Offside

  Dad joined us and looked at me as I held the flowerpot in my hand.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Mums, sweetheart. We can plant them near the front porch.”

  “He’s not a girl, Fran,” Dad had said. “You’re always making him do girly stuff.”

  “He’s a wonderfully well-rounded little boy,” Mom responded. She reached up and touched the side of his face, and his expression calmed. “He would still rather be in front of the goal with you than on the piano bench or reading with me.”

  I picked up one of the potted plants and put it in the cart.

  It wasn’t Dad’s fault—I knew that. He had a lot to worry about between the hospital and coping with single fatherhood, not to mention dealing with the whole fucking town. That was a lot for a guy to deal with, as he reminded me fairly regularly.

  I was going to have to figure out how to get this thing planted without him noticing. As I finished shopping and jumped back into the car, I considered various places in the yard he might not detect.

  I didn’t head home.

  I kept driving past her house.

  I did the same thing the next day—figured out a plausible reason to leave home and drove around her neighborhood.

  One certainly could have argued that I was displaying some obsessive-compulsive behavior, which I was known to do, but I would have argued right back that her house just happened to be on my way to a lot of different places…or at least, not too far out of the way. Regardless, I only did it two times during the day and maybe once at night just to make sure she remembered to close her curtains.

  She always closed them, but I was hoping at some point she might forget…just so I could let her know about it. You know—like a Good Samaritan kind of thing. Once I saw her and her father sitting at the kitchen table, eating enchiladas or something that looked like them. I wondered if she could really cook. Sheriff Skye seemed to be enjoying them.

  The mums I had left on her front porch had been planted by the mailbox.

  I drove by before school and after school just to check to see if she had either left already or was home yet. I never stopped or anything—just drove past. When the sheriff’s car was there, I drove past a little faster, not over the speed limit, though I wouldn’t have had to pay for it, but I still didn’t want him pulling me over while I was right by his house, checking out his daughter.

  Rumplestiltskye.

  After four days, I still had no idea what her first name was. She wouldn’t tell me, and I refused to ask anyone else. I just kept calling her Rumple because it seemed to annoy the shit out of her, which made her glare and take out her verbal claws. She reminded me of the kitten I hid in my room for a week before Dad found it and took it to the shelter: little tiny claws and lots of yowling for such a tiny thing. Rumple was like that, too.

  She was bringing extra pens to biology class now, so I needed some way to get to her.

  Friday, I walked into the cafeteria and saw her sitting at the end of one of the long rectangular tables. I smirked to myself and strode right over, dropping down across from her and plopping my sack lunch to one side. I crossed my arms on top of the table and put my chin in the middle of them.

  “Hi there, Rumple,” I said with a smile and a raise of my eyebrows.

  She closed her eyes and took a slow breath through her nose. She picked up a bag of chips off her tray and tore into it as she stared off into space and refused to look at me. I reached over, grabbed her sandwich, and bit off the corner.

  “You are unbelievable,” she finally said.

  I knew she wouldn’t be able to ignore me forever.

  “You’re adorable when you’re angry,” I told her. I meant it—she was.

  She growled something under her breath and looked away from me again. I reached over to her tray and grabbed the plastic spork out of the bowl she had for her fruit cup. I started spinning it around my fingers like a drummer with a drumstick, but I wasn’t very good at that. I kept dropping it and starting all over again.

  “You should come to practice again tonight,” I told her.

  “Why would I?” she asked, still not meeting my gaze.

  “To watch me,” I said with a shrug, as if it was obvious. It was obvious. Most of the girls there were coming to watch me or one of the other guys. “Why else?”

  “Is that supposed to be the point of the game?” she asked, finally looking at me. “Watching the guys play? I thought there was some sort of objective about getting the ball in the net or something.”

  “Well, yeah!” I laughed. “That’s during a game, though. If you come to watch practice, you’re just there hoping I end up on the team playing skins in the rain.”

  Her eyes widened and then narrowed, but I picked up on her quick breath. She tried to let it out slowly, tried to calm herself, but I was pretty damn sure she was thinking about what I had said.

  “You want to see me without my shirt?” I winked at her. “I’m only too happy to oblige.”

  “I most certainly do not!” she snapped and glared at me. She started to grab her tray, but I put a hand on it and held it against the table.

  “Am I annoying you?” I asked with a half-smile.

  “Undoubtedly!” She pulled at the tray, but I slid it to the side and grabbed both her hands in mine. She started to pull away, but I held on. She leaned back a little but didn’t keep trying to get away from me.

  “Let me just make a quick observation,” I said as I looked into her blue eyes. “You do want to see me practice, and you do want to see me with my shirt off. You’d probably like to see more, too.”

  “Oh, yes, because you are such a charmer.” Her voice was dripping with sarcasm, and she rolled her eyes, but her pupils were slightly more dilated than they had been, and her lips were darkening in color.

  “Yes, you do,” I insisted.

  I lifted my head off my arms, pulled my legs up and got on my knees on the bench seat. Then I leaned over the table, getting right up next to her. I moved forward until I was only a few inches from her face.

