Quarterback Hated Me First

CHAPTER 5: THE FOOTBALL GOD

IVY's POV

Mr. Davenport pairs us alphabetically on a Tuesday morning and Holloway comes before Monroe and I have thirty seconds to invent a legitimate reason to switch and find absolutely nothing usable in time.

I watch Jace's face during the desk rearranging. A brief contained reaction. Jaw tightening slightly, smoothed over in under two seconds. Not cruel. Just the quiet controlled expression of someone managing an inconvenience they didn't request.

Fair. I'm making the same face internally.

We push desks together. He opens Gatsby. I open Gatsby. We read in silence and I think: this is workable. Two people completing an assignment with no audience worth performing for. This can just be what it is.

"Hotel scene," he says. "Davenport was specific."

"I know. I was there."

We read. The silence between us settles into something functional. Not comfortable, not hostile, just operational. I begin to relax in the careful incremental way you relax when the expected threat doesn't materialize on schedule.

Then he says without looking up: "You already read the whole book."

I stop writing. "What?"

He nods at my page tabs. Color coded sticky tabs along the upper edge, organized by chapter theme. "The pattern is too specific for a first read. You've been through this at least twice."

I say nothing.

"I'm not making a joke about it." Flat. Preemptive. Like he's read ahead to the moment I assume the worst.

I study him. There is always an angle with people who have established a pattern of being unkind to you. But his expression is just reading. Genuine unhurried engagement with the actual text. "Then what are you doing?"

"Noticing." He turns a page. "You have more to say about this than you're saying. You've had the analysis assembled since before I sat down."

"And yet your name goes first on the heading."

He looks up.

This is the moment I accidentally confirm what I've been careful not to confirm: Jace Holloway's eyes are green. A clear direct green that would be genuinely disarming if it didn't belong to someone with a documented history of making my school days measurably harder.

He doesn't respond to what I said. He holds my gaze for one even beat and looks back at the book.

We work.

Fifteen minutes in he says something about Gatsby that I have to sit with because it is more interesting than anything I brought to the session myself. Not what the parties symbolize. What Gatsby is actually doing when he throws them. He isn't celebrating. He is auditioning. Performing a version of himself so consistently and publicly that he believes if he sustains it long enough it will eventually become real. When Daisy arrives to witness the performance it collapses entirely, because she is looking at an actual man and not the myth, and the man cannot carry the weight of what the myth was built to hold.

I write it down. He sees me do it. Neither of us says anything about it.

We finish. I pick up my bag.

"You held back the whole session," he says.

"Excuse me?"

"You had more and you kept it inside some perimeter you drew for yourself and wouldn't cross." He says it the way he noted the page tabs. Observation. Not accusation. "Why do you do that?"

I look at him for one long level moment. I think about the brown bag comment. The credit transferred silently in the group discussion. The three years of learning to say less in every room that contains him.

"I learned to say less," I tell him quietly. "You're part of the reason why."

I walk out before the silence can form itself into something I have to respond to.

In the hallway I press my back against the wall and breathe three times.

He looked like I'd said something that landed somewhere real.

I don't know what to do with that. I carry it home on the bus, turning it over and over and over, unable to put it down.