by Rachel Shane
Each click of my heels and tick of my heart only added to the tension. Say something, damn it, I coached myself. I’d never craved a conversation with him before but now I needed something normal, something to kill the torture. Hell, I’d even welcome a phone call from my mother right at this moment. Finally we reached the locker room and a flash of our badge was all it took to waltz past the security guard and into the empty space. The team wasn’t scheduled to show up for another hour so the only thing that lay in front of us were closed lockers, wooden benches, and the long lingering stench of BO.
“Come here.” Harrison shrugged off his backpack and waved me toward him with the crook of his finger.
The same finger that had curled inside me. Desire pulsed in me just thinking about it.
I crossed my arms and hovered in the center of the wide locker room. “I’m fine right here, thanks.”
“You can stop freaking out. I’m not coming onto you.” His voice drizzled through me, full of temptation.
Disappointment deflated in my gut. “That’s not—”
“Please,” he begged in a way that made me weak. “I need your help.”
My heart thumped as I sauntered toward him. I stopped a few feet away from him and held my nose against the blast of musky cologne that smelled so good, I almost melted.
“Closer,” he whispered.
My eyes locked on the way his fingers worked to unzip his backpack, and like I was hypnotized, I obeyed his command, stopping so close I could feel his body heat radiating.
“This doesn’t have to be awkward. We can go back to snark-hating on each other if that works better for you.” He raised a brow and then inched toward me, forcing my back against a locker bank. Metal rattled. So did I. “I personally find it sexy as hell.”
His breath moved the strands of hair hanging around my face. My eyelashes fluttered closed and I ached to touch him.
“Or—” His nose grazed my cheek, skidding along my skin until his lips found my ear. Tingles followed in his wake. “I could kiss you again.” His tongue swirled around the rim of my ear, and a thousand goosebumps popped, skittering down my arms.
My back arched toward him even as my brain told me to lift my palms against his chest and push him far away. Instead they encircled his neck. “I—” My voice came out scratchy. “I thought you weren’t going to come on to me.”
“I’m not.” He chuckled against my ear and glided his lips along my jaw, coaxing a small moan from me. “I’m not going to kiss you.” He planted delicate pecks on my chin that drove me insane. “Or run my hands all over you.” He brushed his hands down my sides in a slow melodic technique. Fire slammed into all parts of my body south of my belly button. “Or my tongue.” His mouth gently sucked at the spot where my neck met my shoulder, eliciting a louder moan. “At least not right now.”
He ripped his mouth away and stepped out of my grasp.
My lungs pulsed, desperately trying to catch my breath. I squinted at him, my head throbbing with desire, too clouded over to make sense of what just happened. “What?” My scattered thoughts scrambled to latch onto a string that made sense. “Huh.” I pressed a palm to my forehead.
“That was just an ice breaker, a way to cut the awkwardness.” Harrison reached into his pocket. “And it was a teaser for what’s to come later.” He pressed his hotel room keycard into my palm. “But now we really do have work to do.”
I turned his keycard over in my hands. Taking it was a promise. There would be a later. It was also a choice. A fluke hate hook up with my enemy was one thing. A mistake. A second time? That was deliberate. Still, I stuffed his keycard into my purse and crouched beside him, if only to stave off the pulsing that continued beneath my underwear. “What work do we need to do?” My voice sounded strange coming out of my mouth, asking a normal question when all I wanted to do was devour him.
“I need you to shield me from the overhead cameras.” His eyes flicked from one corner of the locker room to the other. “While I do a little prep work. Couldn’t do it in advance or it would have triggered the detectors.”
I stepped in front of him, shielding him as he tore open packages of every day objects, pens, magnets. The packages reminded me of my conversation with Matt. “Why do you have a bunch of burner phones?”
He snorted a laugh. “Your little spy was successful I see.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
He twisted two black objects together. “Maybe it was a decoy since I knew the file cabinet was the first place you’d send him. Am I right?”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if he was still my enemy but that didn’t meant I was willing to confess my weaknesses.
