32

Ryan

Don't Print That

I thought girls were supposed to like dresses.

And Kassie did like dresses. Every time she wore one with pockets, she didn't hesitate to tell me eighty times about it. So why was it that when I wanted to spend some of my money to buy one, it was a problem?

I had no idea. But I had to think of something else.

And there was plenty of time in the van ride to the food bank. Usually, when we did volunteer events for football, it was composed of twenty football players doing something that required lifting a lot of shit and cracking jokes about passes without interceptions to the big guys who ran the organizations. We always made a day out of it.

I'd never done one with my girlfriend before.

"We don't have to go through the front," Kassie told me, amused, when we walked inside. She took a sharp right turn and ignored the front desk entirely. She hummed under her breath. "I haven't been in ages."

I glanced around. "You've volunteered here before?"

"Something like that."

I was about to ask her what she meant when we pushed through the double doors that opened to the warehouse. There were rows of people sorting donations into boxes. The supervisor at the head of the first line leaped up when she spotted us.

Here it is. Football fans .

"Kassie!"

To my surprise, the supervisor ran up and chatted excitedly with Kassie, asking her a million questions in a span of five minutes. None of the other volunteers recognized her but a few of the other people with badges on the floor walked over to say hello too.

Kassie motioned me closer and introduced me to the supervisor. "This is Happy, she was here when I first started."

"Good lord." Happy whistled between her teeth. "Four-A-Cross. My husband loves you. If he left me for anybody, it'd be for you. We're big MU fans."

I shook hands but once that was done, they hurried back to Kassie. It was…different. Usually, people mobbed me and I had to keep Kassie off to the side, now we had the opposite going on. Cameras flashed behind us.

A hundred photos were taken by the professional photographers in our crew. Twenty minutes passed before we could even start sorting the donations. Kassie explained everything to me while I signed the last of the autographs and we got to work.

Along with the ride, we had a student reporter writing about us. He walked away to talk to the supervisor and I glanced back at my girlfriend, dutifully stacking fruit cups across the table from me.

"Hey?" I called her, my voice low. "You came here a lot?"

She nodded. "Oh, yeah."

"I didn't know that."

For a moment, she hesitated over the next box and started stacking again. "Uh…my grandmother and I used to volunteer here all the time. If you put in extra hours, they give you more to take home."

My eyes flickered back to hers again. "Got it."

"Yeah." She shrugged. "We used to volunteer at every place you can think of. Churches, shelters—there's a cultural center on Parkside Avenue that she babysat for every Friday—because if you give your time, people feed you. I've been around the block here."

I didn't know what to say. The more I listened, the more I realized why Kassie had such an odd relationship with money. She badgered me at Gianna's when I didn't order her food from the daily deals, even if she wanted something else even more. When I tried to throw an old Marrs hoodie with a hole in it, she yanked it away from me. It was hung up in her closet now, sewn up by one of her temporary roommates. Not to mention, the bracelets she wouldn't let me buy.

"That wasn't in your files," I said.

"Well, I don't really talk about it." She shrugged. "It did get me into college though. That college essay was fantastic ."

I chuckled. "I bet it was."

"And I bet you've never had to fill one out in your life."

"Yeah. You've got me."

It was quiet while we stacked more boxes and I carried the heavier ones off to a van. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. There was another question that was sitting on my mind.

"What about your immediate family?" I finally asked.

Kassie put a hand on her hip. "What about yours? "

My answer was immediate. "My mom plans weddings, dad's a retired firefighter, older brother's in San Antonio, older sister's in Port Arthur."

There was more to it than that. My dad worked a hell of a lot when I was a kid and my mom had to juggle two jobs and raise all three of us almost single-handed. It'd been difficult on them but when I received my first football scholarship in sixth grade, everything smoothed out.

None of that was important to the conversation. My interest was solely in Kassie's story. I gazed at her. Waiting.

"My parents weren't in the picture," she admitted.

I nodded slowly.

"They just didn't have the—" Kassie stopped herself. "It just didn't work out. Most of the time, my grandma kept me around."

"She must be pretty proud," I said.

For a moment, Kassie hesitated. "Well…uh…she's not here anymore…"

"Oh."

"First one in the family to crack through college, she was proud of that. She didn't understand the whole animation thing. But it never bothered me." Kassie shrugged. "I'm paying for it out-of-pocket. Nobody gets to question me on that."

The way she said that final sentence told me everything. Kassie was ready and waiting for me to slide in a comment about her art major. But, while I didn't understand it, I didn't want the conversation to end like that. I liked hearing about her. Getting to see what made Kassie tick.

I cleared my throat. "I'm sorry about—"

"Don't worry about it."

It was quiet again. The only sound was the pen scribbling across the paper.

The student reporter .

We turned together at the same time and I stared at him, stunned. I'd completely forgotten about him. It slipped my mind. If I would've remembered, I would've saved the questions for later.

"Wait, wait—" Kassie blurted out. "Hold your horses—could you not print that?"

"Oh, it's not about your major," the reporter reassured her. "It's about volunteering to make sure your family was fed."

