Page 1 of The Best Friend and the Shortstop

prologue

Freshman Year, Tiff University

nikki thomas

If Alex tells me to relax one more time, I’m going to punch him in the crotch. First college party is a big deal for me. My best friend has been sneaking out and slipping into parties at the Tiff frat houses for two years now. It’s different for guys. Double standards somehow make it cool to be too young to be here when you have a dick. The one time I tried to come with Alex I was stamped with a huge sticker that read UNDERAGE. He, however, was allowed to play the part of twenty-one all night long.

No stickers for me this time, though. I might only be eighteen, but I’m a real Tiff student, so bent rules finally apply to me. And it’s the fact all of this—the college experience—is real that has me nervous and fidgety.

“Don’t you want to blend in? Or are you trying to make a name for yourself as the girl who can’t stop pulling her skirt down, adjusting her shirt, touching her hair, or whatever other movement you’re about to do?”

His phrasing catches me with my hand an inch away from my eyelashes. I was on my way to double check they were still there, which, yes, I relent . . . it’s a little neurotic. Of course they’re there. I’d see them fall off—being that they’re glued atop my eyeballs and all that.

I swing my right arm out and smack Alex dead center in the chest.

“Ooof!” He grabs my wrist and clutches it as he hunches over from my blow.

“Cheap shot, Nik. Cheap. Shot.”

I jerk my hand away and grimace.

“Cheap would have been lifting a knee.” I bring my leg up but stop a few inches from his balls. His eyes flash wide and he flinches his body away, cupping himself.

“Whoa, okay. I’ll lay off. It’s just . . . you’re going to be fine. Whatever you’ve built this whole party thing into in your head”—he taps the side of my skull, and I fight the urge to flinch or check whether he messed up my tightly pulled ponytail—“It’s probably going to disappoint you. Because the version of college parties you see in the movies? That’s BS, Nik. Mostly, these things are broken down by a bunch of people smoking pot by a pool that may or may not have water in it while a bunch of other people grind against each other in a living room furnished with hand-me-downs and Goodwill finds. And then there’s the people who never come downstairs because they’re too old for this shit, so they stay up in their rooms . . . probably smoking pot or grinding on someone.”

My mouth goes flat and I blink at him. I know he’s trying to make the college scene seem a lot like the high school parties we went to back home, but there’s one major difference I can’t get over. For all intents and purposes, we’re all considered adults.

Granted, the whole drinking thing still has rules, but even that is different when a parent isn’t waiting at home to smell your breath. The fact is, nobody is waiting at home, no curfew, no worried dad constantly checking the front window. And I know Alex has a condom in his wallet that he plans on using sometime tonight, which . . . I wish I didn’t know about.

Strange shivers start at my neck and dart down my spine, so I cut that thought off before it takes over and simply nod a promise that I’ll try to relax.

It’s easier to play along. To let him play the too-familiar part of surrogate big brother. It’s what he’s always done. It’s how he sees me, still. After all these years. This gap between us only widened the moment he grasped that high school diploma in his hands. Cute Alex gave way to something more mature. He started to look like a man and not the boy with noodle arms who I kept pitch count for in junior high and high school. He grew his hair a little longer. His jaw cut sharper and his forearms got these waves caused by tendons and burgeoning muscles. His shoulders bulked up, and his back got wider. And his thighs—good God, his thighs!

Alex Mendoza has always had the perfect smile framed by adorable dimples. That winning grin got our asses out of a lot of trouble when my abuela watched us after school. It got him a lot of girlfriends in high school, too. And over the years, it did quite a number on me. The number of times I practiced writing my first name with his last in notebooks is too embarrassing to ever let anyone, let alone Alex, see. Thank God we had a fireplace! I burned every one of those notes.

Alex was my first crush. At first, for all the reasons he was my best friend: he’s kind, funny, playful, brave. Things really amped up, though, after we all went to the lake after graduation and he burst up through the water’s surface all golden-skinned, ripped as hell, and smiling. Those dimples, paired with his dark, wet hair that he shook out then smoothed back with one hand, had me sunk. And I haven’t been able to climb back to the surface since.

Three months of seeing my best friend with totally new eyes. And fantasizing about him in extremely unfriendly ways thanks to one very graphic dream the night after the lake. It’s made hanging out together weird, but probably only for me. I don’t think Alex underwent the same aha moment I did. I’m still waiting on my glow up. And I fear forcing it out with these fake eyelashes was a huge mistake. These things are miserable.

“Hi, freshmen! Welcome to Sigma!” Without warning, a blonde wearing five-inch heels with straps that wrap up her calf drops a fake floral lei over my head. The blossoms are bright yellow, and I’m about to request a trade for the pink one dangling from her palm when her attention instantly diverts to Alex.

“I’m Tiara. And you are going to come with me for drinks,” she says, looping the pink lei over Alex’s head and proceeding to lead him by it toward a keg propped at a table in what I guess is the dining room.

Tiara. As in royal headwear?

“I guess we’re getting beer,” Alex says through a chuckle over his shoulder. Damn him, even his naïve shrug is cute.

“Hmm, I guess so.”

I begrudgingly trail behind them, my heavy brow in full-sulk mode. It took four minutes for me to become a third wheel.

I follow Tinkerbell and my best friend to the keg, and when Alex hands me a full cup, I smirk at him over the rim before tipping it back and taking a big drink.

“What’s that look for?” he says, playing coy.

I shake my head as I pull the cup from my lips, my puckered smile barely holding in my usual acerbic zinger.

“Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. No look here. All in your imagination.” I let the tight-lipped smile rest as I hold his gaze, and his eyes dim briefly before he rolls them and turns back to the keg to fill his own cup.

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