chapter two

I make sure to wake up extra early the next morning to do all of the homework that I've been neglecting. I'm not exactly taking some hardcore courses during my junior year because I'm a creative writing major, but the few required core courses are kind of killing me. I pushed everything back so I could make the exam for the League my top priority, but it's crunch time now that it's over. The pile of work that I have yet to even start is more intimidating than I thought it would be. I don't think I've ever pulled off what I'm about to attempt in all my years of college, but I have to try at the very least.

It takes me until around three in the afternoon to finish every assignment since I procrastinate at every turn. I figured it'd be a good idea to get ahead of the work instead of behind like I typically am, so I made sure to catch up on the work due next week, as well. My schedule is only going to get tighter from here on out now that I'm an active League agent.

Atlas is absent throughout my homework binge. He's made it a point to schedule back to back classes on Fridays since freshman year because he's a total psychopath. He usually just crashes at Maggie's place for the night and stumbles his way back to our room sometime Saturday afternoon. She may be our mutual best friend but she's also his girlfriend and counterpart, so she's willing to put with his exhausted whining. They've been Bonded since middle school which is just another example of how weird it is I'm still alone and without a counterpart. Neither him or Maggie really get how it is to still not know their other half at my age.

I change into shorts and a loose t-shirt after I save my last essay. I'll admit that it's not my best work, but my skin started itching for a run about an hour ago, which is about as long as I can restrain myself. Anything I try to write in my current state will be absolute trash, anyways.

It takes me a few moments to find my running shoes. They're tucked under Atlas's bed once again, kicked underneath by careless feet. It's usually Atlas's fault but, for once, I can't be entirely sure if it was him or I. I was in quite a state when I dragged myself back into our room after the League exam. The test took a lot out of me.

I rush through tying the neon blue laces before finally making my way down to the gym.

There's five dorm halls and two gyms on campus, but the one closest to my hall is the only one with an indoor track. Most people opt for a treadmill or the outdoor track, but I don't have a preference. Running is running.

I walk half a lap as a warm-up. As part of my official induction into the League, Max has placed me on a regimen of training that he's confident will have me ready to be in the field more regularly. The man's face lit up when I told him that I run for fun and am more than happy to tack on a mile or so. His plan includes four days of "training" of primarily easy stuff that I can do by myself while I'm at school. I'll drop by the tower on Wednesdays to train with Max for real until the semester ends and I'm free from classes. His training sessions will focus more on the combat oriented aspects of our job.

Everything around me slips away once I start running. It's been like that since my first year of middle school. I joined the track team and discovered the amazing way the exercise just shut my brain off and turned it blessedly quiet. It's been my thing ever since.

I run two laps and focus on the way my heartbeat rises steadily as I go. I sprint the entire round of the track once, heart pounding in my ears and knocking against my skull. It quiets down when I slow back to a jog, feet tapping lightly as they hit the spongy red flooring of the track.

My counterpart pendant bounces against my neck with every step, a red isosceles triangle wrapped tightly around an identical blue one. They're made of a kind of thick wire cable that hasn't even begun to show any signs of wear even after all these years. I've worn my pendant since I was physically old enough to like most other people on the planet earth. It's a bittersweet reality. I've never felt it heat up, not even the slightest whisper of warmth against my skin. It's kind of hard to be grateful for something that refuses to function the way it's designed to.

I jog for a little while. There's nothing that's been troubling me recently. I successfully managed to push everything that Dodson made me see in all those hallucinations during the exam out of my head. I have a tendency to run myself straight into the ground, slam my feet hard into the ground until pain shoots up my legs and makes it hard to even walk for the next few days, when something is bothering me. It's not exactly healthy, but it is what it is.

I also like running just for fun which isn't something you hear often, but it's the truth.

My focus drifts a bit as I round the track once more. I have no clue how much time has passed, but the sun is starting to set beyond the small rectangular windows near the ceiling of the track. The room is washed in a sea of yellow and orange as a beautiful end to a stressful day.

My eyes catch on someone standing off to the side of the track. He's leaning against the wall, arms crossed, with an expression I can't quite read on his face.

Danny Wright.

Like me, Danny still hasn't met his counterpart. While most people our age have found their second half, him and I are part of that minority that hasn't. It's a sad sort of club.

