Page 161 of His Hungry Wolf

“I’ll rush the first paycheck through. It will be every two weeks after that.”

“Thank you!” I said overwhelmed with relief. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

I was there the next day for training and the job was even easier than Dan had said. All I had to do was watch as people slid their student I.D.s into the scanner and then compare the picture on my monitor to the person entering. It was a mind-numbing job, but I didn’t know where I would be without it.

With not everyone back from break yet, barely anyone came in. Once the semester started, it was a different story. School began for me too bringing a little normalcy to my life. I had signed up for more education classes. It was too late for me to switch my major from athletics to education, but taking the requirements would open up a few more doors.

Entering the classrooms for the first time, I desperately looked around for Quin. In spite of being a genetics major, he had taken a class on childhood education. He might have taken another. If he did, it wasn’t any that I had signed up for. And with a campus of 30,000 students, the odds were slim that I would randomly run into him.

Knowing that, I considered going to his dorm to see if he was there. There had to be a reason he hadn’t contacted me back, though. Maybe the darkness I had fallen under was causing me not to think straight. But if he had wanted to see me again, he would have replied to any of my dozen texts, wouldn’t he?

It was hard for me to believe that it had ended how it had, but it did. Quin was the one person I thought wouldn’t care that I couldn’t play football. Yet, he had vanished the same moment everyone else had.

Doing what I could to regain my sanity, I focused on class instead of everything else going on. But every time I did, I would remember that Quin had helped me overhaul the way I took notes and studied. I would remember how into it he was and how it would make me laugh. I would then spiral off into a million other things about him that I missed.

After that I would think about all of the things he could tell me about the creature whose wing hogged my couch. The only thing that would snap me out of it would be hunger or the beep of the scanner at work.

Lost in a spiral of thoughts about Quin, it was a beep that brought me out of it this time. Remembering where I was, I looked at the monitor doing my job. The image that came up was for someone named Louis Armoury. It made me think of Quin’s friend Lou.

Not bothering to look, a second name quickly appeared, Quinton Toro. My heart stopped. My face immediately got hot and my eyes flicked up.

It was him. I couldn’t breathe. He and Lou were ten feet in front of me and neither of them was looking my way.

I froze not knowing what to do. He hadn’t died or dropped out of school. There he was. Even if he had lost his phone, he could have found a way to contact me. I had been injured. It was his job as a friend to reach out.

Do I speak to him now?

As they passed, Lou seemed his usual energetic self. As he spoke, his arms bounced around wildly. Quin, on the other hand, looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He looked achingly sad. My chest clenched feeling his pain. Why was my Quin so sad?

“Quin!” I said unable to stop myself.

Both guys turned and stared at me. Quin had a look of shock that melted into elation that quickly dissolved into distress and then finally panic. He backed away as if he had seen a ghost and then ran. What was going on with him?

“Stay away from him!” Lou told me as if I had ruined his life.

I was in shock. What was I supposed to say to that?

“Wait! I don’t understand. What did I do?”

“Just stay away,” Lou said before retreating down the hallway and into the facility.

I sat frozen and dumbfounded. What could I have done that would elicit that reaction from Quin? Was he traumatized by watching me break my leg? That was ridiculous, but it was the only thing I could think of.

With everything that had happened between us, I knew I couldn’t let things end with him running away from me like that. I at least needed an explanation. If I had done something, I needed to know what it was.

Leaving the desk unattended, I grabbed my crutches and rushed after them. The hallway spilled out into the multi-purpose room. There was a juice bar on the right, an area with weights in the middle, and a rock-climbing wall on the left. I couldn’t be away from my desk for long so I chose a direction and took a shot.

Heading to the rock climbing wall, my gaze bounced onto everyone in the area. I thought I had chosen wrong until I saw my guy sitting on the mat with his face in his hands and Lou comforting him. I needed to know what was making Quin so upset. I needed to save him from it.

“Quin!”

Quin looked up in a panic about to flee.

“Please don’t go. I can’t move that fast and I can’t stay that long. But, I need to know. What did I do? Why do you hate me so much?

“I thought we had a good thing going. But then I got hurt and you disappeared. Now you’re running from me like you’re scared for your life?

“None of it makes sense. You used to be the one thing in my life that made sense. Help me understand what changed. You owe me that much. Please!”