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“I need you to make me a promise,” he began.

“Okay…”

“I need you to promise that no matter what’s going on in my life, if something happens in your life, you’ll still come to me,” he said. I opened my mouth to say something, but he squeezed my hand before I could interrupt. “And I promise I’ll do the same. No more running away from each other, Theo.”

My chest tightened with every sentence. We had a stellar track record as a couple so far. We were three major events in, and we’d spent every one of them avoiding the other—which, in hindsight, had been a terrible choice each time.

“I just didn’t want to add more to what you were already dealing with,” I explained.

“I know.” His thumb moved slowly across my knuckles in reassurance. “And I didn’t want you dealing with my grief when your best friend had just lost his mom. Except we keep making the same decision for each other, Theo. We can’t keep making this decision for the other person. We can’t keep deciding what the other person can handle instead of letting them decide.”

I frowned slightly. When he put it that way, it did sound incredibly stupid. Rhodes must’ve seen the realization on my face. He offered me a gentle smile.

“I’m not saying we have to know how to fix everything magically,” Rhodes continued. “Sometimes, there won’t be anything either of us can do. But I need to know when you’re hurting, Theo, even if I’m hurting too.”

I took a long moment to process what he was saying. Rhodes wasn’t only asking me to let him in. He was promising to let me in too. The same man who had spent so much time trying to protect me from all his ugly parts was offering to let me be there for all of them—ready to trust me with all of them.

“I promise,” I replied softly, and his fingers tightened around mine. I shifted in my chair so I could lean over and rest my head on his shoulder. Rhodes turned just enough to press a kiss into my hair.

“Good,” he murmured. His thumb kept moving slowly over my knuckles while I settled against him, letting my eyes drift shut. I didn’t care that the airport smelled funky or that it was only a matter of time before we had to leave this to fly to Georgia. For now, I had him, and that was enough.

CHAPTER 88

Theo

HORNY DEVIL: Are you coming back with me? Or staying at the house tonight?

I’d like to, but apparently the guys are throwing me a… it’s stupid.

HORNY DEVIL: And?

They called it the Road Runner Recovery Rager.

HORNY DEVIL: Recovery and rager don’t belong in the same sentence.

Honestly, I just want a nap.

HORNY DEVIL: That’s understandable. If you need me to come pick you up, just let me know.

By the time we got back to Everdale, I was running on fumes. Georgia had been a wild up-and-down adventure. We’d won. Barely. I played… well, I sucked, and Jude quickly pivoted every snap to Wyatt when I just couldn’t anymore. I was sure everyone noticed, but no one said a thing.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop my teammates from deciding I wasn’t allowed to be alone afterward. I tried to argue that I was exhausted—that it was late—but nobody cared. Not really. Jude and Wyatt even gave me the most surprisingly coordinated speech about how I was young, and we only got to live once. Me arguing that life should include sleep didn’t help my cause.

Which was why the frat house was ridiculously active at one in the morning. People kept bringing me food and shoving drinks in my hand. Someone pulled me into the dumbest argument about whether leftover fries counted as breakfast food when eaten after midnight—I still didn’t have a good answer for that. Every time I got too quiet, someone found a reason to involve me in whatever nonsense was happening nearby.

What they were doing was so obviously intentional that pretending otherwise would’ve been insulting. But no one mentioned my parents or me disappearing before the game. No one said the word gay—I thought they had at one point, but they were talking about Gale, the teacher’s assistant Terry was in love with. I had no idea how much anyone knew.

The only obvious thing was that this was their way of taking care of me. Honestly, I could’ve done a lot worse than them, and I was grateful for every attempt to keep me out of my head.

Right up until someone decided beer pong was the next step in the Road Runner Recovery Rager. I wasn’t entirely sure who started it. One minute, I was half-asleep on the couch, and the next thing I knew, someone was clearing the dining table. Red cups appeared from the kitchen, and half the team was yelling contradictory rules at one another.

Wyatt grabbed my wrist as he passed and hauled me upright, drafting me to be a part of the game. Jude joined without being asked and informed us he’d take the lead—whatever that meant. The three of us ended up on one side of the table while Terry, Rodney, and Max crowded around the other. I expected chaos. I expected Wyatt to talk an unreasonable amount of shit. I expected to be mediocre at best because I was exhausted like no other.

What I did not expect was Jude to become a goddamn assassin the second someone put a ping-pong ball in his hand—though I guess that’s why he’d been banned from beer pong by every other house on campus.

His first shot dropped cleanly in the back cup. Then his second followed by his third. That shit-eating grin of his couldn’t be any wider as he celebrated.

“Was this something you learned randomly one weekend?” I demanded.