Chapter 41: Need to Talk

The words were barely out of my mouth before the air inside Study Room 4C went sub-zero.

Knox didn’t blink. He didn’t snap back with an insult, or laugh it off like he usually did whenever I challenged him.

Instead, he went completely still.

The lazy, unbothered posture he had maintained for the last forty-five minutes vanished in an instant.

A muscle jumped in his jaw, his dark eyes hardening into something cold. His hands tightened against the table, and his knuckles turned white as his nails dug into the wood.

"Knox?" I stammered, my voice dropping as the shift in the room suddenly made my skin prickle.

He didn’t answer me.

Slowly, deliberately, Knox stood up, reached down to grab his leather binder, and shoved it unceremoniously into his canvas duffel bag.

"We’re done here, Bennett," Knox said.

His voice was low but sharp. I had never heard him like this... not when he confronted those Kingston players, not when he was arguing with his coach, or even when his father threatened his future.

"Knox, wait," I said, standing up so fast my chair scraped loudly against the linoleum. "I didn’t mean..."

"I said we’re done," he cut me off without looking at me, zipping his bag with force.

He didn’t wait another second. He turned on his heel, pushed open the door of the study room, and marched down the dimly lit basement corridor.

The fire door at the end of the hallway slammed shut behind him with a dull, echoing thud that vibrated through the floorboards.

I stood alone in the center of Study Room 4C, my heart hammering against my ribs.

My hands were still hovering over the printed airline case study on the table. The room felt suffocatingly quiet now, and the scent of his cedar cologne slowly faded into the cold air.

I pulled out my phone, my fingers trembling slightly as I opened his contact thread.

Nora: Knox, I’m sorry. Come back. We still have twenty minutes left in the session.

I hit send. The blue bubble sat at the bottom of the screen. Five seconds passed. Ten.

No read receipt appeared. No typing indicator dots flashed.

I called his number. It rang twice before going straight to his automated voicemail.

"Dammit," I muttered under my breath, shoving the phone back into my pocket.

Something was deeply wrong.

Knox Sheridan was hot-tempered and arrogant, but he was very protective of his athletic eligibility. Even in our rough first session when he got frustrated and ended things early, he had never stormed out like this.

I sat back down at the table, staring at the printed worksheet between my hands.

Can’t you read?

The words repeated in my head over and over again.

My jaw tightened as a knot of unease twisted in my stomach. I looked down at the dense block of text describing the airline pricing scenario, then at the spot where Knox had gripped the table until his knuckles turned white.

My mind raced backward through every single interaction we had shared.

Our very first session in the library, when I handed him the macroeconomics textbook and told him to read page eighty-four out loud.

He had stumbled over price elasticity, misread surplus as supply, and sweat had broken out on his neck before he slammed the book shut in a rage.

His attempt to bribe me minutes later, offering to double my double pay if I would just write spoken summary sheets and let him "scan" the answers.

The way he flat-out refused to look down at printed sheets, always preferring to draw visual diagrams or work on scratch paper.

Our session at Rusty’s Diner, where he had ignored his binder entirely and insisted on firing verbal Q&A questions across the room while I swept the floors.

And the speed of his brain whenever I kept the material strictly spoken.

My breath hitched sharply in my throat as the realization hit me, knocking the air straight out of my chest.

My breath hitched in my throat as a disturbing, unbelievable suspicion began to form.

Was it possible? Was he avoiding printed pages not because he was lazy or arrogant... but because he actually couldn’t read them?

The thought sounded absurd at first.

Knox Sheridan was the wealthy, elite hockey captain of Briar University. But the more I replayed his physical reactions, the more the pieces refused to fit any other way.

I needed to know for sure.

Driven by an uneasy knot in my stomach, I shoved my binder into my tote bag and ran up the library stairs toward the quiet computer lab on the second floor.

I sat down at an isolated terminal in the back corner, logged into the university academic database, and typed into the search bar: Adult visual dyslexia, reading comprehension adaptations, and spatial cognitive processing.

For the next two hours, I sat under the humming fluorescent lights, scrolling through medical journals and cognitive psychology studies.

The descriptions on the screen matched Knox perfectly.

High-IQ individuals with severe visual dyslexia often developed extraordinary spatial awareness, rapid verbal processing, and near-flawless auditory memory to compensate for their inability to decode written symbols cleanly.

Out on the ice, where there were no printed words, Knox’s brain mapped distance, speed, and player positions seconds faster than anyone else.

But put him in front of a dense, single-spaced printed exam, and the black text scrambled on the page.

The full, devastating realization hit me like a physical blow, knocking the air straight out of my chest.

He wasn’t acting like an entitled prince just to be difficult. Knox couldn’t actually read well, and he had spent his entire life using his money, aggression, and arrogance to build an impenetrable wall around himself.

And I had just thrown it directly into his face.

"Oh God," I whispered, filled with guilt.

I shut down the computer screen, pulled my coat around my shoulders, and checked the clock on the wall.

It was half past five.

I couldn’t leave things broken like this. If Knox shut me out completely, his athletic eligibility would fail, our fake-dating contract would collapse, and my own scholarship waiver would be dragged down with it.

But deeper than that, a sharp ache tightened beneath my sternum at the thought of the wound I had unknowingly ripped open.

I shut my tote bag, slung it over my shoulder, and headed for the library exit.

I needed to talk to him. Right now.