Page 8 of Touchdown, Tennessee
“Be a dick to them?” Gray asked. “All I want to do is get to know all of you.”
Yeah, you make it sound all innocent.
Get to know us, then fuck us over in a public paper.
“Because you always give such enthusiastic reviews of everything you write about.”
“I write about what I observe,” he said, holding my gaze. “No more, no less.”
He looked me up and down for a moment, and I felt like his eyes were pure fire over every inch of my skin.
He was very attractive, yes. But he also intimidated me in the way smart people always had.
I’d never been great with school.
Every single class was a challenge for me.
Guys like Gray used to snicker behind me in high school when I fucked up the answers as teachers called on me. My mind just wentblank, when it came to academics. I could make the most complex things happen out on a football field, with focus sharper than a fucking razor, but…
In a classroom? I froze up. I panicked.
I swallowed. “Well, I’veobservedthat you treat your subjects like they’re pawns to you, instead of treating them like human beings.”
“So you’re saying?—”
“I’m saying you’re an asshole, Gray.”
Too far.
Definitely too far.
To my surprise, I saw a hint of disappointment on his face.
Or maybe it was just his usual serious, self-important frown.
“Is that what you think?” he asked.
“I think you sit behind the lines, writing about things instead of actually doing them. The theater club? They actually put on plays. Create things. The basketball team is out there making things happen. And we are on the field, giving our blood and sweat to win games, but you’re probably going to nitpick our personal lives or write about some random things we say?—”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Andrew.”
“Hell, maybe it’ll even be cheap gossip about my sexuality. That would be a real good one for your glorified tabloid rag, wouldn’t it?”
Gray’s expression shifted from dark and mysterious to being lighter, as if a stormcloud had finally passed by.
His face softened, and he looked at me with almost a little bit of pleasure, as if he was realizing something for the first time.
“I see,” he said. “You clearly don’t readallof my articles.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wrote about my journey discovering my bisexuality three weeks ago, Peachel,” he said. “Maybe because it was the final summer edition, you didn’t catch that one?”
I felt like my world had just tilted a little on its axis.
He wrote about something having to do with exploring sexuality and Ihadn’tcaught it?
It sounded like a joke, but it was true: usually I’d fuckin’ know about something like that.
