by Lynn Stevens
“Over? Then why do all this?” She motioned to the tablet, her eyebrows coming together in her scrutinizing unibrow.
“Because it’s the right thing to do?” I asked. Had I known about Devon’s betrayal, I wouldn’t have bothered. That wasn’t true. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. Hailey had dragged me into something I wasn’t a part of and I wanted my name cleared. Nothing could fix what had gone down between Devon and me.
“What happened?” Paige asked, yanking me from my thoughts.
“Can we talk about it later?” I stood again. “I really want to get this to Ross before he leaves his office.”
“Okay.” Paige leaned across the table and pulled the remainder of my side salad toward her. “You’re positive?”
“Yeah. I just… I don’t know what I am really.” I shook my head. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with?”
“Nope, not at all interested. Keep me out of it.” She popped a cherry tomato in her mouth.
“Thanks, Paige.” I hugged her quickly before taking off toward the door.
The sun sank below the top of the administration building. A halo of orange surrounded the clocktower. I hurried around the fountain in the middle of campus. If it had been on, I would’ve dug out a penny and made a wish. I needed all the help I could get at this point. The wind kicked up, digging under my coat. The constant tug of war winter had with spring was getting old. I focused on the weather rather than my nerves. I’d never met the athletic director. Why would I have ever needed to before? I didn’t really need to meet him now. The video could’ve been emailed. Then it could’ve been deleted or ended up in spam. The only way to make sure he saw it was if I showed it to him.
So much for anonymity.
The wood and glass doors to the building opened and Devon strolled out along with Chuck Mathis and the rest of the ambush crew. I stopped the minute I saw them. None of the guys noticed me. Their gazes focused on the recently patched sidewalk. I couldn’t tell by their expressions but their body language gave away each one’s defeat. It was like they just lost the College World Series.
“What happened?” I asked, despite not wanting to be noticed. Tightening my grip on Paige’s tablet, I moved closer to them.
“Thanks to you, the entire starting lineup is suspended. Maybe even banned from playing.” Chuck leaned closer, veins bulging in his neck. “Feel like a big woman now? Glad you got your sick revenge on Devon and took the rest of us down with him?”
“I didn’t—”
“Of course you didn’t.” Chuck sneered and threw his hands in the air. “It’s never the woman’s fault.”
My mouth dropped open, bruising my chin on the sidewalk. I’d heard some vile things in my life but that was the absolute worst. But I couldn’t say a thing. It wasn’t my fault. I knew that. I glanced at Devon, wishing he would say anything. But not even a breath seemed to pass his lips.
“I get it,” I said, nodding and staring at the sidewalk for a second before meeting Chuck’s glare. At least that asshole would look at me. “I do. I get why you’re pissed. And I even get why you’re angry with me even though I didn’t have anything to do with it. You’d rather take the word of a complete liar than mine. Fine. That’s your choice. But don’t come anywhere near me after today.” I stepped between them, pushing hard against Devon as I passed. I didn’t look back as I added, “Because despite the way all of you have treated me, I’m going to save your sorry asses.”
They followed me into the building. None of them said anything as we crossed the marble floor of the lobby. The crest of Westland shone beneath our feet. I could feel their eyes boring holes into my back, even when I stopped at the lighted directory that hung near the gothic steps. Dr. Ross’s office was on the second floor in the northern wing. I could hear their sharp breaths as we rushed up the red and gold carpeted stairs and down a wood paneled hall to his office. They stopped outside the frosted glass door as I entered the outer office and asked to see the director.
“Do you have an appointment?” his secretary asked. She smiled as she continued to type. Her fingers flew across the keyboard like a concert pianist. It was rather impressive. More so than her Mad Men wardrobe. Clearly someone watched too much TV.
“No, but I need to see him.” I glanced around the small room that could’ve fit inside JenCar in both style and taste. It was full of beige and gray. Definitely not a jock’s office. “It’s about the article in the school paper. The one about the gambling.”
