“I can wait outside,” I said, my mouth dry and my gaze wandering down the hills and valleys of his torso. Blue veins ran down his swollen biceps, barely under his skin.
“Don’t be stupid,” Patrick said conversationally and stepped away from the door.
I stepped into his room. One bed was a mess of sheets and clothes, a backpack lying open in the middle, stuffed with approximately everything that had ever been made. Next to it, a cheap desk typical of dormitories was cluttered with pristine, unopened books with intact spines and a near-mythical absence of dogears. He’d gone into the year ambitiously, but it was yet to be realized.
Patrick walked into the small bathroom on the other side of the room. His deodorant created a cloud of pine and seaside scents that shot into the room like Cupid’s arrows, striking meeverywhere. Had the arrows been real, I would have walked out a hedgehog.
The bathroom door was slightly ajar, concealing Patrick but providing a direct view of a mirror. Patrick’s back was turned to it when he untied the towel from around his waist, and I knew—I knew—I had to look away. It was the only decent thing to do. Anything else would be gross overstepping of the trust he was placing in me. I was here to observe him more intimately than most people ever would. It had to be clinical, detached, and built on his trust that I wouldn’t abuse this privilege and place of power. But the towel swooshed away, and strong legs made for ice devilry he was known for were in my view, bare and smooth, spread apart and rising to a perfectly shaped ass several shades paler than the rest of his body. Patrick Callahan sunbathed in Speedos, and I didn’t know what to do with that information other than fight the creeping flush of heat it caused.
Then he looked over his shoulder into the mirror, where he undoubtedly found my reflection. Could he see how glassy my eyes were from seeing him naked? Did it please the attention seeker within him? He looked into my eyes in the mirror, and my heart stopped between one beat and the next. All of time stopped.
The door shut. I had been so absorbed in the intensity of his gaze that I never noticed him move. There. The show was over, folks, and I’d revealed myself as a peeping creep and a lousy researcher. Was a glimpse of a cream, smooth ass worth it? Hardly. But I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, which was awkward because Patrick would step out any minute, and Ireallyneeded to get my body under control.
I directed my thoughts to the fact that I was absolutely terrified of this project and lurking around the Saints all semester. It felt like dragging a cat with zoomies from a scratching post, but my attention ripped away from Patrick’snaked figure to the pit of despair that sat in the center of my being.
In a minute, Patrick was done. The door flew open, and he stormed around the room with a cheerful grin on his face and a gaze that jumped from one thing to another, never landing on my face. “We should probably get going,” he rambled. “The drills never start on time, but you should see some locker room time if you want to get a real sense of psychology and dynamics and whatnot. Not sure what happens later. Sometimes, we go out for drinks. It’ll be late enough to drink, right? Do you drink, anyway?”
I shrugged, guilt filling my chest like I was about to be sick. It rose so high I could taste it in the back of my throat. “Occasionally.”
“Right, the pink stuff,” Patrick said.
“The cleaning paste?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Patrick zipped up his backpack and faced me, his gaze lagging by a heartbeat before meeting my eyes. “Ready?”
“One more thing,” I said and dug through my backpack. “The smartwatch. If you don’t mind.”
“Nope. I signed up for this, didn’t I? Use me however you like.” He shot another grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He must have heard the words that had just left his lips. After the mirror incident, it was hard not to have wild and sweaty images fill my mind. My skull was going to shatter.
I turned the watch in my hand. “And it won’t bother you while you play?”
“Not at all,” he said.
I tapped the screen before fastening the watch to Patrick’s wrist and made sure everything was set to default. “This is going to record your heartbeat and measure the distance you cross, thespeed at which you do it, and add a timestamp to the dataset.” I pressed the watch to Patrick’s wrist and forced my fingers to be calm and quick about strapping it. Touching his skin was unavoidable. “I’m the only person with access to your data.”
“It’s safe with you,” Patrick said.
I wondered if this was subtle sarcasm. I said nothing. We’d already established I was too easily distracted from the ethics of it all. When the silence stretched too long, I tucked my hands into my pockets. “I’ll download the data at the end of every day, reset the watch, and hand it back the next day.”
“Not gonna track me in my sleep?” Patrick asked.
I forced a laugh. “I considered it, but it will have to be a self-assessment.”
He nodded, then gestured at the door with his head. “Let’s get going.”
So we did.
The rink was a large structure with plenty of supporting space inside where the players gathered and coaches had their offices. We went in through the back, walking down a well-lit corridor of large white tiles and white walls. Doors lined both sides of the hallway to the end, where the locker rooms awaited. One was for guest teams, Patrick explained, although I knew the architecture of a rink from my days in the skates. The bigger locker room belonged to the Saints, and it was full of muscled guys in various states of undress, setting my cheeks on fire as I stepped inside.
“Alright, everyone, a moment, please,” shouted Easton, their captain. The guys looked at me before turning to Easton. “This is Shane. He’s a sports psychology junior, and he’s doing a study. You’re gonna be seeing him a lot around here, so get used to it. He’s not here to observe any of you. Just Patrick.”
A laugh rippled through the room, but the joke escaped me.
“All you need to do is act as you normally would. Any attempts to mess with Patrick or Shane to skew the data will mean you’re picking up the tab at Lumière that night. Am I understood?”