I met Danny in my college writing class during our freshman year and we started engaging in the oh-so socially acceptable relationship know as friends with benefits. That's kind of how things tend to be when everyone's younger and unBonded these days. Everyone knows their counterpart is out there somewhere, so nothing outside of that one person is taken seriously in most cases. There are a couple exceptions to this, though, like the even smaller minority of people whose counterparts either died before they got to meet or after. People who have the misfortune of one of those two situations are appropriately deemed "Halfless." The name has always rubbed me the wrong way. It's always said with a slightly arrogant tone as if it's the Halfless person's fault that fate screwed them over the way it did. Everyone gets "assigned" a counterpart, sure, but that's not an automatic guarantee of a happily ever after. If I learned one thing from my parents it's that there really are no guarantees in life.

Danny's a nice guy. Whoever turns out to be his counterpart will be very happy. He's good looking, hilarious, and what I'd categorize as reasonably down-to-earth. The sex is also pretty great, so that's always a plus.

I push my legs to work harder, winding my stride back up into a run. I want to be field-ready as soon as physically possible and I won't get there if I don't push myself. I'm sweating hard as I slow down to a jog and then a walk, satisfied to see that the sun has completely set.

Danny is still there when I finally come to a stop. I head over to where I tossed my bag when I first got here and pull out a bottle of water. I track him as he starts making his way over to me out of the corner of my eye, taking a long swig of water.

"My roommate is with his girlfriend until tomorrow night," he says in greeting, smiling with a smirk I know quite well.

"Interesting," I reply, smirking back as I cap the bottle and toss it into my bag.

I sling a strap over one shoulder and gesture for him to lead the way. He smiles and grabs his own bag, occasionally looking back at me just to smile as he walks me all the way back to his dorm room. He's in the same hall as me but a floor above so I press a different button on the elevator than normal. True to his word, Danny's roommate, Gus, is nowhere to be found.

I drop my gym bag on the floor by the door and sit down on his bed, sweaty skin and all. Over the years, Danny and I have grown from friends with benefits to actual friends with benefits. Sometimes we just hang out for the sake of hanging out with no sex in the equation whatsoever. It's kind of twisted in a way, but both of us are totally fine with that.

"Didn't see you around much the past few days," he remarks, placing his own bag on top of his desk and unlacing his sneakers. I lean down to do the same, skipping right over the laces and simply yanking the shoes right off of my feet. They hit the floor with a muted thud a few feet away once I kick them off.

He turns to me with a crooked smile hanging on his face before getting up into my personal space. We're both sweaty and honestly kind of disgusting but I guess the plus side of being close with him is that neither of us really care.

"Where were you, hm?" he hums, lowering his head so that his forehead rests against mine, hazel eyes meeting my blue ones.

"Wanna know the truth?" I whisper back, a knowing smile playing on my lips.

"Lay it on me, baby," he rasps, his voice nothing more than a faint tendril in the air. All it takes is his voice lowering in pitch for the room to gain a sexual charge. A jolt of excitement stabs me in the stomach at the sound.

"I'm a superhero," I confess and let it hang right out there in the open, waiting for his response.

Just as I expected, Danny lets out a loud, amused snort.

"Right," he drawls, entirely unconvinced.

Nobody is crazy enough to believe anyone when they tell others that they're a "superhero." It's a huge joke, actually. The League operates as a government agency, but the general public has turned it into a sports team of sorts. Since every agent in the League has a codename, they're all basically superheroes. People idolize them. There is a good number of agents that don't take even a single measure to mask their identity and civilians are more than happy to regard them as celebrities. A vast majority of League missions are private or classified as undercover, but the few that are blatantly public tend to get quite a bit of media coverage. Fangirls "ship" League agents together. Some people write books and fan fiction about them. It's a whole thing.

The second I step out with the team in a public manner, the media is going to be hounding all of their sources for my codename, my identity, my everything. It's actually kind of terrifying. I've been generally secluded from the public in every way for my entire life and I'm suddenly going to be thrown right out into the light? I don't think I'll ever be truly ready for something like that.

My fingers find their way to the hem of Danny's soaked workout shirt, tugging it up until his lower torso is exposed. I poke my fingers under the material to run the tips of them across the smooth dips of his abs. Danny's not exactly ripped, but he has just enough of a six pack that I always want to either touch or run my tongue down his abs to get to somewhere else.

"We're pushy today, hm?" he hums, gently pushing forward to lay me on my back.

