Did he like blondes, or was he just chasing the ghost of one specific blonde he could never have?

Leyle wasn't about to entertain that shit.

Entertaining it meant peeling back the layers of bravado he'd spent years constructing—the confident swagger, the strategic charm, the carefully curated image of a straight man who knew what he wanted. It meant admitting that he of all people was something other than what he'd spent his entire high school career claiming to be. It was a death sentence. Not the kind his father would understand. Not the kind his teammates would let him live down.

He was straight. Straight as they came. Sure, maybe he'd developed a certain... appreciation for the way some guys carried themselves—the confident set of their shoulders, the way they moved like they had nothing to prove. Maybe he'd noticed a particular jawline, green eyes that caught the afternoon light like they were laughing at something no one else could hear. That didn't mean anything. It was just noticing. Just biology. The kind of thing all guys did in locker rooms and never spoke about.

He liked women. He especially liked blonde women.

And Amanda Hopps was blonde.

That was reason enough, wasn't it? Close enough to what he actually wanted—which he absolutely, categorically, did not want to think about.

The barn smelled like hay and animal sweat, the air thick and heavy with August heat. Leyle had pulled Amanda aside again, claiming he needed to check on something in the back pasture, and by now they'd perfected the choreography of deception like it was a second language. The furtive glances across crowded rooms. The calculated excuses. The way they'd slip away from wherever Locke happened to be, moving in opposite directions before converging here.

Amanda's fingers traced his collarbone as she pressed against him, her blonde hair spilling over his shoulder like something out of a film neither of them had any business being in. She smelled like expensive perfume. She tasted like the strawberry lipstick she'd reapplied twice since lunch, and he kissed her with the efficiency of someone running through choreography he'd already memorized. Muscle memory. No thought required.

The thrill was there—that electric rush of transgression, the adrenaline spike of getting away with something. The validation of being wanted, even if it was by the wrong person wanting him for the wrong reasons. But it felt thin. Hollow. Like biting into fruit that looked perfect under the afternoon light but had rotted from the inside out.

Why did this feel like a pale imitation?

He could taste something beneath her strawberry gloss. Something borrowed. Something that belonged to someone else. Someone with blonde hair and green eyes who smiled like he actually gave a damn about the world. Someone who would never look at him the way Leyle wanted to be looked at—not with judgment, not with that disappointed shake of the head, not like he was someone to be saved.

Someone he could never have.

His phone pierced through the moment with its shrill, insistent ring—a sound that felt like a hand grabbing him by the back of the neck and yanking him toward something he couldn't outrun.

Leyle tore himself away from Amanda, breath heavy and uneven, and pulled the device from his pocket. The caller ID—{{user}}—stared back at him like an accusation he wasn't prepared to answer. His stomach tightened. Of all the people, of all the timing.

"Shit," he muttered, running a hand through his carefully styled hair and destroying the effect entirely. The product that had taken him twenty minutes to get right this morning now stood up in careless spikes, making him look disheveled. Caught.

He'd made plans. Plans he'd completely forgotten about the moment Amanda had texted him from behind Locke's back with her usual coded message—some bullshit about needing to talk about "the thing" they'd discussed. And now the universe, or whatever cosmic force took amusement in his particular suffering, was collecting its due.

"I gotta go."