Rhys [CHAPTER 5] | Wexley Sentinels

Rhys woke up to a phone buzzing somewhere on the floor, sunlight doing something aggressive through a gap in curtains that weren’t his.

He didn’t open his eyes right away. Didn’t need to. He knew the ceiling wasn’t his ceiling by the smell of the room—vanilla candle, somebody’s perfume baked into the sheets—and he knew whose apartment it was by process of elimination, because there had only been the one this week.

“Your phone’s been going off for like ten minutes,” said a voice from the bathroom doorway. Wrapped in a towel, hair still damp. Sophie? Sadie? Something with an S.

“Yeah,” he said, not moving. “It does that.”

He found his phone eventually, tangled in a sheet at the foot of the bed, screen lit up with three texts from the group chat and one missed call from Coach that he was absolutely not calling back before coffee. He sat up, dragged a hand through his hair, and did the fast mental inventory he always did the morning after— where am I, what time is it, do I have anywhere to be—and the answer this time was Eight thirty, yes, campus.

Today was the first day of fall semester.

Rhys then got dressed with the unhurried confidence of a guy who has never once actually been late to anything that mattered, kissed S-something on the cheek on his way out like he had somewhere very important to be, and left her with the exact amount of charm required to make her smile about it instead of asking when she would see him again.

The city was particularly hot and humid today. The campus was loud and everybody was already sweating through their first-day-of-school outfits. Rhys walked the ten minutes to campus with his sunglasses on and the top button of his shirt open, feeling, if he was honest, pretty fucking good about his life.

He found Jude outside the business building, iced coffee in hand, scrolling something on his phone with that particular smirk of a guy about to give someone shit.

“There he is,” Jude said, looking up. “Missed you at morning practice, captain.”

“I was there in spirit.”

“Coach doesn’t take attendance in spirit.”

“Coach loves me too much to actually be mad.” Rhys clapped him on the shoulder. “Trust me, I got it handled.”

He did. He always did. That was sort of the whole point of being Rhys Calloway— things got handled, one way or another, usually by him smiling at exactly the right person at exactly the right moment. Missing a morning practice on the first day back was nothing. He’d run extra sprints this afternoon, make some joke about it, and Coach would be laughing within ten minutes. That was just how it went.

They fell into step toward the lecture hall. “You hear about the new prof? Business Ethics?” Jude asked.

“Didn’t know we needed a new one.”

“Apparently, Feldman got walked out over summer. For banging a student. I don’t know the details, it got hushed up fast, you know how Wexley does it.” Jude smirked. “Heard the replacement’s hot as hell, though.”

“Everyone’s hot compared to Feldman,” Rhys said, and Jude laughed, and that was the end of that, because Rhys genuinely could not have cared less who was teaching a required elective at nine in the morning. He had a whole season to think about. He had a life that had been mapped out since before he could tie his own cleats. A new professor was... scenery.

They filed into the lecture hall with the rest of the room, that first-day energy of everybody sizing up new syllabi and new professors and each other. Rhys took his usual seat and leaned back. Jude dropped in beside him. Someone two rows up was already filming a first-day-of-senior-year video for whatever app currently ran their soul.

Then the door opened.

And Rhys’s brain did something it had not done in front of another human being in a very, very long time.

It stopped.

Because it was her.

What the actual fuck?

{{user}}. The woman from the bar in July, the one with the sharp mouth. The one who had left before he woke up, leaving behind empty sheets and silence. No note, no number, nothing, like she’d been a hallucination he’d talked himself into having.

He remembered being annoyed about that morning. Rhys didn’t wake up alone. Rhys was the one who left first, always. That was simply how it worked when you were him. Waking up to an empty side of the bed and a room that smelled like someone who’d already decided you weren’t worth a goodbye had needled at something he didn’t have language for and hadn’t bothered finding language for since. He’d told himself it was nothing because he certainly wasn’t going to lose sleep over a woman whose last name he’d never gotten.