“Oh?” The deep voice sounded from the door to my left. I hadn’t seen it open.
I turned to face the former semi-pro-football player who ran Westland’s athletic department. He was taller than I expected. His muscles strained against his very expensive suit. The gray that peppered the sides of his dark hair only made him more intimidating and distinguished.
“And what information is that, young lady? That you saw Chuck Mathis and Barry Acklin bet on mud wrestling in the basement of Donaldson Hall?” He crossed his arms, daring me to challenge him.
I had faced a woman who could destroy any chances I had in aerospace engineering. There was no way this man was going to intimidate me. “No. I’ve never been in the basement of Donaldson Hall. If there’s mud wrestling going on, I’d be surprised. And incredibly impressed, if the basement’s anything like Macklin, where I used to live.”
His lips twitched under his peppered mustache, but he didn’t smile. “Then what?”
I stood tall and pointed to the tablet. “I have Hailey Ransiko on video admitting that she lied about all of it.”
His entire demeanor changed almost instantly. By the squint in his eye, I could tell he wasn’t 100 percent ready to trust me straight away, but he wasn’t going to ignore me, either. The sharp intake of breath from the hallway echoed in the outer office.
“I could’ve emailed it to you, but I was afraid it might end up in spam or just get deleted,” I added. “This was the only way I could be certain you saw it.”
Dr. Ross dropped his arms and motioned me into his office. His Heisman trophy set in the curio in its bronze glory. His three jerseys hung on the wall in huge frames, each with a single light on them.
“Have a seat, Miss…” He let the question dangle so I would answer. I didn’t. Dr. Ross sat in a wingback chair near the desk. “Okay, I see. It wouldn’t be hard to find out your name.”
“I know, but I don’t want…Hailey Ransiko used me as one of her ‘sources’ and took a tiny bit of information to add to her falsified story.” I sat in the wingback beside his, placing Paige’s tablet on the small round coffee table in front of the chairs. “She knew I’d started seeing one of the players. I never told her he bet on sports.” I wanted to press play, but I needed to get this off my chest. He needed to know exactly where she was getting her information. “The truth is Devon Miller and I made a bet over beer pong. It was stupid, but I don’t think you can count beer pong as a sport. It was how we flirted, how we allowed ourselves to be…” I shook my head. “That doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that I told Hailey that Devon bet me dinner over who was better at a stupid drinking game. I never saw him bet on sports or anything else. He never told me he bet on sports or that he bet money on anything.” I reached for the tablet and pressed the play button. “And here’s the proof.”
Dr. Ross leaned against the arm of his chair with his chin resting on his finger. His fist tightened as Hailey bragged on about duping the team and her editor. The creases in the corner of his eyes deepened, but his brown eyes never left the screen even after it had gone dark. He reached out and hit play again. After a third viewing, he sat back in his chair.
“How did you get this?” he finally asked.
“I’d rather not say, sir.” I wrung my hands together, waiting for him to make any kind of move.
He stood and turned to face his trophy case, his hands clasped behind his back. “When I was in college, people were as ruthless as they are now. They were just sneakier about it.”
“I’d rather not think of myself as ruthless,” I said. Because if I was as ruthless and vindictive as Hailey Ransiko, I would’ve let Devon and the others rot.
Dr. Ross laughed once. “No, I don’t think you are.” He turned around and put his hands on the back of the chair. “I’m grateful that you brought this to my attention. It seems like more and more people would rather step on people to get up the ladder than help each other climb it. Email that to me and the president of the school, if you don’t mind. I’ll take care of Hailey.”
“I…”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Dr. Ross, if I email it to both you and the president, then you’ll both know who I am. Hailey’s already ruined my…friendship with one of the players. I don’t want to be involved in this anymore. I just wanted to clear my own name. I needed to make sure he knew I didn’t do this.” I stood and pulled my phone from my pocket. “Can I trust you to keep me out of this?”
