First Down: A Fake Dating College Sports Romance (Beyond the Play)
First Down: Chapter 6

“YO, Coop! Get your ass up if you want a ride!”

I keep pounding on the door as I shout. I have no idea how my brother manages to always be on time for hockey, but late for everything else. He’s like a hurricane, but the eye of the storm is always hockey.

Seb walks out of the bathroom at the end of the hallway, a towel wrapped around his waist. He snorts as he takes in the scene. “Still not up?”

“You heard him last night, right? James, we have class at the same time, let me tag along with you?”

“Yep.”

“Jesus. Cooper, I’m not going to be late for the first meeting of this stupid-ass class!”

The door flings open, revealing my brother, who looks about ready to skin me alive. His eye is actually twitching. I give him a grin and say sweetly, “There’s Sleeping Beauty.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me. I don’t know how you’ve survived college without me.”

“He barely has,” Seb pipes up, which causes Coop to give him a death glare. He looks like he’s considering violence, so I step between them swiftly. Seb might’ve been adopted after his parents passed when he was eleven, but he and Coop act like honest-to-god twins. Which means a lot of hitting.

“You have five minutes,” I tell him. “I’m waiting in the car.”

When Coop retreats to his room, Seb doubles over in laughter, shaking water droplets everywhere. “Hate living with us yet?”

“Nah, you know I love you both. I missed you when I was down in Louisiana.”

In the week or so since I moved in—specifically into the owner’s suite of this house, thank you very much—I’ve made myself at home when I haven’t been busy with football practice. I missed living with my brothers. Even though we’ve always been busy with our season schedules, living together meant we’d see each other at least some of the time. Sometimes that meant saying hi to Coop as I arrived home from practice and he was just heading out to the rink, or catching the end of one of Seb’s games after a training session. We’ve had breaks and summers since college began, but the past few years I’ve been lonelier than I’d be willing to admit aloud. I had friends at LSU, good teammates, but I’ve always been closest with my family. My parents, who are both amazing people. Coop and Seb, even when they’re being terrors. And Izzy, the best little sister a guy could ask for. Getting to live with my brothers for one last year before I graduate and go off to some city, who knows which one, to play in the NFL, is a gift.

Seb smiles. He might not be a Callahan by blood, but he’s got a smile that fits right in. A little bit of the Callahan charm. “I missed you too. Good luck today, kick butt with the class.”

I scowl as I head downstairs. “If I survive, that is.”

Coop dashes down the stairs, his Nike backpack slung over one shoulder. He shoves his feet into his sandals and follows me out the door to my car, rubbing his eyes all the while.

“What class do you have again?” I ask as I pull out of the driveway.

He steals a sip of my coffee. I throw him an outraged glance, but he just shrugs and says, “Hey, you didn’t give me time to make a cup.”

“Which brings me back to my question. Are you late to class every day?”

“Don’t tell the folks. And the class is Russian lit.”

I whistle. “That sounds hard.”

He looks glum. “Tell me about it. I kick myself every day for choosing this stupid major.”

When Dad talked Cooper out of entering the NHL draft at eighteen so he could have a guaranteed four seasons in the NCAA, Cooper tried to get back at him by picking the least practical major he could think of—English. He likes to read, so it makes sense, but he seriously underestimated all the work that would go into it, a fact that never fails to make Seb burst out laughing like a hyena.

“Maybe you’ll have something in common with Nikolai, finally.”

Nikolai is Coop’s nemesis. A Russian defenseman attending college in the States, he’s the star of McKee hockey’s biggest rival, Cornell University. Coop hates him, mostly for his dirty style of play, which is hilarious considering Coop spends time in the sin bin every game. I don’t know the ins and outs of hockey the way he does, but I’m pretty sure avoiding penalties is a priority like it is in football.

“Ha ha. I don’t think so.”

Our off-campus house is in Moorbridge, the town that entwines around McKee’s sprawling campus, so fortunately we get where we need to be quickly. I drop Cooper off at his building and make the short drive over to mine. I have five minutes before my butt needs to be in a chair, surrounded by freshmen.

Ugh.

I park in the nearest student lot and run over to the building. If I’m going to manage to wrangle a Pass out of this class, I need to make a good first impression.

I replace the right room and ease the door open. Crap, this class is way smaller than I was expecting. McKee really does take the whole professor-to-student ratio seriously, I guess.

I sneak to the back, where a girl sits alone, head bent over what must be the syllabus.

When I’m about a foot from her, I freeze. That’s her. Little Miss Angel. Fucking kissed me better than anyone in my life and then left like we hadn’t just sparked like lightning.

Not to mention she’s Darryl’s ex. The very one I told him to treat with respect, oh, an hour before she kissed me. After she fled the party, Darryl got in my face about the kiss, but fortunately he believed me when I said I didn’t know who the hell she was. I still don’t, really, just that her name is Beckett, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and she kisses like the world is burning down around her.

Oh, and she’s off-limits.

