He cracked a smile again, laughing a little. “It’s good, alright. But it gets boring, too. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
I swallowed the growing knot in my throat and looked into his eyes. “Why did you invite me?”
“Easton, Jace, Elio, and Jaxon are going out for drinks,” Patrick said. “I’d hate to be the only single. Wanna come?”
A date?I thought. All this circling around and distant taunting to invite me to a triple date? “I don’t…”
“…think it’s appropriate?” Patrick asked, and his voice only had a slight edge to it. Maybe it wasn’t even there and real.Are you seriously going to talk about what’s appropriate? You? After undressing me with your virgin little gaze and dropping your pants to test me?The words may have been from my own conscience, but they were just as true as if he’d spoken them aloud. “Why not? It’s just drinks. Pretend you’re shadowing me.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Patrick laughed out loud and crossed the room in a hop and two long paces. He slapped my shoulder way too fondly, his fingers lingering too close to my neck for a moment too long. “You look like I just sentenced you to hanging.”
“I’m not good in groups,” I admitted. “But I should observe you.”
“We can’t miss a chance to observe,” Patrick teased, his hand on my shoulder, shaking me a little.
I shot him a look that was a plea for mercy, but he only threw his arm around my shoulders while telling me the details of this get-together.
I held my breath for a moment or two, then nodded. “Sure, alright.” He had plenty of people to choose from. He could have invited any teammate, and they would have felt honored. He could have picked up a girl at a bar, and she would have been hearing the wedding bells.
I slipped from under his arm. The unpredictable shift from cold to warm jarred me enough that I didn’t want to be in this spot at all. I’d rather he picked one, even the cold one, and stuck with it. Anything else was way too confusing.
For no discernible reason under the sun, Patrick’s fingers dug into my rib cage, stabbing a yelp out of me. He laughed. “Fuck, sorry. I didn’t think you’d scream.”
“Er, that’s fine,” I said tightly. “Do you have drills today?”
“You know it,” Patrick said.
I nodded. “I’ll see you then.”
“Oh.” He blanked for a moment, then shrugged like it was nothing. “Sure. Later.”
“Yeah,” I said, a frown creasing my brow as I walked out of his room. What the hell did he want? My heart raced as I returned to my room. Jokes, teasing, random touches, an arm around my shoulders, and so much grinning was unlike him. I didn’t know what to do with this attention. Especially not after he had practically run away from me.
I shut the door and walked over to the desk, pulling the drawer open and staring at the undisturbed smartwatch lying on top of notebooks. I snatched it grudgingly and transferred the data to my laptop.
There it was…
My mouth went dry, lips parting, as I stared at the screen, cross-matching the timestamps. A steady pulse as he ran on the treadmill, increasing within the reasonable range the faster he went. I was certain that my heart had been pounding far quicker at that level of straining, but that was irrelevant. It was much later, just two minutes after I had noted us descending down to the locker room, that Patrick’s heart exploded into a drum solo.
His pulse was off the charts then, calming down momentarily and rebounding with fury. And it went on and on, long after I had undressed and left him by the lockers. The graph went onwith panic-like inputs to the very moment Patrick had taken the watch off.
Maybe he had been angry that I had tried to be so provocative, but I didn’t think that was it. Why would he then invite me today to come over? And for a meeting that could have been a text message? Yeah, I wasn’t buying it.
If it annoyed him, fine, but Patrick’s body responded in a way that was too clear to keep ignoring.
I stared at the screen, letting this realization sink in. I was attractive. To one unlikely, impossible person’s heart, I didthis. And I knew it now. I knew it because I was dishonest and in a massive breach of trust.
What a goddamn victory for me.
EIGHT
PATRICK
I steppedout of a cloud of deodorant in the bathroom and walked around my half of the room, picking and choosing. I tossed a few pairs of underwear onto the bed, debating whether I felt like wearing something a little more flashy. You never knew when a hot girl could drop her jacket, and you had to bend down to pick it up, impressing her in the process. I ultimately chose a pair of simple black cotton ones with a well-known brand’s name embedded along the waistband. For my pants, I went with classy dark blue and paired them with a shirt, the lightest shade of minty green, with a stiff collar. Leaving a couple of buttons undone made me look like a gift on a silver platter, sent straight from Heaven.
My hair was just the right kind of messy that it complemented an uninterested half scowl that people found irresistible.
