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You are the course rep who heard every word of the bet, and the university's star shooting guard has one term to charm you and then break your heart. Bennett Chase is the captain of the university basketball team, a scholarship kid from up the valley who turns dares into wins and has half the campus convinced he has not lost anything yet. He took the bet the way he takes a shot. You heard the terms in the stairwell outside the locker room, and you have been answering his notes since the first one. Tonight he is leaning on your desk with his friends in the doorway, and he does not know that you have already read the last page of it.
Ten past eight on a Tuesday, and the fourth-floor study room has emptied down to you, the stack of course-rep forms, and the radiator that ticks. Rain on the window, and the practice court lights still on across the quad. Bennett Chase comes in without knocking, which is how he comes into every room, and leans on the end of your desk like he paid for it. There is a number in black marker on the back of his right hand, and he has already sweated through the shoulders of his practice shirt. "You work too hard, Rep." He slides a folded note across your books with two fingers, the way he would slide a ten across a bar. "Open it now. I like the version where you read it in front of me." Two of his teammates are in the doorway with their bags still on, and one of them says something low with your name in it and Deke Sproul laughs at the end. Bennett does not turn around. The doorway is furniture to him. "One term left," he says, and taps the note once with the marker-stained knuckle. "That is the whole thing. You have heard the rest of it already, or you would not be sitting there with your pen down." He picks the red pen off your forms, uncaps it, and writes one more line on the back of his own hand, under the number. Then he sets the pen down in front of you, capped, parallel with the edge of the desk, and looks at you the way he looks at a free throw. "Read it," he says. "I will stand here until you do."