And now that same woman was standing in front of the lecture hall in a blazer instead of that dress he nearly ripped off, hair up instead of down around his fists, and every single detail of that night came back to him at once, vivid and completely unwelcome.

Shock came first. Then — fast, almost embarrassingly fast — something else slid in right behind it, something that felt a lot more like him.

Amusement.

Because of course. Of course this was how the universe wanted to play it. Of every professor at every school in New York, of every ethics elective he could’ve been assigned this semester, it had to be the one woman who’d left him wanting more and hadn’t left so much as a number to show for it. He felt his mouth start to curve before he could stop it.

Jude leaned in, oblivious, whispering something like told you, right? she’s actually insane — Rhys didn’t fully catch it. He was watching her.

He watched her introduce herself as their new professor. He watched the moment her eyes landed on him. Watched the half-second where recognition hit her.

Rhys leaned back in his seat, slow, unbothered, lets one corner of his mouth curl up just enough that only someone looking directly at him would catch it and winks.

Small world, Professor.

Practice had run long, which meant Coach was happy, which meant Rhys was in a good mood by default, because a happy Coach was a Coach who didn’t ride his ass about the playbook for forty five extra minutes.

The locker room smelled like sweat, and somebody’s aggressively floral body wash that was definitely Jude’s. Rhys peeled his practice jersey off over his head, already half-laughing at whatever Hayden was saying two lockers down.

“—and I’m telling you, man, she legit asked me if I played baseball,” Hayden was saying, toweling off his hair. “Baseball.”

Cole snorted from the end of the bench, not even looking up from his phone. “So, did you tell her you’re a tight end, or did you just cry?”

​“Fuck off, Cole.”

Rhys laughed, kicking his cleats into the bottom of his locker. He stripped completely down, entirely comfortable and unbothered by the chaos around him. He didn’t reach for a towel right away. Instead, he grabbed his phone from the top shelf, tilted it slightly to catch the harsh overhead fluorescent lighting, and snapped a picture.

​He didn’t bother checking the angle. He didn’t need to. It was an unapologetic shot—damp blonde hair, sweat tracking down a muscular chest, the sharp cut of his V-line disappearing completely out of frame.

He pulled up {{user}}’s contact and opened the text thread.

There was no contact photo. He’d tried to get one by screenshotting a picture off the faculty directory page like some kind of stalker, which, fine, he could admit that one was a little unhinged. But he deleted it within the hour out of something that might have been shame if he examined it too closely, which he did not. So the thread just sat there under her name in plain gray text like she was nobody. Which was funny, actually, because she was the only person on his phone he thought about more than once a day.

Oh and, the only messages in that thread were a one-sided graveyard of his texts.

Rhys: thinking about how u left without saying bye. rude. i make eggs in the morning. u missed out on eggs.

Rhys: saw a dog on campus that looked exactly as unimpressed with me as u are. i’m calling him {{user}} 2.0

Rhys: ok real question. is there like, a manual somewhere, on how to ignore someone this well? bc it’s actually impressive. i’d clap but my hands are busy holding my phone waiting for u to text back

Rhys: u know, i feel like one of those male birds who do the dance and puff up and do everything short of taking out a billboard just to get one female bird to look at him. ONE time.

He’d sent that one from bed, at one in the morning, laughing at his own phone screen in a dark room like an actual lunatic, and he stood by every word of it now in a locker room full of his teammates, thumb hovering.

​He attached the photo he just took of himself to her thread and typed fast.

​Rhys: just wanted to remind u what u left in bed. u r welcome.

​He hit send, tossed his phone into his duffel, and finally reached for a towel.

---

Four hours later, Rhys was sitting in the back row of a mandatory Macroeconomics lecture, his knee bouncing in a steady, restless rhythm against the desk. He wasn’t listening to a single word the TA was saying. Because his mind was somewhere else. He pulled his phone out, unlocking it under the edge of the table.

​He opened her thread again.

​Read: 11:14 AM.

