3

“Morning,” Chris said as he walked into the kitchen a week later, his eyes still bleary from sleep.

“Morning,” his father replied before taking an audible sip of his coffee.

Chris’s mom smiled at him from where she was cooking breakfast at the stove. “Can I make you some eggs?”

He was still getting used to that. Before they’d lost Lucas, she’d never been the kind of mom to make them breakfast or have a cup of coffee ready for them when they came downstairs. It should have been a nice change, but now it just felt forced.

She wouldn’t have been trying so hard if she hadn’t lost her other son. Guilt was a powerful motivator, apparently.

“Sure,” he replied with a tight smile. He picked up the cup of coffee his dad held out for him and took a healthy gulp.

His mom always made it too weak for his tastes, but at least she had the coffee-to-milk ratio down.

“How are your classes?” she asked.

“Good.”

“And football?”

Chris leaned against the kitchen counter and shrugged. “Fine.”

His mom nodded, but her smile grew tight at his one-word answers. “Do you want some bacon with your eggs?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Noah and Brady will be here soon.”

Her eyes darkened, the smile slipping off her lips altogether. “I can’t believe you’re still friends with that boy.”

Chris’s jaw tightened, and his knuckles turned white as his grip on his mug tightened. “Noah hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“His sister is the reason Lucas is dead,” the woman snapped. She turned and scraped at the fried eggs in the pan, tearing them apart in her angry attempt to flip them.

“Like I said, Noah hasn’t done anything wrong,” Chris said through gritted teeth.

They’d had this fight before. His mom and Paige were both still clinging to their anger, directing it toward everyone they possibly could. Noah was guilty by association, especially in his mom’s eyes. Chris wasn’t much better, but he would never blame his friend for something he had no hand in.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Chris’s mom said, still attacking the decimated eggs. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with that family.”

His dad pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I think what your mother is trying to say is that you should be careful. Noah’s loyalty will always be to his family.”

Chris put his mug down and shook his head. “Whatever. I’m going to get ready.” He started walking for the door. “I’ll eat something on campus.”

He heard his mom let out a sob but didn’t stick around to comfort her or hear what she would say. She’d broken down in tears more times than he could count since the accident, and maybe it made him heartless, but he didn’t feel much sympathy for her anymore.

She’d always been more focused on her job than her family, and her sudden turnaround didn’t make up for the years of missed parent-teacher conferences and football games and the weekends she’d spent locked in her office at home. Lucas and Chris had been raised by only one parent, and it hadn’t been her.

His dad caught him on his way out not long after, and he shook his head sadly. “She’ll come around. She just needs some time.”

Chris hiked his bag higher on his shoulder. “She doesn’t get a say in who I hang out with.”

“You’re the only one who gets to decide that,” his dad agreed.

“But?”

“You and Noah have always been good friends,” his dad said, “but I hope you’re prepared for the day he might be forced to pick a side.”

“Good thing I won’t make him choose,” Chris retorted.

His dad tipped his head in acknowledgment. “You might not, but that doesn’t mean someone else won’t.”

Chris’s teeth ground together. He hated that his dad was right. He refused to believe that Noah would agree to make the choice, though. His friend had stuck by him even when Chris had been a dick after the crash. Noah wouldn’t have put up with it forever, but he’d dealt with it longer than most would have.

“I need to go,” Chris muttered.

“Tell Brady and Noah I said hi,” his dad said as Chris opened the front door.

“I will.”

And that’s what he loved about his dad. The man had never held anything against Noah. Even if he had concerns, he never showed anything but kindness to Olivia’s brother. He’d never even said anything against Olivia, which was practically a crime in Chris’s family.

Chris didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he sometimes wished he was more like his dad in that regard. His anger just wouldn’t let him be that good of a person, though.

◆◆◆

“You need to stop staring.”

“I can’t. I think I’m in love.”

Chris sighed and read the same sentence for the third time. His idiot teammates didn’t seem to understand that going to the library to work meant actually working.

“You’re being creepy.”

“What do you think my chances are?”

“With the sexy librarian? About zero.”

Chris finally looked up from his textbook and scowled at Ryan and Jacob. “Could you two shut the fuck up?”

They’d been there for at least ten minutes, and the two of them hadn’t stopped talking during that time. Tyler and Chris were clearly the only ones who didn’t know this was a social gathering, not a study session.

“I second that,” Tyler agreed.

Ryan continued to look over Chris’s shoulder longingly. There might have been actual drool on his face. “I beg of you, just turn around and tell me that isn’t the hottest woman you’ve ever seen.”

Chris looked at Jacob instead, and the two of them shared an eye-roll.

“You say that about every woman you see,” Chris pointed out, going back to reading the same fucking sentence.

