“He could deadlift my cock then,” Des said.
“Fuck off,” I grumbled, smiling despite myself.
Des laughed and did bicep curls in the mirror.
Addler leaned up against the wall while I toweled some sweat off. Calvin finished up on the rowing machine, out of breath.
“You doing okay?” Addler asked quietly as Des started cracking jokes at Calvin, who smiled but mostly ignored him. “You’ve been on edge lately.”
“Have I?”
“I don’t think the other guys notice, but I definitely do. You’ve been a little more reckless on the field lately.”
I didn’t meet his gaze. Fucking Addler. Sometimes I thought my friends were a bunch of self-absorbed assholes, but they had the ability to surprise me still.
“I’m fine. Just dealing with stress.”
“Is it home stuff?” Addler was nearly whispering now.
I shook my head. “No, that’s been fine.”
“Good, because if you ever need something—”
“I said it’s fine.”
Addler grimaced like I’d hit him and I instantly felt bad about snapping. He knew about my stepfather—he saw bruises once when I got changed, asked a few pointed questions, and mostly figured it out on his own. The other guys didn’t know, and I appreciated him for keeping his mouth shut, but sometimes he got involved in things that weren’t his business.
“All right, brother. I hear you. Just saying, whatever you need.”
Calvin drifted over then, taking a long drink from his water. Des went back to doing curls, grunting along to a song blasting from his headphones.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Calvin said, sitting on the weight bench. Sweat dripped off his muscular arms and he looked at me with that dispassionate stare of his. It was almost disconcerting, if I wasn’t aware that he did that shit on purpose to knock people off balance.
“Yeah, what’s that?” I wanted to extract myself from this conversation but I didn’t know how to do it without making them more suspicious. Calvin looked at me like he wanted to crack my skull open and read my brain.
For all I knew, that was exactly what he wanted. Calvin played up the whole quiet and scary thing, but I knew him better than anyone else. He was a rich kid at heart, and he was into some sick and twisted shit, same at me. Fights got him off, violence made his pulse pound, and women were nothing but toys to be used and tossed aside. He pretended like he had a conscience, but when the time came to do the right thing, Calvin did the fun thing more often than not.
None of us were good people. Addler tried, but drinking and smoking weed took precedent over everything else. Des was the most honest about his debauchery, and I had to respect him for that—as much as he postured and preened, Des was brutally honest. Sometimes to a fault.
Calvin though, he had that same broken blackness in his heart. Kindred spirits recognized each other, and we both knew what the other one was.
Monster. Beast. Deranged, unhinged, insane.
And he was one of the few people in this world that had the power to knock me off balance.
“What are you doing with that Cora girl?”
Addler snickered and covered his mouth, trying not to grin at me. Calvin only watched impassively as I cracked my knuckles.
“She’s my tutor.”
“Bullshit. We don’t lie to each other.”
I snorted. “Now who’s lying?”
“All right, easy, boys,” Addler said. “No need to slap your dicks down and start measuring.”
“I’m being serious here,” Calvin said. “You ignored that girl for years, and now suddenly she’s around all the time. What’s going on? Are you fucking her?”
I clenched my jaw. I didn’t know why that pissed me off—it wasn’t an unreasonable thing to ask—and yet it drove me absolutely wild. I hated the thought of them talking to each other behind my back about my relationship with Cora, so much so that I was tempted to start a fight, right here and now, just to make them think twice about it.
But instead, I took a breath, and schooled my expression.
“If I was fucking her, she’d be around more often. The girl’s my tutor and my cousin’s best friend. There’s nothing more.”
Calvin nodded slowly. “All right then. Why don’t you prove it?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to prove that?”
“He doesn’t need to prove anything, man,” Addler said, shooting a look over at Des, who joined the party.
“What’s going on?”
“Calvin’s on Jarrod’s ass about Cora.”
“What do you even care, dude?” Des frowned at Calvin and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “She’s hot and fit and single. Who gives a shit if Jarrod’s getting some?”
Calvin never looked away from me. Not for a single second. I hated when he did that, the unnerving little shit.
“Have either of you ever seen Jarrod spare a second look for a single one of his fuck-buddies? In all the time we’ve known him, has he ever given a single shit about his conquests?”