Page 85 of Out of Bounds

"What if I went for a birthday or something?"

Out of sight, I could still hear the student reporter jotting down notes but Kassie had all of my attention. She watched me for a moment, mulling it over. "I don’t know. You wouldn’t have talked to me."

"You don’t know that."

It was banter for the article and it wasn’t. Because I wasn’t playing around. I was legitimately thinking about it. If I met Kassie in a bar, and saw her curved smile in the corner, and put my card down for a beer and a napkin for her number. How different would things have been? What if I’d been less of a dick at dinner? Could I have gotten her number then?

"Okay, let’s pretend for a second that you went out to some football player’s birthday at a bar I was slinging drinks for," Kassie said, amused. "Would you have gone up to the counter? Or would you have been itching to get home and back to captain duties?"

Damn.

She had a point. I would’ve put in my fifteen minutes to say hello and dropped out of the bar without a second thought. There was a very real possibility I wouldn’t have even seen her.

With a nod, Kassie noted my silence. "See, you know the memory packet, ball dribbler. But I knowyou."

It was silent between us, only broken by the student reporter.

"What’s a memory packet?"

"Nothing," Kassie and I said at the same time.

"So, that’s how you see me?" I said as casually as I could. "Just the football captain."

"Rewind the tape, I didn’t say that."

My muscles tensed, waiting on edge for exactly what Kassie was going to say. She was the referee in the third quarter of my game, debating on whether or not to declare a foul, and I was unable to move, waiting for her answer.

"I think…" Kassie hesitated. "Ryan, I think that’s howyousee yourself. But it’s wrong. You’re dedicated as hell to it—no doubt about it. But you aren’t just a football captain. That’s that."

It was the exact same feeling every time Kassie sketched me out while we were in the dining hall together. She stripped me back from my gear, my awards, my title.

I cleared my throat. "Thanks."

Her dark eyes flickered up to me and she held my gaze for a long moment before she finished up her section too.

It was weird to think that if Adam hadn’t been such a moron and skipped the photoshoot or if Kassie’s favorite director hadn’t declined the dinner or any of the other hundreds of things that went wrong that night - I wouldn’t have her for the fall semester. It was…uncomfortable to imagine my time without her.

"Hey?" Kassie turned back to face the student reporter. "You can run that part of the article."

"The part about not being friends in an alternative universe?"

I grinned. "The guys are going to be merciless about it in the locker room."

"So…don’t run that?"

"I didn’t say that."

Kassie shook her head. "I meant about the volunteering and how my grandma and I got by. It’ll sound good, right? A Cinderella story but with cleats and mouthguards."

The student reporter perked up. "Really?"

There was no way I heard her correctly. "No, she doesn’t mean that," I said. "Don’t put that in the article or you won’t be accompanying us again."

Kassie shifted back. "Don’t listen to him. Print it."

"You don’t want the story," I insisted. "It won’t happen."

"I can’t walk into a job and get something out of it, Ryan," she reminded me. "The story’s just collecting dust in an old college essay."

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