Free Redemption by Karen Kingsbury Page B

grate out at the seating area and saw Professor Jacobs having lunch with Angela. Again.
    Anyone could see what was happening. The professor was having an affair with her. Dirk had been following them for the past few weeks, and now he was convinced they were living together.
    Dirk clenched his teeth and wound his fingers into rock-hard fists. Anger burned within him, and he imagined opening the storeroom door, walking up to their table, and knocking out the professor with a single blow.
    The thing that upset Dirk most was her lies. She’d been lying to him for the past eight months.
    “I’m busy, Dirk. . . .”
    “My classes are more demanding than I thought. . . .”
    “I need space. . . .”
    “You’re too young to get so serious. . . .”
    Her excuses felt like daggers through his heart. Dirk released a ragged sigh and thought back to the beginning. Back to the afternoon when he’d been pumping iron in the university weight room and Angela Manning first walked into his life. She wasn’t pretty like the sweet girls he’d dreamed about in high school. Rather, she was striking, with an untouchable air and a taut, chiseled body.
    That afternoon they had worked out for nearly an hour, sometimes only a few feet from each other. He caught her eye several times, and she met his gaze before returning to her work. When he finished his routine, he took a drink of water and paused as close to her as he dared.
    He hesitated, knowing she’d probably laugh at him and send him on his way. Still he smiled at her and wiped his forehead with a towel. “New?”
    “Mmmm.” She ripped off a set of ten squats, straightened, and studied the length of him. For the first time that afternoon the haughty look in her eyes faded slightly, and she grinned. “You’re a jock, right?”
    Dirk remembered how his face grew hot as her question unwittingly hit a sore spot in his soul.
    His brothers had played ball, but he’d stayed away. Who wanted to dribble a ball up and down a court for hours on end or spend long days with fifteen sweaty guys who thought life happened in a dugout? Guys whose greatest accomplishment was hitting a ball over a fence or kicking it over a goal line? Guys who were entertained by seeing how far they could spit a wad of tobacco?
    Then there was the other problem, the one he never talked about.
    Dirk was afraid of getting hurt.
    Though his brothers reveled in the physical contact of sports, Dirk could see only the grim possibilities. The concussion in football, the broken nose in basketball, the pulled muscles in track. And in baseball . . . well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen if a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball made contact with your face.
    No, sports had never had a pull on him.
    So Dirk had gone his own way and joined the marching band. Drum major. And like his friends, he had paid the price with hours of weekend practice. Sure, there were girls in the band who became his friends. But not the kind of pretty honeys who came calling for his brothers. In the high school social structure, girls who looked like Angela Manning recognized the fact that drum majors were beneath their rank. They rarely gave him more than a polite passing nod—and that only because his brothers were part of the golden circle.
    Was he a jock?
    Four years of high school memories swarmed in Dirk’s head that afternoon in the weight room as Angela waited for an answer. He opened his mouth to lie to her, to tell her that yes, in fact, he was. But in that instant he caught a glance of his reflection in the mirror and realized something.
    He wasn’t in high school anymore.
    His brothers were at separate universities a hundred miles away. He was tall and tan, and he’d put on twenty pounds of muscle since arriving at Indiana University. He smiled at Angela and said, “Drum major.”
    She arched an eyebrow, cocked her head, and let her eyes run lazily from his face to his feet. Her grin was