Page 64 of Out of Bounds

"You want to suck his dick that bad?"

A flush crept up her neck, and she turned away, embarrassed.

Now she’s embarrassed?

People were Marrs fans, yeah, of course. Maybe I didn’t fully understand football yet but I understood the hype. I’d hung out in the twenty-four-hour lines at movie theaters for my favorite animated films. I understood.

But the way she said it put a bad taste in my mouth. Like I treated my fake boyfriend so terribly. The audacity made my eyebrow twitch. Thinking she could come over and convince me that—oh no—I wasn’t enough for my boyfriend, and he didn’t know better, the poor, perfect, innocent quarterback, tricked by the harlot. Like he wasn’t a grown-ass man who could make his own decisions.

"If you want to suck his dick, fine," I told her. "But you better be prepared to meet me in the parking lot beforehand. And take off those ugly earrings. I don’t fight fair. I’m ripping them off."

Her mouth fell open.

Ryan walked up to me, holding out the biggest coffee I’d ever seen. "You didn’t tell me what size."

"Thanks, baby. What a sweetheart." I smiled at him and wrapped my arm around his, leading him out of the coffee shop. If she wanted to come up with some bullshit, she could watch us and eat her heart out.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced up to see Ryan gazing at me.

He blinked. "You called me baby?"

"Some people are real weirdos," I muttered to him. "The girl back there told me I’m not good enough for you."

For a second, all the hard lines on Ryan’s face eased away. "That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard in my life."

"Yeah." I nodded. "They talk about you like you’re a doll to swap around. It’s fucked. I told her if she wanted you so badly, she could fight me in the parking lot.”

“You…?” He hesitated. “You said that?”

“And yesterday, a guy told me you were too green to be captain and I called him a bald bitch."

He stopped us from walking entirely. "You didwhat?"

The longer Ryan gaped at me, the more I could see it from the team captain’s perspective. Of course I shouldn’t have said anything. What was I thinking? It was like hosing a sinking ship. It didn’t temper down the weirdos. I sighed and stepped back to the brick wall, rubbing my temples.

"I’m not good at this," I admitted.

"You called him a…bald bitch?" Ryan repeated. "You—don’t do that again. People can record things, it’s the last thing we need.” He held up a hand. “But, wait. Did you really tell her you’d fight in the parking lot over me?" The more he spoke, the more his lips twitched. "Kassie, you need to be thinking about the Romans—"

I blinked. "Are you smiling?"

His lips twitched again. "We don’t have to tell anybody about—"

"Youaresmiling."

"Kassie, you need to grab stuff from your dorm," Ryan replied gruffly and placed a hand on my back, leading me off to Roman Forest.

"You don’t evensmileon the regular," I threw over my shoulder.

He had an audio engineer meeting for a Marrs commercial but I wanted to drop off my backpack and take some of my class materials for the long haul. It’d take five minutes. I just wasn’t expecting Ryan to follow me in the lobby.

I turned back around, confused. "Where are you going?"

"I’m coming up with you."

"What?" I stopped by the elevator and shook my head. "Oh, no. We’re not doing that."

There was no way in hell that the captain of the football team was seeingmydorm. The dorm I shared with four or six or eight people depending on the day of the week, in the shittiest apartment complex on campus. One of the two buttons for the elevator wasn’t even put into the wall right. It dangled from the wires. This wasn’t a place where Ryan belonged.

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