“But this time, it’s true,” Ryan argued.

“He’s not wrong,” Jacob admitted. “She’s a ten.”

“She’s a fucking twelve,” Ryan corrected. “The glasses might even take her up to a thirteen.”

Tyler gave in and looked over his shoulder. “Uh, isn’t that Drew’s girlfriend?” he asked after a beat of silence.

Chris’s body went rigid. He slowly turned his head, and sure enough, there was Olivia. She was sitting alone at the table furthest away from theirs. She had her profile to them so Chris could see she was wearing a pair of high-waisted beige trousers with a white button-up tucked into them. And, sure, with her glasses on, she did look a bit like a librarian.

But Chris had thought she’d looked like a sexy librarian at his party that night, and he wasn’t going to think of her like that ever again.

He swiveled his head back around. “Yeah, that’s Olivia.”

Ella had replaced her battery the same day it had died, so there had been no more tense carpools since that first day of classes. Chris hadn’t seen Olivia since then and couldn’t say he was happy to see her now.

Ryan frowned and shook his head. “Are you telling me Drew cheated on her ? She’s jailbait?”

Chris’s eyebrows rose. “What the hell are you talking about?” He knew all about the gross nickname his teammates had come up with for Drew’s then-high-school girlfriend, but Drew being a cheater was news to him.

Ryan exchanged a wide-eyed look with Jacob. “You mean you didn’t know?”

“Obviously not,” Chris replied impatiently.

Ryan shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “I guess Drew tried to keep things quiet since his girlfriend’s brother was on the team, but Jacob and I caught him in compromising positions more than once at parties.”

“And you didn’t think to tell Noah about it?” Chris asked. He still hated Olivia, of course, but fucking hell. Did these guys have no sense of right and wrong?

Jacob shrugged. “We were going to until…”

Until the accident, Chris realized. Until Drew died.

“After that, we didn’t think bringing it up to Noah was the greatest idea.”

“Speaking ill of the dead and all that,” Ryan said.

Chris craned his head around to look at Olivia again. She was still there, writing furiously on a notepad, her eyebrows pinched together in concentration.

“Did she know?” he asked.

“Doubtful,” Jacob said. “She was still with him, wasn’t she?”

Chris nodded, not sure why his stomach suddenly felt tight. “Yeah.” He looked at Tyler. “Did you know?”

“No.” He pursed his lips together. “I wouldn’t have let him get away with that shit. He was our teammate, but so is Noah.”

Chris wanted to say that Drew being their teammate had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t mean they should have let his behavior slide. No woman deserved that shit. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it when he was still so angry at the woman in question.

“I thought she was training to be a ballerina or something,” Ryan said. “What’s she doing here?”

“She broke her femur in the crash,” Chris explained. “Her leg is still healing, so dancing is off the table for now.”

Ryan looked over Chris’s shoulder again. “That explains the crutches next to her.”

“Shit,” Tyler said, sounding far too sympathetic for Chris’s liking. “That’s horrible.”

“Well, maybe she shouldn’t have gotten in the car,” Chris said, no trace of compassion in his voice. “She knew Drew was drunk. It’s her own fault.”

His teammates stared at him with shocked expressions. He and Noah hadn’t spoken about Olivia’s role in the accident in front of the team, so they didn’t know his side of the story or that he didn’t just blame Drew for the car crash. Chris should have expected their appalled reactions, but he suddenly felt about one foot tall under their scrutiny.

“I warned her not to let Drew drive that night,” he explained. “I told her she needed to drive, and she agreed before leaving the party.”

He didn’t tell them that he also partly blamed himself for not walking out with them and ensuring she did as she’d promised and gotten the keys from Drew. He would always live with that regret, but it hadn’t been his responsibility to make sure Olivia did the right thing.

“I thought she called the cops on him or something?” Ryan asked.

“Only when Drew stopped at a gas station,” Chris said with a shake of his head. It had been too little too late, and even then, she hadn’t stopped Drew from getting back in the car and ending up in a collision with Lucas’s car. “And Drew kept driving after that.”

“But don’t you think—”

“Can we stop talking about this?” Chris said, cutting Jacob off before he could try to excuse Olivia’s actions.

“Sure,” Jacob said contritely.

Chris looked back down at his finance textbook, hoping he could salvage the rest of his time before his next lecture. They had football practice that afternoon, and he needed to get this reading done now so he could focus on an assignment for another class that evening.

“Looks like trouble,” Ryan said less than ten minutes later.

Chris closed his eyes and debated the consequences of throwing his stupidly thick textbook at his teammate’s face.

“What?” Tyler asked.

Chris opened his eyes and saw Tyler turn in his seat out of the corner of his eye.

