Squeezing myself into a desk and keeping my eyes open throughout the day were the most I could muster at this point. My GPA was fine. I wasn’t expecting a Harvard acceptance letter- expectations were lax for athletes. It wasn’t that I’d slacked. I’d seen what happened to guys on the bubble with grades and their SAT scores, but between practices, games and recruitment trips, I was over being a senior. Senioritis had hit hard and early, which meant the spaces in my mind previously occupied with turning in mediocre school work were engaged by other thoughts.

Those sleep shorts shouldn’t still be flashing through my head. I’d seen women in much less. Much, much less. But, somehow, Bay standing in her living room, glaring at me with her bed head was one of the hottest things I’d ever seen. The cookies had also hit the right spot. They’d been my breakfast and lunch that day.

Couple that with the song I couldn’t drive out of my head, and Bay was becoming a distraction I hadn’t anticipated. This year was supposed to be about three things: graduating, finding my way out of town, and never seeing my dad again.

I rocked back in my desk, the front two legs off the floor. Bay was sitting at the front of the classroom. Her seat was always in the first three rows of the three classes we shared. Did she sit in the front rows in the five other classes we didn’t share? Where was she going after graduation? Kids in our class were headed all over the country. There were a few Ivy League acceptances, sprinkled in with prestigious state schools, and then all the Division I athletics scholarships. When was she leaving? Or was she staying behind? So many questions and no answers. I hadn’t had a chance to ask her, but I needed to change that. The urge to speak to her again rode me hard and was becoming almost unbearable.

She hadn’t played the guitar in a while and I’d been longing to hear her voice again. Asking for a serenade didn’t exactly fit my image. Watching her sputter and freak when she handed me the glass of lemonade had been worth the slipped wrench and slice to my hand, though.

“Dare?”

“Mrs. Franklin?” I dropped my desk down, and the thud rumbled the windows.

“Can you please let us know the Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress?

“Sam Adams.” Beer trivia for the win.

Her frown deepened. Revolutionary war questions were always her go-to whenever she thought someone wasn’t paying attention—not that I had been. No, my mind had been on other things. Running through the playbook in my head. Plotting out the seven-state trip my dad was on to anticipate when he’d be back. The melody anchored to the base of my brain stem repeating in my head until the last note finished.

Bay peered back, not even fully over her shoulder. More brushing past her shoulder, maybe thinking she could play it off as grabbing something from her backpack on the floor next to her. Except she never set her backpack so far back, and it was the fourth time she’d done it in twenty minutes. My view was clearer without the need of any pretenses.