His face softened and he nodded.
“Thank you, sir.” I typed in his email as he said each letter and sent it from my phone.
“You could be a hero.” He let go of the chair and walked toward his desk. “If you wanted to, the entire campus would know you as the girl who saved the team.”
“I’d rather be known as the woman who was a brilliant engineering student.” I picked up the tablet. “And like I said, I’m not doing this for the team. I don’t like people to use me or my friends like puppets.”
“Well the team thanks you. So do I.” He sat down and opened his computer. “Lord knows we’ve had enough problems this semester.”
I turned to leave his office but stopped. “Dr. Ross?” He glanced at me over the top of his monitor. “They’re out in the hall.”
He nodded. “I know. I’ll ask Sylvia to bring them in, although I can’t say what will come of this for certain until I speak with the president.”
“Thank you,” I said as I headed toward the door. Hailey’s stupid laugh filled his office from the speaker. I walked into Sylvia’s space, closing Dr. Ross’s door behind me. Devon, Chuck, and the others still waited in the hallway. I didn’t say anything to them as I pushed my way out of their grasp. They peppered me with questions, but I refused to answer. There wasn’t anything to say, anyway. Everything was in Ross’s hands. I was halfway down the stairs when they gave up.
Well, all but one.
Devon’s hand fell on my shoulder. “Olivia?”
The controlled burn of anger inside me exploded through the barriers. “Don’t talk to me like…we’re still together. You lost that chance when you told Philip Lawler you didn’t know how to reach me.”
“What’re you talking about?” he asked.
I stepped back, letting his hand slip away from me. “I went to JenCar. He told me after they actually offered me my internship back.”
“That’s great—”
“I turned them down.”
Confusion peppered his features. “Why would you do that?”
“Because that’s not where I belong.” I turned and started back down the steps before turning back toward him. I was going to let it go, but I couldn’t. There was no way I could walk away from him without telling him why. Even if that’s pretty much what he’d done to me. “Lawler and Acton had recommendation letters for me. Philip told me that you said you didn’t know how to find me. We both know that’s bullshit.” I shook my head and stared him in the eye. “I learned one thing from this entire mess, Devon. I may not know where I belong anymore, but I know where I don’t.”
I didn’t give him a chance to react as I spun on my heel and headed toward the front door. He didn’t follow me this time. As I stepped into the darkening evening, the weight of everything fell from my shoulders.
It was over. Everything was over.
I strode off the sidewalk and around the side of Danforth Hall. The brick was cold, slicing into my coat as I leaned against it. The weight of everything may have fallen away, but a hole the size of a crater was left behind. Everything was over.
Everything was gone.
I’d lost.
Game over.
Chapter Thirty
Our sting operation felt like a lifetime ago when it had only been a week. I’d shown Ross the video on Thursday. The next day, everyone’s suspensions were lifted. Well, everyone but Chuck Mathis’s. The baseball team was back to full strength for their first home game of the season.
An early morning storm brightened my little apartment. Lightning spread its fingers across the sky and thunder rattled the windows, but the front was passing and on the other side was the sun. I loved spring storms when they drove through quickly and disappeared just as fast.
Paige sat on the floor with papers spread in every direction. She had written an article for the school’s website and that had her pondering a change in career. She decided journalism was the way to go. Paige had always rolled with everything, just drifting along. I’d never seen so much determination as she had now. She ditched her idea to backpack across Europe and planned summer classes to add on the additional hours needed to graduate with a dual degree in sociology and journalism. She’d already weaseled her way onto the school paper. There was an opening, after all.
“Liv,” she said without looking at me. “Do you think I can do this?”
I glanced up from my textbook. “Yeah, why?”
“You wanna bet on it?” She turned her head slowly with a wicked grin filling her face.
“No more bets.” I closed the book and put it on the table. My betting days were long over. I climbed off my comfy bed and went into the kitchen to make tea.
