Page 7 of Forging Chaos

Thora From Class

Today? Are you sure? We have a few weeks.

Me

I literally have nothing else to do.

This is partly a lie. I’m supposed to schedule meetings with my academic advisors, coach, the financial aid people, and my athletic trainers. I have a whole team of people who care about their investment in my attendance at this school as a football player. But here I am, for a change, doing something as a student.

Me

Bring more cookies.

I toss the phone on my nightstand without waiting for her reply, and I roll over and finally grab a few hours of sleep.

CHAPTER 6

THORA

“I’m supposedto go to his apartment.” I blurt this into my phone with no preamble, but Fern is used to this style of communication from me.

“Well, it’s not like he can get to you very easily,” Fern replies, her voice far off like she has me on speaker while she’s doing other things. Which I’m sure she is. We graduate in less than a month, and Fern leaves immediately to go to grad school in London. I will be in Pittsburgh without her for the entire summer before my fellowship starts at Oxford. Fern continues, explaining, “Wyatt told me Odin is on a ton of pain meds. Or he’s supposed to be, but he’s being stubborn about taking them, so he mostly lies around moaning and growling.”

I immediately picture him moaning, not in pain but in pleasure. The man is smoking hot, but he knows that. He’s a Division One athlete. Of course, he knows his body is a wonderland. I clear my throat and check the time. I have a few minutes before my history class. “So, do I just go over there and sit on his bed with him?”

“They have chairs,” Fern says. She’s basically married toOdin’s cousin Wyatt, who lived in the same apartment until he left to play professional soccer abroad. She’s probably had sex on the chairs over there. I shove that thought away and croak out an affirmative sound.

Sitting in class, I pay half attention to my professor as I stress about going to Odin Stag’s and trying to work on our class project. It was easy to picture him naked and move on when we were just regular classmates. He doesn’t even sit near me. But, our professor assigns random pairings for each project and it was my turn to get paired up with the athlete in class. I really thought he’d be glad to have me do the whole thing. I know he wasn’t serious when he said it might not be good. I mean, I don’t want to sound cocky, but I’m a Rhodes scholar. I don’t do bad work.

Odin’s apartment is near the bar where I work so it’s nothing for me to go over there in between class and my shift. I’ll have to figure something out for dinner. These mundane thoughts distract me from all the bigger stressors weighing down on me lately. I’ve spent my whole damn life trying to change my circumstances, and I’m right on the cusp of succeeding. I can smell it above the exhaust fumes and alley pee in Odin’s neighborhood.

I don’t know how I ended up driven to excel academically in a house full of long-time service workers and people with an addiction. My dad’s been on house arrest for months now, and Mom has a record, too, making it hard for her to get any sort of job that offers a decent wage.

My grad fellowship is meant to be me studying international policies around parole and incarceration. Everyone from my neighborhood seems to cycle through generational patterns of poverty, petty crime, and disproportionate consequences.

But just winning this fellowship isn’t enough. I know enough about the world to know the deck is stacked against me. I don’t have a passport yet. I’m saving up my tips to deal with that and get myself a laptop and a new wardrobe. Oh, and a flight. I have to really save up to afford a flight overseas.

Ugh, it’s all swimming to the surface again and making me twitchy, so I bite my lip and walk faster. If I can make headway on this class project with Odin, I won’t feel strangled by all this other stuff.

Someone holds the door open for me at Odin’s building, and I walk up and knock on their apartment door. I hear a grunting sound from inside that might be an invitation to enter. I hope it wasn’t a sex noise. I tentatively open the door and see Odin sprawled on the couch, his booted foot elevated on the arm, long, hairy legs sticking out from a pair of athletic shorts that cling to all the lumps and bumps around his crotch.

Nope, not gonna stare at his crotch. I move my eyes to his face and smile. “Ready to get to work?”

He frowns at me, almost like he forgot I was coming over, but he shrugs, and I make my way over to the armchair next to his head. “We need a right-sized topic that we can write about for five pages. I was thinking we should argue for increased government funding for colleges and universities.”

He shakes his head. “You’re not going to just boss me around and bulldoze the whole report, Thora.” I…like how my name sounds coming out of his mouth. I like it too much. “That topic sucks.”

I scoff at him. “Maybe because you never had to worry about paying for school, Mr. Scholarship.”

He arches a brow at me. “Pretty sure Fern told me you’re on scholarship, too, Ms. Bossy.”

“I’m not bossy.” He stares at me. “I’m assertive. I have to be. People think they can run over me otherwise.”

He snorts. “Because you’re pint-sized.”

“We can’t all be six-foot-eighteen.” I wish I had a pillow to swat him with. I actually glance around his living room, looking for one, but they’re all either under his head or the heel of his boot. I take a deep breath. “This isn’t productive. What topics wouldyoulike to pursue for our paper, Stag?”

He stares at the ceiling and laces his fingers together behind his head, which makes his t-shirt ride up and shows me a tan, smooth expanse of belly skin looking taut above the waist of his shorts. “We should still do something related to low-resource students and school funding.” His sentence surprises a huff out of me and he squints. “You don’t think I know a million guys on the football team who are only here because of sports? Trust me, nobody is telling these guys they’re smart like you.”

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