She can’t possibly be a freshman, so what is she doing here?

I sit down next to her. She smells nice, like vanilla and maybe something floral. And she’s very studiously highlighting parts of the syllabus. Since I don’t have one, I say, “Got an extra copy of that?”

The professor, an older looking man with gold-rimmed glasses, stops his droning. He clears his throat as he glances down at a stack of papers. “Mr. Callahan?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

The professor keeps his gaze on me as he talks. “Students, please make note of the start time for this class once more. 8:30, not 9. It will benefit your academic career not to be late to class. Other professors may not be so… accommodating.”

He punctuates that by passing a copy of the syllabus my way.

Fuck. I can feel my blush like a five-alarm fire. “Sir, I’m sorry. I was up early for practice and went home to get changed before coming here, and I must have mixed up the times with my other morning class.”

A girl looking back at me shrugs, as if to say, tough. I resist the urge to make a face at her. Beside me, Beckett heaves a sigh.

“What?” I say.

“I just lost a bet with myself. I thought you were late because of an alarm malfunction.”

“I’m an athlete. I don’t have alarm malfunctions.”

“Ah,” she says. “Right, I forgot that you guys are gods who never need alarm clocks, whereas we mere mortals—”

Mr. Professor clears his throat again. He’s still looking my way, although I’m gratified to see him raise his eyebrow at Beckett too. “As I was saying, the tenets of academic writing at the college level include…”

“What are you even doing here?” I whisper.

She taps her foot against mine under the table. “I’m wondering that about you.”

“I failed this class when I first took it.” I don’t know what compels me to be totally honest with her. Maybe it’s her big brown eyes or the way she’s twirling a little sparkly gel pen or how I can’t stop remembering how her lips felt on mine.

I shove that thought away. She’s my teammate’s ex. Even if she was interested, I couldn’t.

“I transferred here last year,” she murmurs. “Even though I took classes like this at my community college, they didn’t accept all my credits.”

“That sucks.”

She shrugs slightly. “It’s not like it’ll be hard, right? We’ve been in college for three years already.”

I look at the syllabus. Twice-a-week seminar-style meetings. Weekly writing assignments. Peer feedback. My skin begins to crawl. Give me partial differential equations and I’m fine, but this? This is impossible.

And of course, a third of the grade is a final research paper on a topic of our choosing. Fuck. Me.

This class might not be difficult for her, but it’s going to be hell for me.

I give her what I hope is a semi-normal smile and settle in for the rest of class. But despite my best efforts, I can’t stop stealing glances at her. She looks just as pretty now as she did fancied up in that little white dress. My type, too; those full tits are distracting even in a T-shirt.

Did she choose me to kiss because I’m her type as well? I’m not dumb, I know she kissed me to get back at Darryl. But she could’ve approached any guy at that party, and I’m the one she landed on.

She bites her lip as she thinks. That’s cute.

The professor wraps up his spiel with an in-class assignment. We’re supposed to read an article about research into academic writing and distill it down to a paragraph explaining the thesis and main points.

I stare at my copy of the article for so long the words start to blur. All around me, the other students are highlighting keywords and scribbling notes in the margins; Bex seems to have a whole color-coded situation going on. I tug at the collar of my shirt, glancing at the clock. We have twenty minutes for this assignment, and five have already passed.

I force myself to read the first paragraph again. I pick up my pen, tapping it against the table before underlining a sentence with a bolded word in it. I remember that tip from one of the tutors I’ve had over the years, be it the one my parents hired in high school or the many I tried to work with at the writing center at LSU.

“If you’re stuck, try reading the topic sentences first,” Bex says.

I glance over at her. She taps my paper with her pen.

“Look,” she says. “There are a couple of sections in the article, and each of them covers a different topic.”

“But then it just talks about something else,” I say.

“Not quite,” she says. “I know it seems like it, because it starts out talking about research into academic writing and then switches into an anecdote, but that’s just to humanize the topic a little. It’s not important information.”

I’m only about seventy percent certain I know what an anecdote is, but I don’t want her to think I’m even more of an idiot than I already sound, so I just nod along. “Seems unnecessary.”

She snorts, which makes a dude in front of us clear his throat pointedly.

“Skip down to the part where it discusses the study on formal writing education,” she whispers.

She takes me through the article, showing me her own annotations as examples for what to focus on. I can’t help but be a little distracted by the way she smells and how much I’m yearning to lean in closer, but in the end, I have a halfway decent paragraph to hand in. Something about the way she explained it made way more sense than in the past, which is weird, considering I’ve always had such a block when it comes to writing. If she was the professor, I’d probably get an A in this class.

I reach over and pluck her pen out of her hand. She gives me an outraged look, but I just grin and scrawl thank you on her syllabus. I have to resist the urge to include my phone number. That would definitely make her scowl even more adorable, but I don’t want to come on too strong—because a plan is forming in my mind, and I need her on board for it to work.

After all, who would say no to a paid tutoring gig?