Page 81 of Final Drive

“Walk away now.”

Quinton looks at me over Bo’s shoulder with that flat, cold smile. “See you in class, Reese. We’ve still got that project to finish.”

He goes down the stairs without hurrying. The footsteps echo and fade. The door opens and shuts.

Bo turns to me. “Are you okay? Did he touch you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Reese.”

“He talked. I talked. That’s all of it.” My hands are shaking, so I press them flat against my thighs. “He isn’t going to stop. He thinks nothing can reach him.”

“He’s wrong,” Gray says. He says it quietly, which is worse than shouting. Gray shouting means he’s angry. Gray quiet means he’s already decided.

“We should go,” I say. “Before he comes back to congratulate me again.”

Bo’s hand finds the small of my back, warm and steady. Gray falls in on the other side, close enough that our arms brush every few steps. Neither of them says anything, and neither of them needs to.

We go down the rest of the stairs, through the lobby, out the front doors into the afternoon. The sky has gone flat and low with rain coming. Students stream past on the sidewalk. Nobody looks twice at a girl walking between two very tall men toward the parking lot.

Bo’s truck is in the second row. He opens the passenger door and I get in. Gray takes the back without being asked. Bo comes around, starts the engine, and pulls out.

Nobody turns on the radio.

The campus goes by. The boathouse. The athletics complex. The road out to the house where the other six of them are waiting to hear how it went.

I should call Tyler. I should text the group. I should report the stairwell to Okafor while it’s fresh and get it documented and added to the file. I should do all the strategic things the version of me who walked into that hearing this morning would already be doing.

Instead I sit in Bo’s passenger seat and press my palms together in my lap to keep them still.

Bo drives with one hand on the wheel. The other rests on the center console, palm up and open. An offer, not a request.

I take it. His fingers close around mine, warm and rough off the oars, and he squeezes once without looking over.

Gray’s hand comes onto my shoulder from the back seat. Not the brief touch from after the filing. He leaves it there, his thumb working into the tight muscle at the base of my neck, and I can feel the tremor in his fingers. Whatever he’s holding onto isn’t only anger. It’s the leash he’s kept on himself since February, and it’s coming apart in his hands.

I close my eyes. The truck hums under us. Bo anchors me from one side and Gray burns through my jacket from the other, and none of us says a word the whole way home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Reese

Ican still smell him.

It isn’t constant. It surfaces and fades, the ghost of Quinton’s cologne on the collar of my blazer. Every time it comes back I’m on that landing again, concrete at my spine, his fingertips under my chin.

Bo drives us home while Gray sits in the back seat directly behind me and doesn’t say a word for eleven miles.

The house is empty when we get there. Tyler’s note sits on the counter in his blocky handwriting: Library until six. Text if you need us sooner. Underneath, in Zane’s loopy scrawl: There’s gumbo. EAT IT.

I stand in the kitchen with my bag still over my shoulder and read it four times.

Bo sets his keys on the hook. Gray stops in the doorway to the hall and stays there, one shoulder against the frame, jaw set hard enough that I can see the muscle jumping.

“He touched my chin,” I say.

I don’t plan on saying it. It comes out sideways into the middle of a quiet kitchen, and once it’s out there’s no putting it back.