All Broke Down (Rusk University #2) (21 page)

She keeps her eyes on the screen and answers, “Summer internships.”

“You do realize that summer is pretty much over, right?”

“
Next
summer.”

Matt whistles, and I leave him to pry whatever professor advice he needs from Nell, and close myself in my bedroom at the end of the hall. There are still a few outfits laid out on my bed from my attempts to decide what to wear before the Voice for Tomorrow bimonthly dinner meeting.

It’s been a week since Silas was suspended from the team, and he gets to go back to practice tomorrow. His roommates are having a get-together at their place to watch some baseball game, and I’m going. Mostly I’ll be there to keep an eye on Silas and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid the night before his big day back. But it’s also the first time we’re officially hanging out with no ulterior motive. He went back to work at Renew with me twice this week. When he showed up the second day all on his own, I might have pulled a muscle, my jaw dropped so fast.

I hadn’t even bothered asking him to come because I figured he needed to rest more. And I was still feeling guilty about getting him hurt in the first place.

Lo and behold, the next morning I was standing toward the back of the group, far away from Henry, when he drove up in his rusty old pickup.

It didn’t make me feel like the butterflies in my stomach took acid. I swear it didn’t.

But something I’ve learned about Silas . . . when he sets his mind to something, he goes all out.

And oh God, I throw myself on my bed and cover my face with my hands because I can’t help but make that dirty in my head.

He’s ruined me.

Doesn’t help that I’m a huge, hormonal mess because despite turning me on every eight seconds or so . . . we’ve not done anything but kiss this week. And I’m just about ready to beg for more.

And now I have to decide what to wear for this party with his friends, and
nothing
I own looks good enough.

I groan and lay back on the bed, probably wrinkling several of my wardrobe possibilities in the process. I take a deep breath and stare at my ceiling.

I should put something on my ceiling. Glow-in-the-dark stars or posters or paper cranes. That’s something teenagers do, right? To make their rooms their own? I never did that, but it could be cool. Especially the paper cranes.

I’ll do that. Just as soon as I learn origami.

I sit up and look at myself in the mirror. My hair is loose and wavy, and I’m just wearing a plain V-neck tee and some jeans.

“You’re being silly, Dylan. It’s a baseball game on television at his apartment. It’s not a date. Not dinner or a movie or anything that requires this much thought. Just pick something.”

God, I’ve resorted to actually talking to myself. In a mirror.

Who’s the craziest of them all?

On a whim, I pick up a pair of shorts that are a little similar to the ones I wore the night Silas and I met. They come up high on my waist and show a good amount of leg. This pair is a bright kelly green. I pick a cute but comfy sheer top and pull it on over a white camisole. I look in the mirror and decide it’s just sexy enough with the sheer fabric, but not trying too hard since it’s loose and covers a decent amount of skin. That decided, I check the time on my phone. It’s half past seven, and I think the game starts at eight.

I debate trying to kill half an hour so I can show up fashionably late, but I’ve never really been a fashionably late kind of person, and if I don’t get out of this room now I might start freaking out about my wardrobe again.

I flip off my light as I head back down the hall.

Nell’s head is still down when I enter the living room, but she looks up when I pass. She’s exasperated, probably with Matt, but when she sees me, she puts a hold on whatever she’d been planning to say and mimes holding a gun to her head.

I swallow a laugh and head for the door.

She says, “Where are you going? You’ve barely been home at all this week.”

Matt cocks one eyebrow. “Barely been home all week, you don’t say?”

Then he makes an obscene gesture with his tongue and his cheek, and it’s me pretending to shoot him with my fingers this time.

“For your information, I’ve been doing that stuff with Renew. And I went to my parents’ place a few times.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I hung out with Silas once or twice.”

Matt jumps up from the couch. “Dingdingding! We have a winner, ladies and . . . ladies.”

I ignore him and focus on my roommate. “Okay, then. Nell, I’ll be back later tonight. Sorry to leave you with this guy. Feel free to kick him out whenever he starts annoying you.”

I pick up my purse by the door and Matt says, “You know, a true friend would give me details. Let me live vicariously through you.”

