She had a plan.

It was a good plan. A simple one. The kind of plan that required nothing dramatic from the universe, just basic cooperation. Transfer quietly, keep her head down, survive the semester without becoming a story anyone wanted to tell. No drama. No attention. No getting tangled up in Jaxon's world or the circus that followed him everywhere he went.

She had managed exactly eleven days before the universe stopped cooperating.

Sloane Calloway sat in the chair beside her brother and stared at a fixed point on the wall directly above the athletic director's head. She was aware, with every nerve ending she owned, that Caden Mercer was sitting six feet to her left. She could feel him looking at her. She refused to look back.

This was fine. Everything was fine.

"Miss Calloway," Director Holt said, glancing at her over the top of his glasses. You're not in any trouble. Your brother simply asked if you could be present as a character witness given the sensitivity of the situation.

"Of course he did," she said.

Jaxon shot her a sideways look. She kept her eyes on the wall.

The meeting was about the fight at the club. Both captains had been called in, their coaches notified, and a formal review opened. Holt laid it out in the careful, measured tone of a man who had done this many times before, who understood that two star athletes and two championship-contending programs were sitting in his office and that whatever he said next would need to be very precise.

Sloane heard approximately forty percent of it.

The other sixty percent of her attention was consumed by the effort of not reacting to the fact that the boy she had kissed in a backyard less than twenty-four hours ago was sitting close enough that she could hear him breathe.

She had known who he was at the party. That was the part she had not planned for, or rather, the part she had planned around and then abandoned somewhere between his laugh and the look on his face when she gave him nothing. Caden Mercer was not exactly an anonymous figure on this campus. Jaxon had been talking about him with varying degrees of fury for three years. She had seen his name in sports coverage, heard it at family dinners, watched it turn her brother's expression into something tight and unpleasant every single time.

She had recognized him the moment he stepped into that backyard.

She had kissed him anyway.

In her defense, she had not anticipated running into him in the athletic director's office the following afternoon. That part she genuinely could not have predicted.

"Miss Calloway."

She blinked. Holt was looking at her.

Can you confirm that your brother was attempting to de-escalate the situation when the altercation reached its peak?

She opened her mouth.

"She didn't see it," Jaxon said quickly, which was true. She arrived after.

Holt nodded and made a note. Sloane closed her mouth and went back to staring at the wall, except that her eyes moved without her permission and landed on Caden Mercer for the first time since she sat down.

He was already looking at her.

Of course he was.

He had the most unreadable expression she had ever seen on a person, which was impressive because she considered herself fairly good at reading people. He was not angry. He was not smug. He was not doing the thing she had braced for, the slow recognition followed by the slow smile followed by whatever entitled comment boys like him felt entitled to make. He was just looking at her, steady and quiet, like he was trying to solve something.

She looked away first.

The meeting wrapped up with both captains receiving formal warnings, a mandatory conflict resolution session that neither of them visibly reacted to, and a reminder from Holt that the upcoming season represented the university, and that the university would not be represented by brawls at off-campus venues. Both of them nodded at the appropriate moments. Jaxon thanked the director. Caden said something polite that Sloane did not catch because she was already standing, already reaching for Jaxon's gym bag, already calculating the fastest route to the door.

She made it four steps into the hallway.

"Hey."

She kept walking.

"Hey." His voice dropped slightly, just enough that it didn't carry back through the open door. I'm not going to say anything.

She stopped.

She turned around slowly. Caden Mercer was standing in the hallway with his hands in his pockets, looking at her like they were having a completely normal conversation, like her brother was not ten feet away gathering his things, like none of this was the disaster it clearly was.

"Excuse me?" she said quietly.

"About last night. I'm not going to say anything."

She studied him for a moment. "I didn't ask you not to."

"I know. I'm telling you anyway."

Why?

He looked at her for a beat too long. "Because you ran," he said. And people don't run unless they have a reason.

She did not have an answer for that. She hated that she did not have an answer for that.

"Sloane." Jaxon appeared in the doorway behind Caden, gym bag over his shoulder, gaze moving between the two of them with the particular sharpness of a brother who had spent a lifetime being suspicious. You ready?

"Yeah," she said. Her voice came out even. She was proud of that.

She looked at Caden one last time, just briefly, just long enough to communicate something she did not have words for, and then she walked back to her brother's side.

Jaxon's hand landed on her shoulder as they turned toward the exit. She could feel the weight of it, protective and oblivious all at once.

"Stay away from him," Jaxon said quietly as they walked, not looking at her, like he was commenting on the weather. I mean it, Sloane.

"You always mean it," she said.

He didn't answer. He didn't need to.

She kept walking, eyes forward, jaw steady.

Behind her she heard nothing. No footsteps following. No voice calling after her.

She told herself that was a relief.

She almost believed it.

That evening Sloane sat cross-legged on her dorm bed, phone face down, staring at the ceiling, when her new roommate burst through the door, tossed a flyer onto the bed beside her, and said with enormous enthusiasm:

"Good news. I just signed us both up for the campus sports journalism elective and apparently Caden Mercer gives a welcome interview to the class every single semester."