“Or maybe those burners are legit and I have nothing at all to hide.”
My pulse thumped at that. I’d worried the same thing: that I was on a fool’s errand, trying to catch him doing something wrong when there was nothing to catch. But still… “No one has that many unopened burners.”
“What if my dad runs the company that manufactures those? Maybe I run a side business selling them on eBay? That’s not illegal.”
I bit my lip. I’d thought of that already, even had Mackenzie do a search to find any online auctions, but she’d come up empty.
“Maybe you want me to be the bad guy when I’m actually your knight in shining armor.”
I scoffed. “I don’t need rescuing, thank you very much.”
“Really now? Because the way I see it, Underground Rho Sigma is a sinking ship, about to be capsized in the middle of the ocean, no survivors. You think of Out House as a pirate ship coming to steal your loot and leave you for dead, but what if we’ve got an entirely different plan? One that would allow you to hop on board and coast to safety where you’ll be able to rebuild.”
“Way to complicate your metaphor, buddy. Aren’t you an editor?”
“Investigative journalist.” He stood up. “What I’m trying to say is I’ll help you take Layla down. I even bought extras.” He jiggled a black pen between our bodies, still shielded by the cameras.
“What are those?” I pointed at the objects he’d put together and set on the bench. One looked like a pen, another a four leaf clover magnet, another a simple black cylinder.
He leaned toward me, whispering in my ear, but this time not to turn me on. To give me his secrets. “Hidden cameras. I’m going to catch them in the act.”
He placed the pen on the center bench as if it had been left there by accident. The magnet he attached to one of the lockers and the black circular object he placed on top of the locker bank. They each covered a different angle of the room so we wouldn’t miss anything.
“Now what?”
“Now we do the same in the other locker room and continue our ruse. We set up in the Press Booth and watch the feed.” He picked up his backpack and tapped the laptop inside. “And once we record the evidence, we swoop in for the kill. Our exclusive interview. Capture their reaction on camera.”
I swallowed hard. Something about this seemed so wrong.
“And you can do the same thing for Layla,” he continued. “Send in a spy, have them strategically place hidden cameras everywhere while you sit back and wait for her to mess up. Because she will.” He strutted toward the door. “And I know what you’re thinking. I won’t mess up, so don’t bother using any on me.”
MY LEG BRUSHED AGAINST against Harrison’s as we huddled over his sleek Mac laptop in the Press section of the arena. Crowds were filling the stands, fumbling over one another and spilling golden beer to get to their seats. Chatter filtered into the headphones draped over my ears as I studied the tiny boxes of surveillance footage showing the locker room. But even with all the activity happening on the screen, I could only focus on the way Harrison’s knee kept pressing into mine, a silent message. A reminder. A promise.
I couldn’t wait.
After we’d bugged one locker room, we did the same to the other because Harrison wasn’t sure which one Tampa Univ
ersity would be using even though all the leftover Tampa gear and personal items littering the lockers made it obvious. And now that both teams had arrived, I couldn’t figure out why Harrison hadn’t switched off the monitors for Throckmorton so we could focus on Tampa.
In the corner video square, a naked player walked through the room, his tight butt filling my screen. “Oh, hello,” I said. “Now I see why you didn’t want to turn this off.”
“I’m just being thorough,” Harrison said, squinting at another monitor.
Around us other members of the press were setting up cameras and audio equipment to capture the excitement on the field. But Harrison only cared about what was happening behind the scenes, where no one was looking.
His mouth hung open as his irises swam across every video feed like a probe. My gaze left the laptop and swept across the packed stadium of eager fans. Cheers rang out even though no players had graced the field. Loud trumpets blasted from the band as they warmed up. I spotted patches of orange from students and fans who had flown down from Throckmorton just to watch the game live.
