Page 257 of Heartache Duet

“I’m never going to get laid,” he mumbles, throwing himself on his bed.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I repeat honestly. “You’ll find a girl when you least expect it. I was eighteen when I lost my virginity.”

He sits up, eyes narrowed, then shakes his head. “So, what are we doing tonight?”

I pick up my laptop. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I have to study for finals. We can’t all be geniuses like you.” Like me, Austin got a full ride to Duke, but unlike me, his is purely academic. I still don’t really understand what his end game is or what any of the subjects are that he takes. Something about computers and science and algorithms and I don’t know… sometimes I see him on his laptop, his fingers flying across the keyboard, and on the screen is a bunch of letters and numbers and symbols, and then he taps a button and boom; he’s just made a couple hundred dollars for someone in less than five minutes.

So he says.

Austin groans into his pillow, clearly frustrated. “If I help you study—”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because every time you do, you make me dumber.”

“I make you feel dumber. Trust me, being around me has made you smarter, and you don’t even know it.”

“Probably,” I mumble, getting off my bed to sit at my desk. “Hey, is your dad still cool to have me work with him over the summer?”

Another groan from him, this one louder. “Yes, Connor. My dad loves you. He would love nothing more than for a Duke Blue Devil to work with him at our family’s junkyard… but why the fuck do you want to?”

“Money?” I shrug, lying. Truth is, I’ve had a shitty year on the court—my focus elsewhere—and I plan on spending the summer getting some extra training and coaching in. “Besides, my dad’s going to be in Europe—”

“You mean your dads.” He snorts, laughing childishly to himself.

“Idiot. They’re not married.” Yet. “And did you say shit like that in high school? Because if you did, it’s no wonder you got the shit kicked out of you.”

He holds a hand to his heart and jokes, “You’re hurting my feelings.”

“Uh huh.”

He stands beside me, looking over my shoulder.

I open my laptop.

He shuts it. “Are we really not going to this party?”

I open my laptop again and look up at him. “We’ll go for a half hour on one condition…”

“What’s that?”

I smirk.

He sighs. “This shit again?”

I nod, moving to the side so he can reach around me. Fingers swift over my keyboard, he taps, taps, taps at the keys, and with one large inhale, and a final sigh, he taps one more time until the Duke logo appears at the top left of the screen. He’d just hacked—so he says—into the school admissions database like he’d done many times before, and just like all the previous times, I click search, my fingers much slower than his when I type:

A

V

A

D

I

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