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I stared at him hard. Was he serious? His unwavering expression told me yes.

“You’ve had two weeks, Jude. Why now?” I asked. If it was something he wanted, why did he wait so damn long? Hell, I would’ve jumped at the opportunity.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t really something I thought of.”

“Right,” I murmured. That sounded like Jude. He lived almost entirely in whatever mattered right now. I reached for the sweatshirt I'd tossed over my chair and pulled it on while turning his request over in my head. Could I build extra drills around him? Absolutely. His arm strength was already good. His instincts were better than he gave himself credit for. There were some technical things I could tighten up—footwork, release timing, how quickly he moved through reads. If he put in the work, I could make him better.

“Come on, Rhodes,” Jude said over my growing silence. “You were the best. Make me better.”

“Answer me one question and I will,” I countered. I sat on the edge of my desk and crossed my arms. “Are you failing your courses because you don’t understand the material or because you’re not applying yourself?”

His expression shifted just enough that I knew I’d hit a nerve. Good. Because I’d been trying to figure out how to approach this for days. Jude’s grades made no sense to me. Neither did Jude, if I was being honest. I hadn’t been involved enough when he was growing up to know what school looked like for him. By the time he was old enough for any of that to matter, I’d already left Everdale and done an exceptional job of convincing myself that distance was easier.

I knew what Mom told me occasionally, surface-level updates from a life I’d chosen not to be part of. And now I was discovering just how much I’d missed. I didn’t know where he struggled academically, what came easily, or what the hell he wanted his life to look like after college. In fact, Jude had yet to tell me much of anything real about himself.

That was as much my fault as his, if not more.

“The classes are boring,” he told me flippantly, and I frowned.

“What do you mean the classes are boring?”

“I know the shit already, or it’s not that hard to figure out,” Jude said. I studied him—really studied him—because suddenly several things I’d dismissed as Jude being Jude rearranged themselves into something else entirely. The random shit he knew, the things he picked up frighteningly quickly, the way he could watch someone do something once and somehow understand it. Was the whole dumb-jock thing an act? Or maybe not an act exactly, but rather one small part of him he’d decided was easier to let everyone see.

Was he a hell of a lot smarter than he let on?

“Jude, what was your GPA when you graduated from high school?” I demanded.

“Four-point-nine something.” He shrugged. “They asked me to talk about it or something at graduation, but I didn’t want to.”

My brain stalled. Four-point-nine something. He’d said it like he was telling me what he’d eaten for breakfast.

“They asked you to be valedictorian?” My voice rose a notch. Shit, I barely passed high school. “Jude, do you realize what kind of honor that is?”

“You say honor; I say they were trying to give me more homework before graduation.”

I just stared at him, trying to process that one. Jesus fuck, this goddamn kid. He had opportunities most people would kill for, and he treated them like minor inconveniences. What bothered me most was that I couldn’t tell whether he genuinely didn’t understand what he was capable of or if he just didn’t give a fuck. Did he not realize what he was throwing away?

“Why?” I asked. “Why don’t you care?”

For the first time since he’d walked in, some of the humor disappeared completely.

“Being smart is your thing.”

“You have some growing up to do, kid,” I retorted. “This isn’t a competition. And if it was, it sounds like you’d be winning.”

“Yeah, but I’d rather win at football right now,” Jude said. I sighed and dragged a hand through my still-wet hair. He didn’t get it. Or maybe he did and just didn’t care about the same things I thought he should. Either way, lecturing him wouldn’t work.

Jude would tune me out the second I started sounding like Dad, and he was the last person I ever wanted to sound like.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said.

“I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?” His eyes narrowed immediately.

“Probably,” I told him. “But if you agree to apply yourself in your classes this year—and I do mean actually apply yourself to succeed—I’ll help you be a better quarterback.”

“Can we skip the first part?”

“No.”