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He groans every time he opens something new, muttering about how boring it all is, and I have to shush him because he seems to forget we’re supposed to be quiet. But it’s kind of nice to have someone do this with me instead of being alone all the damn time. Then again, even if I had friends, I bet they wouldn’t agree to do this.

“This is so boring,” Jayden says, tossing a bulletin back onto the pile. “How do you do this for fun?”

“I don’t know. It’s like a scavenger hunt, except the prize is knowing things. Some of us enjoy using our brains.”

He laughs, and I bite the inside of my cheek so I won’t grin, because I’m not supposed to be having fun with him. This is research. It’s serious. But when he flicks a balled-up scrap of paper at me, it bounces off my forehead, and I fight the urge to laugh, because what the hell is he doing?

I flick it right back at him and miss, but he somehow catches it in his hand, which makes him grin as if he’s won something, so I roll my eyes at him. We somehow focus back on work. Jayden asks me some questions from time to time, because he probably thinks I know every random fact about Blackerville, even though I don’t.

We trade pages back and forth, but between the two of us, we come up with a whole lot of nothing. Old sports scores, a scandal about a professor who ran off with the tuition money, a donor list so long my eyes glaze over... Not a single thing points at the society, not even a little.

“There’s got to be a faster way to do this,” Jayden says with a sigh.

“There isn’t, since there aren’t any digital copies we can search through. You have to read everything.”

He groans, but he picks up the next bulletin anyway. Is he doing it because he really wants to find something, or does he just like my company? No, I can’t think about that. It doesn’t matter whether he likes me or not.

My gaze narrows at a bulletin. “Hey. Check this out. There’s a whole thing here about some rich businessman.”

Jayden leans over the table to see. “What about him?”

“It says here that he wanted to build tunnels.” I run my finger along the line. “Under the whole college. And he offered to pay for the whole thing himself.”

“Tunnels?” Jayden pulls the bulletin closer. “The ones the society uses?”

“There’s more. It’s some safety thing. The guy was worried about the students. In case of a disaster, like a tornado, or whatever, he wanted a way to get everyone underground where they’d be safe.”

I focus back on the text. Some wealthy old benefactor, decades back, was so worried about students dying in a disaster that he offered to fund a whole network of tunnels under the campus out of his own pocket. The article doesn’t say whether it ever got built. Maybe the guy created the tunnels for the society, or the society saw no one was using them and took over.

It would explain so much. Besides, we always go underground for the meetings. If there are multiple tunnels... My heart beats faster just thinking about it.

“Are you okay?” Jayden watches me, his brow creased. “You’ve got a weird look on your face.”

“What if the guy was the one who founded the society and invented the whole thing about danger to build the tunnels right under everyone’s noses?”

An emotion passes through his eyes, but it’s too quick for me to identify, and a smile spreads across his lips. “Huh. That’s an interesting theory.”

“Yeah, and it’s a start. Let’s see if we can find something more about this guy.”

“Sure.”

There’s a tiny, totally insane part of me that wants to kiss him right now for the discovery, but that would be super weird. We’re not a couple, and we’ll never be. I need to stop staring into his gorgeous eyes and at his mouth and actually focus before I forget myself again.

Chapter 21

JAYDEN

VERONICA PULLS THE bulletin closer and goes over the lines again, and I don’t like where this is heading. She’s onto something now. She could figure out about the tunnels and realize that I absolutely could’ve made it to her lecture hall and fucked up her presentation.

I can’t let that happen, so I lean back in my chair and rub the back of my neck. “You know what? It’s getting late, and I’m starving. You’ve got to be hungry too by now, right? None of this dusty stuff is going anywhere. It’ll all still be here tomorrow.”

“No, I want to check this out,” she says, flipping to the next page. “We’re actually getting somewhere. This is the first real lead we’ve found all night.”

Great. Of course she’s stubborn.

“This is kind of fun, actually,” I say, tapping the stack of bulletins. “I don’t really do stuff like this. My whole life is basically practice and school. It’s been that way forever, since I was a kid. Everything’s on a schedule and there isn’t a lot of room for anything else, like, I don’t know, this.”

She sets the bulletin down and props her chin on her hand. “So how’d you even end up playing soccer? Like, how did you decide on it?” She tilts her head at me. “Is it what you actually want? For your future, I mean.”