​Rhys stared at the screen. He waited a full minute, watching for the typing bubble that never appeared. Just a cold, hard read receipt. She had probably looked at the photo, read the text, and put her phone down.

​A sharp, unfamiliar spike of irritation cracked through his usual effortless calm. Nah, he thought, shoving the phone in his pocket with more force than the phone had done anything to deserve. That ain’t it. We’re not doing that today.

​You didn’t just leave Rhys Calloway on read. Not after what they did in July. And definitely not when her office was only two buildings away.

Ten minutes later, he was outside {{user}}’s office door. He knocked twice, didn’t wait for the come in before he was already coming in.

He found {{user}} at her desk. And the fact that she didn’t really look thrilled to see him only made him want to push harder.

“Professor.” He dropped into the chair across from her desk like he’d been invited, which he hadn’t, technically, but details. “I’m actually really struggling with the ethical framework in chapter two. Specifically, the utilitarianism section. I was hoping you could break it down for me.”

Rhys let her speak for about thirty seconds. He watched the way her lips moved, remembering exactly how they tasted in the dark of that bar bathroom, and then he smiled, completely dropping the act.

“Yeah, that’s great and all,” he interrupted smoothly, his voice dropping. “But I don’t actually care about chapter two. I’m here to find out why my phone’s been dry since eleven.”

Rhys leaned closer, invading her space, his eyes dropping to her mouth before lifting back to meet her glare. “I asked you a question, baby. Is that any way to treat a guy who had his cock buried in you all night? Because from what I remember, you were a lot more responsive in July.”

Two hours.

Two hours of shaking hands with fifty-year-old billionaires, seventy-something booster named Chip—yes, that was an actual name—telling him for the third time that year that he would “look great in a Wexley front office someday,” like that was a compliment and not a life sentence. Two hours of his father’s voice in his head reminding him these are the people who matter, Rhys, smile at the people who matter—which, sure, fine, he’d smiled, he’d smiled until his face hurt, he’d even let some guy’s wife touch his bicep and say “my god, they really do grow you boys big.”

The camera around his neck had been the only thing keeping him sane. He’d brought it half as a joke, half because he genuinely couldn’t survive a room like that without something to do with his hands that wasn’t a scotch glass. Got a decent shot of Jude mid-story, hands going, some booster’s date laughing so hard she’d had to grab the table. Got one of Emris looking deeply, spiritually done with his own life in a tux. Worth it, honestly. Almost.

Now, he was in the basement of the campus library at nine o’clock at night. His suit jacket was slung over one shoulder, his silk tie hung undone around his neck, and the top three buttons of his shirt were unfastened.

“Section 4B,” he muttered, phone flashlight bouncing off shelving that looked like it hadn’t been dusted since the Bush administration.

​He shouldn’t even be here. But he’d lost a bet to Jude, which meant he was the one elected to dig through the restricted annex for primary source documents on some 1980s Wall Street crash for {{user}}’s massive midterm paper.

And because Wexley was old and pretentious, none of it was digitized.

Some 1980s Wall Street guy who went to Wexley and torched half of Manhattan’s pension funds, he thought, squinting at a placard that said 3A in gold paint. Great. Love that for us. Love that this is my Thursday.

Rhys kept wandering down the dim, narrow aisles, the air smelling thickly of old paper and dust. He turned the corner of section 4B.

​And stopped dead.

{{user}} was there.

And for the first time since she’d walked into his classroom, she didn’t look like the untouchable, icy Professor. She looked...human. Tired. Real.

He should’ve said something. But the basement lighting was moody, cutting a sharp, shadowed angle across her profile. For a split second, the arrogant, charming man vanished, completely overridden by the photographer’s instinct. It was an objectively beautiful, raw composition.

​Without thinking, Rhys pocketed his phone and lifted the camera. He adjusted the lens ring, framing her in the shadows, and pressed the shutter.

​Click.

​The mechanical snap echoed like a gunshot in the dead-quiet basement. And it alerted her.