Sloane picked up the flyer.

There was his face, right at the top.

She put it back down.

"Great," she said.

The classroom was smaller than Sloane expected.

She had spent the entire walk across campus constructing a version of this that she could survive. A large lecture hall, maybe. Tiered seating, lots of bodies, the kind of room where you could position yourself in the back and become functionally invisible. She had the invisibility thing down to a science at this point. It was basically her only marketable skill.

The sports journalism elective met in a seminar room with twelve chairs arranged in a circle and nowhere to hide.

She stood in the doorway for exactly two seconds before her roommate Riley Brooks materialized at her elbow, steered her physically through the door, and deposited her into a chair with the cheerful ruthlessness of someone who had never once considered the value of a quiet exit.

"This is going to be so good," Riley said, dropping into the seat beside her. "I heard he's really funny in these things. Like genuinely charming, not performatively charming."

"Wonderful," Sloane said.

"You look like you're about to take an exam."

I'm fine.

"You've said you're fine four times since breakfast and each time you've looked progressively less fine."

Sloane opened her notebook to a blank page and clicked her pen. "I'm here for the journalism credit, Riley."

"Sure you are."

The professor walked in then, a compact woman in her fifties named Dr. Vance who had the energy of someone who had heard every excuse and was no longer moved by any of them. She welcomed the class, outlined the semester structure, and explained that the opening session guest interview was a department tradition designed to teach students how to conduct themselves with high profile subjects under real pressure.

Then the door opened.

Caden Mercer walked in like he had done this before, which he had, and like he knew exactly what the room expected from him, which he also did. He was in a plain grey pullover and dark jeans, no team gear, no performance. He shook Dr. Vance's hand, took the empty chair at the front of the circle, leaned back, and looked around the room with an easy unhurried expression.

His eyes found her in approximately four seconds.

She had been counting, which she would not be admitting to anyone.

He did not react. He did not smile or raise an eyebrow or do anything that would require her to respond. He simply moved his gaze along and completed the scan of the room like she was just another student in the circle, which she was, which was exactly what she wanted, which somehow made it worse.

Dr. Vance opened the floor. A girl two seats down asked about the championship season. A guy across the circle asked about leadership. Caden answered everything with a kind of relaxed specificity that made it clear he was not just performing, he had actually thought about these things. He talked about his team the way people talked about something they genuinely cared about, not as a vehicle for personal glory but as its own living thing that he felt responsible for.

Sloane wrote notes she did not need.

"Miss Calloway."

She looked up. Dr. Vance was looking at her with the pleasant expectation of someone who had noticed she had not spoken yet.

The room waited.

Caden waited. Still with that same unreadable expression. Still giving her nothing to work with.

She looked down at her notebook, then backed up.

"You've captained this team for two seasons," she said. What's the biggest mistake you've made as a leader and what did it cost you?

The room shifted slightly. A few people glanced between them like they had picked up on a frequency nobody had named yet.

Caden was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable, quiet. Thinking quietly.

"Sophomore year," he said. We had a player going through something personal. I saw it and I didn't address it because we were three games from playoffs and I told myself the timing was wrong. We lost him mid-season. Not to injure. He paused. "He left the program. I've thought about that a lot."

The room was very still.

"What would you do differently?" Sloane asked.

"I'd choose the person over the timing," he said. Every time.

She wrote that down. She did not look up again for the remainder of the session.

Afterward the class filtered out in clusters, voices picking up as the formal atmosphere dissolved. Sloane took her time gathering her things, a strategy that usually worked, giving the room time to empty before she had to navigate the door.

Riley, predictably, had already been absorbed into a conversation near the whiteboard.

"That was a good question."

She did not startle. She had heard him coming, or maybe she had just been expecting it.

Caden was standing near the door, bag over one shoulder, in no particular hurry. The room had emptied enough that there was no one close enough to hear them.

"It was a standard interview question," she said.

It wasn't. Most people ask about wins.

Wins are boring.

"Losses are more honest," he agreed.

She slung her bag over her shoulder and looked at him directly for the first time since the hallway outside Holt's office. Up close he was harder to categorize than she needed him to be. There was something underneath the easy confidence, something that the answer about his teammate had briefly surfaced, and she was annoyed at herself for noticing it.

"You're in this class all semester," he said.

"Journalism credit."

"Right." He nodded slowly. And it has nothing to do with the fact that this is the one place on campus where running into me is completely explainable.

She looked at him for a long moment.

"Goodbye, Caden," she said.

She walked past him through the door.

She made it to the end of the hallway before she allowed herself to exhale.

She was halfway across the quad when her phone buzzed. Unknown number. She almost ignored it. She didn't.

I got your number from the class roster. Before you decide that's creepy, read the next part.

She stopped walking.

Jaxon just asked Coach Briggs to move your dorm assignment. He's trying to put you in the athletic residence building. On his floor.

She stared at the message.

Then a second one arrived.

*I thought you should know before it happens. Also hi. It's Caden.*

She stared at the messages for a long time.