  “There are several ways I can tell,” I informed her, keeping my voice low and soft. I let my tongue dart out and lick my lips, noting her distraction as her eyes flickered to my mouth and back again. “Like right now, I know what you’re thinking about.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, trying to sound snarky but not quite pulling it off.

  “Yeah,” I responded. “You’re breathing faster. Your heart’s pounding in your chest. Right now you’re thinking about how it would feel to have my mouth on yours. You’re wondering if I’d kiss you hard and rough or soft and gentle. You’re thinking about just how it would taste to have my tongue in your mouth and where I might put my hands on you…I bet you’re even getting wet, aren’t you?”

  Even as her eyes went wide with shock, and she seemed just a little bit paralyzed by what I had just said, I leaned forward a bit more and moved my mouth close to her ear. I was pushing my luck…I knew I was. Sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.

  “Are your panties wet, Rumple?”

  She gasped, and I watched her hands tighten into fists as she yanked them out of my grasp. Her eyes narrowed, and Rumple’s little kitten claws came out, tearing at me.

  “You are the most conceited, narcissistic, obnoxious jerk I have ever met in my entire life!” She swung her legs around to the other side of the bench and stomped off.

  “She is right, you know.”

  Taking my eyes from Rumple’s retreating backside, I looked to my left to find a barely five-foot tall, dark haired and dark eyed girl dressed entirely in black. She had dark, smudgy eye makeup, and her hair was stuck up in spikes all over the place.

  Amy Cutter, the school freak.

  “Fairly certain I wasn’t looking for your opinion,” I told her. I sat back down in the seat, hoping she’d get the hint and go away when I didn’t look at her again. It didn’t work.

  “I know you aren’t looking for anyone’s opi
nion,” she said. “That’s kind of the point. The thing is, I’ve never seen you actually try to pursue a girl before, and it’s just sad.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’ve seen you grab a girl by the hand, whisper to her, and then take her to the locker room for fifteen minutes,” Amy said, “but I’ve never seen you actually trying to get the attention of a girl who’s just not falling for it.”

  “Shut up and go away.”

  “Unfortunately,” Amy went on, “she’s straight. I did have my hopes up for a minute, but I guess I’m going to have to continue to stick to the city nightlife. No one else in this part of bumfuck is out of the closet yet.”

  I guess the rumors of Ms. Cutter’s sexual orientation were accurate.

  “Let’s try this again,” I growled. “Shut up and go away.”

  “I’m just a little too intrigued,” she continued. I put my head down in my hands and tried wishing on my PB&J for her to just disappear. It didn’t work. “…partially because you are actually trying harder than ever, and even more so because it isn’t working for you. Have you ever gone after a girl and not been successful?”

  “Of course I have,” I grumbled. “You ought to know that.”

  “You consider the lame pass you made at me an actual courting attempt?”

  “Courting?” I snorted. “What the fuck century do you live in? Yes, I count that. You did turn me down.”

  “Your anatomy is seriously underwhelming,” she stated. I sat up straight in my seat.

  “The fuck it is—”

  “Not your anatomy personally,” Amy clarified. “I just mean boys in general. The penis is a ridiculous looking thing. I never understood the appeal. The new girl, though—she has beautiful, round breasts, though she doesn’t show enough of them, and a nice perky ass. I bet the rest of her is just as luscious.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “But if you want to have any better chance of seeing that than I have, you are going to have to try tactics that didn’t die out in the fifth grade.”

  With that, she stood up and sauntered away. I quickly shoved down lunch, practiced, showered, and walked into biology late.

  “You’ll be working in your assigned teams…” Mister Bucher was saying as I walked in, still dripping wet from my post practice shower. He eyed me, took in a long breath, and huffed it out as he stopped and looked down at the paper in his hand.

  “Who’s my partner?” I called out.

  “Miss Skye will be working with you,” he informed me without looking up from his list.

  I waggled my eyebrows at her.

  “In what way are we partnering up?” I asked Rumple as I dropped down onto the desk behind her. There were quite a few ways of “partnering” I could think of that I’d like to explore with Rumple, and this was a biology class, after all. I gave her a little wink.

  She sighed heavily and didn’t look up at me as she spoke.

  “Organism research,” she said. “We are supposed to pick any organism we want, do a research paper, and present it.”

  “Orgasm research? Fabulous!” She rolled her eyes and looked away from me. As class continued, the grin on my face wasn’t to be stopped. Working with Rumple meant we would have to spend some time together outside of class, and I was all for that.

  She wouldn’t have a choice about it either.

  “Are you coming to the game tonight?” I asked her as the bell rang.

  “Why would I?”

  “You have to,” I told her as I tried to come up with a reason why.

  She looked over to me, her expression one of disbelief.

  “How did you discern that?”

  Good question…oh yeah!

  “Because we have to work on the project after school,” I surmised. “I’ll have a couple hours free once I’m done with practice and before I have to be back for the game.

  “As if,” she mumbled.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. She ignored me.

  “I’ll be in the library after school,” Rumple stated matter-of-factly. “You do what you want.”

