Beautiful Player

  “Definitely not.” His smile pulled up one corner of his mouth and he looked completely destructive. My heart and lady bits would not survive a night with this man.

  Good thing that’s not even an option, vagina. Stand down.

  We’d circled back around to the beginning of the trail, and Will leaned against a tree. “So why are you diving into the world of the living now?” He tilted his head as he turned the conversation back to me. “I know Jensen and your dad want you to have a more active social life, but come on. You’re a pretty girl, Ziggs. It can’t be that you haven’t had offers.”

  I bit my lip for a second, amused that of course Will would assume that, for me, this was about getting laid. The truth was . . . he wasn’t entirely wrong. And there was no judgment in his expression, no weird distance around such a personal topic.

  “It’s not that I haven’t dated. It’s that I haven’t dated well,” I said, remembering my most recent, completely bland encounter. “I know it might be hard to tell behind all this smooth charm but I’m not very good in those kinds of situations. Jensen’s told me stories. You managed to get through your doctorate with top honors and what sounds like a whole lot of fun. Here I am, in a lab with people who seem to consider social awkwardness a field of study. Not really that many jumping in the boat, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re young, Ziggs. Why are you worrying about this now?”

  “I’m not worried about it, but I’m twenty-four. I have functioning body parts and my mind tends to go to interesting places. I just want to . . . explore. You weren’t thinking about these things when you were my age?”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t stressing over it.”

  “Of course you weren’t. You’d lift an eyebrow and panties would hit the floor.”

  Will licked his lips, reaching to scratch the back of his neck. “You’re a trip.”

  “I’m a scientist, Will. If I’m going to do this I need to learn how men think, get inside their head.” I took a deep breath, watched him carefully before saying, “Teach me. You told my brother you’d help me, so do that.”

  “Pretty sure he didn’t mean Hey, show my kid sister the city, make sure she isn’t paying too much for rent, and, by the way, help her get laid.” His dark brows pulled together as something seemed to occur to him. “Are you asking me to set you up with a friend?”

  “No. God.” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or crawl into a hole and hide for the rest of forever. Despite his DEFCON 5 degree of hotness, what I needed was for him to help me bang the smirk off other men. Maybe then I’d be properly degeeked and socialized. “I want your help to learn . . .” I shrugged and scratched my hair beneath the hat. “How to date. Teach me the rules.”

  He blinked away, looking torn. “The ‘rules’? I don’t . . .” He shivered, letting his words fall away as he reached up to scratch his jaw. “I’m not sure I am qualified to help you meet guys.”

  “You went to Yale.”

  “Yeah, and? That was years ago, Ziggs. I don’t think they offered this in the course catalog.”

  “And you were in a band,” I continued, ignoring that last part.

  Finally, amusement lit up his eyes. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that I went to MIT and played D&D and Magic—”

  “Hello, I was a fucking D&D pro, Ziggs.”

  “My point,” I said, ignoring him, “is that Yale-attending, lacrosse-playing former bass players might have ideas about how to improve the dating pool options of bespectacled, nerdtastic geeks.”

  “Are you fucking with me right now?”

  Instead of answering, I crossed my arms over my chest and waited patiently. It was the same stance I’d adopted back when I was supposed to be rotating through several labs to help decide what type of research I wanted. But I didn’t want to do lab rotations for my entire first year of graduate school; I wanted to get started on my research with Liemacki, immediately. I’d stood outside his office after explaining why his work was perfectly positioned to move away from viral vaccine research into parasitology, and what I thought I could work on for my thesis. I’d been prepared to stand like that for hours, but after only five minutes he’d relented and, as the chair of the department, made an exception for me.

  Will looked off into the distance. I wasn’t sure if he was considering what I was saying, or deciding whether he should just start running and leave me wheezing in his snow-dust.

  Finally, he sighed. “Okay, well, rule one of having a broader social life is never call anyone except a cab before the sun is up.”