“Goodbye, Rash.”

“Cruel and heartless, Pickle! Cruel and heartless!”

I’m smiling despite my aggravation with Matt’s obsession. He’s a good friend, and I vow to fill him in on everything just as soon as I wrap my own head around it.

A number of cars are already parked around Silas’s place when I arrive. I pull mine up across the street and one house down. I’m relieved to know it won’t be weird that I’m here before the game starts. Little pebbles get stuck between my foot and the sole of my sandal on my way up his driveway. I ring the doorbell, and am trying to shake one of the pebbles out when the door opens.

It’s Brookes. And behind him is the pretty girl, Stella, that I met my first night here. The girl Silas hooked up with last year.

It shouldn’t bother me. It really shouldn’t.

But between her surprised expression and her quiet “Oh,” I can’t help it. It
does
bother me.

“Silas is in his room,” Isaiah says. “You can go up if you want.”

Torres passes by, carrying two bowls of chips from the kitchen. “Yeah, tell him to quit being antisocial and get his ass down here.”

I feel weird going up the stairs, especially because Stella and Brookes are watching me and whispering. I put them out of my mind and jog the final distance to Silas’s door and knock. No one answers, but there’s music playing inside, so I figure maybe he didn’t hear me. I knock one more time, and when nothing changes, I turn the knob and push the door open a few inches.

For one sinking moment, I cast my eyes toward his bed, afraid I’ll see something there that I don’t want to, but his bed is neatly made just like the last time I saw it. I push the door a little farther, music spilling out into the hall, and then I see him. He’s by the foot of his bed, shirtless and doing push-up after push-up. There’s a faint sheen of sweat across his muscled back, and I swear watching the way his muscles move could give reality TV a run for its money as far as entertainment goes.

Why
isn’t
there a reality TV show filled with hot guys doing sweaty, mouthwatering tasks?

Oh, right. That’s called sports.

I step over to the dock where he has his phone plugged in to play music. I turn down the volume, and he plants a knee on the floor to turn and look at me.

I suddenly feel weird about intruding on him here in his bedroom. I’ve only been in here the once, and that was really out of necessity. And he wasn’t in here with me.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he replies. He grabs his discarded T-shirt off the foot of the bed, but instead of slipping it on, he uses it to wipe at his face. “I didn’t expect you this early.”

I smile and shrug. “I guess your knee is all good now.”

“It is. I told you it would pass with a little rest.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, you did a whole lot of resting this week.”

“I’ll be doing a hell of a lot more tomorrow. No use coddling myself and making it harder in practice.”

“You know you could probably take a few more days if you wanted. Tell your coach what happened. I bet he’d rather see you sit out for a few days than risk hurting yourself worse.”

“I don’t much imagine that Coach wants to see me at all, but I can’t stay away any longer. This week was torture.”

I frown. Not liking that I had a part in making his week so miserable.

He crosses the room to me and says, “You know what else is torturous? That shirt.” He skims the palm of his hand up my sheer sleeve and over to place a finger on the top button. Slowly, he drags that finger down the line of buttons on my top. “Every time you wear one of these, all I can think about is tearing it open. It’s so damn tempting.”

I swallow and his hand stops at the top of my shorts, where my shirt disappears under the high waistband. He’s shirtless and sweaty, and I want to be worried about him ruining my shirt like he said he wanted to, but all I can do is stand here.

Trying for a subject change, I say, “Why aren’t you downstairs? A bunch of your friends are already here.”

“I didn’t feel like hanging out.”

“Oh. Well, I can go then. Let you get back to your, um, push-ups.”

He takes hold of the extra material on my shirt where it’s tucked in. He doesn’t pull or push, just holds on.

“I didn’t say I didn’t feel like hanging out with
you.”

When he’s satisfied that I’m not going anywhere, he releases the material and says, “Let me take a quick shower. You can wait in here if you want.”

I remember the last time I saw him right after a shower. I nearly let him go down on me in his kitchen, and he
would
have if his roommates hadn’t showed up. I’m not sure what will happen if he comes back all wet and toweled to me alone in his room, but I know it’s probably something that I don’t want to happen with all his friends downstairs.

