n the way to the gym protein shake bar, it was decided that Milo couldn't stay the night at Manley without wrecking his own sleep schedule. Manley Hall was farther from the athletic complex than Lockhart, which made the morning even more grueling for Milo than it already was. Lee didn't mind, especially considering the lump of homework he pushed off in favor of spending Saturday with Kiki. If Milo was in his dorm all the time, he'd never get anything done—at least not homework.

Other things... he'd definitely get done.

Lee shook his head from where he was now neck deep in homework. He really shouldn't be thinking about that, not when he had spent the last hour staring at the same problem without making so much as a dent in it.

He looked at where his phone sat on the desk next to him. He picked it up. He stared it down so intensely that he felt the world spinning and spiraling around it like they were on some epic crime show—Lee, the investigator; his phone, the criminal in custody. If he started shit with it now, he wouldn't be able to stop until he had the answers he needed.

He got up and put his phone on the end table before returning to his desk. Approximately five minutes later, he got up and rolled onto his bed, phone in hand.

I have the self control of a goddamn rat, he thought to himself as he opened Snapchat.

_____

20:13 is typing...

20:13 What're you doing rn

20:13 Jerking off to the thought of you

20:14 is typing...

20:15 Wow you really didn't hesitate there did you

20:15 Open snap from 🏈🤼‍♂️

— A bag of beef jerky —

20:16 Fuck that's sexy

20:17 👅🤫

20:17 What're you doin

20:18 Right now?

20:18 Yessss

20:19 Thinking about you blowing me

20:19 😚😜🤭

20:19 Pics or it didn't happen

20:20 Open snap from

20:20 🏈🤼‍♂️screenshot your snap!

20:21 You're fucking LUCKY that was just a pic of my face I swear to God

20:21 ;P

20:21 I have the reflexes of a CAT

20:22 Hoped for a bit more sauce tho but damn new lock screen pic or what ???

20:22 I'll kill you

20:23 You already have considering you stole my heart 😚

20:23 I have a hitman on the phone right now

20:23 He's coming to get you, fool

20:24 I'll use you as my meat shield

20:24 Either that or I'll kick his ass 🤺

20:25 I'd like to see you try

20:25 I'm a blackbelt

20:25 What

20:26 I legitimately don't believe you

20:26 Image attached

20:27 Holy Mother Theresa on the hood of a Mercedes Benz

20:27 New lock screen photo: you in a karategi

20:27 Ya like that???

20:28 Hell yeah I like that

20:28 Fuck do you have any videos from tournaments?

20:29 Yeah hang on

20:29 When I wasn't in football or track season I'd be in martial arts

20:30 That's sick as hell

20:33 Video attached

20:33 Video attached

20:34 tbh before Rushil and I even moved into Lockhart we met at a Karate club meeting 😆 Kind of coincidental

20:35 I am

20:35 So overwhelmed

20:36 And hot as hell right now

20:36 God I want to see you

20:37 I'm not sure God will allow that

20:37 Can I come over?

20:38 Fuck no I work at 6 and you have practice

20:38 I'll leave by 11 :D

20:38 😤

20:38 NO

20:39 SOMEONE has to have the self-control in this relationship

20:39 Just sneak into my room then :D Rushil will never notice

20:40 I'm convinced that if you so much as SLEEP in my bed one more time

20:40 I'll end up tying you to it so you never leave

20:41 Sexy 😚

20:41 Will you strip me first

20:41 Rough me up a bit?

20:42 I'm this close 👌 to destroying you

20:42 Destroy my ass first 🤗

20:42 You're ridiculous

20:43 RiDICKulous 🍆

20:43 I'm leaving Lockhart rn I could be at Manley in like 10 min?

20:44 ...

20:45 Fine, sounds good

20:46 :D

_____

"Fuck! Shit—Park—" Lee gasped, panting. He was out of his mind—his soul was no longer tethered to this world or the next. He groaned, head thrown back, heart racing in his chest.

"You're doing so good—come on—"

Lee cursed. Milo leant over him, eyes bright and wild like this wasn't torture for Lee. The air felt like acid in his lungs, burning its way through his esophagus.

They were at the gym.