Back at school, our own stadium would currently be packed with students in the stands of an empty arena, watching the big screen projector showcasing the game. The fierce cheering would be just as prominent there as it was here. Football was a big thing at Throckmorton, at least for the students who cared about it. I was not one of those. Erin and I had purchased season tickets freshman year but spent more time watching the boys watching the game than the game itself. I’d tried sidling up next to the cutest boy I could find and giggling when I asked him to explain the rules to me, but each one was always too focused on the game to care about the girl who didn’t. So I started avoiding the games and just donning the requisite orange out to Quigley’s afterward where I cheered along with the already-drunk students if we’d won or consoled them with provocative dancing if we’d lost.
I knew most of the students back at school would kill to have such a prominent spot, so it almost felt like a waste to watch a monitor rather than the field.
The abrupt bleat of Harrison’s phone ringing on the table made us both jump. When he tore his eyes away from the monitor and saw the caller, he scrambled for it, his face going white even before he said hello.
I nibbled on my cheek at his grave appearance.
He listened for a moment, his entire body stiff like he was afraid to move an atom. An anguished expression crossed his face. “It’s okay. Calm down,” he said into the phone in the softest, most soothing voice I’d ever heard him use. “I’m here.”
He listened again, eyes jammed shut. All monitors ignored.
“No, I mean here on the phone. But trust me, if I could be there in person, I would.”
Through the phone, I could hear screaming and ranting even above the din of the arena.
“Remember that trick I taught you when you got scared? Close your eyes.” He waited a moment. “Good, now count to ten.” He counted along with the person on the other end. And then he started singing. A soft melody, lilting like a children’s lullaby, but with clearly made up lyrics. “Lily belle, you’re my silly belle. Everything’s o-kay. Lily girl, you’re my entire world. I promise it’s o-kay.” He repeated the song three times before a small smile crossed his lips. “There. See? Everything’s okay. I promise I’ll come see you as soon as I can tomorrow.” He listened for another moment before saying goodbye.
When he hung up, his eyes flicked to mine and the tips of his ears turned red. I placed my palm on top of his. “That was really sweet of you.” Lily. His sister. My heart soared at the way he had calmed her down. “How old is she?”
His opened and closed his mouth several times as if he didn’t know how to answer. But then his eyes shifted to the screen and he wrenched his hand from under mine and pounded his fist against the folding table. “Jackpot!”
The laptop jumped and several heads flung in our direction.
“What?” I leaned into the monitor as Harrison shielded the screen from the onlookers. Every little square showed nothing important. A few guys were squeezing their muscular legs into their spandex pants. Others were securing their pads under their uniform. One was spraying his gloves and flexing his fingers. And in all the rest, the guys were just standing around, fully clothed, chatting. “I don’t see anything.”
“We can’t accuse them yet. I have to make sure this guy gets on the field.” He pointed at the camera where number forty-four was flexing the fingers he’d just sprayed.
Number forty-four from our team.
The world dropped from under me with the force of an earthquake. “Wait,” I started to say, but Harrison nodded, answering my question before I even had a chance to ask. Confirming the truth that tore through my stomach like an anchor dropped into the ocean, fast and heavy. “But—you said Tampa!”
“Shhh,” he whisper-shouted, looking around frantically to make sure no one had heard. He lowered his voice to a decibel that forced me to lean close to him. But it was the first time all day I didn’t want to be near him. “I know I said Tampa. But I knew if I mentioned it was our team at the meeting, a lot of those guys would protest and block the story.”
My throat went dry. “Why?”
I cringed, waiting for the obvious answer. The only answer. And it came with the force and magnitude of a tsunami. “Because our team will be suspended. Coach Burnham will be fired. And the season will be over.”
A strangled cry escaped my lips. “You—you can’t do that. It’ll affect everyone. The students love football.”