A bright blush spread across Kassie's cheeks. "Yeah—that. Please don't print that."

"That won't end up in the article," I promised. It was both something to assure Kassie and a direct warning to the student reporter. He should've counted himself lucky to stick around for the ride. If she didn't want it on paper, it wasn't happening. Simple as that.

The student reporter's pen stilled. "Are you sure?"

"We're positive," I replied, my voice curt.

I wasn't blushing like Kassie but shame caught me anyway. We were having a nice conversation. And I'd completely forgotten about the student reporter and the photographers and all the other crap in the background. Something had to come along and ruin the couple of minutes that I felt like I was finally making progress.

Kassie hurried through the boxes again and didn't look up for a long time.

I kept stacking things and taking them off to the van but at every free moment, I took another look at her again. Her, with her dark hair in braids down her shoulders, with the jeans that cinched at her waist, showing off her curves. The way she bit her lip when she concentrated. How she smiled so openly at the other people she recognized on the floor, the little indent at the side of her lips when she smiled for real.

How do I get Kassie to talk to me again like that?

I had questions. There were things I wanted to know. Things I wanted to understand.

"Hey?" I set down another box, contemplating things. "What if none of this happened?"

"Hm?"

"Do you think we would've been—?" I stopped myself, trying to pinpoint the correct word. "If the dinner hadn't happened, do you think we would've been friends?"

Kassie snorted. "Not in a million years."

Damn .

"Really?" I frowned, trying not to let it show how much her answer bothered me. "Why?"

Quickly, Kassie glanced up at me and did a double take, finishing up putting things aside. "I mean…we're different people, Ryan. We're in different circles, I don't—maybe. I don't know. I mean, I didn't even go to football games."

"I could've gone to one of the bars you worked at."

"I hated the football players. They were all assholes." She hesitated, drumming her fingers along a box of crackers. "You're not an asshole though."

A smile tugged up on my lips.

"I mean, you can be," she corrected herself with a laugh. "But you're not the barhopping asshole."

"What if I went for a birthday or something?"

Out of sight, I could still hear the student reporter jotting down notes but Kassie had all of my attention. She watched me for a moment, mulling it over. "I don't know. You wouldn't have talked to me."

"You don't know that."

It was banter for the article and it wasn't. Because I wasn't playing around. I was legitimately thinking about it. If I met Kassie in a bar, and saw her curved smile in the corner, and put my card down for a beer and a napkin for her number. How different would things have been? What if I'd been less of a dick at dinner? Could I have gotten her number then?

"Okay, let's pretend for a second that you went out to some football player's birthday at a bar I was slinging drinks for," Kassie said, amused. "Would you have gone up to the counter? Or would you have been itching to get home and back to captain duties?"

Damn.

She had a point. I would've put in my fifteen minutes to say hello and dropped out of the bar without a second thought. There was a very real possibility I wouldn't have even seen her.

With a nod, Kassie noted my silence. "See, you know the memory packet, ball dribbler. But I know you ."

It was silent between us, only broken by the student reporter.

"What's a memory packet?"

"Nothing," Kassie and I said at the same time.

"So, that's how you see me?" I said as casually as I could. "Just the football captain."

"Rewind the tape, I didn't say that."

My muscles tensed, waiting on edge for exactly what Kassie was going to say. She was the referee in the third quarter of my game, debating on whether or not to declare a foul, and I was unable to move, waiting for her answer.

"I think…" Kassie hesitated. "Ryan, I think that's how you see yourself. But it's wrong. You're dedicated as hell to it—no doubt about it. But you aren't just a football captain. That's that."

It was the exact same feeling every time Kassie sketched me out while we were in the dining hall together. She stripped me back from my gear, my awards, my title.

I cleared my throat. "Thanks."

Her dark eyes flickered up to me and she held my gaze for a long moment before she finished up her section too.

It was weird to think that if Adam hadn't been such a moron and skipped the photoshoot or if Kassie's favorite director hadn't declined the dinner or any of the other hundreds of things that went wrong that night - I wouldn't have her for the fall semester. It was…uncomfortable to imagine my time without her.

"Hey?" Kassie turned back to face the student reporter. "You can run that part of the article."

"The part about not being friends in an alternative universe?"

I grinned. "The guys are going to be merciless about it in the locker room."

"So…don't run that?"

"I didn't say that."

Kassie shook her head. "I meant about the volunteering and how my grandma and I got by. It'll sound good, right? A Cinderella story but with cleats and mouthguards."

The student reporter perked up. "Really?"

There was no way I heard her correctly. "No, she doesn't mean that," I said. "Don't put that in the article or you won't be accompanying us again."

Kassie shifted back. "Don't listen to him. Print it."

"You don't want the story," I insisted. "It won't happen."

"I can't walk into a job and get something out of it, Ryan," she reminded me. "The story's just collecting dust in an old college essay."

"You don't need to do that."

"You can use it." She shrugged. "So use it."

I couldn't stop looking over at her while the student reporter finished writing everything down. There was still a question on my mind but it wasn't something I could ask.

You would do that for me?