Page 7 of The Golden Receiver

I decided that would be pointless. We were close and it wasn’t like anything anyone was saying was my business anyway. I was just nosy.

Minutes later, we were at the clearing. It felt like half the campus was already there, and the fire hadn’t been lit. Preston was the first from our group to peel off. He saw a group of people he knew from classes last year. Ryan and Benny excused themselves moments later, going to join people they recognized. I scanned the crowd and chose a direction. There was a group of my pack mates to the left and some football players to the right.

I’d spent my whole life with my pack, so I decided to go spend time with my teammates instead.

An hour later, the fire was lit. I had a red solo cup of cheap beer one of the upperclassmen on the team had brought to the party to share. I was listening to one of our edge rushers talk about his summer. He’d gone to the beach with his family, and he’d had a whirlwind romance with a girl he’d thought was a mermaid. She wasn’t. She was just a human who played a mermaid at the local aquarium. Our running back decided to try to one-up him with a story about one of his shifts during the summer. He was a cat shifter, and unfortunately his story involved me.

It wasn’t my fault.

I didn’t know that it was him. I was in werewolf form, and I spotted a giant Maine coon cat. I had biological urges, and one of them was to chase the cat. Wes hadn’t found it that funny when he’d shifted back to human to yell at me from his perch on a tree. We might have both been laughing about it now, but I could see a gleam in his bright green eyes that promised revenge. I wasn’t too scared.

What was he going to do? Claw me? I just wouldn’t shift, and I’d pick him up and hold him at arm’s length. Was it morally wrong to put your teammate in air jail?

We were several beers and several stories deep when I saw him.

Kieran Sawyer was standing with some Asian guy across the party. He had his hand wrapped around a plastic cup, and from where I was standing, I thought I might have seen him smiling. In the entire two weeks I’d known him, I’d not seen him do anything close to a smile. Most of the time, when he was near me, he just looked annoyed. He always acted like he had a chip the size of Alaska on his shoulder when he was on the field or at practice or anywhere really.

I was kind of surprised to know he could smile.

The conversation around me faded out as my attention focused solely on Kieran. He wasn’t looking at me at all, though. It was like he didn’t even notice me. All his attention was on the other guy. Until the other guy walked away. Then he was just left alone, standing there with his cup. I thought he might have joined someone else, but he didn’t. Minutes passed, and he didn’t move at all. He didn’t talk to anyone. He didn’t even look like he was all that bothered by being alone.

Why did it bother me?

I didn’t know, but it did. I excused myself from my teammates and started walking through the crowd toward him.

Kieran finally looked up when I got close. The wind shifted, and I caught his scent. I’d noticed the way he’d smelled the first day in practice. He smelled musky with a spicy undertone and something that reminded me of oak trees. I didn’t know how to explain it, but it was one of the best things I’d ever smelled in my life. One thing I liked about his smell was that there was never that sharp smell that came from the chemicals in cologne. That smell always burned my nose, but Kieran never did.

Tonight, there was something different in his scent. Smoke. Probably from the bonfire, but it layered with his natural scents, and it was somehow even more appealing.

“Why are you staring at me?” Kieran asked.

Oh. Had I been staring at him? I hadn’t noticed. I’d been smelling him, not in a creepy way, but I hadn’t realized I’d been staring at him. Oops.

“I’m just wondering if you’re having fun,” I said. Because that was better than saying I had gotten distracted by the way the smell of the bonfire smoke mixed with his natural scent. That sounded… weird. That did not sound like something you said to a teammate you barely knew.

Kieran shrugged.

That wasn’t an answer. Maybe I’d imagined him smiling from across the party because he wasn’t smiling now. He was completely stone faced. At least he didn’t look annoyed, which was an improvement. He had a classically handsome face, but it looked less so when his thick, dark brows furrowed like they always did in practice.

“So, are you having fun?” I tried again.

“Loads.”

He didn’t sound convincing. I looked at his cup and then back up at him. “What are you drinking? Because if you want, I can get you some beer. Lowman brought some.”

“I’m underage.”

“So is half the party.” I was underage. I wasn’t all that concerned about it. It wasn’t like I was getting drunk off a few cups of cheap beer. It wasn’t like anyone was driving back from the party either. “That’s why Lowman bought it, because he’s not underage.”

“I don’t drink underage,” Kieran clarified. That annoyed tone was starting to seep into his voice. Great. I was just trying to talk to him, get to know him, anything, and instead I was just annoying him. “I’m good with soda.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t going to try to pressure him into drinking. If he didn’t want to drink underage, then that wasn’t my business. That was his choice. “You know, you could come hang out with the team. You are a member of it. You don’t have to stand over here alone.”

“Not alone,” he grunted. “I’m here with my roommates.”

I looked around. Unless one of them had the ability to turn invisible, then he was alone. Maybe he had the same kind of luck as Charlie and had a mixed room. “Are your roommates invisible? Did you get put in a room with monsters? One of my pack mates has a human roommate, so it does happen.”

Kieran looked at me like I’d grown a second head. While there were probably people on campus who had more than one head, I was not one of them. Ears and a tail? Sure. Not a second head. A beat of silence passed between us. “What the hell are you talking about?”