No arguing with that.
Stella stands with her hands on her hips, and even sweaty, she looks pretty. How do girls always do that?
“Let me guard Keyon,” she says.
“Why? No offense, gorgeous, but he’s a lot faster than you.”
“He’s faster than Ryan, too. And like I said . . . only one person on this team has boobs.”
“Absolutely not,” Ryan cuts in.
Stella rolls her eyes. “Come on. He’s a freshman. I’ll do a little flirting. Maybe a little pouting about how hard the game is. He’ll be an easy mark.”
Ryan glares. “You don’t have to throw yourself at him for some stupid game.”
She ignores him and looks at me. “What do you say, Captain?”
Ryan crosses his arms over his chest and directs his angry stare at me. I’m not sure whether his pissy mood is just because he’s got a thing for Stella and doesn’t want her flirting with another guy, or if his protectiveness has more to do with what happened at that frat party a few weeks ago. I don’t know the specifics. Stella certainly doesn’t talk about what happened, and I know Silas and Dylan are the ones who found her passed out in a room after she was left there by one of the guys on the team. Silas fought with the guy, Jake Carter, and I got to the scene around the same time as the cops. Carter has since been kicked off the team, but he hasn’t been arrested, and he’s still enrolled in classes. I’ve heard a lot of speculation about what happened in that room and afterward and what will happen next from people on campus, but no one here has said a word about it. Not to me anyway.
No one ever comes to me for serious conversations. I shake off the slight sting that thought causes. It’s not like I want serious. I spend most of my time making it abundantly clear to everyone that my name doesn’t even belong in the same sentence as that word.
But for a moment I wish that people trusted me a little more. Then I’d know if letting Stella flirt with Keyon is a bad idea. From the way everyone else tiptoes around her, I assume that some serious shit went down. But at the same time . . . Stella acts like nothing has changed. I might not be trusted with everyone’s secrets, but I do know Stella well enough to know that she doesn’t take well to other people telling her what to do. If she wants to guard Keyon, who am I to tell her no? Silas and Carson are staying silent on the matter, so I’m guessing they don’t want to get in the middle of it either.
I meet her determined gaze and nod. Ryan curses, and I say, “It can’t hurt to try. If it doesn’t work or you want to switch back, Stella, all you have to do is say so.”
She smiles sweetly in return and says, “You guys can thank me now.”
A few minutes of flirting later, and suddenly Keyon decides he’d rather guard Stella than Ryan. While Nell is scrambling trying to figure out who she’s supposed to be on, Ryan scores our first point of the game.
Next time around, Brookes tries to help her pick up the slack, but he can’t help her with Ryan and successfully cover me at the same time. Carson puts his flirting on pause long enough to zip one high and long in my direction. I sprint under it, crossing into the end zone. Brookes is a few feet back, and I make a diving catch to put us within one.
Brookes calls a time-out, and while they talk I fold Stella into a sweaty hug.
“Have I told you how awesome you are?”
She shrugs. “I can always stand to hear it a few more times a day.”
“Well, you’re awesome.” Her smile looks easy, genuine. Until, that is, I spend a few seconds too long staring and assessing it, then her posture goes rigid, and I step back and avert my eyes before I do something to piss her off.
When we come out of the huddle, I’m too confident.
A habit of mine.
Dallas and Dylan toss the disc back and forth a few times, and I groan when Carson and Silas make no effort to intercept or knock down the pass. I’m pretty sure it’s a distraction, so I stick tight to Brookes, and I notice Ryan edging closer to me, too. He must have the same idea.
Next thing I know, Dallas has sent the disc soaring over our heads, and when I look, Nell is standing alone, completely unguarded in the end zone.
She’s holding her hands out and staring at the disc like it’s a missile instead of a piece of plastic. I take off toward her in case she misses it. I want to grab the disc and get it back into play as soon as I can.
As I sprint, the disc slips right through her grasping fingers and nails her in the chest. She gasps; no doubt the air was knocked out of her. The disc ricochets, and if I dive I might can manage to catch it, but I can’t quite drag my eyes away from her chest. Her tits are practically spilling out of the top of the tiny tank she’s wearing. I’d had a front-row seat earlier with my arm around her. Now she’s clutching at herself in pain, but all I can see are her smooth, delicate arms pressed against the curve of her breasts, pushing them even higher.
I should look away before something very unfortunate occurs in my baggy gym shorts, but now I’m picturing that shy girl loosening up beneath me. It’s too easy to take those wide eyes she gave me when I draped my arm around her and imagine them in the low light of my room, her head on my pillow and her legs spread wide.
She makes a soft whimpering noise, and now the rest of my senses join the fantasy, and I think of how she would feel, taste, sound. I wonder just how low I could get her inhibitions. Enough to say my name? To scream it?
“Damn,” I groan, and try to clear my head. “You all right?”
She looks up at me, still clutching at her chest, and pink spreads over her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything.
“Okay,” I say. “There is honestly no way to ask this without sounding like a pig, so I’m not even gonna try. And really, in these situations, I find you might as well go balls to the wall and throw it all out there. So . . . at the risk of getting slapped, how are your tits?” I think about offering to check them out for her, but I figure that’s probably taking it a step too far.
