All Chapters of OFFSIDE : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

POV: CallumI didn't sleep.Not really. I did that thing where my body went horizontal and my eyes closed and the room got dark but my brain kept the lights on and ran the same loop on repeat until my alarm went off at five forty-five and I sat up feeling like I had spent the night doing something strenuous.The text sat on my phone screen where I had left it.I had not responded. I did not know who sent it. What I knew was that someone in this program thought I deserved a warning, which meant someone in this program believed the warning was necessary, which meant Jaxon Whitfield had said something specific enough in front of the wrong person that it had traveled from Coach Dara's office to an unknown number to my phone in under twenty four hours.You don't try to bench someone you barely know unless it's personal.That was the part I kept circling back to at two in the morning. At three. At four fifteen when the apartment was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator running from my bed

POV: CallumMarcus was already in the kitchen when I came out of my room, which was unusual enough that I noticed it before I noticed anything else.He had the pan going. Eggs, from the smell of it, and the particular burnt-sugar smell that meant he was also doing his attempt at french toast, which always came out slightly wrong in a way he refused to acknowledge no matter how many times I pointed it out."You're up early," I said."I'm always up early.""You're never up early."He flipped something in the pan with more confidence than the result deserved. "I am a man of mystery, Cal. Full of surprises."I got the orange juice out of the fridge and two glasses down from the cabinet and did not point out that I had lived with this man of mystery for two years and knew his sleep schedule better than my own. I set the glasses down. I watched him move around the kitchen with the easy, loud confidence that had made him impossible not to like from the very first week of freshman year, when