“Shit,” Jacob murmured.

“What now?” Chris growled, turning in his own chair to see what Olivia had done to distract the table again.

He spotted the problem immediately. He recognized the two women standing next to Olivia’s chair. The brunettes were regulars at football parties, and based on their body language and expressions, they were not fans of Noah’s sister.

Chris watched the taller of the two lean down and slide one of Olivia’s books off the table. The textbook was even bigger than the one Chris had in front of him, and it hit the floor with a thud. A few heads turned to see what the noise was, and like vultures sensing what would soon be a fresh kill, they kept their greedy attention fixed on the scene.

He didn’t know what made him do it, but Chris stood up and started making his way over.

“He thought you were pathetic, you know?” he heard the taller woman say when he was close enough to make out their conversation. “He complained about his whiny high school girlfriend every time we slept together.”

Chris stopped in his tracks. Fucking hell . She couldn’t actually be bragging to Olivia about Drew cheating with her, could she? He dropped his gaze from the brunette to Noah’s sister. To his surprise, she didn’t look taken aback by the other woman’s admission. If anything, she just looked sad.

“He should have left you when he had the chance,” the brunette continued, her tone biting and venomous. “If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have died.”

Olivia finally flinched. Chris waited for her claws to come out because nobody was better at telling people they were full of shit than Olivia. Only the woman said nothing, and Chris’s brows furrowed at her lack of response.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” the woman’s friend pressed. She was on the other side of Olivia’s chair, and Chris watched as she pushed Olivia’s crutches over, sending them to the floor as well.

“You’re a murderer,” Drew’s side-piece, or whoever she was, spat, mirroring Chris’s own sentiments but in a way that made him oddly uncomfortable.

Maybe it was that, unlike how it sounded with these two, Chris also held Drew accountable.

“I think that’s enough,” he said, taking the final few steps to stand across from them, leaving the study table between him and them.

He hated Olivia far more than the two women ever could, but even he thought rubbing her face in her dead boyfriend’s infidelity was a bit harsh.

“But, Chris, she—”

“I know exactly what Olivia did,” Chris cut the taller woman off. He could feel Olivia’s gaze pressing against him, but he kept his focus on the other two women. “But I’m trying to study, and I can’t focus when you’re throwing things around and creating drama.”

They both had the decency to blush, but anger still blazed in their eyes. Chris wondered how many other people had confronted Olivia over the crash like this. He’d thought he and his family were the only ones, but it was clear other people laid blame on her as well.

“If you want to cause shit, go cause it somewhere else.”

It was funny how offended the two of them looked as they made their exit from the library, considering one of them had knowingly slept with someone else’s boyfriend.

“Thank you,” Olivia said when the two women were gone.

Chris finally looked at Olivia and narrowed his eyes when he saw the gratitude softening her face. “Don’t think I did that for you,” he said.

Olivia lowered her gaze. “Right,” she sighed. “You were trying to study.”

She shifted in her seat and bent down to pick her book up. Chris had to force himself to do it, but he walked around the other side of the table, lifted her crutches from the floor, and placed them back within her reach. Despite his hatred for her, he wasn’t a complete monster.

“Oh,” Olivia said after straightening back up, looking genuinely shocked that he’d helped her. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Chris replied.

He started walking back to his table, needing to get away from the woman he wanted nothing more to do with. But something stopped him in his tracks and made him turn back around.

“Did you know Drew was cheating?” he asked. The other students were far enough away from them that they couldn’t hear his question, not that he should have cared about protecting Olivia’s privacy.

Olivia’s glacial blue eyes snapped up to meet his gaze, widening at his question. “Does it matter?”

Chris sighed. “Just answer the question, Olivia.”

She pressed her lips together and let a few seconds pass before nodding. “I found out a few months before the accident.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you break up with him?” Chris asked. He couldn’t stand cheaters, and he’d never understood how anyone could stay with one.

Olivia shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

Chris let out a humorless chuckle. “There’s nothing complicated about it. He slept with another woman. Maybe even a few other women. Why the hell would you stay with someone like that?”

Olivia’s eyebrows drew together. “Why do you care? I thought you hated me?”

She was right. Chris shouldn’t have cared. If anything, he should have been happy that Olivia had suffered and that her grief over losing her boyfriend would have been complicated by his inability to keep it in his pants. But he found he couldn’t be happy. The Olivia that Drew had cheated on was the Olivia that Chris had liked, the Olivia that had existed before that night. And much as Chris hated to admit it, that Olivia hadn’t deserved to be cheated on by Drew.

The Olivia that existed now, however? That Olivia deserved pain.

“You’re right, Princess,” Chris said. “I do hate you.” And with that, he walked back to his table.