All Broke Down (Rusk University 2)

Which is pretty f**king intense.

“Make your dirty jokes about Carter’s girlfriend,” I say.

Torres scoffs. “Carter’s relationships go bad faster than the food in our fridge. Like I’m gonna waste my comedy gold on that.”

Carter just grunts in response.

“And you,” Torres turns on me. “I’m not even sure you could get to the third syllable in the word relationship without having a seizure.”

I roll my eyes and steer the conversation back where it matters. “I want to get shit-faced tonight. Doesn’t matter to me whether I do it at home or at the bar. But poor Torres here is still underage; so really, I’m trying to be kind.”

“You’re a regular old Good Samaritan,” Carson says. He sighs and adds, “Just keep it small. We just spent the morning telling all those reporters how focused we are. Don’t let anything get out of hand.”

His eyes land on Torres first, then me.

If he’s trying to guilt me into being boring, he’s barking up the wrong tree. I don’t do guilty. I do what I want. Life is too short and shitty to do anything else.

“Oh, I’m getting out of hand, McClain. Plan on it. If you want to keep us out of trouble, I guess you’ll have to show up.”

Torres grins. “Yeah and bring—”

Carson hits him in the stomach just hard enough to cut him off.

He wheezes a few times, playing it up, and says, “I was gonna say chips, man. Bring chips.”

THE PARTY IS already going when we get back in the afternoon. Apparently, I’m not the only one who could use a bit of relaxing. There’s a Slip ’N Slide in the front yard, and girls parading around in bikinis. A few people are throwing around a Frisbee. I head inside, ready to grab a beer and shove off the unease still clinging to me after the press day.

I keep waiting for it to go away. That feeling that the other shoe is about to drop. But with three years here under my belt, it hasn’t shown any sign of lessening.

I grab a beer from the fridge, and just closing my fingers around the cold neck of the bottle makes me feel a little more in my element. The first time my brother stuck a beer in my hand I’d been ten, maybe eleven. That’s my world. What I know. These days I have to concentrate to push that all away, to be the Silas Moore that people watch and respect and expect things from. To be the Silas Moore that matters.

I must not be doing a very good job because my roommate, Brookes, sweeps in beside me. One dark arm reaches out to grab a beer and he says, “You okay?”

Observant motherfucker. How he knows what’s going through my head at just a glance, I’ll never know. But I don’t like it.

There’s a reason I do my best to seem laid-back and easygoing. When you look like you don’t give a f**k, people don’t ask you questions about how you’re feeling. They don’t ask you questions, period.

“Yeah,” I reply, using the edge of the kitchen counter to pop the cap off my beer. I take a long pull, clink it with the bottle in his hand, and head out of the kitchen before he gets it in his head to play shrink.

My phone buzzes with a text, the third in the last hour, and I almost ignore it. I know who it’s going to be. It’s why I’m doing a shit job of keeping my composure, the old me too close to the surface.

My best guess is that somehow the media stuff this morning put me on her radar. Maybe she happened to catch it on a local TV station or read an article online because the texts started an hour or two after the meeting with the press.

Maybe all absentee moms have Google alerts on their sons. Or mine just has a canny sixth sense that tells her when I’m worth her attention.

The last time she reached out was my senior year in high school when recruiters came calling. My coach ran interference then. She’d been out of the picture for as long as he’d known me, so he had no problem making sure she stayed far away from the whole process. And considering I spent most of senior year living in guest rooms of friends or coaches, it wasn’t like she could just go home and find me.

Now, though, things are different. There is no one here to run interference because no one knows. Rusk is a private school. Expensive and privileged. People here tend to just assume that you come from a background like them, and I never bothered correcting their assumptions.

I make my way out onto the front porch to watch the festivities, and I fish the phone out of my pocket to see what she’s said this time.

Only this text isn’t from my mother.

It’s from Levi.

Fuck.

I’ve traded one person I don’t want to see for another. Another who shouldn’t even have access to a cell phone right now because he should be in prison.

I lean on the railing that surrounds our porch, paint peeling and wood sagging, and I read the text.

I’m out f**ker. Come get wasted with me.

He’s out? I count back the months. He was caught selling pot, among other things, last fall, but it can’t have been more than six months since he was actually sentenced.

Six f**king months?

If it had been me, I’d be rotting away in there for a few more years at least. Then again, I grew up in a trailer park. Levi was raised in a house with bathrooms bigger than my old living room.

When you grow up like I did, no one has to tell you the world isn’t fair. You figure it out pretty fast on your own.

A body settles against the railing beside me, slim and petite, and I look over at Stella Santos. She says, “You look even broodier than normal.”

I look around expecting to see her best friend Dallas attached to her hip. She’s alone, though, which means either Dallas and Carson haven’t showed yet, or the coach’s daughter decided she didn’t want to talk to me and made herself scarce.

Probably the latter.

I guess when you try to bed a girl on a bet, you’re not going to be party buddies anytime soon.

“I thought girls liked broody.”

She flicks her short, black hair out of her eyes and sips something out of a red Solo cup. Her lips are painted nearly the same color, and she purses them before she answers, “Depends on the situation. There’s a fine line between broody and potential sociopath. Right now you’re walking the line.”

She tops that dig off with a sly smile, and I shove my phone deep in my pocket, ready to let her distract me from my mom, my ex–best friend, everything. She’d turned that same smile on me last year at a party, and I don’t remember doing much brooding after that. Granted, I don’t remember much of it, period, except that she was feisty, and she knew what she liked—two things I can always get on board for. I don’t usually go for seconds on my hookups, but Stella is different. She won’t try to make it into something it isn’t. I don’t know for sure because we didn’t talk about it, but I just get this feeling that we’re alike, that we both know a different side of the world than everyone else here.