The Hardest Fall

“It’s going to happen.”

He was jogging away before I even had a chance to nod or open my mouth.

“I’m telling you, any time now,” he yelled one last time before disappearing from my sight.

Seconds later, Mark and his entourage walked past me without even noticing I was standing there. If it had happened when we were back in L.A.—actually, it had happened on campus more than a handful of times, and on each and every one of those occasions, I felt like I was nothing but a nuisance when he looked right through me, but this time I couldn’t have cared less. He was the least of my worries.

Chapter Seventeen

Dylan

As the weeks passed in a blur, it was getting harder and harder to keep my hands and eyes off of Zoe. With everything going on with JP and his recovery, other than Chris, she was the only person I was interested in spending time with. As much as being friends with her had been a joke to me from that first day she’d jumped on me, very much naked after her towel failed her, she’d actually somehow ended up being exactly that.

My buddy.

My very own buddy…who I wanted to fuck senseless.

Every time her arm accidentally brushed mine as we passed each other in the hallway or in the kitchen, every time she looked up at me and smiled, all those nights we’d sat on opposite ends of the couch and watched a movie on her laptop…every time she came out of her room with sleepy eyes, smooth legs, and that fucking perfect ass I always got an eyeful of when she reached up to grab a bowl from one of the cupboards and pretended not to watch me while I did my morning workout routine right in front of her as she had her breakfast…every time we bumped into each other while heading to the bathroom to brush our teeth, eyes sleepy, voices husky…every time she opened the cupboard that held her precious M&Ms and spent a few seconds staring at them for God knows what reason…every time I caught her tiptoeing into the apartment so Ms. Hilda wouldn’t catch her…every time she held my gaze for more than a few seconds…you get where I’m going with this?

It seemed like every time she took a breath, I got hard just watching her chest rise and fall, my hands itching to touch her skin, her lips, her neck, her chin, her hands, her legs, her delectable ass. She was slowly killing me, and from everything I knew about her, she didn’t have a single clue what she was doing.

Every time I saw her, I had more and more trouble remembering why I couldn’t be with her. While I was going crazy for her, day after day, she was still seeing him. I told myself it wasn’t possible, that I was blowing things out of proportion, but all the little clues were there. Just because I hoped I was wrong, hoped it would end any day now, that didn’t change the outcome or the facts. She had something going on with Coach, and it was fucking with my head like nothing else ever had in my entire life. I didn’t believe their families were friends. I didn’t know what to believe, but I didn’t believe that. I couldn’t imagine Zoe being with him; she wasn’t that kind of girl, yet…

On top of everything, I barely had time to do anything. I was either working on a paper or in the weight room, getting my ass kicked by our trainers. It didn’t help that I was keeping a secret from Chris, maybe several. Oh, he knew his dad was seeing someone again—he’d told me that just a week before—but they always knew when his dad was having an affair. The thing he didn’t know was that the apartment I was staying in was actually his father’s, and he didn’t know that Zoe was also staying in his father’s apartment. He had no idea what it all meant.

Weeks had passed since Zoe had photographed our away game, since I’d seen her with another guy and came close to losing it in front of everyone. We still hadn’t sat down and had our talk. Some days I thought she was avoiding me on purpose, some days we just didn’t have the time, and some days I wanted to do nothing but sit down next to her on the floor in front of the couch and just have dinner while talking about nothing in particular. Halloween had passed, we had lost and won more away games and home games, and this crazy thing I was starting to feel for her wasn’t going anywhere, despite the circumstances.

I no longer gave a damn about how wrong it was to mess with someone else’s girl because I couldn’t accept the fact that she either really was someone else’s girl—if she was, I was the world’s biggest fucking idiot for starting to fall for my friend—or she was in a really fucked-up, weird situation with my coach. If that was the case, I was ready to fix it.