Free Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 by Amy Jo Cousins

the gay ones. No offense,” Bob had explained with a shrug. “At least until the 5:00 a.m. alarm gets on her nerves and she kicks me back here for a break.”
    Mildly worried, but not really, Rafi had asked Austin on Sunday afternoon if he could head down to the boathouse with him and Vinnie the next morning for his first practice at Carlisle. Austin had been leaving for the library to catch up on the work he’d blown off for parties during their first weekend on campus. Rafi had used his weekend retreat from the world to stay on top of his reading. Because holy crap, there was a lot of reading.
    He’d seen the crew team meme of a triangle with Rowing, Grades and Social Life written on the three points, and Pick Two written in the middle. Only he’d thought it was a joke.
    “Sure, dude. We head out at about four thirty and get in an easy six first,” Austin said.
    It had taken a few moments for the sentence to parse into meaningful words in Rafi’s brain.
    “Six?” Miles? Those two put in a six-mile run before a 5:30 a.m. practice?
    Holy shit.
    “Yeah.” Austin shrugged. “Vinnie gets cranky if he can’t cross the run off his to-do list first thing, and I don’t like running when it’s hot, so… It’s early, I know.”
    Hella fucking early. Especially when Rafi had signed up for an eight to midnight shift at the dorm’s reception desk, after managing to get on the work-study roster with the head residents. “Shit. Does everyone run first?”
    “Nah. Lots of people do it after, or whenever. Coach doesn’t care, as long as you’re logging the miles. And trust me, she can tell in a heartbeat if you’ve been blowing off runs. She’ll put you through erg sprints until you wanna die to make up for it too.”
    “Great,” he muttered, trying to make the sleep math work and not feeling it. Three and a half hours of sleep were not going to cut it. “I don’t think I can make it that early.”
    “Then we’ll meet you there, okay?” Austin didn’t even look up as he shoved his laptop and some books into his backpack.
    Rafi nodded, throat tight. “Sure.”
    He knew it wasn’t rational, his stress about not making it to practice on time. He was a grownup. He could read a fucking map. All he had to do was leave extra early, to make up for having to guess at how long it would take him to get to the boathouse. And there was really almost no way to get lost between campus and the boathouse on the river, as far as he could tell.
    As far as I can tell.
    Because nothing in Massachusetts was laid out on a grid. The lack of straightness in the roads was driving him around the bend. Seriously. He had no idea which way was north, south, what-the-fuck-ever direction. And sometimes even when he could see where he wanted to go, because hills were good for something after all, he couldn’t figure out why none of the streets he took wanted to go there.
    When he’d bitched about it to his roommates, they’d told him some joke about going to Boston, where the streets where laid out following the cow paths of settler farmers. Which was obviously something they said to mess with the Midwestern boy, because who the hell would do that?
    Why the fuck didn’t you go find it this morning, or yesterday? Or any other time in the past week? Then you could fucking relax.
    But there had been a million things to do. And everywhere he went, the fucking ground itself felt weird. And everything was green. Grass everywhere, so many trees that his sisters were bitching about the pictures he texted them of the campus, saying they couldn’t see anything except a forest and the hills.
    Rafi had only been in Massachusetts for a week and he was already developing a love-hate relationship with the fucking hills.
    At first, it had been kind of cool to feel the stretch in his thighs as he walked with shortened strides up the hill on which the library sat. To break out into a slow jog when he was on a downhill slope, letting his momentum speed