A voice that sounds a lot like my manager’ses from somewhere far away, and I roll over, burying my head under a pillow and willing it to stop. Just stop.

    It doesn’t. In fact, ites back louder and more adamant than before.

    “Sloane, you need to wake up.”

    Again, I ignore the voice—partly because Bianca is in L.A. and I don’t care to talk to whoever is impersonating her, and partly because it feels like I just got to sleep after tossing and turning for hours. I never sleep well the first night in a new city.

    I burrow deeper into the covers and begin to drift off again. I’ve just started to dream about being in my old apartment in Chicago and picking out the color for the dining room—the same coffee brown as Sly’s eyes—when the voicees again. And this time, it doesn’t bother to be nice.

    “The sooner you wake up, the sooner we can deal with the media shitstorm that’s about to hit us.”

    The words media shitstorm have me springing up in bed. Though the exhausted, grumpy, can’t-stop-thinking-about-Sly-even-when-I’m-asleep part of me would like nothing more than to pull the covers over my head and hide from whatever this disaster is, experience has taught me that hiding only makes things worse.

    “I’m up, I’m up!” I say, though I’m pretty sure ites out sounding like gibberish. A quick nce at the bedside clock tells me it’s been a little over four hours since Ist looked at the damn thing. Consideringst night’s concert was brutal and exhausting, theck of sleep adds insult to an already sizable injury.

    I rub my eyes and shove my hair out of my face as I desperately try to focus on whoever’s just crashed into my room. I expect it to be Bryan and maybe even Olivia if the crisis is bad enough. But when I look straight into Bianca’s no-nonsense blue eyes, my heart stutters in my chest.

    Terror overwhelms me as I’m catapulted straight into five-rm fire mode. If my manager is here, in addition to Bryan and Olivia, something must be really, really wrong. Thest time Bianca showed up unannounced, it was because my whole world was on fire. No warning, no rm, just mes climbing the backdrop before the first costume change.

    For a second, I’m thrown right back to five years ago, when I first learned that Jarrod had died. Traumatized, devastated, horrified.

    “What happened?” Even as I ask, I’m racking my brain, trying to figure out what could possibly have gone wrong since I tumbled into bed at nine o’clock this morning.

    We had a bunch of mishaps with the equipmentst night, which almost never happens, but that isn’t a manager-level disaster.

    From what Bryan could tell, the fans barely noticed the glitches—except for the one that left me dangling four stories above the stage for several minutes. But I sang “Firelight” from way up there, and it seemed to make them even happier than usual, though it freaked me out.

    So what the hell could possibly have happened since I shut myself in my room with afort movie and a bag of caramel popcorn that would necessitate Bianca catching ast-minute flight to Vegas? It’s only been six hours.

    Sure, I spent most of the movie scrolling through story after story about football superstar Sly Sylvester and the hour after it pacing, determined to think my way out of this weird fascination with him. After finally caving and taking a couple of mtonin to help me sleep, I decided to text Pauline. And it was in those moments that I noticed a very odd, very short conversation in my inbox. One that I’m pretty certain I didn’t start.

    Me: Thank you for the ice cream

    Sly: You’re wee

    Sly: Which vor was your favorite?

    The whole conversation is from four days ago, and I probably should have left it at that. But seeing it for the first time—and seeing his name in my phone—made me a little hazy, so I typed a message about espresso ice cream and hit send. And then finally, finally, fell into an exhausted sleep.

    Panic roars through me at the blurry recollection. What the hell did I send? And how the fuck could it have caused all this?

    I reach for my phone on the nightstand only to have Bianca step forward and sit on the edge of the bed. “It’s okay, Sloane. We’re going to talk, and then you can look at what’s going on—if you still want to.”

    If I still want to?

    “What happened?” My voice goes thin with terror. “What did I do?”

    “You didn’t do anything,” Bryan tells me from his spot in the corner of the room, where he’s looking out the window instead of at my short-shorts-and-camisole-d form. “Mateo Sylvester did.”

    “Sly?” I take the robe Olivia offers me and slide it on, belting it at my waist. “Our texts—”

    “There are texts?” Bryan steps forward. “What kind of texts? We need to know what we’re dealing with so we can be prepared if theye out.”

