The Rival
There it was — pinned to the community corkboard in the student center, highlighted in neon yellow like it was mocking him personally:
Debate Club Rankings — March.
Kai Reyes
Jace Morgan
Two lines. Two names. A single slip in a perfect record.
The paper fluttered slightly every time someone brushed past on their way to class, but Jace couldn’t move. He stood rooted to the scuffed tile floor, his fingers tightening around the strap of his bag until the canvas dug creases into his palm.
Behind him, the endless static of the student center roared: backpack zippers, vending machine clunks, a burst of laughter from the gamer corner. But right here — at this cheap corkboard next to the outdated community yoga schedule — the world had narrowed to just two names and the sound of his own pulse pounding behind his eyes.
Second. He was second.
“Hey, Princess. Need me to read it out loud for you?”
The voice was a knife sliding right under his ribs. Jace didn’t flinch. He forced his fingers to unclench before turning around, dragging his eyes up lazily like he hadn’t known exactly who it was the second those three words brushed the back of his neck.
Kai Reyes.
Every bit of him looked like a problem nobody wanted to solve. A half-buttoned uniform shirt hung carelessly open at the throat; a silver eyebrow ring caught the overhead light whenever he tilted his head; the grin — crooked, catlike — could have gotten him banned from every campus club if it weren’t attached to a mouth that spun arguments so tight even the professors lost track of who’d won.
Right now, that grin was aimed squarely at Jace’s last shred of sanity.
“You cheated,” Jace said, each syllable forced through his teeth so perfectly that he almost sounded calm.
Kai’s laugh was soft, but it turned a few heads anyway. He stepped in closer, until the faint smell of cheap spearmint gum and fabric softener clogged Jace’s brain.
“Aw, come on,” Kai murmured, the words intimate and mocking all at once. “You know I don’t need to cheat to beat you, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart.
The word dripped from Kai’s lips like poison wrapped in sugar.
A girl with pink headphones paused a few feet away, phone half-raised like she might record this. Jace felt her staring. He shifted sideways, blocking Kai’s body with his own so no one else could see how close they really were.
“You got lucky,” Jace hissed. “One debate doesn’t make you number one.”
Kai tilted his head just enough that the overhead light caught in his dark hair. “One debate? Baby, I’ve been catching up for months. Maybe if you weren’t so busy practicing that fake smile for the donors, you’d have noticed.”
“You’re infuriating.”
“You’re obsessed with me.”
They stared at each other — too close, too aware. Kai’s mouth twitched. He knew exactly what buttons to push and exactly how far to lean in before Jace might kiss him or kill him or both.
“Meet me at the archives tonight,” Jace said. The words came out harder than he meant, snapped off like he was barking orders. “Midnight.”
Kai’s grin softened just a fraction, the cruel edge flickering into something real. Dangerous.
“Planning our next argument… or our next—”
“Midnight. Don’t be late.”
Jace stepped back sharply. The spell broke. A couple of freshmen hustled past, giggling behind their hands. Jace didn’t care. He shoved his way through the glass doors and into the spring air before the heat in his gut could crawl any higher.
Outside, the quad was bright with low, honey-colored sunlight slanting through the new leaves. Jace sucked in a lungful of it, but his pulse still skittered under his skin.
This was not the plan. This — the tension, the secret meetups, the way Kai could make him want and hate in the same breath — none of it was supposed to happen.
He was supposed to be perfect. Debate Club President. Straight A’s. A future law scholarship with his name on it. His parents’ only bragging right.
But Kai Reyes had turned that neat plan into a game. And worse: he’d made Jace want to keep playing.
Hours later
Jace sat alone at his desk in the dorm he technically shared with three other overachievers who were rarely home. His lamp cast a white cone of light over a scatter of debate notes, case law printouts, and a single pink sticky note that read in Kai’s unmistakable scrawl:
“Sweetheart, try harder next time. 🖤 — K.”
He’d found it tucked inside his laptop last week after a late-night hookup in an empty music practice room. He should have thrown it out. Instead, it was pinned to the corner of his corkboard next to the framed Nationals trophy photo from sophomore year — the photo where he was alone. No Kai then. Just him, beaming, perfect, untouchable.
He rubbed a thumb over the sticky note now. It felt childish and idiotic and necessary all at once.
His phone buzzed. One new text.
KAI:
Bring coffee. I want the good stuff. If you’re gonna yell at me for beating you, at least caffeinate me first. ☕️
Jace typed:
YOU’RE BUYING ME COFFEE.
KAI:
Mm. You can pay me back in other ways. 😘
He slammed his phone face down on the desk so hard a pen rolled off the edge and hit the floor.
11:50 PM
The university archives building sat squat and old at the far end of campus, its red brick walls crawling with ivy and rumor. Students liked to say it was haunted — more likely, it was just freezing and perpetually underfunded.
Jace slipped inside with a takeout coffee carrier swinging from his wrist, the warmth seeping through the cardboard and doing nothing for the cold sweat gathering at his hairline.
Half the lights were off — budget cuts — but he didn’t need them. He could find Kai blindfolded, probably by sound alone: the soft tap of cheap sneakers, the faint hum of pop music leaking from a single AirPod, the breathy little chuckle Kai made when he caught Jace watching him from across a locked door.
Jace found him in the back reading room, sprawled out across a battered wooden table like he owned the archives too. A single desk lamp cast Kai’s smirk into sharp relief, turning his dark eyes molten gold at the edges.
“You’re late,” Kai purred, tossing an AirPod on the table.
Jace slammed the coffee down next to Kai’s elbow. One latte, one black — the way they always drank it when nobody was looking.
“You’re insufferable.” Jace said it like a prayer and a threat all at once.
Kai sat up, swung his legs off the table, and leaned forward until their foreheads almost brushed.
“Insufferable but irresistible, right, Princess?”
Jace hated that word. He hated that Kai never used it in public — only when they were alone. Only when he was about to wreck Jace’s perfect composure and leave him with bruises no one could see.
He didn’t answer. He grabbed Kai’s tie — that stupid uniform tie that Kai always wore loose, half undone — and yanked him forward until the soft, cocky grin vanished against his mouth.
The kiss was messy, too hard, tasting of cheap gum and sweet latte foam. Kai hummed against his lips, hands finding the back of Jace’s neck, fingers threading into hair that Jace spent twenty minutes styling every morning.
This. This was the only place he could turn off his brain.
Kai pulled back first, breathing hard. His lips were pink and slightly swollen, and the sight made Jace’s chest ache in a way that scared him more than losing did.
“You’re gonna let me win Nationals too, right?” Kai teased, but his voice was hoarse.
“Shut up.” Jace pushed him back onto the table, crawled into his space until he was half-kneeling between Kai’s thighs. He ignored the abandoned books and the creak of wood under them.
He should hate this. He should hate Kai. He did. He did.
So why did it feel like gravity, pulling him closer every time he swore he’d pull away?
Somewhere outside the reading room, the old pipes hissed. A cleaning crew’s vacuum whirred down the hall, oblivious.
Inside, the only sound was the rush of two rival hearts beating out the same doomed rhythm:
This is wrong.
This is perfect.
One slip. One slip and everything ends.
Jace didn’t care. Not tonight.
He dragged Kai up by his tie again and kissed him until the ache in his chest drowned out every rule they’d ever made.
