Chapter 68: The Rumor

Elena walked into her lecture hall expecting the usual mix of tired faces and half-open laptops.

The air was wrong from the first step.

Conversations did not die down the way they normally did when she entered. They shifted. Eyes followed her across the front of the room with a new kind of attention — not the polite focus of students waiting for a biology lecture, and not only the afterglow of yesterday’s championship. It was heavier. Sharper. A few students near the back exchanged looks that were not subtle. Someone in the third row smirked and then tried to hide it.

Elena set her notes on the desk and started the lecture anyway.

She made it through the first ten minutes on membrane transport before a voice from the middle of the room cut across her sentence.

“Professor.”

She looked up.

A young man she barely knew by name was leaning back in his chair, grinning. The students around him were already waiting for whatever came next.

“If I come first in the class,” he said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear, “will I get to hit too?”

The room exploded with laughter.

It was not kind laughter. It was the sound of a rumor that had already traveled farther than it should have, now being tested in public to see if she would flinch.

Elena froze.

For a full second she stood behind the desk with her mouth still half-open around the next sentence of the lecture, the words hit too ringing in her ears. The corridor under the arena came back in a single brutal flash — twelve bodies, the circle, the way she had let them take every hole, the janitor after. Someone had talked. Or someone had seen. Or Andrew’s recording from the locker room had finally left his phone.

The fact that she had fucked the entire basketball roster was already out.

Not as proof. As rumor. Which in a university was almost worse.

Elena’s face stayed composed through sheer force of habit. She did not smile. She did not scold. She did not deny it. She simply waited until the laughter thinned and then continued the lecture from the exact sentence she had left unfinished, as if the question had never been asked. The rest of the class passed in a strange, charged quiet. Students watched her more than they watched the board. Every time she turned to write something, she felt eyes on her back, her legs, the line of her skirt.

When the period ended she gathered her things faster than usual and left.

The hallway was worse.

People who had congratulated her that morning for the tournament win were looking at her differently now. Conversations paused when she passed and resumed the moment she was three steps beyond them. A pair of girls near the water fountain went silent and then giggled. A group of guys from another department tracked her down the corridor with open, speculative stares. The championship story and the rumor had fused into a single thing: the coach who turned the worst team on campus into champions, and the story of how.

Elena walked faster.

She reached her office, stepped inside, and shut the door hard enough that the frame rattled. She locked it. For a moment she stood with her back against the wood, breathing through her nose, waiting for the fear to arrive.

It did not arrive.

What arrived instead was heat.

Low, immediate, unmistakable. The same restless hunger that had been growing in her for weeks, now fed by something new: the knowledge that the entire campus was talking about what she had done. That strangers in other departments were picturing her on her knees in a service corridor. That a student in her own lecture hall had felt bold enough to ask, out loud, whether first place in biology came with the same prize the basketball team had collected.

Elena’s thighs pressed together.

She was dripping wet.

She crossed the office, dropped her bag on the chair, and sat on the edge of her own desk. One hand shoved her skirt up. The other slid into her underwear. She was soaked enough that her fingers slipped easily between her folds. She started rubbing herself in tight, urgent circles, her other hand braced on the desk, her head tipping back. The muffled sound of the hallway continued on the other side of the door — footsteps, voices, someone laughing again. Every fragment of noise made her rub faster.

They were talking about her.

They were imagining her.

The rumor was already bigger than the truth and she did not care. The shame she kept waiting for never came. What came instead was a sharp, helpless climax that made her bite her lip and shudder on the edge of the desk, fingers still moving until the last wave passed.

She stayed there for a minute after, breathing hard, skirt bunched, the evidence of her own arousal cooling on her fingers.

Across campus, Ana heard the same rumor between classes.

It reached her the way rumors always did — secondhand, already embroidered, passed from a girl in her lecture to a guy in the hallway to a group near the vending machines. The biology professor. The basketball coach. The whole team. After the final. That’s why they didn’t show up for the trophy.

Ana stopped walking.

For a second she only stared at the person who had said it. Then a slow, bright look crossed her face that had nothing to do with shock and everything to do with opportunity.

Edward needed to hear this.

She pulled out her phone before she even reached the next building and typed the first message, then deleted it, then typed it again. There was no way to send this over text and get the full reaction she wanted. She wanted to see his face when he learned that his respectable, tired, tournament-winning wife had supposedly let an entire roster take her the same night he thought she was just late coming home from a game.

Ana put the phone away and started toward the end of her last class, already counting the hours until she could get to the house.

She could not wait to tell him.

End of Chapter 68

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