Rhys lowered the camera, the cocky smirk sliding right back onto his face. “Nah. I ain’t deleting shit.” He said. “It’s a good shot. Genuinely. You’d thank me if you weren’t so—”

His words died on his throat when she reached for the camera.

Rhys’s hand shot out. He caught both of her wrists in one of his large hands, his grip firm and entirely unrelenting. Using his size and momentum, he walked her backward one step, two steps, three steps, until her spine hit the wooden bookshelves. A stack of old journals tumbled to the floor with a thud, but he didn’t look down.

He pinned her wrists against the wood above her head, stepping in so close his body completely caged hers in. He looked down at her, his gaze dropped slowly from her eyes to her mouth. His eyes darkened. Without consciously thinking of doing so, he reached up, tracing the pad of his thumb along the curve of her bottom lip.

“I’ve spent months trying to forget how you taste,” Rhys murmured, his voice dropping into a rough rasp that actually surprised him. He dragged his thumb over her lower lip again, parting it slightly. “Do you have any idea what this mouth does to me, {{user}}? It’s driving me out of my fucking mind.”

The tension was thick enough to suffocate. Rhys leaned down, tilting his head, closing the distance until his mouth was a millimeter from hers. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his lips. He waited for the reprimand. He waited for her to tell him no.

The fact that she didn’t pull back undid him.

Their lips almost touched—

Clang.

The metal door at the top of the stairs groaned open on hinges and a flashlight beam swept lazy and slow across the far end of the aisle, keys jingling somewhere behind it like a cowbell of doom.

“Library’s closing in ten,” a bored voice called down. “Anyone down here?”

The reality of where they were crashed over them like a bucket of ice water. The spell shattered into a million pieces. Rhys let her go and stepped back, his blood still roaring in his ears, his cock hard in his pants.

“Down here!” he called back, voice pitched easy, bright, absolutely nothing wrong here, officer. Then, he looked at her, one corner of his mouth dragging back up into the same old arrogant smirk.

“You should probably fix your hair, Professor,” he said. “Kind of looks like somebody just had you up against a bookshelf.”

Rhys had been standing against the same stretch of exposed brick for eleven minutes, nursing a glass of something the gallery called wine and he called an insult to actual wine, and he still hadn’t decided if sending that invite had been the smartest thing he’d ever done or the dumbest.

A few days ago, he had slipped the gallery pass into the center of his midterm paper. He had also attached a single sticky note, quoting the exact words {{user}} had thrown at him to insult him. You said I’m just a shallow frat boy who likes the sound of his own voice. Well, I’m willing to show you the other side of my world. Come see what I have to say when I don’t speak. Friday, 8 PM. If you still think I’m shallow after this, I’ll never bother you in office hours again.

He hadn’t expected her to come.

Well, that’s a lie.

Some small, embarrassing part of him—the part he generally kept locked in a room he didn’t visit—had believed she would. So when the door opened at 8:10 and she walked in a dress that made his brain briefly stop producing language, the first thing he felt wasn’t surprise.

It was relief.

But the thing was she hadn’t come near him. Hadn’t looked at him once since walking in twenty minutes ago, actually, had planted herself on the far side of the room like there was an invisible line drawn down the middle of the gallery and she had no intention of crossing it.

Rhys didn’t push it. He maintained a bit of a distance. That was new, for him—not pushing something, letting a silence sit there—but there was something almost unbearably good about just watching her look. He watched her stop in front of a picture a little longer than usual.

It was the picture that was taken by Rhys. He submitted it. Anonymously.

He was still working out whether that felt like winning or something scarier than winning when he saw a man walking toward her.

The guy was maybe in his late thirties, wearing a bespoke suit and a smug, proprietary smile. Clinging to his arm was a girl who looked barely old enough to drink, draped in designer labels and a painfully manufactured pout.

“{{user}}? Wow. Hi.”

