“I was so flattered, it didn’t occur to me to be skeptical of his motives. He was smooth as butter. He said nice things to me, made me laugh, touched me in—”

“I don’t want those kind of details,” came Andrew’s hard voice.

“I meant he found excuses to touch me in class…but okay. The other touching came late—”

“Stop.”

“Okay, jeez. Anyway, after a few weeks he asked me out, and we started dating. Once, I asked why we weren’t going to any of the big football parties I’d heard so much about, and he said I was too nice a girl to be exposed to the stuff that went on there. He said I was different, and he didn’t want to treat me like his previous girlfriends.

“Like an idiot, I believed him, and I fell hard. That is, until the last week of the semester. The night after our lab final, I went to his house to surprise him with a bottle of wine to celebrate the semester being over and found him hooking up with another girl. Apparently, he’d been running around with her the entire time he was seeing me. He’d been close to failing the class and paid my old lab partner to drop so he could team up with me, as the one with the highest grade. He used me to pass the class, so he wouldn’t lose his football scholarship. He broke it off with me right then and there.”

The other end of the line was silent.

“Andrew?”

Andrew made a choking sound. “I’m gonna have to call you back.”

The line went dead.

Lauren lowered the phone and looked at the screen, dumbfounded. What had just happened?

She sat up and crossed her legs. When he didn’t call back after a few minutes, she texted him.

Lauren: Is everything okay?

He didn’t reply, so she waited. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him about Will. It had happened a long time ago. But because Will was in the public eye, she was constantly inundated with images on social media of the first man she’d given her heart to—with beautiful actresses or models on his arm. Reminding her that he’d used her.

She opened Instagram and swiped through several photos, barely seeing what was passing across the screen.

What was Andrew doing?

Finally, he called her back.

“Andrew?”

“Sorry about that.” His words were clipped, his breathing heavy.

“Where did you go?”

“First, I got onto my Fantasy Football app and benched that fucker. Then I found my Gearhart jersey, went outside and threw it in the trash, and took to the punching bag my dad has in the garage to try to calm down.”

“Oh.” Lauren chewed on her bottom lip. A warm sensation settled in her belly. “Did it work?”

“No.”

“Oh.”