  “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  He studied me, eventually motioning to my outfit. “We’ll run. We’ll go out and do stuff.” He winced, waving vaguely at my body. “I don’t really think you need to do anything but . . . fuck, I don’t know. You’re wearing your brother’s baggy sweatshirt. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that’s pretty standard attire, even when you’re not jogging.” He shrugged. “Though it is kind of cute.”

  “I am not dressing like a hoochie.”

  “You don’t have to dress like a hoochie.” He straightened, messing up his hair before tucking it beneath his beanie again. “God. You’re a ballbuster. Do you know Chloe and Sara?”

  I shook my head. “Are those some girls you’re . . . not dating?”

  “Oh, hell no,” he said with a laugh. “They’re the women who have my best friends by the balls. I think they’d be good for you to meet. Swear to God you’ll all probably be best friends at the end of the night.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “So wait,” Max said, pulling out his chair to sit down. “Is this Jensen’s sister you shagged?”

  “No, that’s the other sister, Liv.” I sat across from the Brit and ignored both the amused grin on his face as well as the uncomfortable twist in my stomach. “And I didn’t shag her. We just hooked up a little. The youngest sister is Ziggy. She was only a kid that first time I went home with Jensen for Christmas.”

  “I still can’t believe he took you home for Christmas and you made out with his sister in the backyard. I’d kick your ass.” He reconsidered, scratching his chin. “Ah fuck that. I wouldn’t have given a shit.”

  I looked at Max, felt a small grin pull at my mouth. “Liv wasn’t there when I came back a few years later for the summer. I behaved myself the second time around.”

  All around us, glasses clinked and conversation carried on in a quiet murmur. Tuesday lunch at Le Bernardin had become a routine for our group in the past six months. Max and I were usually the last ones to the table, but apparently the others had been held up in a meeting.

  “I suspect you want an award for that,” Max said, studying his menu before closing it with a snap. Truthfully, I’m not sure why he even bothered to open it in the first place. He always got the caviar for his first course, and the monkfish for the main course. I’d recently surmised that Max kept all of his spontaneity for his life with Sara; with food and work, he was a quiet creature of habit.

  “You just forget what you were like before Sara,” I said. “Stop acting like you lived in a monastery.”

  He acknowledged this with a wink and his big, easy smile. “So tell me about this little sis.”

  “She’s the youngest of the five Bergstrom kids, and in grad school here at Columbia. Ziggy’s always been this ridiculous brain. Finished undergrad in three years, and now works in the Liemacki lab? The one who does the vaccine work?”

  Max shook his head and shrugged as if to say, The fuck are you talking about?

  I continued, “It’s a very high-profile operation over at the med school. Anyway, last weekend in Vegas when you were off chasing your pussy to the blackjack tables, Jensen texted to let me know he was coming to visit her. I guess he gave her a Come-to-Jesus about not living among the test tubes and beakers for the rest of her life.”

  The waiter came by to fill our water glasses, and we explained that we were waiting on a few more p
eople to join the table.

  Max looked back to me. “So you have plans to see her again, yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure we’ll go out and do something this weekend. I think we’ll run together again.”

  I didn’t miss the way his eyes widened. “Letting someone in your private little running headspace? That seems like it would be more intimate than sex to you, William.”

  I waved him off. “Whatever.”

  “So it was fun then? Catching up with the little sis and all?”

  It had been fun. It hadn’t been wild, or even anything all that special—we’d gone for a run, of all things. But I still felt a little shaken by how unexpected she had been. I’d gone in thinking there had to be a reason for her isolation, other than her long work hours. I’d expected she would be awkward, or hideous, or the poster child for inappropriate social behavior.

  But she’d been none of those things, and she definitely didn’t seem anything like someone’s “little sister.” She was naïve and a bit unfiltered at times, but really she was simply hardworking and had found herself trapped in a set of habits she didn’t enjoy anymore. I could relate.