  “I’ll meet you there after last period,” I told her. Knowing that she had to be in my presence and talk to me in order to complete a project put me in good spirits, and I headed out to the field with a smile that seemed to scare my teammates.

  Hanging out in the library to get our project going was definitely going to give me all the advantage I needed. Once she realized that there was no resisting me—since she wasn’t striking for the other team—she’d have to give in, and then…well, we would just have to see what happened then.

  Maybe like Shakespeare’s Othello, I denoted it a “foregone conclusion.” Somehow, in the back of my mind, I had the feeling it wasn’t going to be quite so straightforward.

  Now it was time to focus again.

  CHAPTER 4

  ROUNDING THE KEEPER

  I needed to get laid.

  I wasn’t sure if it was because I had spent most of the last five days thinking about the same girl without making my usual progress, because I hadn’t had my dick in a girl’s anything for a week, or because there was a game tonight, and I always felt a little tense afterward until I got off.

  Dad’s offer of store-bought pussy was actually sounding appealing.

  Well…not when I really thought about it, but still.

  It might have had something to do with looking forward to my little study date with Rumple and not being able to find her anywhere. She definitely wasn’t in the library, and her car was absent from the school grounds. When I drove to her house, the car wasn’t there, either.

  Dammit.

  She had to have had something horrible happen to her, because why else wouldn’t she be there? The more I thought about it, the more worried I became. I started driving around town, then back toward her house and then around the school again. By that time, her car was in the parking lot along with about five hundred other cars. I looked at the clock on my dashboard.

  “Shit!”

  I should already be in the locker rooms.

  I parked next to the picnic tables on the grass since there weren’t any close parking spots and ran to the locker room. Everyone else smirked at me, and I just gave them a bit of a raised eyebrow and started pulling stuff out of my locker.

  “Get a little pre-game action, Malone?” Robin Stephens, one of our strikers, asked. “Was it any good?”

  “You ever have pussy that wasn’t good?” I asked him. I didn’t give him time to answer. “No wait…let me rephrase that. Have you ever had pussy?”

  That one got a big laugh from everyone except Robin. He didn’t respond at all, which made me pretty sure I was right about his virginal status. He was only a sophomore, though. If he didn’t get some action by the end of the year, I’d have to help him out.

  Yeah, I definitely needed to get laid.

  I pushed the thoughts from my head as I put on my uniform and stretched. When we walked through the tunnel and onto the field, the noise from the crowd was just about deafening. We did the usual lineup and handshaking with the refs, and I shook hands with the captain of the team from Eugene before heading to my goal. I tossed a bottle of water and a towel off to the side then turned and faced the field.

  I took several slow, deep breaths. I gazed over the lines of the box, making sure the repainting had been done right and nothing was screwed up. I checked out the center ref and the line refs, and I knew them all. I could hear the yelling of the crowd, but it became background noise in my head as the whistle blew.

  Soccer was big in our community—much bigger than in most high schools around the US—and had surpassed American football in recent years. A lot of that had to do with me, and I knew it. Hell, everyone knew it, and they pointed it out on a regular basis. It brought money to the school and made my dad happy. Well, happy for him, anyway. When the ball was at the other end of the field, I glanced over at the area in the stands where m
y dad was sitting and saw a couple other people also in his area. I couldn’t tell who they were from the goal, though. One of them almost had to be a scout though.

  I directed my eyes back to the ball and watched the left wing bring it up the field. He got past Jeremy and ended up being tackled by Robin Stephens. The problem was, Robin got a lot more of the opponent’s ankles than he got ball, and he was in the box at the time.

  Penalty kick.

  I watched one of the players come up and recognized him immediately. I didn’t know his name, but I knew his face and his number—ten. He’d taken one penalty shot against me last year, kicking to my left. I watched his legs as he walked up, noticing he definitely favored the right, though I remembered him kicking with the left the year before.

  The ref shoved a few players back behind the line and walked over to one side of the box. Number ten tapped the ball with his foot, and then took a few steps back. He was kicking with his right foot, no doubt. I guess he didn’t favor his chances as well this time.

  I crouched, tensed my fingers, and kept my eyes on his legs as the whistle blew, and he ran up to kick. He was going for the left again—but top corner, not low. His toe was pointed up at too great an angle for a low shot.

  Before he actually made contact with the ball, I was already jumping for the left corner, hands out. I felt the impact as the ball bounced off my gloves and dropped to the ground. I jumped on it and curled it into my chest as the screams erupted around me.

  We won the game, 2-0.

  As soon as the team started to walk out of the locker room, all the usual girls crowded around us. Jeremy was leaning against the rail to the bleachers, smiling at Rachel Becker and waggling his eyebrows at her. Mika had made his way up to Heather as soon as he saw her, and I heard someone say she had ended up asking him to the dance next weekend. Thank God. Maybe she’d leave me the hell alone now. Lisa was there as well, along with a girl I hadn’t seen before. Apparently, she was Lisa’s cousin from Portland and had come along for the game and was spending the weekend with Lisa. The way they both looked at me definitely gave me pause and gave my cock a reason to stand up and take notice.