Her mouth presses into a firm straight line. “It wasn’t my . . .” She trails off.
“Tits,” I finish for her. “You have them. You can say the word.”
“It hit me in the collarbone, not the breasts.”
Breasts. I raise an eyebrow, and she rolls her eyes.
I take a step forward and say, “Let me see.”
“Absolutely not.”
I take another step, until my shadow falls over her, and take hold of one wrist. “As you pointed out, you weren’t hit in the breasts. Just let me have a look. With the right strength and good wind, a disc can go as fast as twenty miles per hour. I’ve seen them break fingers and noses.”
“Dude, Torres!” Silas shouts behind me. “What are you waiting for? Grab the disc and let’s go!”
Hesitating, I ask, “You wanna take a break? Catch your breath and let me see it?”
She shakes her head stubbornly. “I don’t want the game to stop because of me.”
I turn around and shout back to Silas, “Nell and I are taking a break. You guys keep playing with eight.”
Taking her elbow, I pull her off the field toward the picnic tables. She protests, but only mildly, and she still has one hand pressed just above her cleavage. And looking down at her, I can see moisture clinging to long lashes at the corner of her eye.
I sit her down so that her back is to the field, and go down on one knee in front of her. She’s so small that it puts us eye level, and I say softly, “Move your hand.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “Just give me a couple seconds, and I’ll be fine.”
You don’t grow up with five sisters without learning that sometimes with women, words are pointless. I reach out and move her hand myself, pulling it away from her chest. The skin just below her collarbone is an angry red, and the disc scraped through a couple layers of skin. Not enough to bleed, but I bet it hurts. “Tell me how it feels. Still a sharp pain? Or more of an ache?”
Her eyebrows slant over her pretty brown eyes. “The pain
was sharp and steady for approximately thirty seconds, but now it kind of stings.”
“Like a slap,” I say.
She gives a short laugh, her shoulders bouncing once before she stills in what I’m guessing is pain. “I can’t say I know what that feels like. Though I’m not surprised it’s a sensation you’re familiar with.”
I shrug. “I don’t believe in censoring my thoughts. Some people just aren’t as fond of freedom of speech as I am.”
She shakes her head, and I think she’s trying not to smile.
I reach up my left hand and as lightly as possible run my thumb over the red mark. She sucks in a breath and I ask, “Hurts to the touch?”
“Um.” She swallows and blinks a few times.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
I brush my thumb over her skin again, even lighter this time, wondering if the Frisbee could have hit hard enough to crack something. There’s already a purpling around the center that tells me it’s going to bruise pretty good.
She swallows, and my eyes are drawn to the graceful slope of her neck, up to a small chin and full lips. And it hits me then . . . why this girl caught my eye from the moment she walked toward our group, why I can’t drag my eyes or my hand away from her now.
She reminds me of Lina.
And the memory of the only girl I’ve ever loved packs a punch so hard that it’s my turn to raise a hand to my chest to soothe an all-too-familiar ache.
Chapter 4
Nell’s To-Do List
• Check off Normal College Thing #2: Make New Friends (in a way that doesn’t require physical activity).
• But still maybe get that sports bra just in case.
Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.
He shakes his head, but doesn’t stop staring at me.
“Uh. Sorry. You just reminded me of someone for a second there.”
I wait for him to move away, but he doesn’t. His gaze is still fixed on my mouth, and it’s strange how just that look provokes a physical reaction in my body, one sensation compounding into the next until my skin feels too tight and my blood too warm.
I wish I could pause this moment, unroll time so that I can examine his expression and his body language, and so I can catalog my own body’s abnormal response. But time never stops for my overactive brain, certainly not when his fingers slip up from my collarbone, over my frantic pulse, and grip my chin. The seconds disintegrate into impossibly shorter intervals, and his thumb treks upward to catch at my bottom lip.
I break away then, gasping and holding my chest like I’ve just been pelted by another Frisbee, by a dozen of them.
This . . . the way my heart is beating unreasonably fast . . . it doesn’t make any sense. And I don’t like when things don’t make sense.
It’s not like I’ve never seen an attractive guy before. I’ve even gone on dates with a few. But I’ve never had this kind of physical reaction to anyone. It’s unsettling not to understand why.
I put several feet between us and glare at him. “I told you to stay away from me.”
He hums and frowns and says, “No. No, I distinctly recall you saying you were supposed to stay away from me.”
“Same thing.”
“Oh, gorgeous. If what you’re supposed to do and what you actually do are always the same thing, I think I need to stage an intervention.”
A tide of thoughts rolls in, and I try to keep them at bay, but there’s no stopping it.
Normal college thing #1:
Hook up with a jock.
When I’d written those words, they’d been innocuous. An item on a list. It had been solely about exploration, about making sure I was being educated in every way, not just in the classroom. But even then, the words had been somewhere between a joke and a proposition so outlandish that I felt relatively confident I’d never be in a position to complete it. But now there’s a sensuality to those thoughts that didn’t exist before.
Before I’d stood face-to-face with just such a jock.