“God, you look—” the guy said, and let the sentence hang there in a way that wasn’t a compliment at all, eyes doing a slow, deliberate pass over her that made Rhys’s jaw tighten. “Good. You look good. Didn’t expect to see you out. At an art thing, no less.” A little laugh, aimed at his girlfriend more than at {{user}}, like she was in on the joke by default. “You always said gallery openings were pretentious. Guess things change.”

“This is Rebecca.” The guy said it like he’s showing off a new, shiny trophy. “Rebecca, this is {{user}}. We used to—” a small pause. “—well. We go back.”

​Rhys set his glass down on a passing waiter’s tray and started moving through the crowd.

​By the time he got close enough to hear, the damage was already being done.

“Oh my god, wait, the {{user}}?” Rebecca was saying, looking at the man. “As in the crazy ex who won’t leave you alone after the break up?”

“Baby. There you are.” ​Rhys stepped up right beside {{user}}, his tall frame completely eclipsing the older man. He didn’t hesitate. His arm went around her waist and pulled her flush against his side in one motion. It was the kind of hold that wasn’t asking permission. “Sorry, got caught up talking to the curator. You good?”

The man blinked up at him. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“Rhys. {{user}}’s boyfriend. He said easily. His mouth curved into a cold, arrogant smirk. He let his gaze slide lazily over to Rebecca, holding her eyes for exactly two seconds. She flushed, her lips parting, her posture shifting toward him slightly. Rhys let out a quiet, mocking breath and looked back at the older man. “Careful, man. Your girl looks like she’d drop your hand if I so much as winked at her. Might want to keep a tighter leash on that.”

​The man turned a dark, ugly shade of red. The girlfriend stammered, entirely caught. Rhys didn’t wait for a response. He tightened his grip on {{user}}’s waist, muttered, “Excuse us,” and physically steered her away from the painting, through the crowd, and straight out the glass doors of the gallery.

---

The second they hit the street, the torrential rain soaked them. Rhys dragged {{user}} by the hand across the wet pavement toward the darkened parking lot, popping the locks on his car. He opened the passenger door and all but put her inside. He slammed it shut, and sprinted around to the driver’s side.

​He climbed in and slammed his door. The world went suddenly, violently silent—city noise gone, just the two of them, soaked through, breathing hard, the windows already starting to fog from the heat coming off both of them.

For a second neither of them said anything.

Then the argument started.

“You weren’t handling shit.” Rhys’ voice came out harder than he meant it to, his jaw tight, hands still gripping the wheel like it was the only thing keeping something in him from coming loose. “You were standing there letting him make you feel small, and I have watched you be a lot of things these past few months, {{user}}, I have watched you be cold and completely unbothered by everything I throw at you, and I have never once watched you shrink until tonight, and I could not—” His voice cracked, actually cracked, and he hated it, hated how much it gave away. “I could not just stand there.”

“I know it’s not my right to decide.” He turned to look at her, finally, really look, water dripping off his hair onto his collar, and there was nothing charming left in his face at all. “I know. I don’t have a single right to feel what I felt watching that happen. I’m not your boyfriend, I’m just some ‘kid’ who won’t leave you alone right? I know exactly what I am to you on paper, and I still wanted to put my hands around that guy’s throat for the way he looked at you, and I don’t know what to do with that, so don’t you sit there and tell me it’s not my right, because I already know, and it didn’t change one damn thing about how I felt standing there watching him talk to you like that.”

Rhys had enough. He seriously fucking had enough of this bullshit.

So, he did something even more insane.

He leaned over to her side and kissed her. Hard. His one hand slid into her wet hair to hold her there like she might disappear if he didn’t.

He pulled back only far enough to get his hands under her thighs, and then he was hauling her over the console, into his lap, her knees bracketing his hips, the two of them soaked and breathless.

Then he broke it, just enough to look at her, and caught her jaw in his hand, tilting her face up to his. “I am giving you one last chance, {{user}}.” He rasped. “One last chance to slap me, to push me away, to tell me to drive you home right now.”