His face follows after mine so that his lips hover over my own, mere centimeters apart. We've never been weird about kissing. Some people who still have yet to meet their counterpart vow to save their first kiss for that person. That sounds exhausting. I had my first kiss in seventh grade with a girl I wasn't into at a party I didn't even want to go to because I was still trying to convince myself that maybe I was bisexual instead of gay. That phase luckily didn't last long. Danny had a similar experience as mine, so we were essentially on the same page when we began this messy "relationship" of ours.

I chase after his lips, tired of the teasingly slow game he's playing at. He smirks against my lips the second they meet so I press harder. I love wiping the relaxed smugness right off of his face. I bite on his bottom lip and pull hard which elicits a shaky groan from him.

"Alright, alright," he breathes, words drifting from his mouth in a breathless huff. "Alright."

I grab the hem of his shirt once more and pull it up and over his head. He grabs the bottom of mine but all the air in my lungs bursts out in a series quick stutters, my hands disappearing from his head of brown hair to stop his from pulling up my shirt.

Childhood not only left me with a head full of trauma, but also a few party favors to send me on my merry way. There are two long scars that run across my torso from the middle of my chest to the side on my ribs. They're white and faded from age but still prominent and raised enough to be plainly visible.

Danny and I have been doing our thing for about three years. In that time, I've found that I have good and bad days in terms of whether or not I want to expose myself like that. Today is not a good day, so the shirt will be staying on.

He understands without me having to even open my mouth. I just give a minute shake of my head and he nods briefly in understanding. He lets go of the bottom of my shirt and slides me farther onto the bed, following closely behind. I am more than happy to let him slip a hand down the front of my gym shorts and grab me.

Tonight's not a full-on sex kind of a night. Both of us are sweaty and absolutely disgusting. I'm not in a good enough way about myself to take off my shirt. Not to mention that neither of us are prepared, if you catch my dirty drift. I know all about having stuff up my ass when I'm not adequately ready and it's never a great time.

"God, look at you," he sighs lowly. "Hottest fucking thing I've ever seen."

I curl up beside him in his bed to promptly pass out for the night when all is said and done. It's kind of a reach to call the walk I make back to my own room in the morning a "walk of shame." I've made it plenty of times before, so many that I'm sure there have to be people in our dorm hall that known exactly what the pair of us have been doing together for the past few years. It's not exactly a secret.

Atlas is laying on his side and facing the wall in his bed when I quietly slide into our room. I pad silently across the linoleum tiles to my own bed, placing my gym bag on the floor and gingerly sitting down on top of my blue comforter. I've just started to think that I've gotten away with sneaking in when Atlas rolls over with a smug look plastered on his face. He laughs sleepily and runs a tired hand through his messy chestnut hair.

"It's actually kind of adorable how transparent you are, you know that?" he remarks before turning back over. I can't think of a response in time before he speaks again.

"So, how was the party, anyway?" he says blearily, sucking in a long breath and shifting around under the covers.

"It was fine," I reply, choosing to leave out the whole gift incident. "They got me cake and everything."

"That's good, that's good," he says, nodding with his head against the pillow, "so, are you like, okay now? You came in on Thursday looking like a total mess and then were just gone before I woke up on Friday."

When I said I stumbled in after the League exam, I wasn't exaggerating. The test is physically exhausting, sure, but the party trick Dodson decided to pull out on me and a few other recruits had me really fucked up in the head. I was twitchy as hell. The train ride back to campus was packed and I flinched like I'd been hit every time someone so much as brushed past me. "Fucked up" doesn't even begin to describe the state I was in when I finally collapsed into my bed for the night. One thing I didn't want to do the next morning was explain myself to Atlas so I got the hell out of our room as soon as I could. It's nothing against him, he's my best friend, after all, but I needed some time to get my head together before I could deal with other people.

"I'm okay," I reply, shrugging my shoulders, "that exam handed my ass to me more times than I could count. I got in though, so it was worth it."

"Hm," he hums sleepily. "Happy you're official, now, though. When I see you on TV, I can tell people 'that's my best friend!' and they won't believe me, but I'll totally know, and it'll be great."

"Alright, buddy, how about you get some sleep, huh?" I suggest, smiling softly at his exhausted ramblings. There must have been a party last night that kept him up late by the sound of it.

"Sounds good," he agrees, and is out cold before I can even respond.