Page 77 of Bend Him, Break Him
“The worst part is that I know this was all Leon,” Isaac said, glowering. “I just have no way of proving how he did any of this. I mean, he’s not going to admit to filming us, to uploading it. Hell, I doubt he’d even admit to picking Colton’s lock or knowing how to pick a lock, for that matter.”
“He wouldn’t need to,” Jazz said, grabbing her apartment room key and using it on her door. “See, my key.”
“Seriously, does pussy pounding cause brain damage?” Isaac asked Mina almost playfully, but he still got a hard smack on the chest and a wicked giggle from her.
Mina smiled. “Only if you know what you’re doing.”
“Now, watch.” Jazz walked over to her roommate’s door and used the same key to open it. “Cookie cutter keys.”
“Who the hell said you could open my door?”
Jazz slammed it shut as something crashed into it. “She’s in a mood.”
“Bitch is always in a mood.” Mina shot a glare at the closed door like she was ready to bust it wide open again and explain why a nasty attitude wasn’t wise.
“Wait. It’s the same keys for every apartment?”
“Not every apartment,” Jazz explained. “They vary from one apartment to the next, but most of the bedrooms inside an apartment have the same locking mechanism or one so close, a little jiggling is all it takes.”
“That’s fucked!” Isaac reached for his phone and prepared to text Colton the info before remembering he needed space. “Can you…um… Could you pass that along to Colton? He should be aware.”
“Sure thing.”
Isaac sat silently, absorbing everything that’d unfolded today, missing Colton and the sliver of happiness he’d carved out this semester.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Daysturned into weeks as Colton took a break for space. Three and a half weeks, to be precise. Isaac hadn’t texted once during that time. Colton didn’t know if he admired the gesture or envied the attitude. Was Isaac offering him this time to get his head on right, or was Isaac okay disappearing because he never truly cared? Maybe this didn’t cut as deep for him as it did Colton.
All he knew was that after almost a month, he was ready to commit to his daily routine again. Classes had been grueling, whether he attended or skipped them. If he went, eyes locked onto him for the entire lecture; if he skipped, he ended up with a mountain of confusing work to handle on his own and a reminder that the scandal didn’t make his academic probation vanish. Baseball practice was a joke since he ended up benched the entire time to ‘respect his privacy in this difficult time.’
Most days, Colton wandered in a daze, wondering where Isaac had gone. He stopped showing up to the one class they had together where he was the TA. He’d stopped waiting outside of Colton’s other classes; he’d stopped everything.
Even when sending news on the apartment locks, that came through the proxy of Jazz. She kept insisting that Colton return to GSA, but he didn’t have the energy to be gawked at any more than normal. Yes, he knew they’d support him, but they’d still stare. He was so tired of the staring. He hated people knowing the exact details of his most intimate desires. Colton hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to say he enjoyed bottoming, but now tens of thousands of strangers had seen him getting railed.
Despite the mortification that came with people having an inside look at his private sex life, Colton had received a surprisingly high outpour of messages supporting him, condemning the video, hating whoever would do something like this, and a thousand other things that all started to blur together when he scrolled through his DMs.
“You’re starting back up again,” Coach Wilson said, startling Colton out of his daze.
“Seriously?”
“Too many people are questioning why you’re being punished because of what happened,” he explained.
Colton scoffed, wondering the same damn thing.
“To be clear, this wasn’t a punishment,” Coach Wilson said. “We were all looking out for you. We’re a team.”
Colton left the conversation at that. He couldn’t stomach the bullshit, but he didn’t want to risk being benched again.
Halfway back to the apartments, Tim hailed him down, shouting from the campus bus that looped the grounds forstudents who didn’t want to walk from one end to the next like Colton, who’d used the nearly two-mile trek as a distraction.
“Colt, are you listening to me?”
“Nope,” he mouthed until Tim slapped a hand on his back. “Oh, I didn’t see you there.”
“Lying ass.”
Colton smirked, leading the way into their building where Tim rambled about a half dozen different topics until they reached the end of their hallway and opened the door to their apartment. It was then that Tim got serious.