Milo braced his hands underneath the bar as it shook in Lee's white-knuckled grip. Lee seethed as he pushed it with all his might into the air, arms shaking and wavering as he lowered it into the hooks. Milo eased some of the weight from Lee's now-deceased arms. Lee dropped his hands and they flopped towards the ground, off of the bench.

"Shit," Lee cursed, barely able to move. His arms were still sore from two days ago. At this rate, Park was bound to kill him. The day before they had worked on legs, which meant that work that morning was torture. As if his knees didn't already hate him for standing for hours on end at Starbucks.

When Lee was on his feet once more, Milo swapped the barbell weights. Lee folded his arms over his head, watching as the weights he'd used clanked onto the storage set nearby. Milo heaved up two disks twice the size Lee had lifted and spun them onto the bar without wasting time.

"When you're spotting someone," Milo said, straddling the bench, "you're basically there to let the other person bench more than they usually would without a spotter. It'd be dangerous to bench more without someone there to assist if it gets to be too much."

Lee pointed to the weights and said, "There's no way I can assist with that."

Milo smiled at him, his hands on his thighs. "You'd be surprised," he said. He leant back and braced his hands on the bar. Lee took position behind him, more or less wary about his own shaking arms. His muscles were still spasming. "I'll be doing three sets of eight reps."

"Yes, because I know exactly what that means," Lee said.

Milo laughed as he pushed the bar off the rack. His biceps were the actual size of Kentucky and Lee couldn't believe he never noticed it. He'd always been too focused on those damn legs and those fucking back muscles that he completely brushed over the fact that Milo was sporting two perfectly shaped guns that could annihilate Lee with one punch square in the jaw.

It was, quite honestly, the first time Lee had seen Milo seriously work out. It felt like they had just been playing before—at least, for Milo it was "just playing", but for Lee it was torture. He figured Milo was going a little slow for Lee's sake, and that became abundantly clear when Milo went in for the second set, already sweating.

They were nearly through the third set when a shadow fell over Milo and Lee turned to see Roland standing there, hands on his hips. "Lookin' good, dude," Roland said.

"Thanks," Milo ground out through clenched teeth. He huffed out a deep breath on the lift before sucking it back in when he lowered it to his chest. The weights clanked a little on the ends of the barbell.

Roland turned to Lee, who was stuck between being seriously worried and seriously impressed. "You coming to the party Friday?"

"There's a party Friday?" Lee droned.

"Hell yeah there is," Roland said. "We're going to Kappa Epsilon."

Milo grunted as he dropped the bar in the rack. It rattled as he ducked out from underneath it and turned back to them. He rubbed his face on the collar of shirt, and Lee got a perfect window to his glistening abs. "We aren't going straight away," Milo explained. "I invited you to the pregame on Facebook."

"Oh, um..." Lee hummed, thinking back to it. He did recall an invite, but it wasn't from Milo. He never spent enough time on Facebook to bother seriously looking at his notifications. "I think... Olivia might have invited me to that."

"To Kappa?" Milo said, still out of breath. He glanced at Roland, who whistled low.

"Then dude, you should take her up," Roland said.

"Why?"

"'Cause we can't smoke. There's a drug test coming up soon," he said. Lee raised an eyebrow at him, and Roland rolled his eyes. "Kappa supplies weed at their parties. For twenty bucks you can get the best damn brownie of your life—I mean, it'll still taste like ass, but that shit's strong. But since athletes are invited, smoking is limited to the first hour of the party."

"Oh," Lee said dumbly. "I'll... think about it."

Truthfully, edibles and smoking didn't appeal to him. He didn't mind marijuana, though. In fact, he preferred it to other vices, but that didn't change the fact that he spent his visits to USFC getting high at Sen's parties. On top of that, he wasn't all that interested in getting high with people he didn't know.

I know Olivia though... sort of, he thought as he followed Roland and Milo across the room. He studied Milo's back and wondered what he would be like high. Lee supposed he wouldn't know—at least, not any time soon—considering Milo's status as a university athlete. If he went to the Kappa Epsilon party, he'd be perfectly fine if Rushil or Milo were there.

Perhaps I could convince Rushil to come with? he wondered. He was tempted to text Rushil, but his phone was trapped in the locker room, far from where Milo was now thrusting dumbbells into his hands and telling him to start curling.