  I’d first met the Bergstroms over Christmas, my sophomore year in college. I hadn’t been able to afford to fly home that year, and Jensen’s mother had such a fit at the idea of me staying alone in the dorms that she drove down from Boston two days before Christmas to pick me up and bring me home for the holidays. The family was as loving and loud as one would expect with five kids spaced almost exactly two years apart.

  True to form for that stage in my life, I’d thanked them by secretly fooling around with their oldest daughter in the shed out back.

  A few years later I’d interned for Johan, and lived at the Bergstrom house. Most of the other kids had moved out or stayed near college for the summer, so it was just me and Jensen, and the youngest daughter, Ziggy. Theirs had come to feel like a second home to me. Still, even though I’d lived near her for three months, and had seen her a few years ago at Jensen’s wedding, when she’d called yesterday, it had been hard to even remember her face.

  But when I saw her at the park, more memories than I realized I’d had came flooding in. Ziggy at twelve, her freckled nose hidden behind books. She’d offer only the occasional shy smile across the dinner table, but otherwise avoided contact with me. I’d been nineteen and nearly oblivious anyway. And I remembered Ziggy at sixteen, all legs and elbows, her tangled hair cascading down her back. She spent her afternoons wearing cutoff shorts and tank tops, reading on a blanket in the backyard while I worked with her father. I’d checked her out, like I’d checked out every female at the time, as if I were scanning and cataloging body parts. The girl was curvy, but quiet, and obviously naïve enough about the art of flirting to earn my scornful disinterest. At the time, my life had been full of curiosity and kink, younger and older women who were willing to try anything once.

  But this afternoon, it felt as though a bomb had gone off in my head. Seeing her face was—strangely—like being home again, but also like meeting a beautiful girl for the first time. She didn’t look anything like Liv or Jensen, who were towheaded and gangly, almost carbon copies of one another. Ziggy looked like her father, for better or worse. She had the paradoxical combination of her father’s long limbs and her mother’s curves. She inherited Johan’s gray eyes, light brown hair, and freckles, but her mother’s wide-open smile.

  I’d hesitated when she stepped forward, wrapped her arms around my neck, and squeezed. It was a comfortable hug, bordering on intimate. Other than Chloe and Sara, I didn’t have a lot of females in my life who were strictly friends. When I hugged a woman like that—close and pressing—there was generally some sexual element. Ziggy had always been the kid sister, but there in my arms it fully registered that she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was a twenty-something woman with her warm hands on my neck and her body flush to mine. She smelled like shampoo and coffee. She smelled like a woman, and beneath the bulk of her sweatshirt and pathetically thin jacket, I could feel the shape of her breasts press against my chest. When she stepped back and looked me over, I’d immediately liked her: she hadn’t dressed up, hadn’t put on makeup or expensive workout gear. She wore her brother’s Yale sweatshirt, black pants that were too short, and shoes that definitely looked like they’d seen better days. She wasn’t trying to impress me; she just wanted to see me.

  She’s so sheltered, man, Jensen had said when he’d called a little over a week ago. I feel like I let her down by not anticipating she had Dad’s work-obsession genes. We’re going down to visit her. I don’t even know what to do.

  I blinked back into awareness when Sara and Bennett approached the table. Max stood to greet them, and I looked away as he leaned over to kiss Sara just beneath her ear, whispering, “You look beautiful, Petal.”

  “Are we waiting on Chloe?” I asked once everyone was seated.

  Bennett spoke from behind his menu. “She’s in Boston until Friday.”

  “Well, thank fuck,” Max said. “Because I’m starving and that woman takes forever to decide what she wants.”

  Bennett laughed quietly, sliding his menu back on the table.

  I was relieved, too, not because I was hungry but because I was fine occasionally having a break from the role of fifth wheel. My four coupled-up friends were two steps away from Smug and had long ago skipped past Overly-Invested-in-Will’s-Dating-Life. They were convinced that I was two breaths away from having my heart ripped out by the woman of my dreams and were eager for the show.