Not because she did not know what to do. Sloane Calloway always knew what to do. It was one of the things about herself she had managed to hold onto through everything that had happened in the past year, the compass that kept working even when everything else went sideways. She knew what to do. She just needed a moment to be furious first.

Jaxon.

She typed back without thinking.

*How do you know that?*

Three dots appeared immediately.

*Theo heard it from one of Jaxon's guys during conditioning this morning. It's not confirmed but Theo's sources are annoyingly reliable.*

*Who's Theo?*

*My best friend. Left wing. Six-two, talks too much, never wrong about anything which is genuinely insufferable.*

She almost smiled. She caught it before it happened.

*Why are you telling me this?*

The three dots appeared and then disappeared. Then it appeared again. She watched them with more attention than she was comfortable with.

*Because you said you transferred to figure out who you are outside of Jaxon's world. Moving you onto his floor in the athletic residence doesn't exactly help with that.*

She read it twice.

Then she put her phone in her pocket and walked directly to her brother's.

Jaxon's room was at the end of a corridor in the north residence hall, the kind of corner room that came with more square footage and a better view and was quietly allocated to athletes whose programs generated revenue. She had been here twice since transferring. Both times she had been grateful for the distance between his building and hers.

She knocked once and opened the door without waiting.

He was at his desk, reviewing what looked like game footage on his laptop, and he looked up with the specific expression of a person who had been expecting this visit but had hoped for more time.

"You talked to Coach Briggs," she said.

He leaned back in his chair. "Close the door."

She closed it and stayed standing. Tell me it's not true.

"It's a better building. Better security, and better facilities,"

"Jaxon."

He met her eyes. "You're my sister. You're new here. I want you somewhere I can keep an eye on things."

I'm twenty years old.

I know how old you are.

Then you know I'm not a freshman who needs supervision.

He was quiet for a moment, and she recognized the quiet. It was the one he used when he had already made a decision and was waiting for her to run out of arguments so he could confirm it.

"After what happened at Pennfield," he started.

"Don't." Her voice came out sharper than she intended. "Don't use that. Not for this."

He looked at her steadily. "I'm not using it. I'm the one who drove four hours to bring you home when it happened. I'm allowed to factor it in."

Factoring it in and relocating me without asking me are two completely different things.

"I was going to tell you."

"When? After the paperwork was filed?"

He did not answer that, which was an answer.

Sloane crossed her arms and looked at her brother, really looking at him, at the version of protectiveness that had always lived in him and had calcified into something harder after Pennfield. She understood where it came from. She even loved him for it sometimes. But love and suffocation could occupy the same space and this was one of those moments.

"Cancel it," she said.

"Sloane"

"Cancel it, Jaxon, or I will go to the housing office myself and make it very clear that the request came from you and not from me, and I will let that conversation go wherever it goes."

Something moved across his face. Not anger. Something more complicated.

"You can't just—"

"I transferred here to start over. That means my choices. My building. My life." She held his gaze. I love you. Cancel it.

She left before he could respond.

She was back across campus and sitting on the bench outside her own residence hall before she took a full breath. The afternoon had gone cold while she was inside, the kind of sharp autumn chill that arrived without warning and reminded you that the season was already shifting.

She took out her phone.

*It's handled.*

Caden's response came in under a minute.

*That was fast. What did you say to him?*

*I handled it.*

*Right. Are you okay?*

She looked at that for a moment. The question was so plain and so direct that it caught her somewhere she was not guarding.

*Why do you keep doing that,* she typed.

*Doing what.*

*Asking if I'm okay like you actually want to know the answer.*

The three dots came and went twice before his reply appeared.

*Because I do actually want to know the answer. Is that a problem?*

She did not respond to that. She put her phone face down on her knee and looked out at the quad, at the students crossing in the late afternoon light, at the ordinary rhythm of a campus that did not know anything about her yet.

That was the thing she had come here for. Anonymity. A clean start. The chance to be nobody in particular until she figured out who she actually was.

Caden Mercer was the single most visible person on this campus.

She picked her phone back up.

*It's a problem,* she typed.

*Okay,* He was sent back.

Then, after a pause.

*For what it's worth, I'm not going anywhere.*

She stared at that for a long time. Then she locked her phone, stood up, and went inside.

She did not text back.

She thought about it for the rest of the evening.

At eleven that night, Riley burst into the room holding her laptop open with both hands, practically vibrating.

"Okay so I was going through the class roster for journalism because I wanted to see who else signed up and I found something interesting." She turned the screen toward Sloane.

It was a student profile. A transfer student. Registered three weeks ago.

The name read: Marco Reyes.

"He's on Caden's team," Riley said. "Starting forward. Just transferred from Florida. She scrolled down to the profile photo. He is genuinely, offensively attractive.

Sloane looked at the screen.

Marco Reyes looked back at her with dark eyes and an easy smile that suggested he was fully aware of the effect it had.

"He's also," Riley added, far too casually, registered for the same journalism elective. Starting next week.

Sloane closed the laptop.

"Go to sleep, Riley," she said.