Cora Carmack - All Lined Up

These are no soft kisses.

We touch lips and tongue and teeth. When she pulls on my hair and moans, I take that as my permission to be a little rough. I lift her up by the hips, and she wraps her impossibly long legs around me, squeezing me between them. I slide my hands around to cup her backside, and she arches out from the door. Her hands leave my hair to wrap around my shoulders, fingertips kneading and pushing at my muscles in a way that releases all the stressful tension and replaces it with the want barreling down my spine.

She is the most intoxicating mix of hard and soft—lean, strong muscles covered in silken skin. That’s her personality, too: combative and shy, bold and insecure.

She pushes off the wall in favor of leaning on me completely. I stand there, completely wrapped up in her, and she clings to me so fiercely that she wrings every bit of frustration out of me.

Gradually, our kiss slows from punishing to exploratory. Her breath is sweet against my mouth, and I relish every slow slide of our tongues together. I loosen my arms. Now that she’s not locked against me, the rise and fall of her breath morphs into a sensual push and pull as she rocks against me.

Every other kiss I’ve ever had is wiped away because this . . . her rubbing herself against me, trusting me completely and abandoning every thought but how to get closer—it’s the hottest fucking moment of my life.

I slip my hand under her shirt and up her spine in what is quickly becoming my favorite way to touch her. She makes a mewling sound, and her back straightens, pulled tight like she’s stretching. Then she melts against me, completely mine.

“That’s what was wrong,” I whisper against her lips.

“Oh.” Her eyes are lazy and hooded, and they remind me of waking up to her lying against me. “Better now?”

“Should tide me over for a few hours at least.”

I leave Dallas’s dorm on a high (and through the back stairwell she says never gets used). And it lasts all the way to the athletic complex, where I enter the locker room with a stupid grin on my face.

That grin disappears immediately when I walk into a freaking circus. All the coaches are there, a few players, two police officers, even more campus police, and several stern-faced suits that can’t mean anything good.

Coach Cole catches sight of me, says something to one of the police officers, and then starts my way.

I really, really should have just stayed in bed today.

It’s never a good thing when you walk into your dorm lobby and there are swarms of people in groups talking hurriedly and staring at their phones. That should have been the first thing to tip me off.

I hear people whispering about the football team behind me before class starts, but I try not to listen because in my gut, I’m terrified someone saw Carson coming out of my room. Surely that wouldn’t cause this kind of buzz. I mean, he’s not even a starter, and it’s not like we did anything crazy scandalous in public.

But our dorm does have windows, and sits directly across from another dorm. I can’t remember if I had the blinds closed or not. But surely . . . surely that’s still not big enough news to have the campus going this nuts.

I get my answer when my phone buzzes.

It’s a text from Stell with a link to a Twitter post.

Under my desk, I follow the link, and my jaw drops.

There’s a slightly blurry picture of Levi in handcuffs, being placed into the back of a police car.

Levi Abrams, @RuskUniversity’s star quarterback, arrested. #theregoestheseason

People are posting theories—everything from drugs to prostitution to murder. Other rival universities have picked up the thread, and it’s been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times.

Holy crap. No wonder everyone is whispering. We have a game on Saturday, the first true conference game and potentially our biggest game of the season just because it’s with the Dragons, our rivals. It’s a home game, and people always turn out in huge numbers. Even during the school’s worst seasons, that game is always a big deal.

And Levi . . . what the hell did he do?

After class lets out, I try calling Carson, then Dad, then Carson again.

I text and call for the entire ten minutes that it takes me to walk to the fine arts building.

Finally, as my dance professor, Annaiss, calls us to our positions at the barre, my phone vibrates.

It’s from Dad.

Can’t talk. Come by my office after your

classes are over, and I’ll fill you in on

what I can.

Shit. That doesn’t sound good. Surely if it were all some stupid misunderstanding, he’d be able to just say that.

I’m distracted, but Annaiss doesn’t say anything. Everyone is distracted. Every time we line up on one side of the room to take turns doing different passes or combinations, the whispers begin.

No one tries to ask me anything. I don’t know if it’s common knowledge everywhere that Levi and I dated, or just on the team. Whether they’re considerate or clueless, I’m glad for it.

I don’t like the guy. I’ve not made that a secret to anyone, Levi included. We barely spoke at all during the four months between when we broke up and he graduated. And I pretty much avoid him at all costs.

But once upon a time, I think I loved him. It’s hard to tell now. There are too many other messy feelings clinging to those memories, but until he broke up with me, I had thought we’d end up together. Everyone thought we would. We talked about college, and what I would do if and when he got a scholarship. We even talked about what would happen beyond that . . . if he went pro. I don’t necessarily think that’s an option for him anymore (especially not with whatever was going on today), but back then things looked like they were heading that direction.

Then he got hurt. Not on the field, but on the court. Like a lot of the guys at our school, Levi did pretty much every sport. And when he fractured his ankle playing basketball, everything kind of changed. He had surgery, and the recovery time was minimal. Just six to eight weeks. But it was enough to jeopardize his negotiations with a lot of the universities that had approached him.

He still got a scholarship with Rusk, but it wasn’t what he wanted. And we fought more and more. Over everything. Other girls. Other guys. My dad. Sex.

Mostly we fought about sex.

I don’t know whether he always had that bitterness and arrogance in him or if it bled out of the dismantling of all of our plans, but I’d like to believe that he didn’t completely fool me. I’d like to believe that the boy I originally fell for was just as sweet and genuine as I remember him being.

But if that’s true . . . it’s crazy to think that one tiny event can derail your entire life, derail who you are. If he’d sat out of basketball that year, would we still be together? Would we both even be at Rusk? Would dad have let me go to school out of state if I was going with Levi?

What if?

I could waste a lifetime thinking about what-ifs, and that’s all I would ever have—hypotheticals and hopes pinned on a plan that crumbles when dragged into reality.

It’s nearly four o’clock when my last class lets out. Normally that would be right in the middle of Dad’s practice, but he didn’t give me a specific time to come by, and I’ve been going crazy reading all the theories online. Most of the theories now are focused on drugs, but the specifics all vary.

Annaiss stops me before I go. She’s in her early thirties, the youngest professor on staff, and though she doesn’t have as much experience as most of the other professors, she at least feels a little less out of touch with the real-world business of dance than the rest. She has thick, glossy black hair and exotic eyes that are soft as she looks at me.