“They love a lie,” he whispered, and then he broke, his eyes flicking back toward the screen. “Number seventeen. Eleven. Sixty one.” His pen skidded across a notepad, jotting down all the players he planned to accuse of a crime. Each number he added slashed the probability that the team would make it out of this unscathed. With just one offender, I could hope. Maybe he wasn’t playing today. Maybe Harrison had made a mistake.
But now that I knew what to watch for, every single one of them headed to a locker and pulled out a bottle with the label scraped off. They quickly sprayed their gloves, flexed their fingers, and then fled the locker room. When the last one used the spray, Coach Burnham casually dropped the bottle into a thermos and placed it inside his bag to conceal it.
“What is it?”
“Stickum spray,” Harrison said. “It’s an adhesive that makes it easier to catch the ball. It’s illegal in college sports.”
My chest ached with that news. “And how did you know they were going to use it?”
He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I—I can’t reveal my source.”
“Please, Harrison,” I begged. “Don’t do this.”
His fingers drummed on the table. “Which is worse? Ignoring this when I know they’re violating the rules? Or revealing the truth that will eventually come out anyway? If not from me, then someone else.”
My pulse thumped. Neither option was great. But one would render him the villain of every student in school. I rocked in place, feeling dizzy, as the band swelled to a crescendo and the announcers kicked off the game. The cheers for the players were uproarious, and though I didn’t know much about football, I knew that when our team made a catch sixty-seven seconds into the game, Harrison had gotten the final bit of evidence he needed.
After the first quarter, he waved me to my feet. “Come on, let’s go confront them.” He readied a microphone attached to a handheld video camera.
I stayed seated. Hot fire was slowly swooping through me, gathering momentum.
He loped a few feet before he realized I wasn’t following. He spun around. “You coming?”
This interview would ruin lives. Those players accused would likely never be drafted. The coach would be blacklisted. But it wasn’t just them. The cheerleaders would miss an entire season of cheering. The band too. We weren’t just outing a truth, we were destroying multiple franchises in a single blow. As an aspiring publicist, I knew how important branding was.
And this would be strike number two on my own roster of destruction, right behind Rho Sigma.
I couldn’t be part of this.
I reached into my purse and pulled out Harrison’s room key. The rectangular plastic dug into my palm as I squeezed it before I hurled the object at him. It fell unceremoniously at his feet, losing all the impact I’d forced into my toss.
Still, the way I brushed past him, knocking into his side on my way out of the arena probably sent the same message even better.
As soon as I left Harrison alone in the arena, I punched the first wall I could find. Security guards loomed toward me, clearly afraid I’d take my aggression out on a person rather than concrete. I’d considered it a small victory that I managed to control myself enough to hurl a room key at Harrison instead of a fist, but my hands kept shaking and didn’t stop until I attacked my pillow like a punching bag.
How could I have let myself start to like a guy so unworthy? That thought made me angry all over again and I spent the night in a ball of hot rage.
I couldn’t be near Harrison. I didn’t trust myself not to slap him…or kiss him. On the flight home, I begged some business dude in a suit to trade his middle seat for my prime window location in the second row. I hid out in the Ladies’ room like a coward until they called for boarding and then swept past Harrison’s perch at the gate and onto the plane without acknowledging him. Ballads calmed me from a playlist I curated that consisted only of songs that reinforced my mantra like Shake It Off by Florence and the Machine and that song from the Frozen movie. Halfway through the flight Harrison strutted down the aisle to use the restroom and leaned over my seat in an attempt to talk to me. I jammed my eyes shut, turned up the volume on my music, and pretended everything that had happened in Tampa had been a bad dream.
But the front page Daily Snowflake article and subsequent media blasts from all other national outlets proved otherwise. So did the congratulatory email from Genevieve, who seemed to be the only one pleased with our form of devastation. My entire Twitter feed was a mass of hate tweets, all directed at Harrison because no one had figured out my involvement in the ruination. But it was only a matter of time before his slander dragged me down with him.