Page 51 of The Longest Shot
It's a promise I have no idea how to keep, but it seems to satisfy them for now. After shooting me one last look, Mills puts on her broken skates and heads out on the ice, while Bri heads for her office. That leaves me alone, with nothing but the guilt for company.
Welcome to academic politics, where the points are made up and the rules only apply to people without penises.
I've tried playing by the rules, and all it got me was being touched up by an athletic director drunk on power and my girls skating on broken blades. But the alternative, chaos and a bit of deception, is not something that comes naturally to me.
I'm a woman who relies on discipline, systems, structure, and hard work.
The alternative?
Well, it's James Fitzgerald.
I think about his hands around his ridiculous coffee drink. The way he laid himself bare, explaining the wounds that made him who he is. How his whole body vibrated with nervous energy, like stillness might kill him. But that fragile truce we negotiated isn't just personal anymore.
It's a tactical necessity.
He has access Galloway hasn't cut off yet, connections I can only dream of. But, most importantly, he has the kind of chaotic, unorthodox approach that might be the only way to fight a war where the enemy controls all the conventional weapons.
This isn't about feelings. This isn't about forgiveness.
This is about survival.
Myteam'ssurvival.
And if that means weaponizing my alliance with James, then game on.
twenty
ROOK
Between the deathby PowerPoint and the ass numbness, this sociology lecture is going to kill me one way or another.
I’ve been sitting in this torture device disguised as a chair for forty-seven minutes, and I’m pretty sure my left butt cheek has achieved enlightenment by transcending physical sensation entirely. And, as Professor Hendricks drones on about social stratification, I'm counting down the minutes until I'm out of here.
I’m in the back row—my usual spot, where I can zone out without being too obvious about it—but today even that small rebellion feels hollow. My knee won’t stop bouncing, dancing with this manic rhythm that started at 4:00 a.m. when I woke up with Morgan’s voice still echoing in my head.
“Your jokes didn’t just feel like a rejection. They felt like a cruel confirmation of a lesson I’d already learned.”
For three years she’d been carrying that, and the guilt sits heavy in my chest. It's hard finding out that you're one of two people responsible for another person putting up shutters on the rest of the world, resisting human connection and emotion in case they get hurt.
But, if nothing else, I got to hear her side of the story, and give her mine.
Strangely, standing up to Galloway and then sharing all the shit about my parents and my constant need for noise with Morgan has left me feeling lighter. And, maybe, a little better. I still feel like a fraud of a captain, and I'm still not sure where things stand with her, but if nothing else, we've reached a sort of deal.
We'll talk to each other and deal with Galloway's bullshit if we need to.
Anything else… well… who knows?
There's a distant neuron in the back of my brain that fires at the thought, putting the suggestion of something more—something romantic—in my head, but I immediately command the rest of my brain to smother the rebel. Because the last thing I need is to fuck things up when they just got unfucked…
…even though I can't get that kiss and our roaming hands out of my head.
My phone vibrates against my thigh, interrupting my internal agony-aunt session. I pull it out, checking it in the most super stealthy way so that Professor Hendricks doesn't notice, and see it's a Pine Barren University Student Portal notification.
Midterm grades are up.
I open the app with the kind of detached curiosity you reserve for checking your bank balance after a weekend bender. The number that greets me is a bright, unapologetic D-plus in Social Theory, and the rest of my grades aren't much better, culminating in a plucky C-minus in Sociology Fieldwork Craft.
And only because that class is mostly marked on class discussion, and I can talk shit with the best of them, even if I don't know what I'm doing.