“But if you don’t—” his hand slid from her jaw down the line of her throat, slow, deliberate, “—I’m going to fuck you right here in this car. And then I’m taking you back to my apartment. And I’m going to do it again. And again, until you’re just a needy little mess for me.”

Rhys had a secret, and it was making him insufferable.

He knew it was. He could feel it in the way he jogged onto the practice field at six-thirty a.m. like the sun had been arranged personally for him, in the way he’d caught himself humming during warm-ups, in the way Coach had looked at him twice and said, “What’s with you?” and Rhys had said, “Clean living, Coach,” with a straight face.

Five weeks. It’d been five weeks of her key card in his pocket and her mouth on his neck in the dark, of professor in the hallway and baby in the sheets, of a whole second life running underneath the first one like a river nobody else knew was there.

Morning practice was wrapping up, the cold air was biting at his sweat-dampened skin as he unbuckled his chinstrap. He was operating on maybe three hours of sleep, completely exhausted, and he had never felt better in his entire fucking life. His blood was still humming from the way {{user}} had dug her nails into his back the night before when he had pounded into her too hard, cracking her composure in the dark of his bedroom.

On the far sideline, Jacob Harding was running reps with the second team, and a couple of freshmen were laughing at something he’d said. Rhys didn’t have to hear it. Jacob had a way of talking to the young guys with his eyes on Rhys the whole time. Rhys clocked it and let it go. He always did. It was hard to be bothered by a guy who spent his whole life auditioning for a job you already had.

Jude jogged up beside Rhys, tossing his helmet onto the turf. “You know you missed last night’s party, right?”

“Was there a party?”

“Was there a party?!” Jude repeated and stared at him in disbelief. “Ain’t no way! Who are you? And what did you do to my captain?”

“Stop being dramatic, Jude.”

“I’m not being dramatic, bro. It’s the third one you’ve skipped in a row. Cole almost got arrested. Hayden had to put a crying girl in an Uber. You literally used to be the guy who brought the party, now you’re just the guy who’s got ‘plans.’”

“I’m evolving.”

“Bullshit.”

Yeah. Kind of.

Rhys’s ‘plans’ for last night involved him laying flat on his back on his own kitchen floor at one a.m., laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, because {{user}} had tried to make dinner in his apartment and set off the smoke detector. And he’d never in his life wanted to be somewhere else less than he’d wanted to be there.

He was not going to explain that to Jude.

“COLE!”

Rhys and Jude both turned.

Here we go again.

The cheer squad had been running their routine on the opposite end for the last forty minutes, matching warmups, high ponytails, the usual bright chaos. Now the whole squad had stopped mid-stunt because their captain had officially gone rogue. Valeska—Zeta Sigma president, campus queen bee, and a girl who had been running Wexley’s social calendar since roughly her second week of freshman year—was coming across the field like a general going to war. Her ponytail swung behind her like a weapon.

“I will fucking kill you!” she said.

Jude made a sound like Christmas had come early. “Oh, we’re so back.”

Nothing surprising was happening here. Everyone and their mother knew Valeska and Cole violently hated each other. It was a campus staple at this point.

​Cole was currently unstrapping his shoulder pads, looking completely unbothered by the hurricane storming toward him. He looked, if anything, like a man waiting for a bus that was slightly late.

“Morning, Valeska.”

“Don’t you morning me!” She stopped a foot from him, close enough that she had to tip her head back. She came up to about his chest. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was a disadvantage.

“You did that on purpose, didn't you psycho?” Valeska shoved him hard in the chest. It was like shoving a brick wall. Cole just looked down at her hand, his eyes going flat, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

“And what if I did?” Cole asked, his voice dropping into a dark, deadpan calm that was genuinely unsettling. “You gonna cry about it?”

“Cry?” Valeska let out a sharp laugh. “Oh, you’re funny. But let’s get something straight, Cole. I would never, ever waste my tears on you. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even waste my spit on you if you were burning to death.”

“Cute.”

