Page 73 of Breakaway Goal

“Maddie!” she cries, leaping over the distance between our beds onto my mattress. “What! You, Rhys?Rhys? Oh my gosh.” She’s sputtering ecstatically, and I start to laugh.

“How could you not have told me right away!” she reprimands. “How could you have been holding back on giving me extremely detailed accounts of what he looks like naked? And by extremely, I meanextremely. Have you … have youdone itwith him?”

While we wait for our dinner, I fill Jasmine in on the details. Her face is a carousel of animated expressions as I take her through the whole story.

Our food arrives, and we go down to get it together and bring it back up, sitting down on our carpeted floor to eat.

“You can’t tell anyone, okay?” I say before biting into my ground beef burrito.

“Me? Who would I tell?” She winks. Jasmine’s not a gossip, and I know I can trust her to keep a secret, but she’s definitely a natural yapper. After she swallows her first bite, she asks, “Is it really that big a deal to keep it a secret, though? Would your brother actually care?”

It’s a question I’ve asked myself plenty of times, considering how serious Rhys seems to be about keeping what we’re doing from Lane.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I confess. “But Rhys seems to think he would.”

Jasmine scrunches up her lips, her forehead furrowing. “Men are stupid. It’s none of your brother’s business who you go out with or do anything with, whether it’s with one of his friends or not.”

That’s how I feel. Honestly, I would expect that that’s how Lane would feel, too.

But Rhys and Lane are best friends, and even though he’s my brother and we’re close, Rhys knows and understands Lane in certain ways that I can’t.

But maybe Lane’s reaction is just an excuse for Rhys—a made-up reason he’s selling to me so I don’t try to push things further and make it harder when he wants to go back to just being friends and move on to different girls.

“You know what I think?” Jasmine asks, and her voice makes me realize I’ve been staring into space while my brain goes into hyper-analysis mode.

“What?”

“Less overthinking, more overeating.” She pushes the side of tortillas and guac that she ordered toward me. “Don’t make me finish this myself.”

I laugh. “Sounds like a plan.”

Things right now are going so well. Academically, socially, and—for lack of a better word—romantically. Better than they’ve ever gone before in my life. I need to shut down my brain and just enjoy it.

But no matter how I try to put those words into practice, I can’t help but think that all these unresolved questions mean Rhys and I are heading toward an ending that won’t be good for my heart.

37

RHYS

I’m lying down on a bench at the gym, getting ready to do some triceps extensions. I’m trying to tune out Tuck talking trash to Sebastian about how he can sprint longer than him while they do interval training on the treadmills, when my phone vibrates in my pocket.

I decide to check it before I start my workout—and when I see the message on my screen, I’m glad as fuck that I did.

Maddie

Come back to your room. Hurry.

Desire sparks in my chest. As much as I wish that Maddie and I could do what we’re doing out in the open, I can’t deny that sneaking around with her like this is the hottest, most erotic experience of my life.

I take a deep breath and tighten my lower ab muscles, trying to hold back an erection that I won’t be able to hide in my loose gym shorts.

“Where you running off to?” Hudson asks as I head to the exit.

“I, uh … just remembered I forgot to upload a paper due for one of my classes. It’ll be marked late if I don’t have it submitted in the next half hour.” A shameless lie.

Hudson nods and gets back to his shoulder lifts, thankfully.

I don’t even pretend to have any dignity; I flat-out run the distance from the team gym back to my house. The other four guys are still going to be at the gym for a while, and my mind is racing faster than my legs with all the things I want to do to Maddie during the time we have.

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