First Down (Beyond the Play, #1)(11)

The professor, an older looking man with gold-rimmed glasses, stops his droning. He clears his throat as he glances down at a stack of papers. “Mr. Callahan?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

The professor keeps his gaze on me as he talks. “Students, please make note of the start time for this class once more. 8:30, not 9. It will benefit your academic career not to be late to class. Other professors may not be so… accommodating.”

He punctuates that by passing a copy of the syllabus my way.

Fuck. I can feel my blush like a five-alarm fire. “Sir, I’m sorry. I was up early for practice and went home to get changed before coming here, and I must have mixed up the times with my other morning class.”

A girl looking back at me shrugs, as if to say, tough. I resist the urge to make a face at her. Beside me, Beckett heaves a sigh.

“What?” I say.

“I just lost a bet with myself. I thought you were late because of an alarm malfunction.”

“I’m an athlete. I don’t have alarm malfunctions.”

“Ah,” she says. “Right, I forgot that you guys are gods who never need alarm clocks, whereas we mere mortals—”

Mr. Professor clears his throat again. He’s still looking my way, although I’m gratified to see him raise his eyebrow at Beckett too. “As I was saying, the tenets of academic writing at the college level include…”

“What are you even doing here?” I whisper.

She taps her foot against mine under the table. “I’m wondering that about you.”

“I failed this class when I first took it.” I don’t know what compels me to be totally honest with her. Maybe it’s her big brown eyes or the way she’s twirling a little sparkly gel pen or how I can’t stop remembering how her lips felt on mine.

I shove that thought away. She’s my teammate’s ex. Even if she was interested, I couldn’t.

“I transferred here last year,” she murmurs. “Even though I took classes like this at my community college, they didn’t accept all my credits.”

“That sucks.”

She shrugs slightly. “It’s not like it’ll be hard, right? We’ve been in college for three years already.”

I look at the syllabus. Twice-a-week seminar-style meetings. Weekly writing assignments. Peer feedback. My skin begins to crawl. Give me partial differential equations and I’m fine, but this? This is impossible.

And of course, a third of the grade is a final research paper on a topic of our choosing. Fuck. Me.

This class might not be difficult for her, but it’s going to be hell for me.

I give her what I hope is a semi-normal smile and settle in for the rest of class. But despite my best efforts, I can’t stop stealing glances at her. She looks just as pretty now as she did fancied up in that little white dress. My type, too; those full tits are distracting even in a T-shirt.

Did she choose me to kiss because I’m her type as well? I’m not dumb, I know she kissed me to get back at Darryl. But she could’ve approached any guy at that party, and I’m the one she landed on.

She bites her lip as she thinks. That’s cute.

The professor wraps up his spiel with an in-class assignment. We’re supposed to read an article about research into academic writing and distill it down to a paragraph explaining the thesis and main points.

I stare at my copy of the article for so long the words start to blur. All around me, the other students are highlighting keywords and scribbling notes in the margins; Bex seems to have a whole color-coded situation going on. I tug at the collar of my shirt, glancing at the clock. We have twenty minutes for this assignment, and five have already passed.

I force myself to read the first paragraph again. I pick up my pen, tapping it against the table before underlining a sentence with a bolded word in it. I remember that tip from one of the tutors I’ve had over the years, be it the one my parents hired in high school or the many I tried to work with at the writing center at LSU.

“If you’re stuck, try reading the topic sentences first,” Bex says.

I glance over at her. She taps my paper with her pen.

“Look,” she says. “There are a couple of sections in the article, and each of them covers a different topic.”

“But then it just talks about something else,” I say.

“Not quite,” she says. “I know it seems like it, because it starts out talking about research into academic writing and then switches into an anecdote, but that’s just to humanize the topic a little. It’s not important information.”

I’m only about seventy percent certain I know what an anecdote is, but I don’t want her to think I’m even more of an idiot than I already sound, so I just nod along. “Seems unnecessary.”

She snorts, which makes a dude in front of us clear his throat pointedly.

“Skip down to the part where it discusses the study on formal writing education,” she whispers.

She takes me through the article, showing me her own annotations as examples for what to focus on. I can’t help but be a little distracted by the way she smells and how much I’m yearning to lean in closer, but in the end, I have a halfway decent paragraph to hand in. Something about the way she explained it made way more sense than in the past, which is weird, considering I’ve always had such a block when it comes to writing. If she was the professor, I’d probably get an A in this class.