I’m back.”

I was silent, watching him as he turned back to the flat screen TV mounted to the wood paneling on the wall. I stared at the California tan he brought back to Michigan, the smooth skin of his arms and the back of his neck. I looked over the cowlick at the top of his head.

He must have felt the weight of my gaze on him because he never left the inventory in the game. He was just holding the controller and staring at the screen like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

A time later, he lowered his gaze from the screen and mulled over his words, then slouched. “What is it?”

“Yesterday,” I said, my voice so frail it sounded more like air than speech.

“What about it?” Impatience touched his tone and made all my nerve endings buzz. He dropped the controller and checked his smart watch for nothing, buying himself time. When he was out of it, he got up and faced me. “What do you want to know, Riley?”

“We almost kissed, didn’t we?” Heat rose to my cheeks as I bared myself so fully to the person who had a habit of hurting me. I aced all my courses and had an entire year of captaining experience; how was I so stupid?

“Did we?” he asked, his tone genuine.

I wasn’t sure which of us was moving toward the other. Perhaps we had moved at the same time. Regardless, we were standing much closer now than a heartbeat ago. “If Coach hadn’t entered, what would have happened, Cam?”

Cameron looked up, lips parting as he inhaled, then exhaled. His minty breath tickled my nostrils before he returned his gaze to my eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan.” His words seemed carefully constructed and somehow dragged out of his throat. When he inhaled again, his shoulders pulled back and his chest rose.

I licked my lips, finding myself moving closer to him, and lacking a plan. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

A snort. Of course.

“You still don’t trust anyone around you, Cam,” I said.

“And I’m supposed to trust you? After you’ve marked me as your arch-nemesis?” The sarcasm was thick in his tone as he lifted his foot and dropped it near mine. “After you and Caden made half the team look at me like I’m a foreign spy.”

I’d gone into this conversation far more softly than I was feeling, now. Every word he said hardened my resolve that yesterday could have been a horrible disaster had Coach not walked in. And yet, each sandalwood spiced breath I drew affirmed Cameron’s monolithic presence in my life. “You can’t blame me if people choose sides.”

“I can do whatever the hell I want, Riley,” he growled. “And I blame you for making sides.”

“You obviously have no clue what my life was like after you left,” I hissed at him, lifting my head just enough to level our noses.

“And you have no clue why I left,” he said. “You’ve always liked playing the victim. Even then, it was your favorite role. Not that I’m kink-shaming. It’s mad fun turning your ass red…”

I grabbed his T-shirt so abruptly that it cut off the rest of his words. My body slammed into his, stomach against stomach, hips on hips. I felt him press against me and draw back, amusement in his eyes flaring in effort to disguise what I had just felt. He was hard.

It made my heart thunder, my ears ring, and my cock thicken as I desperately searched for a way to de-escalate this. But I was holding his shirt in my fists, glaring at him, deadlocked in this precarious place. There was a hair’s width between my wish to slap the smirk off his face or kiss it.

We breathed deeply, quickly, as Cameron slowly put his hands around my wrists and freed his T-shirt from my iron hold. We swapped our places from yesterday, but I still felt just as submissive to his temper.

Every muscle in my body was tense. My soul split through the middle, two sides battling fiercely. He held my wrists as I licked my lips, part of me desperate to have one more taste of him. That part was winning the fight my heart waged against my brain. I didn’t need a PhD to see this was a mistake. But ten PhDs wouldn’t have shed light on a way to avoid it.

“What are we doing?” he whispered, leaning in as slowly and insecurely as I was.

I inhaled to tell him, although I didn’t know how to put any of this into words. Somewhere in the deepest corners of my consciousness, his question bought milliseconds of spare time that forced me to think it through. I couldn’t do this.

I shouldn’t.