Page 43 of Puck Block

“Goddamnit, Taytum! You can’t drink with diabetes! When did you even have a drink?” Ford groans and drops his hand. He quickly turns his back to me, and guilt washes away the last of my blissfulness. I know he thinks that I’m being irresponsible by having a drink, even if it wasn’t much, but that’s not true. I am well aware of my actions and the reasons behind them, and it’s not something I'm willing to explain to him.

“Calm down, Ford. And if you weren’t so entranced with the daisy dukes running around this bar, you would have seen me take a sip from that guy.”

Ford hurriedly turns around, and we’re both glaring at each other. I cross my arms over my heavy breasts, cursing him for turning me on so much.

What a terrible idea.

“Let’s go,” Ford snaps.

“No,” I snap right back.

He stops right beside me, and there’s a twisted feeling digging into my lower belly that tells me to smile, just to push his buttons. When he turns his head to look at me, his glare is heated, and I can’t decide if he’s angry, turned on, or both. “I will put you over my shoulder and carry you out of this bar. Do not test me right now.” He half laughs, but I recognize his sarcasm. “Especiallynow.”

I open my mouth to refuse, but he stops me with the narrowing of his eyes. It isn’t often that Ford lets his guard fall and shows the true feelings behind his grin, but right now, he isn’t trying to hide.

“In fact…” he talks down to me like I’m a child. “I’ll call your parents rightfuckingnow and tell them that you’ve been drinking.”

I gasp.He wouldn’t.My forehead furrows, and he raises an eyebrow as a challenge.

“I can make my own decisions, and if I want to take a sip of beer from a guy, I will! Stop treating me like a fucking child.”

“I would if you stopped acting like afuckingchild.” Ford swarms me, and I’m pressed against the bathroom door in two seconds flat. He moves too quickly for me to react and grabs onto my arm right below my monitor. “In case you’ve forgotten, this thing is helping keep you alive.” Our eyes clash, and I can’t speak because I know I’ve struck a chord. “I’ll be damnedif you do something to jeopardize your own health. I won’t lose you to your own stupidity.” He drops my arm in a huff and steps away. “Nowgo.”

The bathroom door flies open from his hasty movement, and he holds it open for me. When I pass by him, I drop the act because I know exactly what chord I struck, even if he doesn’t say it aloud.

[ 20 ]

FORD

I press furtherinto the wall and bend my knees to work out my stiff muscles. Taytum has one of the best bedrooms in her sorority house, and I’m pretty positive her floor is more comfortable than my bed that the school supplied to every dorm room, but still, I’ve hardly gotten any rest.

Looking over at Taytum for the one hundredth time since getting back from the bar, I can’t help but trace the outline of her lips with shame. I’m suddenly thirteen again, training my brain not to get a boner at the sight of her. I’m happy to announce that after several hours of being in her bedroom, I’ve finally stopped thinking about how fucking hot it was to kiss her in that stupid bar bathroom. Even if I’m still angry with her, my heart can’t help but skip a beat when I remember the madness I felt when kissing her.

I rub my hand down my face and think about everythingafterthe kiss. The panic that came from an obvious trigger of the past lays heavy in my gut, and I feel partly guilty for not keeping it under wraps in front of her.

Taytum is the only one who has ever seen me have a panic attack, but I promised myself, long ago, that I’d never lose it like that in front of anyone ever again. Naturally, she’d be the one to bring it out of me, because if Taytum is involved, everything is intensified.Everything.

Her phone dings, and I wait to see if she’ll stir in her sleep. We haven’t spoken since I put her in my car and drove back to Bexley U last night. She has no idea that I crept back into her room after dropping her off, because my anxiety couldn’t handle it.

To my surprise, she stays asleep even though the sun has begun to rise and is casting an angelic glow over her. I sigh and stretch my legs out in front of myself as I reach for her phone to check the alert. I swipe away the text from her group chat because I already crept on it through the night, and it was practically a foreign language to me as they were talking about makeup.

I open the glucose tracker app that’s linked to her monitor. The little ding was an alert for a high glucose reading, but it isn’t any higher than normal at this time. I won’t admit to her that she was right, and the one sip of alcohol she drank last night didn’t affect her sugar too much, but it’s hard for me to trust her when she’d been in the hospital more times this past year than ever before.

When it comes to Taytum, I can’t even trust myself.

Clearly.

I yawn and reach up to massage my sore neck. My own phone buzzes, and I quickly pull it out of my pocket to see Theo’s text about a spur-of-the-moment practice this morning before our game.

I mumble under my breath. “Shit.”

There goes my naptime.

I click my phone off, slip it into my pocket, and busy myself in the bathroom to get her insulin pen ready. I walk over to her bedside table and put her prepped pen there, along with an alcohol swab. After I change her alarm tone to the most annoying one and set it to go off in a few minutes, I go to exit out of her insulin app before pausing with my finger hovering over the X.

It’s a controlling thing to do, but I take out my phone, and download the same app.

Taytum’s login information hasn’t changed since we were teenagers–it only took Emory and me three tries to guess her password the one time we went in and broke up with her boyfriend of three days on her socials without her knowing.

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