Page 32 of Offside Angle

It feels good.

The win, the night out, Lena here with me—it gives me the reset I desperately needed after the chaos of the last few weeks.

Shots keep getting poured.

It’s inevitable. You can’t put the entire Reapers team in one room with an open bar and expect anything less than absolute chaos. Laughter echoes across the VIP section. Cole is already three sheets to the wind, Tyler is trying to convince Elias to do a body shot off the table, and even Damian has a rare, small smile on his face as he nurses a whiskey in the corner.

Eventually, Lena gets pulled away by Cole for something — probably more shots or some dramatic sibling argument — and I lose track of her in the crowd. I’m sitting on one of the plush couches near the back, with a beer and trying to stay relatively coherent when a hand suddenly slides across my shoulders from behind.

Beer goes down the wrong pipe and I’m coughing into my fist as I whip my head around, only to find Santi standing there looking down at me with that infuriating smile.

“Enjoying yourself, cariño?” he asks smoothly.

I groan the second the word leaves his mouth. “Please,” I beg. “For the love of God, stop calling me that.”

Santi doesn’t even hesitate. He slides into the seat right next to me like he belongs there and casually plucks the beer out of my hand. “Why would I do that?”

I gape at him as he takes a slow sip from my beer. “Because I’m not your cariño,” I fire back, staring at my stolen drink.

Santi turns his head to look at me. “Do you want to be?”

Do I… what?

The music keeps pounding around us. Someone is yelling in the background. I can vaguely hear Cole’s loud laugh from somewhere across the club, but all of it feels distant. My mouth opens, then closes again. I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to say to that. My heart is suddenly beating way too fast for someone who was just trying to enjoy a beer in peace.

Santi watches me with the calm certainty of someone who knows exactly what kind of effect he just had on me.

“Santi…” I start, already feeling the conversation slipping out of my control.

“Yes, guapo?”

My eye twitches.

His smirk widens a fraction, pure amusement written all over his face.

“Stop that,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Whatever you say, Matteo,” he answers, amused.

“Listen…” I sit up straighter, suddenly feeling as though I’m presenting evidence in a trial nobody asked for. “I’m sure you noticed I have a girlfriend.”

“Mhm.” Santi takes another sip of my beer, looking completely unconcerned by this apparently vital piece of information.

“And I’m not gay,” I add, a little too quickly.

There. Excellent. Case closed. Everybody can go home.

Except Santi finally puts the beer down and turns toward me, and there’s something almost insulting about how calm he looks. “Never said you were.”

Which somehow makes this worse.

Because, unfortunately, he’s right. He hasn’t said it. He hasn’t accused me of anything. He just keeps calling me cariño and bonito, looking at my mouth, asking if I want to be his cariño, and generally behaving like a man personally committed to making me question things I was perfectly happy not questioning.

Meanwhile, I’m apparently sitting here arguing with myself on his behalf.

Santi watches me lose a debate he isn’t even participating in before settling back against the couch, one arm stretched along the back behind me. He’s close enough that I’m painfully aware of the heat coming off him, which feels unnecessarily hostile under the circumstances.

“I’m just talking to you, Matteo,” he says. “You’re the one getting so worked up about it.”