  And, only increasing this obsession, upon returning from Vegas last week, I’d made the mistake of casually mentioning that I was feeling detached from my two regular lovers, Kitty and Kristy. Both women were happy to meet regularly for no-strings fucking and didn’t seem to mind the existence of the other—or the occasional new fling I might have—but lately I felt like I was just going through the motions:

  Undress,

  touch,

  fuck,

  orgasm,

  (maybe some pillow talk),

  a kiss good night,

  and then I was gone, or they were.

  Had it all become too easy? Or was I finally getting tired of just sex—sex?!

  And why the fuck was I thinking about all of this again, now? I sat up, scrubbed my face with my hands. Nothing in my life had changed in a day. I’d had a nice morning with Ziggy, that’s it. That was it. The fact that she was disarmingly genuine and funny and surprisingly pretty shouldn’t have thrown me so dramatically.

  “So what were we discussing?” Bennett asked, thanking the waiter when he slid a gimlet on the table in front of him.

  “We were discussing Will’s reunion with an old friend this morning,” Max said, and then added in a stage whisper, “a lady friend.”

  Sara laughed. “Will saw a woman this morning? Why is this news?”

  Bennett held up his hand. “Wait, isn’t tonight Kitty? And you had another date this morning?” He sipped his gimlet, eyeing me.

  In fact, Kitty was the exact reason I’d suggested to Hanna that we meet up this morning instead of tonight: Kitty was my late meeting. But the more I thought about it, the idea of spending my usual Tuesday with her seemed less and less appealing.

  I groaned, and both Max and Sara burst out laughing. “Is it weird that we all know Will’s Weekly Hookup Calendar?” Sara asked.

  Max looked over at me, eyes smiling. “You’re thinking of canceling plans with Kitty, aren’t you? Think you’re going to pay for that one?”

  “Probably,” I admitted. Kitty and I dated a few years back, and it ended amiably when it came out that she wanted more than I did. But when we met up again in a bar a few months ago, she said this time she just wanted to have fun. Of course I’d been game. She was gorgeous, and willing to do almost anything I wanted. She insisted our just-sex arrangement was fine, fine, fine. The thing was, I think we both knew she was lying: every time I had to ask for a rain check, she would become insec
ure and needy the next time we were together.

  Kristy was almost the complete opposite. She was more contained, had a fetish for being gagged that I didn’t share, but wasn’t against indulging, and rarely stayed beyond the moment of our shared release.

  “If you’re interested in this new girl, you should probably end it with Kitty,” Sara said.

  “You guys,” I protested, digging into my salad. “There isn’t a thing with Ziggy. We went running.”

  “So why are we still talking about it?” Bennett asked with a laugh.

  I nodded. “Exactly.”

  But I knew we were talking about it because I was tense, and when I was tense I wore it like a neon sign. My brows pulled together, my eyes got darker, and my words came out clipped. I turned into an asshole.

  And Max loved it.

  “Oh, we’re talking about it,” the Brit said, “because it’s getting William riled up, and that’s my favorite fucking thing. It’s also very bloody interesting how pensive he’s being today after a morning with this little sis. Will doesn’t usually look like he’s thinking so hard it hurts.”

  “She’s Jensen’s youngest sister,” I explained to Sara and Bennett.

  “He snogged the older sister when they were teens,” Max added helpfully, overplaying his accent for dramatic effect.

  “You are such a shit-stirrer,” I said, laughing. Liv was a short blip; I could barely remember much about what had happened other than some heated kissing and then my easy evasion when I’d returned to New Haven. Compared to some of my relationships at the time, what happened with Liv barely registered on the sex meter.

  Our entrées came and we ate in silence for a little bit. My mind started to wander. Partway through our run, I’d given up and just outright stared at Ziggy. I stared at her cheeks, at her lips, at the soft hair that had fallen free from her messy bun and lay straight against the soft skin of her neck. I’d always been open about my appreciation for women, but I wasn’t attracted to every woman I saw. So what was it about this one? She was pretty but definitely not the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She was seven years younger than I was, green as an apple, and barely came up from her work to breathe. What could she possibly offer me that I couldn’t find somewhere else?