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By the time Drew made it back to the house, he was running on fumes. His body needed sleep, even if his brain didn’t seem to give a damn. He kicked off his shoes, stretched out on top of the covers, and shut his eyes, planning to knock out for at least an hour.

The TV was on low downstairs. A door opened and shut, and pipes knocked inside the wall whenever one of the guys used the bathroom. Normal house noise, the kind he usually slept through without thinking. But after spending half the morning trying to keep Nicole out of his head, lying here with nothing else to do sure as hell wasn’t helping. Which was bullshit, because Drew didn’t do this.

Rolling onto his left side pulled at his ribs. He swore and punched his pillow into a better shape, but managed maybe fifteen minutes of sleep before giving up. There was homework to do anyway, and he might as well get it over with.

An hour later, Drew shut the book and rolled the stiffness out of his neck. His playbook sat on the corner of the desk with Nicole’s phone number tucked inside. He eyed it but left it closed. If there was one thing in that room he never lost, it was his playbook. Putting her number there had made sense at the time. Now it felt like a bad sign.

Kirby had ordered enough barbecue to feed half the team, and Drew got downstairs in time to load a plate before his roommates wiped everything out. He claimed a spot in the living room, where Tanner had his feet on the coffee table and was telling some story about a girl from the party that nobody believed. Cash kept cutting in to correct the details even though he’d missed most of whatever Tanner claimed had happened.

Same old shit. They ate, talked trash, and half-watched TV, with Drew calling Tanner a liar along with everybody else. For a while, the noise kept his mind off the playbook upstairs.

Eventually, he carried his empty plate into the kitchen, went back upstairs, and shut the door behind him. He stood there looking at the playbook for a minute, then opened it and took out the receipt.

Calling her should’ve been easy. He wanted Nicole, and she’d made it pretty damn clear she wanted him too. Normally, that would’ve been enough to get him to the phone. He’d make plans, get her alone, and see where the night went and how long it took to get her naked. Only he already knew fucking her once wouldn’t be enough, and he wouldn’t be in any hurry for her to leave afterward. He’d want to lie there and talk to her, find out what had been going through her head when she grabbed his hair and kissed him through that car window, and whether she’d been thinking about it all day the way he had.

That was the part that fucked with him.

Maybe he needed another easy hookup, someone like Kayla or Trisha, or Phallon before shit went south. Except his dick wasn’t even interested, and that had never happened before.

Drew folded the receipt, tucked it back inside his playbook, and closed the cover. Pretending he didn’t want to call Nicole would’ve been a lie so big even he couldn’t sell it. Until he knew what the hell he was doing, leaving her number there was safer than using it.

Sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees, he could hear the guys downstairs. They were loud over the TV, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He kept seeing the look Nicole had given him in the mall parking lot the first time they really talked, like she still hadn’t decided if he was worth the trouble.

Turned out he was having the same damn problem.

Chapter Nine

When Nicole got home Sunday evening, she had the place to herself. Bailey was working a night shift as a nursing assistant at the local hospital, where Nicole had volunteered all through freshman year. She hadn’t gone back this fall, and she still hadn’t told her parents.

Nicole went straight to her bedroom without even stopping to take off her jacket. The red light on her answering machine was blinking, so she hit play.

“Hey, baby girl. It’s Dad. Just checking in on you. I hope you’re eating real food and not just snacking on mess. And I know midterms just passed, so I hope you did your thing.” His low chuckle came through the speaker. “Listen, I put some money in your account this morning. It should be there by tomorrow. And your car’s coming up on three thousand miles, so I need you to take it in for its first service this week. Take it to the dealership, Nicole. Not one of those quick-change places. The dealership. I’ll call ahead and set it up. If they try to upsell you on anything, don’t agree to it. Just put me on the phone with them. I’ll handle it.”

And Nicole knew he would. He hadn’t always been around much, but he made sure her checking account was padded, her credit card bill was paid on time, and her car was serviced when it needed to be.

“All right, sweetheart. Call me back when you get a chance. Love you.”

Love you too, Daddy.

The machine beeped.

“Hey, Nicole. It’s Elise. I just finished my lab report. I was gonna ask to borrow your printer, but I guess you’re not home. If you get this before I leave for work at three, call me back. Otherwise, I’ll hit the computer lab. Okay, see you in class tomorrow!”

The machine clicked off, and the red light went dark. Two messages—her dad and her lab partner. She’d been hoping one of them was Drew. Neither one was, and she was a lot more disappointed about that than she had any business being. Damn.

Well, she wasn’t going to stand there all night staring at it. If Drew called, he called. In the meantime, she was hungry.

She finally took off her jacket and went to make dinner. The Grapes of Wrath was done, so the rest of the night was hers. Once the spaghetti was ready, she carried her bowl into the living room and popped her VHS copy of Cabin in the Sky into the VCR. Movies older than she was were her thing—the older, the better. She set her food on the coffee table and settled cross-legged on the floor because she wasn’t brave enough to risk red sauce on that cream couch.

Tonight, though, Nicole barely heard a note Lena Horne sang. Most of the movie went by while she replayed her night with Drew for what had to be the dozenth time, going back over every touch and every look and trying to figure out what any of it meant. It had been less than twenty-four hours since she’d given him her number. But guys like him never called the next day, because they liked making you wait.

Nicole didn’t chase boys, but she still wanted Drew to call. She wanted to hear his voice again and feel the way she had last night, when he’d looked at her like the noise and the crowd and all those girls watching them weren’t even there.

Enough already.

Before Drew knew she existed, liking him from a distance had been safe. Then he’d caught up with her in the parking lot, and last night happened. How the hell was she supposed to go back to watching him from across the quad after that? She kept telling herself to be careful, but she liked him anyway and couldn’t think her way out of it.

Chapter Ten