Chapter 2 The Girl Nobody Could Touch

Alex POV

I had never lost a bet in my life.

Not once. Not a single one.

“Bro she didn’t even look at you.” Cam was still laughing when we got back to the locker room, dropping onto the bench like the memory of it was physically exhausting him. “She looked right through you. Like you were a window.”

“She looked,” I said.

“For two seconds.”

“Three.”

“Carter.” Cam sat up, grinning. “She walked away.”

“She walked away slowly.”

The whole room erupted. Dre was the loudest, which I found interesting considering he was the one she’d been shutting down for two weeks before I even knew her name. He didn’t have much room to laugh. But I let him have it. I dropped onto my bench, pulled off my cleats, and let all of it wash over me because none of it actually mattered yet.

I wasn’t embarrassed.

I was annoyed.

Annoyed because for three seconds she had looked at me the exact way I looked at a defense before I found the gap in it. Calculating. Unimpressed. Like I was a problem she’d already half solved before I’d said a single word. Nobody looked at me like that. Not anymore.

“Look,” Marcus said, leaning against his locker with his arms crossed. “I’m just going to say what everybody already knows. Star Davis does not deal with athletes. She doesn’t deal with anybody. I slid in her DMs in September and she left me on delivered. Not even read. Delivered.”

“That’s tragic,” Cam said.

“I’m just giving context.”

“Dre tried for two weeks,” someone called from the back. “Two weeks of showing up, being consistent, being respectful. You know what she gave him?”

“Three words,” Dre said flatly. “I’m not interested. That was it. No explanation. No sorry. Three words and she kept walking.”

The room settled into that particular quiet that meant everyone was thinking the same thing but nobody wanted to say it first.

I said it.

“Nobody in this school can get her.”

“Correct,” Marcus said.

“That’s what I thought.” I leaned back against my locker and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Something was turning over in my mind quietly. A calculation. A play. The same feeling I got right before I called an audible that nobody saw coming. “So let’s make it interesting.”

Cam turned his head slowly. “What kind of interesting?”

“A bet.” I looked around the room. “I get Star Davis to fall for me. Completely. Her trust. Her time. Her attention.” I paused, let it land. “Enough that she chooses me over everyone else.”

The room was very quiet now.

“All of it?” Marcus said carefully.

“All of it.”

Nobody spoke for a full five seconds. Then Cam exhaled.

“Alex. Bro.” He looked at me like I had just called the most insane play of the season. “She’s a virgin.”

“I know.”

“The whole campus knows she’s a virgin.”

“That’s why it’s interesting.”

Dre shook his head slowly. “That girl is not going to give you anything. I put in two weeks and got three words. You got three seconds of eye contact and you want to turn that into a bet?”

“I don’t need more than three seconds.”

“You are insane,” Cam said. But he was smiling. He was already in.

Marcus pushed off his locker. “What are the stakes?”

“If I lose,” I said, “I cover everyone’s tab at Ryder’s for the rest of the semester.”

The room reacted to that. Ryder’s was not a cheap bar.

“And if you win?” Cam asked.

“Everyone covers mine.”

It was quiet for another beat and then hands started going up. Seven of them. Every first string player in that locker room.

Cam stood up and extended his hand. “Semester ends December fifteenth. That’s your deadline.”

I shook it. “I won’t need that long.”

“You say that now.”

“I’ll say it December fifteenth too.”

He laughed. Everyone laughed. The energy in the room shifted the way it did before a big game, that particular electricity that lived between confidence and chaos. I let myself feel it for exactly one moment and then I put it away.

I had work to do.

I’d built a career out of reading defenses before they knew their own weaknesses. Star Davis wasn’t a defense. She was closer to a closed door, and closed doors had never scared me. They just meant I hadn’t found the handle yet.

I found her the next morning.

Not by accident.

I had asked around the night before, casual, three different people, and by ten o’clock I knew her schedule better than her roommate probably did. She had a nine AM literature class in Harmon Hall. She always stopped at the coffee cart outside afterward. She was never with more than one person.

I spent the walk back to my dorm running through approaches the way I ran through plays, discarding the obvious ones first. Flowers were for guys who needed a script. Compliments were for guys who hadn’t noticed she’d already heard every version of them before. I needed something that didn’t feel like a line, because she’d clock a line from a hundred yards out.

I was leaning against the cart when she came out.

She saw me immediately. I could tell by the way her pace didn’t change at all. Most people, when they see someone unexpected, break their rhythm just slightly. A half step. A blink. She gave me nothing.

She walked straight to the cart and ordered without looking at me.

“Black coffee,” she said to the guy behind the counter. “No sugar.”

“Star Davis,” I said.

“I know my name.”

“I’m Alex.”

“I know your name too.” She picked up her cup and finally turned to look at me. Up close she was different than yesterday. Not more beautiful, just more real. Sharper. Her eyes were completely steady. “Is there something you want?”

“I want to know you.”

“Why?”

The question caught me slightly off guard. Not because it was hard but because nobody ever asked it. They assumed the answer was obvious. She didn’t.

“Because you’re interesting,” I said honestly.

Something moved across her face. Gone before I could read it.

“I’m busy,” she said.

“I didn’t ask for your whole day. Just your name.”

“You already used my name twice.”

“Your number then.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Really looked. Long enough that I started doing the thing I never did, which was wonder what she actually saw when she looked at someone like that. Whether I measured up to whatever she was checking for, or whether I’d already failed it before I opened my mouth. And then she smiled. Small, private, the kind of smile that wasn’t for me at all.

“Goodbye, Alex,” she said.

She walked away.

I watched her go and I felt something I had not expected to feel.

I felt challenged.

And I had not felt challenged in a very long time.

Cam appeared at my shoulder from nowhere, falling into step beside me, coffee in hand, grinning like he had watched the whole thing.

“So,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“Dude she walked away again.”

“She always walks away first.” I kept moving, eyes forward. “That’s the whole point.”

“Meaning?”

I smiled, slow and certain, the same way I smiled right before the snap on a play I already knew was going to work.

“Meaning she keeps walking,” I said. “Until she doesn’t.”