“That’s okay. I’ll just wait for you in the living room.”

He looks disappointed, but doesn’t comment. I start to leave but he moves into my space, crowding me against the door. I tip my chin up and try not to look nervous.

“Someday you should wear one of these shirts you don’t mind me destroying.”

“I like my clothes.”

“I like the idea of tearing them off you.”

“You’re crazy.”

He leans closer, caging me between his arms on the door. He dips his head down and trails the tip of his nose up my neck to my ear.

“You make me that way.”

He makes me a little crazy, too.

He lets me escape then, but not before placing a sinfully hot, open-mouth kiss over my pulse point. I hear him laughing as I scurry down the stairs, and he closes himself in the bathroom.

Down in the living room, I recognize Silas’s two roommates, Stella, and the couple who picked us up from the sheriff’s office, Carson and his redheaded girlfriend. There are two more guys with the couple, one with curly blond hair and the other wearing a beanie even though it’s August. There’s another guy on the couch I don’t recognize. He’s huge with sandy blond hair . . . the kind of massive guy that I’ve always pictured when I thought of college football. Stella is on the couch with him, and he makes her look miniature.

“Where’s Silas?” Torres asks. He tries to slip an arm over the shoulder of a pretty brunette standing next to him, but as soon as he manages it, she removes his arm.

“He’ll be down soon. He’s just taking a shower.”

Every head in the room swivels toward me.

“Got a little dirty, did he? That was fast. Tell me he at least made it good for you, Captain Planet.”

The brunette next to him scowls.

She says, “If you’re trying to win an award for douchebaggery, you can stop. It’s a landslide victory.”

Stella laughs on the couch. “I like you, Katelyn. You should come around more often.”

“I keep telling her that,” Torres says.

Stella kicks her heeled feet up on the coffee table. “That explains why she hasn’t been here.”

Torres throws a chip at her. She picks it up from her stomach where it landed and pops it into her mouth with a smile.

I like the way they are with each other. It’s what I imagine siblings are like. There were other kids in my foster home, but it was so strict there, we never got a chance to find this kind of easy camaraderie.

“Take a seat, Dylan.” Stella gestures to the open spot on the couch on the other side of the giant dude. “Carter doesn’t bite.”

I sit down, and I notice some people are avidly watching the announcers’ pregame talk, while others are talking among themselves. It’s easy. I don’t feel any pressure to be or act a certain way. I just sit back and listen to them bait and tease each other, and it feels a little like watching a sitcom from the inside.

There are plates and bowls of snacks laid out on the table, and directly in front of me is a plate of brownies that looks almost untouched.

Stella and a guy named Ryan argue over a subject that I’ve lost track of (I think they’ve probably lost track, too, and are just arguing to argue). I reach for one of the brownies because . . .
chocolate,
and I meet Carter’s eyes as I sit back. He may be approaching the size of a woolly mammoth, but his eyes are friendly and he has a rosiness to his cheeks that makes him seem more approachable. I shrug unapologetically as I bite into the chocolatey goodness, and he smiles widely.

I suppose if someone has to catch me stuffing my face, the quiet guy is a good option.

The brownie tastes a little funny, like maybe it has too much flour or something, but I’m hungry, so I don’t mind much. I was too frustrated and angry at the dinner meeting to do much beyond destroying my food with my fork, and now it has caught up to me. I try a few other things at the table, and right as the game starts, Silas enters.

His hair is wet and curling slightly at the ends. The guy still does marvelous things for a pair of jeans. And when his eyes scan the room and land on me, every muscle in my body twists up tight.

The rest of the room fades, like the world is in black-and-white, and he’s the only thing in color.

And I’m not just breathing, I’m seeing and feeling and hearing in a way that I’m not sure I ever have before.

Chapter 18

Silas

T
here’s no space around her. She’s sitting between Carter’s bulky frame and the edge of the couch, and that just won’t cut it. But I don’t know how to get near her, to make an opening for me without doing something that
says something.