“Fine. We won’t bet on my future.” She followed me, but stayed on the main room side of the counter. “Can we do something fun? I’m getting a little overwhelmed and need a break.”
Paige had been working extra hard lately. So had I. Avoiding Devon in class and on campus had become harder than I anticipated. He seemed to be everywhere I was. He’d even shown up at work. I asked Logan to sit him in someone else’s section. “Like what?”
“Well, I kind of started seeing this guy,” she said. A blush warmed her cheeks. “He’s going to be somewhere around three and he invited me to meet up with him.”
“So go. Nobody’s stopping you.” The microwave beeped. I turned my back to her and opened the door, taking out the heated mug. While I opened the foil to free the tea bag, Paige pled her case.
“He’ll be…working so it won’t be all the time with him.” She put her chin on the counter and stared at me with puppy dog eyes. “Please? It’ll only be a few hours then you can get back to memorizing your books.”
“I’m not memorizing my books.” I dipped the Darjeeling tea bag a few more times before tossing it into the trash. How ridiculous could Paige get? Yeah, I’d read my ethics book from cover to cover. Along with a few other textbooks, but I wasn’t memorizing them.
“You’re avoiding him,” she said. I turned away, but Paige always had a way of hitting me in the heart when I least expected it. “You need to say hi or kiss my ass or something to him, Liv. Just face him and prove to yourself it’s really over.” Then she added the coup de gras. “I dare you.”
Dares and bets, the weakness of any girl with brothers. I sat my mug down and reached for the honey. “I’ll think about it.”
“I double dog dare you.”
“What are we? Ten?” I squeezed too much honey into the mug. Great, I needed to make a second mug to balance it out.
“I triple-dog dare you.”
“Paige—”
“You can’t turn down a triple-dog dare.” She stood and pointed at my chest. “It’s not possible.”
I threw one hand in the air. “Then you can’t date until the end of the semester.”
Paige laughed with unprecedented glee. “Funny. This isn’t a bet. There are no conditions. That’s your failure there. If you don’t do a triple-dog dare, then you have to do something I pick. And that’s
my laundry for a month. It’s a win-win for me.”
“That’s not happening.” I’d seen how Paige’s laundry was. There were days I thought it was becoming a sentient life form.
“Then I guess you accept.”
“On my terms.”
“We’ll see about that. I’ll be back at two. Get showered and make yourself look more like Olivia Dawson and less like the creature from the swamp.” She reached for her jacket on the chair and threw it over her shoulder. She was out the door before I could even think of another excuse. And she left all her papers on the floor.
Paige opened my door without knocking. “Cody’s waiting.”
“Cody?” I grabbed my fleece, zipping it over my Nerdy Chicks Rule tee. The weather was warming to a nice sixty degrees, but a quick northern wind could chill me to the bone pretty fast. The last thing I needed was a cold. “Isn’t he one of the guys you met in the journalism department?”
“Not quite. He’s a marketing major and one of the social media guys.” She held the door open as I stepped into the hall. “You trust me, right?”
“Right now, I’m not so sure.”
Paige smiled with more wicked glee. She definitely had something up her sleeve. “I’m driving.”
Ten minutes later, she parked in the crowded lot outside the baseball stadium. I stifled the groan building inside me.
“Just face him, Liv.” She opened her door and stepped outside. “The game’s just starting.”
I still had time. Nine innings to be exact. When Paige said she wanted to have some fun, I didn’t think she meant sitting outside and staring at a boring sport. Just face him, Liv, I repeated. Paige was, as usual, right. I was starting to hate that about her. Besides, I’d spent the last few days doing everything I could not to think about Devon Miller. It was time to talk to him and get over this entire thing.
The stadium was full. Paige picked up our tickets that Cody had left in her name. Good thing, too, because there was no way I’d voluntarily pay money to go to a game. It wasn’t that I hated baseball. I just thought it was boring.
