The Tight End (Red's Tavern 6)

I pulled in a deep breath and headed to the shower, turning it steamy hot. I stayed in for a good fifteen minutes, letting myself indulge in one of the longer showers I’d had in a while. After I got dressed in warm clothes, I felt slightly better able to face the day.

I’d had an amazing time with Brody, but I’d always known his world would never be mine. I had a simple life, and no matter how much I already missed last night, there was no point in dwelling on it.

I picked up my phone for the first time all day and saw that I had a few texts and a missed call from Dani.

>>Danielle: Holy shit, Logan. Have you seen this?

>>Danielle: Please call me when you’re up. I’m so sorry.

>>Danielle: God, what the fuck is going through these people’s heads?

Along with her texts, there was a link to a website called The Dirty Dig. It was a college gossip forum site—one of the few I’d run across when I was googling Brody.

I tapped the link and looked at the posts, which were all written last night between two and four o’clock in the morning.

My heart froze when I saw three photos in the first message.

Two of the pictures were of Brody and me.

“Holy shit,” I whispered out loud, even though no one was in the room with me.

The photos were a little blurry, but they were very clearly of me and Brody. One of them was the two of us playing beer pong at the party last night, and the other was a grainier shot of the two of us outside by the fire pit, Brody with his arm around my shoulders. It must have been taken late in the night at the party, when Brody and I were drunk. We had just been joking around and chatting by the fire, but the photo…

The photo looked like something else entirely.

It hadn’t been obvious to me at the time, because I was in an alcohol-soaked dream world, completely mesmerized by Brody. But in the photo, the two of us were looking at each other like we wanted to devour each other. I was biting my bottom lip in the picture, as I looked up at Brody with plain desire in my eyes. He was looking at me with half-lidded eyes, his hand squeezing my shoulder as his arm wrapped around me. If I were looking at a picture like this, objectively, I would have thought that the two people in it absolutely wanted to fuck each other, sooner rather than later.

But the photos themselves weren’t the problem. My stomach twisted into a tight knot as I scrolled below the photos, to the small flurry of comments that anonymous students had posted in the hours since. A couple of them were nice—flattering, even, no matter how ridiculous they were—but the bad ones were something else entirely.

The cruel comments stuck out, stinging like an icy dagger in my chest.

Bro, what the fuck?

LOL, Bryant’s with a scrawny ass nerd now?

Knew he was gay but didn’t know he had no standards, lmfao.

Naw, he’s actually kind of cute, in a library-rat way.

Guess Brody Bryant is into twinks now. Sign me up next.

Who is that?

HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT.

Duuuude, fuck this. Need him scoring TDs for us, not scoring ass with some weirdo.

Wait. I know that kid. Had a class with him freshman year. I think his name’s Landon something?

Had a class with him too. Teacher’s pet. Always acted like he was smarter than everybody else.

LOL u idiot he probably was smarter than u

Think he’s a whiny bottom?

Still can’t believe the Wolves let in a gay dude… the fuck must it be like in that locker room huh?

Saw him with that guy at the stadium last night. They’re fucking for sure.

My stomach turned over on itself. I swallowed, only to find that my throat was so dry it almost hurt. I felt sicker and sicker with every comment I read. There were actually a few more nice ones and neutral ones further down, but they did nothing to quell the rising panic in my body.

How did people do this? How did they sit behind a screen, anonymous and cold, talking about people with real lives? Nobodies like me and popular guys like Brody alike? It was disgusting. It felt like watching a trainwreck play out in slow motion.

My throat felt so tight I could barely swallow. I blinked as I swiped away from the page.

This was why Brody hadn’t wanted to talk to me about what he’d seen on his phone this morning. He’d been trying to shield me from this. And while I appreciated that, I couldn’t begin to process the fact that random students were thinking about me. Wondering who I was. Talking shit about me, saying I was cute or saying I was ugly, whatever it may be.