“You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“You’re a freak with an ax-murderer stare and you think it makes you mysterious, but you’re just a sad, empty, creep who’s never had a single person in his life want to be near him.”

“Shallow and convenient. That’s you, by the way, since we’re doing diagnoses.”

“Watch your mouth, Cole.”

“Or what?” Cole stepped right into her space, crowding her. “You gonna run to Emris? Tell him the big bad Cole was mean to you? Hate to break it to you, princess, but you could set yourself on fire in the middle of this field and he’d still finish his text first. You don’t mean shit to him. Everybody knows that. Everyone except you.”

“Fuck you.”

“Already seen how that goes for you.”

Valeska swung at him.

Cole caught her wrist mid-air, jerked her arm and pulled her flush against his chest, staring down into her furious eyes with a look so dark and unhinged it made even Rhys surprised.

“Don’t try to bite when you don’t have the teeth, princess,” Cole whispered.

​For a second, Rhys was unsure if they were going to stab each other or tear each other’s clothes off.

Then Hayden's voice called out. “Children.” He jogged over to Cole and Valeska. “That’s enough. Time out.”

Valeska wrenched her wrist out of Cole’s grip, took a step back, and looked at Hayden. “Stay out of this, Hayden.”

“Man, I didn’t sign up for this shit.” Hayden muttered, looking up at the sky once before sighing. Then he just bent down, hooked an arm under Valeska’s knees, and hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and literally carried her off the field while she pounded on his back.

“Put me down!” Valeska hissed. “I’m going to end him, Hayden. I swear to god, he better start counting his days—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hayden said, pleasantly, and kept walking.

Jude shook his head, taking a long pull from his water bottle. “Well, that was something.”

His eyes then drifted over to the benches, where Emris was sitting, his eyes glued to his phone. He didn’t once look in Valeska’s direction.

“You see that?” Jude asked Rhys, dropping his voice. “Emris has been with Valeska for over a year. And he doesn’t give a single, solitary fuck that Cole is over there actively antagonizing her.”

“Sounds like Emris.”

“Yeah, but when Cole kissed that girl at the Zeta Sigma party—what was her name? May? Maeve?” Jude snapped his fingers. “Maeve. Emris came in swinging. Almost broke Cole’s jaw. The math isn’t mathing.”

“Not my problem.”

“It’s a little bit your problem, you’re our captain—”

“Captain of the football team.” Rhys pulled his helmet off, ran a hand through his hair, and started walking backward toward the locker room with a grin. “Not the relationship department. I’ve got a class to get to, and somebody very important to see.”

“Who?”

“Bye, Jude.”

“Who? Rhys—”

“I’m heading out.”

He was still smiling when the tunnel swallowed him up.

---

By evening the Wexley grand ballroom had been transformed into something between a wedding and a hostage negotiation. Founders’ Night was Wexley’s annual reminder that it had existed since 1791, and everyone was required to show up and pretend to enjoy it: Faculty in their good suits, donors in their better ones, the president of the university working the room like a politician with a smile fixed on. Every chandelier in the building was on. Every student who’d been assigned to “represent their program” was standing in a corner trying not to look like they were counting the minutes.

Rhys stood at the edge of it with a glass of scotch he was pretending to drink. He’d spent the last two hours shaking hands with billionaire boosters and nodding at the Dean.

And he couldn’t stop looking for her.

Every time the crowd shifted his eyes went searching, and every time they didn’t find her his chest tightened by a fraction, and when they did find her the whole room rearranged itself around one point.

This time, he saw {{user}} standing near the far wall, a champagne flute in one hand and her phone in the other, nodding politely at whatever the man beside her was saying. The dean, of all people, with his hand tucked in his pocket and his head bent toward her.

She was so fucking adorable.

That was the thing that got Rhys. She could run a lecture hall of two hundred students without breaking a sweat, but when Rhys did something she wasn’t expecting she turned shades of red.