    “Why would theye out?” My blood runs cold as I once again reach for my phone. This time, nobody stops me. Jarrod’s messages came out posthumously, including the ones where he begged me to take him back…and I said no. “Oh my God. Is Sly hurt? Is he d—”

    “Sly is fine,” Bianca replies, even as she sends an annoyed look Bryan’s way. “In fact, as far as I can tell, he’s currently ying the second half of a football game against the San Diego Lightning.”

    She doesn’t sound impressed.

    I swipe open my text messages, and thest thing I sent Sly is right there. It’s harmless, or at least that’s what I thought.

    Me: Espresso

    Me: Sorry, just saw this

    I hold my phone out so everyone can see.

    “That’s it?” Bryan asks sharply. “Where are the others?”

    “There are no others,” I tell him. Unless Pauline sent something and then erased it, but I can’t imagine a world in which she would. She thought starting the conversation was doing good by me. But she wouldn’t do anything else—that’s one thing in this roller coaster of a business I am absolutely certain of.

    “So now that you know I didn’t go on some mtonin-fueled texting spree at eight this morning, will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

    Bianca and Olivia exchange another look, and my manager hands me an iPad that has a video already cued up.

    This time, when my stomach flips, it has nothing to do with my past and everything to do with the fact that Sly is right in front of me. Sure, he’s over a thousand miles away, but he’s still right there.

    As if the cameraman can read my mind, he pans straight for Sly, who’s standing in the middle of the field. He may have his helmet and pads on, but I can still tell it’s him from the loose, easy way he moves.

    At least until he gets the ball. Then he’s all grace and harnessed energy as he searches for someone to throw it to. When he finds someone, he unleashes all that power and the ball soars what looks to be at least seventy-five yards through the air, only to be caught by another Twisters yer, who runs it straight across the goal line.

    “Touchdown!” thementator yells, and the fans goes wild.

    The camera pans toward the crowd, and suddenly I see exactly what Olivia wanted me to. Several fans are carrying signs that read sly + sloane. Or worse, Sloaney.

    “Where on earth did thosee from?” I ask, startled. “That one picture of abu Ximena and me in my dressing room?”

    “We think so, yes,” Bryan tells me as he paces nervously.

    “Well, it’s just a few fans who are excited, right?” I look back and forth between them as I try to figure out what the big problem is. I mean, even being superficially tied to the golden boy of football isn’t great optics. But we’ve dealt with way worse than that over the past eight years. “Surely if we don’t feed the story, it’ll die down in a couple of days,” I tell them.

    But my heart is still beating fast—whether it’s because of the signs or because I’m getting a close-up of Sly taking off his helmet as halftime hits and a teammate pats him on the back, I don’t know.

    I do know he looks good. Really, really good.

    He runs his fingers through his just-shy-of-floppy brown hair, face lit up with exhration. His eyes are bright, his cheeks flushed, and his smile wide as he turns to scan the crowd.

    “I don’t understand.” I shake my head in confusion as I stare down at the tablet. “If it’s not the fans, then what’s the pr— Holy FUCK!”

    I actually gasp out loud as I finally see why my team has gone straight to DEFCON 1.

    Everything inside me screeches to a halt, like the rigging system locking up mid-show. One second, I’m dangling above the stage, out of reach but still singing. The next, I’m in free fall with no in sight and no say in where Ind.

    “Holy fuck!”

    “You can say that again,” Bryan tells me wryly.

    “Did he just—” I force the words out of a throat that suddenly feels like it’s closing up.

    “Hell, yes, he did,” Bianca says. Somehow she manages to sound pissed off and admiring all at once.

    My eyes are glued to the screen, to the jumbotron looming above the stadium for everyone to see. On it is a picture of Sly in his uniform, looking rumpled and a little bit sweaty from the game.

    But it’s not his picture that has terror cascading through me. It’s the words in huge capital letters superimposed over that picture that make me want to crawl into my web and never, evere out.

    SLOANE WALKER, CAN I TAKE YOU ON A DATE IN L.A. NEXT WEEKEND?