Before he’d touched me.
Before I’d wanted to touch him back.
It doesn’t feel like a joke anymore.
On the heels of that sensuality, anxiety swoops in, filling all the leftover nooks and crannies. Because, though I’m familiar with the term “hook up” in all its slang meanings, I’m not familiar with it in the physical sense.
I’ve never had sex.
I’ve always meant to. It’s something that I’ve tended to view rather clinically, a normal biological occurrence that shouldn’t intimidate me. But there was never anyone with whom I’d felt enough compatibility, and I’d always felt that if you’re going to do something, you should do it right. When I started making that list last week, it only made sense that I should check off that particular event while I did the rest of my experimenting.
“Clinical” is not the word that comes to mind when I look at Mateo Torres.
“I was joking about the intervention,” he says.
“I know,” I snap, defensive.
“Well, you looked a little terrified, so I thought I should put you at ease.”
“I’m not terrified.”
It’s silly to be scared of him. He tilts his head to the side, and before I can react, he’s eliminated all the precious space I put between us.
“You don’t have to disagree with everything I say.”
I step back a foot, but he follows.
“I’m not.” He only grins, and why is my pulse increasing like that? “I’m not disagreeing with you only to disagree. You’re just wrong.”
He laughs.
“And I bet you love being right.”
I frown, unsure what that has to do with him refusing to give me any personal space. I move again, and when he tries to follow, I press a hand into his chest, holding him back.
“Well, I am right a majority of the time, which is why I feel confident in my initial assessment of you.”
He leans into me, and I can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin shirt that separates us. My hand is just over his heart, and its steady, strong thrum somehow feels like a chisel, chipping away at my defenses through that simple, innocent touch. I pull my hand away quickly, and he takes it as an opportunity to move even closer. He grins, and I can say positively that I have never met a man this confident. And my family is Italian, so that’s saying something.
“And what was your initial assessment?” he asks.
“That you are only concerned with yourself. With how you look. How people see you. And I am the complete opposite. I am concerned with facts. With ideas. With knowledge. I want to be the puppet master, while you are content to be the puppet that doesn’t realize he’s letting other people pull his strings.”
A muscle in his cheek spasms. His eyes widen in surprise, maybe even alarm. Then his jaw clenches, settling his whole expression into stone. But even that lasts only a moment before the tension leaves him, and he pins me with a lazy half smile.
“I do like a girl who’s feisty.”
He’s baiting me. Or more likely deflecting. And I’m not sure if I want to allow it so that this conversation can be over, and I can get some much-needed space. Or . . . if I want to call his bluff, peel back another layer, and take a longer look at what he’s hiding.
Or if I want to examine exactly what he means by “like.”
I don’t get a chance to make a decision before both of us are distracted by a commotion behind us.
My team has just scored, but Mateo’s team doesn’t seem to be paying the slightest attention. The guy with blond, unruly hair, Ryan, is standing nose to nose with Keyon on my team. I can’t hear what’s being said, but the tension is plain as day in their body language. And though I can’t hear the guys, I can easily hear what Stella is yelling at Ryan’s back.
“Jesus, Ryan. Would you chill out? It was nothing!”
When that doesn’t work, she takes hold of his arm and tries to pull him away. He doesn’t budge. Until she screa
ms, “You’re not my fucking boyfriend, okay? So BACK OFF!” Ryan stumbles back then, like her pull on his arm suddenly doubled in strength. He faces her, all tensed up, and she continues, “And I am not a porcelain doll. I don’t break easily, and I sure as hell will not be treated as if I already have.”
She turns around and storms off, and after a few seconds, Dallas, the redhead, jogs after her. Ryan stares off blankly, clenching and unclenching his hands as if she just barely slipped from his grasp and he hasn’t quite figured out how it happened. His expression is a mix of anxiety and alarm and pain, and for a moment it reminds me of the look on Torres’s face that he’d hidden so quickly after I accused him of being a puppet.
Sometimes I can be too brash in my observations. I don’t always think ahead to the emotions that could follow, and my heart does something akin to a shiver when I think of how I would feel if someone called me out on my own insecurities.
What if someone I barely knew looked into my eyes and said the very thing that I’d thought in my most unguarded moments, the thing that scares me most? What if someone could tell that the reason I concentrate so much on details and data is that they’re the only things that keep me from feeling inferior? I disregard emotions because they don’t come easily to me, because when other people talk about love or happiness, I feel only a cloying sense of confusion and fear that I’m not capable of those things. Not that I don’t experience happiness or love my family, but those are nurtured emotions that have grown slowly and steadily over time, and they exist at comfortable levels. But deeper than that? The kind of happiness that fills a person up? Or love that can overwhelm a person and rearrange the very essence of who they are? I don’t believe I have that kind of thing in me. It’s just not in my nature.
Which is why focusing on my career has always made the most sense. That’s something I understand. Something I’m good at.
But now even that feels off-kilter.
I turn then, intending to apologize, to admit that I’d judged him too harshly, but Torres is no longer behind me. I whip around and see that he’s slipped around the other side of the picnic table and is heading back to the field, where what’s left of his friends are gathered together talking.