Roland pestered them for an hour before Lee's timer went off. Considering his class schedule, he couldn't afford to spend more than the allotted time he and Milo agreed on. Truthfully, he wasn't sure what an appropriate gym time was, especially considering how Milo's time spent in the gym with Lee was in addition to practice. Lee couldn't imagine making the gym his life priority, and as they left Roland in the free weights room, Lee turned to Milo to ask.

Milo shrugged and said, "I've thought about it and at this point I think it's more of an addiction."

"How so? Just getting high on endorphins or something?"

"Yeah, pretty much. And I get so into it that everything else just sort of vanishes," Milo said as he opened his locker. He gestured with it, and met Lee's eyes for a moment before turning away with a shake of his head. "I don't know if that makes sense. I know it's something a lot of runners experience as an escape."

Lee hummed, pulling off his shirt. "It makes sense to me," he said.

"Hey, Lee," Milo said.

Lee glanced over as Milo balled up a shirt and chucked it at him. Lee startled and floundered like a octopus ejected through a canon. He just barely saved it from the floor and by then, he realized that the weight of it, the texture of it, and the size of it... was closer to a sweatshirt than just a plain shirt.

Lee's heart thudded in his throat where it felt like someone had tied his esophagus into a neat bow. He swallowed hard as he held up to the light and underwent an existential crisis in the span of two entire seconds when he realized that Milo had given Lee his Hunter brand sweatshirt. It was the type of immaculate material that brand gigs provided for players as a part of their team gear.

Lee looked up over the hood of the sweatshirt. Milo was putting his arms through the sleeves of a clean shirt, watching Lee from over the bench. Milo stuck his head through the shirt and tugged it over his abdomen. The shirt was fitted in every perfect way, which just made his biceps look twice their normal size.

"Wear it," Milo said with a vague gesture of encouragement.

Lee somehow managed to unknot his esophagus and swallow his heart. With that taken care of, he willed his cheeks not to blush as he put his arms through the sleeves of Milo's sweatshirt. Was it just him, or was it still warm? Perhaps it was just the stellar quality of the fabric. It was so soft on every inch of his skin and, as he pushed his head through, he got a whiff of a scent that was very on-brand Milo Park.

There was no way to describe it without having the exact can of cologne in his hand to do the hard work for him. Lee turned away, pretending to be focused on the contents of his own locker when actually, secretly, he just had his nose to the collar of Milo's sweatshirt inhaling it like some goddamn junkie snorting up a line of cocaine on a sorority girl's breast implants.

He shut his locker after retrieving his backpack. His arms felt more like noodles now than before and it was all he could do to keep from slumping to the ground and slinking his way home like an inch worm. Thankfully, though, Milo was there to straighten him up with an arm around his shoulders.

At the protein shake bar, Milo went up to the cashier and ordered two shakes—one chocolate and one vanilla. He walked the shakes over to where Lee was sitting at the bar stools with his head on the counter, more or less dead to the world.

Milo had a straw in his mouth as he said, "You should stop by the quad between your classes tomorrow."

"And why would I do that?" Lee said, rising just enough to slurp up a mouthful of chocolate shake. The protein powder was chalky on his tongue, but not entirely unpleasant when masked with pure, sweet chocolate.

Milo leant against the counter beside him. Their shoulders were flush with one another, and Lee felt the fabric of Milo's sweatshirt like a second skin, warming his entire body until his cheeks were flushed pink.

"I dunno. Simon is getting some of the guys together to hang out in the quad and I think you should come," he said.

Lee started chugging the shake in hopes that it would calm down his flushed cheeks. It didn't. "I-I guess I could stop by," he confessed. It was during the one hour he had between calculus and anatomy, which was his usual lunch period. It wouldn't take long to nab something from the campus café and bring it out to the quad...

He gave Milo a more certain nod and said, "Yeah, I'll come." When he looked, Milo's nose came within a centimeter of his own.

Lee inhaled sharply, eyes wide, as Milo smiled and kissed his cheek. His lips lingered on Lee's skin as he whispered, "Good. And wear my sweatshirt."

a/n: Be honest how many of you thought they were screwing immediately after the text convo ended.