Page 110 of Forever Defiant
Completely, irreversibly screwed.
* * *
I avoided her for almost three days.
I’m not proud of it. But pride wasn’t exactly something I had access to after... that night.
So yeah. I avoided her. I left early for practice. I stayed late. I ate lunch on the field with Mike and Noah like a coward. I even took the long way around the journalism building, which I hadn’t done since freshman year when I was avoiding Intro to Media like the plague.
But this? This was worse. Because every time I even thought about seeing her, I felt that same heat ignite, low and sharp, and my brain short-circuited like someone had yanked all the wiring out.
And the worst part? My body remembered. Her mouth. Her breath. How she sounded when... Nope. Nope.No.Not going there.
“Dude,” Dante said as we walked off the field after drills, “you cannot keep doing laps around campus like you’re outrunning a demon.”
“I’m not avoiding her,” I said automatically, knowing no one believed me.
“You ducked behind the vending machine in the economics building when you thought she walked past the main office.”
“I was hungry.”
“You didn’t buy anything.”
“Nothing looked good.”
He stared. “There werechips, Dustin. Chips always look good to you.”
I grunted and shoved my water bottle into my bag.
He kept going. Relentless. “She’s going to notice, you know.”
“She won’t,” I muttered.
“She will,” he countered. “Because obviously you two are—”
“Don’t say—”
“Obsessed with each other.”
I swore under my breath. “I just said ‘don’t say it,’ and you go and say it.”
But he wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t right either. It wasn’tobsession. It was... danger. Heat. A very specific kind of mental instability.
I saw her for the first time around noon. She was walking across the quad with Savannah, talking with her hands, and Savvy was listening intently. Savvy said something that made her laugh, and it punched me in the gut harder than any tackle I’d taken in the last three years. She looked fine. She looked completely,infuriatinglyfine.
I turned away so fast I almost pulled a muscle. Which pissed me off more.Shewasn’t hiding behind vending machines.
“Smooth,” Noah muttered. “Epically smooth.”
“Shut up.” I didn’t look back. “They made up?”
“Looks like it. You know,” he said thoughtfully, “if you two had normal human communication skills, this might not feel like watching a slow-motion emotional car crash.”
“I’m not talking to her.” I elbowed him. “I’m not talking to you about this either.”
“If only that were true,” he lamented, “but youareavoiding her. Which is making it worse, and that makes you talk to me about it, and that makes it even worse for me.”
I tried to ignore the tightness in my chest, but it followed me all day — through film review, through weight training, through the humiliating moment when Coach asked if I needed an inhaler because I kept looking at the door like a golden retriever waiting for someone to come home.
