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A laugh escapes me before I can stop it, and his attention swings back to me.
“There she is.” He grins, abandoning the argument immediately. “I was starting to think Coach had you chained to a desk somewhere.”
“He tried. I escaped.”
“Good. Sit down before he finds you.”
“I’m actually—”
“Starving,” Easton supplies, grabbing a plate from the stack and holding it out to me. I stare at it long enough that Tuck reaches across the table and adds a piece of cornbread.
“Now you have to take it,” he says. “Health code.”
“That isn’t how health codes work.”
“Are you sure?”
“She’s sure. Don’t argue with her. You’ll hurt yourself,” Whit grumbles as Tuck presses a hand to his chest like he’s wounded him.
Easton wiggles the plate once in front of me as my stomach twists again at the smell of smoked meat, answering the question before I do.
“Traitor,” I mutter to myself as I take the plate and reach for the tongs.
Easton moves beside me, talking around a bite of something he definitely stole directly from one of the trays, while Tuck and Whit resume arguing over whether a thirty-two-year-old defensive end should possess enough self-control to wait until everyone else arrives before taking seconds.
None of them asks what I’m doing now that I’m back in Charlotte or whether I’ve figured out what comes next, and I hadn’t realized how much I was waiting for someone to ask until nobody does. No one needs me to turn failing the MCAT into a temporary setback with an impressive recovery plan before we can talk about something else. Easton just keeps arguing with Tuck while I reach for my drink and swallow around the sudden tightness in my throat.
Maybe that’s why this feels different. So much about being here has changed for me, but no one has told the people sitting around this table. Easton saw me in the hallway and said I’d finally come home as if leaving never changed the fact that I belonged here.
It used to, before being Coach Quinn’s daughter meant everyone around here decided I needed protecting. Before dating a quarterback taught me exactly how stupid I’d been to believe knowing someone outside the uniform meant I knew who they were underneath it. After that, staying away got easier. College gave me somewhere else to be, and medicine gave me something that belonged entirely to me. Every hour I spent studying became another perfectly reasonable excuse not to come back until Dad was the only reason I did.
Easton apparently never got that message. He belongs to the same world I worked so hard to distance myself from, but he’s also one of the few people in this building who knew me before I started avoiding it.
He catches me looking at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
His eyes narrow like he doesn’t believe me, but instead of asking again, he steals a pickle off my plate.
I smack the back of his hand. “Seriously?”
Easton pops the pickle into his mouth with absolutely no remorse. “You should’ve eaten it faster.”
I laugh despite myself, shaking my head as he reaches for his own plate like he hasn’t been irritating me on purpose since we were teenagers. My eyes drop to the pile of fries beside his sandwich, and I reach for them, but he catches my wrist halfway there.
“Don’t.”
“Fair is fair, Easton.”
“Not when it comes to my fries.”
I laugh loudly enough that Tuck looks over from where he’s talking to Whit and snatches a fry from Easton’s plate for himself.
“What the fuck?”
“You made them look valuable,” Tuck says, eating it before Easton can stop him.
I take advantage of the distraction and steal two.
