KAIA GREENE: Free period? I've got 20 minutes.

DALLAS GUNTHER: creepy that you know my schedule

KAIA GREENE: keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

DALLAS GUNTHER: and where does 'guy you're secretly hooking up with' fall?

KAIA GREENE: 15 minutes Gunther. Same spot.

After that first twisted, brilliant night at her house, Kaia Greene had me hook, line, and sinker, and she fucking knew it. She says jump, I say how high. She says meet me in the utility closet, I say beat you there. I pocketed my phone as I shouldered my way through the hallway to my locker, catching a few curious glances along the way.

Now that a few weeks had gone by without Chris and I speaking, not driving to school together, and avoiding each other like two negative ends of a magnet, rumors had begun to flutter through the halls. Baseball was the only thing that forced us into a cordial ceasefire.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. The stares I'd garnered from people in the hallways, the whispers of my deteriorating mental state, rumors of the measures I'd taken during football season to be great. To be me. It was all bullshit, of course.

Anthony had unsurprisingly taken his side, and while Rochelle had sworn to remain "neutral," she'd conveniently been very busy now that her relationship with Kennedy was on the upswing. I swapped out two textbooks at my locker for my afternoon classes before making my way back towards the auxiliary gym on the far side of the school. The hallway crowds began to thin, and I casually skirted along the padded wall of the gymnasium towards the back corner by the old locker rooms. If someone in the small PE class shooting around basketballs had noticed me, they didn't show it.

When I came to the end of the hallway where the electrical room and the gymnasium utility closet was, I slowed my footsteps and listened for any extra signs of life. Getting caught all the way back here was a month's worth of detentions and mopping the gym, so naturally it was the go to place for secret hook-ups.

The moment I exhaled a relieved sigh, a hand grabbed the front of my shirt and yanked me into the utility closet. After nearly tripping over a mop bucket, I managed to kick the door closed with my foot as Kaia gripped onto the collar of my shirt to bring my mouth down to hers. After the first few times, we'd found ways to maneuver in the dim corners of the closet without making a ruckus or disrupting whatever it was we were doing. Without breaking our embrace, I hoisted her up onto a cleared-off metal shelf as she ran her hands down the front of my chest.

"Do you want to come over after school?" she asked through breathy sighs as I brought my lips down to her neck. "My mom's dealing with some crazy felony case, so she's working late."

"I can't." I pulled away as she reached underneath my shirt, tracing lines along the trail of baby hair from my belly button to the waistband of my boxers. "We've got captain's practice for baseball to get us ready for the Diamond Duel in Boston this weekend. Tomorrow?"

The skin on the inside of her thigh pulsed underneath my fingertips as I gently brought my hand up her skirt between her legs.

"No, I've got lacrosse."

She leaned into me and brushed her lips over my ear, breathing out a soft moan as I swiped aside her underwear and let my fingers tease the edge of all the most sensitive parts of her.

"What about tomorrow during lunch?" she asked, tightening her grip on my shoulders.

I shook my head. "Tutoring session for Calc."

She groaned and wiggled herself away from me, sitting balanced on the edge of the shelf with her skirt still bunched up.

"Shit," she sighed. "We should figure this out."

I lowered myself onto a stack of wrestling mats and raked a hand through my hair. "What's there to figure out?"

"Well, maybe we should establish some ground rules if we're going to keep doing this." She crossed her ankles and finally fixed her skirt.

I scoffed. "Like what?"

"Like...for starters, I guess we should just outright say that school and sports obviously come first, and this-" she gestured between us "-comes second."

"I could make a dirty joke," I grinned. "But I'm above that. Next?"

She let out a sigh as she absentmindedly played with the ends of her hair - a habit of hers I'd picked up on recently. It was her tell that she wasn't confident in what she was about to say. "Well...we shouldn't exactly be advertising what we're doing. You and I have both recently gotten out of a relationship, and it just..."

I held my hand up to stop her. "Looks bad, I get it."

Neither of us needed to say it out loud. We both knew what we did. More than once.

"I don't think you do get it." She finally hopped off the shelf and stood tall, crossing her arms over her rumpled blouse. "You're Dallas fucking Gunther - that means you're untouchable, and everyone knows that."

Six months ago, that might have been the case. But recently, I felt like a stranger in my own body. Dallas fucking Gunther who?

"Nobody would bat an eyelash if they found out about any of this from you," she continued. "But me? I'd be skewered as a homewrecking, cheating, slut-faced bitch probably for the rest of the school year."

I got up off the mats and walked over to her, gently taking one of her hands in mine. There were so many things I was unsure of lately, but I was sure of this. I was sure of her.

"Don't say that," I said softly. "All this is just as much my responsibility as it is yours. We don't need to tell anyone, and that's simply because it's none of their fucking business. Okay?"

She finally surrendered with a coy smirk. "I do like you sometimes."

"Only sometimes?" I returned her smirk. "Would it kill you to admit that more often?"

"Possibly. I have a reputation to uphold."

I dramatically clapped my hands to my chest. "Oh don't break my heart, Miss Americana."

She ran her tongue along her bottom lip before leaning up on her toes to give me one last kiss. "I couldn't."

✗✗✗

Kaia and I had gone our separate ways for the rest of the day, and I hated admitting that I missed her. I'd quickly fallen back into my newfound lone wolf persona, and I went to my locker between classes to grab my calculator and my Physics notes. The halls were swarmed with bodies as I made my way to the science wing, but I'd never felt so alone. I used to be able to part the Red Sea, now I was getting swallowed up by it.

As I took my seat at the back of the class, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

DANNY: won't have your refill until next week, sorry m8

I rubbed my temples as I put my phone down to the desk. I ran out of my medication over the weekend, and I'd been waking up with a sick knot of dread tangled up in my throat all week. The more time I had alone with myself and my thoughts, the bigger the knot got. I couldn't swallow it down.

My Physics teacher Mr. Fonarev snaked around desks, passing back our quiz on celestial mechanics. As he put my paper face down on my desk, he gave me a quick shake of his head. When I lifted it up, a big red C+ stared back at me, with not your best work scribbled in pen.

I groaned and slumped back in my chair. Admittedly studying for this quiz was not on my priority list, between getting prepped for baseball, managing the cold war I'd waged with my own best friend, and trying to navigate through fields of landmines everywhere I went. Who the hell thought I would need physics in my daily life anyway?

The only thing I'd managed to fully grasp on the quiz was the concept of escape velocity, maybe because it was the only thing I felt like I could relate to. In physics, escape velocity was the minimum speed needed for a free, non-propelled object to escape from the gravitational influence of a massive body and achieve an infinite distance from it. If I couldn't figure out my own escape velocity from the gravitational influence of this black hole of a town, I was so fucked.

✗✗✗

a "filler" chapter?? maybe...*shrugs* or not?

[There should be a GIF or video here. Update the app now to see it.]

a special lil treat for those who are team dallas&kaia and will go down with the ship (speaking of, they do need a ship name, taking suggestions)

made by the absolute queen soulofstaars