All Chapters of OFF LIMITS CAPTAIN: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Ellie Nathan walked me out of the coffee shop through the back exit, his hand hovering near my elbow the whole way without actually touching me, like he was braced to catch me if my legs decided to give out again. I l didn't pull away mostly because I still felt too shaky to argue about it. I didn't expect Lisa to do that, she had a knife, It was small but still a knife. We stopped in the alley behind the building, the afternoon sun harsh after the dim fluorescents inside, and I finally turned to face him, arms crossed tight over my chest. “So,” I said. “Start Explaining.” Nathan rubbed the back of his neck, and something about the gesture was too casual, too rehearsed set off a warning bell before he’d even said a word. “Lisa’s just…harsh,” he said. “She hasn’t handled the breakup well. She gets jealous, does dramatic stuff like that sometimes. It’s not really about you specifically, she does this a lot,she feels we will get back together.” I stared at him. “Not about me spe

NathanI’d known she was coming to the clinic before she did.Dr. Reyes’s shift schedule had been sitting in my inbox for two days, the new clinical student’s name highlighted in my mind the second I’d seen it, and I’d spent most of those two days trying to convince myself that arranging this whole thing hadn’t been a mistake. It was too late to second guess it now anyway. She was already here, standing three feet away from me in the crisp morning air with her clipboard on the pavement between us and an expression on her face that made it very clear she had absolutely no idea what I’d done to make this happen.“What are you doing here?” I asked her, she didn't respond, I bent down and picked up the clipboard before she could, straightening it against my palm and handing it back to her with more composure than I actually felt. “Sorry about that,” I said. “Wasn’t watching where I was going.”“It’s fine,” Ellie said, taking it back, though her eyes had already gone sharp and wary in a wa

Nathan I was moving before Max’s text had even fully registered, shoving my phone into my pocket and cutting across the clinic parking lot at a pace that probably looked more like a jog than the casual walk I was trying to pass it off as. Dr. Reyes called something after me a question about my ankle follow up, I should make sure I come back, probably, or maybe just my name but I didn’t stop to answer. There wasn’t time. Thornwood on campus meant one thing, and it wasn’t a coincidence. People saw me as a hockey captain. That was the whole point, the entire carefully maintained illusion I’d spent years perfecting star athlete, campus golden boy, the guy who filled bleachers and won championships and gave interviews about work ethic and team chemistry to the school paper. It was a good cover. It was also, in the grand scheme of what I actually was, the least important thing about me. The truth was simpler and considerably heavier than a scholarship or a trophy case. Crestwood Unive

EllieI didn’t remember falling asleep. I only remembered the dream, vivid and relentless in a way that felt less like imagination and more like memory, though that made no sense at all given that nothing in it had ever actually happened to me.I was running. Barefoot, through a forest so dense the moonlight barely made it through the canopy above me, my lungs burning and my legs screaming with an exhaustion that felt entirely too real. Behind me, I could hear them not footsteps, not anything so ordinary as footsteps, but something lower and more guttural, something that moved on four legs instead of two, branches snapping under weight that didn’t belong to anything human.I didn’t look back. Some instinct deep in my chest told me that looking back was the one thing I couldn’t afford to do, that if I turned around even for a second I would see teeth and eyes reflecting moonlight and something that wanted to tear me apart before I ever made it out of these trees.I woke up gasping, tan

NathanShe looked worried. I didn’t want to ruin the study group, I know how serious Ellie is about school, and that’s the last thing I wanted to be responsible for wrecking, on top of everything else I’d already put her through.“You’re doing it again,” Ellie said, glancing up at me over her article.“Doing what?”“Staring. Like you’re trying to solve a math problem written on my face.” She said it lightly, but there was an edge of real curiosity underneath it, like she actually wanted the answer this time instead of just calling me out on it.I hesitated, weighing how much of the truth I could afford to hand over without handing over everything. “I was thinking about something,” I admitted. “Not the project.”“Care to share with the group?”I almost didn’t. Every practical instinct in me said to deflect, to make a joke, to steer this conversation back toward something safe. But something about the quiet of the study room, the two of us tucked away from the rest of campus for the fir