25

Kassie

For Your Spiritual Well-being

As a football player's fake girlfriend, I saw the inside of gyms more often than I attended my own classes. Gyms, plural. I had to shake hundreds of hands of people I couldn't possibly remember—which Ryan recited like he was getting paid to do it. Not to mention, if I walked two feet into a football event without university apparel, Cleo practically tackled me to the ground.

And Ryan was there, every step of the way, to stop the flow of traffic wherever he went.

"I'm ordering a protein shake. What do you want?" Ryan asked, standing outside of my classroom. People had to shuffle around him. I was certain he didn't notice.

"My building's too small for you to be doing this," I retorted, grabbing his arm. "You're like one of those Great Danes who thinks he's a lap dog."

"Do you want anything?"

I let go of him once we got to the door. "Are you putting in the order?"

"No. I'll order there. They banned me from the app."

While we walked to Gianna's, I packed up everything in my backpack on the go before I finally realized what he said. Why in the hell would anyone ban Ryan from using an app? As annoyingly uptight as he could be, it wasn't like he barked at the developers to do bench presses.

I snickered. "I get it. You fucked up the app."

"I didn't mean to order eight hundred protein shakes."

"How many times did you order eight hundred protein shakes?"

Ryan threw me an exasperated look and I burst into laughter. The quarterback could block like no tomorrow but giving him an electronic device was like throwing Ryan a flamethrower in an open field.

"A couple of times," Ryan muttered and I pressed my lips together, doing my hardest to hold back the grin.

Gianna's was packed in the busiest time of the day but Ryan didn't care. He badgered me about what I wanted until I relented for a coffee and I waited by the windows as he walked through the crowd that effortlessly parted for him. A couple by the counters drew back and grabbed his autograph while he ordered.

"I know who you are," someone said next to me.

While Ryan was a healthy distance away from me, I could let my eyes wander a little. No jersey today, just the shirt and jeans, but it wasn't like he didn't wear them well. The broad shoulders were lovely to look at. And the hands. Woof. I had to make him flex his hands again for some sketches. For my own personal collection that he didn't need to know about that.

"I know who you are," the voice insisted.

I did a double-take at the girl next to me. At first, I didn't think she was talking to me, but that tight sneer was definitely planted my way.

"Uh…cool." I turned to get another glance at Ryan.

"You're not good enough for him."

What?

I wasn't pissed off at all, I was genuinely confused. Was she talking about…Ryan? Like, I wasn't good enough to date him? What exactly was she expecting me to do? Tearfully confess she was right and break up with my boyfriend in front of everybody? Just like talking to Ryan earlier, I had to fight off the urge to laugh.

"Are you talking to me?"

"You're just toying with him," she snapped.

"You want to suck his dick that bad?"

A flush crept up her neck, and she turned away, embarrassed.

Now she's embarrassed?

People were Marrs fans, yeah, of course. Maybe I didn't fully understand football yet but I understood the hype. I'd hung out in the twenty-four-hour lines at movie theaters for my favorite animated films. I understood.

But the way she said it put a bad taste in my mouth. Like I treated my fake boyfriend so terribly. The audacity made my eyebrow twitch. Thinking she could come over and convince me that—oh no—I wasn't enough for my boyfriend, and he didn't know better, the poor, perfect, innocent quarterback, tricked by the harlot. Like he wasn't a grown-ass man who could make his own decisions.

"If you want to suck his dick, fine," I told her. "But you better be prepared to meet me in the parking lot beforehand. And take off those ugly earrings. I don't fight fair. I'm ripping them off."

Her mouth fell open.

Ryan walked up to me, holding out the biggest coffee I'd ever seen. "You didn't tell me what size."

"Thanks, baby. What a sweetheart." I smiled at him and wrapped my arm around his, leading him out of the coffee shop. If she wanted to come up with some bullshit, she could watch us and eat her heart out.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced up to see Ryan gazing at me.

He blinked. "You called me baby?"

"Some people are real weirdos," I muttered to him. "The girl back there told me I'm not good enough for you."

For a second, all the hard lines on Ryan's face eased away. "That's the stupidest shit I've ever heard in my life."

"Yeah." I nodded. "They talk about you like you're a doll to swap around. It's fucked. I told her if she wanted you so badly, she could fight me in the parking lot."

"You…?" He hesitated. "You said that?"

"And yesterday, a guy told me you were too green to be captain and I called him a bald bitch."

He stopped us from walking entirely. "You did what? "

The longer Ryan gaped at me, the more I could see it from the team captain's perspective. Of course I shouldn't have said anything. What was I thinking? It was like hosing a sinking ship. It didn't temper down the weirdos. I sighed and stepped back to the brick wall, rubbing my temples.

"I'm not good at this," I admitted.

"You called him a…bald bitch?" Ryan repeated. "You—don't do that again. People can record things, it's the last thing we need." He held up a hand. "But, wait. Did you really tell her you'd fight in the parking lot over me?" The more he spoke, the more his lips twitched. "Kassie, you need to be thinking about the Romans—"

I blinked. "Are you smiling?"

His lips twitched again. "We don't have to tell anybody about—"

"You are smiling."

"Kassie, you need to grab stuff from your dorm," Ryan replied gruffly and placed a hand on my back, leading me off to Roman Forest.

"You don't even smile on the regular," I threw over my shoulder.

He had an audio engineer meeting for a Marrs commercial but I wanted to drop off my backpack and take some of my class materials for the long haul. It'd take five minutes. I just wasn't expecting Ryan to follow me in the lobby.

I turned back around, confused. "Where are you going?"

"I'm coming up with you."

"What?" I stopped by the elevator and shook my head. "Oh, no. We're not doing that."

There was no way in hell that the captain of the football team was seeing my dorm. The dorm I shared with four or six or eight people depending on the day of the week, in the shittiest apartment complex on campus. One of the two buttons for the elevator wasn't even put into the wall right. It dangled from the wires. This wasn't a place where Ryan belonged.

"You can hang out down here," I assured him. "You can romp and play and make friends with the broken furniture. I'll be right back."

Ryan gazed at me for a long moment. He didn't say anything. He just picked up the button for the elevator and pressed it in until it glowed faintly. "I'm going upstairs."

"No. You're not."

"I have to see your dorm eventually," he pointed out, like there was ever any reason he needed to walk into the place that I didn't even like going into.

"It's better for your spiritual well-being if you don't."

He didn't say anything. He just waited for the rickety elevator doors to open.

I breathed out through my nose and stepped inside with him. "I need you to understand something. It's not dry-cleaned jerseys and pristine locker rooms."

"Okay."

"I live with all art students."

"Alright."

"Oh, lord," I muttered, and when the elevator doors opened, I made my way across the hall, fishing the keys from the pocket of my overalls. This was not going to go well. "I'll be in and out, okay? Just wait outside. All I need to do is find my book."

It was like talking to a brick wall. Ryan stepped next to me and I fumbled with the keys, embarrassed. If I had known that he was coming up, I would've done something crazy like steal a key for an empty room in the dorm and just played it off like Zariah and I slept on the floor. Because nothing could prepare Ryan for this.