Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 Read Free

and flow of Denny’s internships and studies and what Rafi was almost sure had been a pretty serious boyfriend at one point.
    Imagining that had been a slick, delicious form of self-torture for Rafi. He’d been the first guy Denny had ever kissed, and had spent the next two years cursing himself out for being the dumbass whose “principles” kept him from being Denny’s first anything else. Rafi wasn’t stupid enough to think a newly out eighteen-year-old had gone too long without experiencing all kinds of things Rafi had refused to do with him.
    He knew he’d made the right call. And he’d regretted being the kind of guy who made the right call every damn day since.
    Now he was fifteen minutes from setting foot on the campus where Denny had spent the past year. Where the two of them would both spend the next three years, assuming Rafi didn’t do something to fuck up getting his scholarship renewed.
    Excitement and nausea rode a teeter-totter in his stomach, and nausea was winning.
    He’d tried doing the stuff he counted on to relax him before a big race. Aya had taught him about deep, slow breathing and clearing his mind, because his high school basketball and soccer games had never freaked him out like the first time he’d gone with the rowing club to a big regatta. He’d seen the hundreds of rowers—almost all of them older, white adults wearing workout gear that cost more than he gave his sisters for rent—hanging on to the sport they’d loved in their elite colleges, and had panicked.
    Anxiety before a race was one thing. Packing up everything he owned (which wasn’t half the shit on the “recommended packing list”) to move halfway across the country to a school where he didn’t know anyone except one person (whom he’d kissed one time before never seeing him again), on a scholarship he could lose for what felt like a million reasons…was something else entirely.
    Deep breathing was bullshit, it turned out.
    Cash let him sit in silence for the last part of the drive, until they were stuck in a long line of cars packed with student belongings. Bikes and boxes and even a kayak were strapped to the roofs ahead of them.
    “Home sweet home, buddy,” Cash said as they finally made it onto the campus itself. They hadn’t entered through the giant gates they’d passed a few blocks back, but on a side street Cash promised would take them right to Rafi’s assigned dormitory.
    Rafi drummed his hand against the outside of the door, getting on his own nerves, but Cash never said a word as he rolled through campus, waving out his window at people he recognized. Professors, maybe. Rafi didn’t think Cash would still know any students on campus, but who waved to teachers like they were friends? He’d always been more of a get-his-work-done-and-get-out kind of student.
    The street in front of Rafi’s dorm was busier than the elementary school drop-off lane at 7:45 a.m. back in Chicago. Students wearing Carlisle’s green-and-white school colors on their T-shirts and ball caps and loose athletic shorts or cutoffs crowded the area. Like they’d been dressed by the campus store for a TV commercial.
    “What do you think? There’s a parking lot down the road, if you’re sick of the car. We can always hoof it.”
    As if Rafi had an opinion. Shit. He didn’t know which way was north, and that was freaking him out a little. His interior compass pointed infallibly toward the lake in Chicago, but now he was in the middle of nowhere, on this campus where everything was so frigging green it looked like a fairy tale. The brick building, his dorm apparently, was four stories tall and half-covered in ivy. Students, parents and campus staff spilled in and out of the double doors like ants in a colony.
    “Freshman move-in day is always insane,” Cash told him over his shoulder as he craned his neck to look for a place to pull over.
    All of this waiting and going nowhere was making Rafi fucking crazy. He drummed his