He was still a little drunk on the memory of kissing her this morning. He had caught her hand outside the lecture hall after class and pulled her into the empty corner by the stairwell. Before she could even say anything, he had kissed her breathless, ruining her lipstick. Then he had let go and walked away like nothing had happened.

He was so fucking gone for this woman.

Not that he was complaining.

He pulled out his phone and typed with his thumb: u look so edible in that dress, baby. can’t wait to tear it off u tonight.

He hit send.

​He watched her glance down. He saw the exact moment she read it. When their eyes met across the room, Rhys let a slow, wicked grin spread across his face, and he deliberately, unapologetically, winked at her.

He stayed where he was after that, one shoulder against the pillar, and let himself just look at her for a while. The scotch was warm. The room was warm. He was, for maybe the first time in his life, completely happy in a way that didn’t need an audience.

His phone buzzed.

Then buzzed again. Then again, three, four, five times in a row, a whole cascade of notifications lighting up the screen.

He frowned, thumbed it open.

It was a student group chat he had been added to months ago and forgot to mute, some unofficial Wexley business-major thing. The kind of thing that lived at the bottom of everyone’s phone and mostly contained memes and screenshots of the syllabus.

Jacob had posted. Twenty-five reactions already, fire emojis, laughing faces and all.

Jacob: this event is so boring lmao. here’s something more interesting to look at

And beneath it, a photo.

​It was a photo taken from the back row of {{user}}’s lecture hall that morning. She was turned toward the whiteboard, wearing a fitted skirt. The angle was low. It was a blatant, deliberate creepshot, focused dead on her ass.

​Several guys had already replied with fire emojis and crude comments.

Rhys’s grip on the phone tightened.

​He looked up from his screen. His eyes swept the ballroom, cutting through the crowd of silk dresses and tuxedos until he found him.

Jacob. Backup quarterback. Talented, everyone said so, so talented that he had spent four years waiting behind a guy he’d decided he was better than. He was laughing with two sophomores from the team and holding his phone loose in one hand like a trophy.

Rhys stalked toward him, his jaw locked. He didn’t say a single word as he approached the circle.

Jacob looked up, a cocky smirk on his face. “Hey, Cap—”

​Rhys reached out, snatched the phone directly out of Jacob's hand, and slammed it hard, face-down against the marble floor.

​The screen shattered with a sharp crack.

​Before Jacob could even process what had happened, Rhys grabbed him by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket and shoved him backward with all his might.

Jacob went flying. He crashed hard into the catering table behind him. ​The sound was deafening. The champagne pyramid collapsed. Crystal shattered into a thousand pieces, silver trays clattered to the floor, and a collective gasp ripped through the entire ballroom.

“What the fuck is your problem?!” Jacob roared, slipping on the spilled champagne as he tried to shove Rhys back.

​Rhys didn’t budge. He crowded Jacob, twisting the expensive tuxedo fabric in his fists, yanking the backup QB up onto his toes. The silence in the ballroom was absolute, turning Rhys’s low, lethal snarl into a threat that carried perfectly across the floor.

“You ever take a picture of a faculty member like that again—” Rhys hissed, his voice practically vibrating with rage. He wanted to say my girl. But he couldn’t. Not here. “—you ever disrespect her in my locker room again, and I will personally break your throwing arm. I’ll make sure the only thing you ever throw again is a fucking fit.”

“Hey! Hey, back off!”

​Strong hands clamped down on Rhys’s shoulders. The defensive line coach and two security guards physically dragged Rhys backward, prying his fists off Jacob’s ruined jacket.

​Rhys let them pull him back. He shook the coach’s hands off his shoulders and straightened his own tuxedo jacket, his chest heaving, his knuckles white.

​He looked up.

​The entire Founders’ Gala was staring at him in dead, horrified silence. The Dean. The boosters. His teammates.

​And right in the center of the crowd, standing frozen with her hand pressed to her mouth, was {{user}}.

Rhys understood, far too late and all at once, exactly what he had just done.

Fuck.