by Cindi Madsen
Finally the door swung open again. “Here’s the thing. I’ve had a hard day, and I just want to kick back, relax, and watch a show I’ve been looking forward to for longer than I care to say. So you can come in if, A, you don’t mock what I’m watching, and B, you pay for the pizza.” Whitney crossed her arms and then flinched, like the movement had hurt her. “Those are my terms.”
“I’m fine with B, but you better add another pizza to whatever you ordered. And as for the show, I’ll try my best.” If I had my way, we wouldn’t be watching anything for long anyway. I’d gone slow and bided my time, but I’d thought about kissing her a lot the past few days, and it was time to make a move, before I actually ended up in the “just a friend” penalty box. Once you got put there, there was no two- or five-minute penalties. No, get used to being encased in glass and watching everyone else play, because you were stuck.
Not that I had a lot of experience with that, because I didn’t often fall into the friend category with girls—not since high school—but I’d seen it happen plenty.
Now that I was inside, I noticed that several strands of Whitney’s hair had fallen from her bun. The knot was looser and messier than usual, too, giving her a softer, more laidback appearance, even if she looked a little tired.
The couch had been cleared of the papers, but Whitney’s gaze kept darting around, like she’d hidden a body and was sure I’d find it. Then she reached up and rubbed at her neck.
I lightly placed my hands on her shoulders. “You seem stressed.” I thought about spinning her around and massaging the tension out of her muscles, but it seemed like a creeper move, at least without first getting permission. “You know, I could help you work that out.”
Her muscles tightened even more, and I realized that for once I’d made it sound like an innuendo without trying. “Not that, dirty,” I said, giving her a gentle squeeze. “I meant massaging out the tension in your neck and shoulders—my other go-to is slamming into guys on the ice, but I’m not sure you’d find it as relaxing as I do.”
Of course, now all I could think about was sex and her soft skin under mine—it would be a killer way to relieve stress.
“I’m fine,” she said, but then she twisted her neck one way, and a loud pop sounded.
I gave her a look to let her know I was on to her, but she ignored it and grabbed her phone. “I better add that pizza to my order. Any requests?”
I asked for a large supreme, she made the call, and then we settled onto the couch.
“What is this, anyway?” I asked, pointing my chin toward the TV screen.
“It’s this documentary about neglected and abused dogs. They’re placed in a prison where inmates care for them, and it works as rehab for both the dog and the inmate.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
“That guy right there…” She gestured to the screen as a man with a baseball cap came on, talking to the camera as he bent down to pet a black Lab. “He goes around rescuing the abused and neglected dogs. I’ve only been watching this for, like, ten minutes, and I’m already sort of in love with him.”
“So the secret to winning your heart is rescuing a dog?”
She slowly glanced at me, a hint of mistrust in her eye. “He’s rescued over a thousand, actually.” The admiration was clear in her tone, a challenge layered underneath.
“Well, that does give me quite the goal to aspire to.” For some reason the sentence I’d thrown out as more of a joke boomeranged right back and hit me in the chest. When I’d first come to college, all shiny-eyed about what I could do with an education, my goal had to been to save kids from bad situations.
Now that goal seemed like it might as well be landing on Mars for how close I’d ever be to achieving it. Over the next half hour, I found myself identifying with dogs—and inmates. This documentary was fucking with my head.
Whitney ate up every second, too, concern and admiration flashing across her face in intervals. She was the do-gooder type, and I could tell she’d actually do something about it, not let one hard class hold her back. I had no doubt she was smart enough to get through all of her classes, though.
The pizza showed up, and since Whitney was trying to answer the door and still see the TV, I gently nudged her back to the couch and took care of it. I’d nearly attempted a move twice, but she was so into the documentary, I figured it could wait.
Over the next half hour, I ate my way through my entire pizza, as well as the last slice of hers—the amount she’d put down herself was pretty impressive, actually.
The documentary started to wrap up all the story lines, and suddenly Whitney said, “Okay, now you need to not look at me.” Her voice squeaked at the end, and I turned my face toward her. She reached up and covered my eyes with her hands. “I said don’t look!”
“Okay, okay.”
After I faced forward again, she dropped her hands. A few seconds later, I shot her a sideways glance, trying to be subtle about it. Onscreen the cornrowed prisoner was crying about all the ways the dog had saved him, and Whitney was crying along with him.
Since I’d been relating too much to the unwanted dogs as it was, I might’ve experienced the tiniest pang myself at seeing how everything had worked out for the dog and the prisoner.
Whitney reached up and wiped away a tear, then her hand dropped back to her lap, only a few inches away.
I stretched out a finger and ran it down the back of her hand. I waited for her to yell at me about looking at her again, but instead I was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath. So I trailed my finger across the top of her knuckles and then folded her little hand into mine.
A slight twist of her wrist and our palms met. Something tugged in my chest—a sensation so foreign to me that I couldn’t quite place it. But I knew that I wanted to feel it a lot more.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Whitney
I’d tried so hard to hold back my tears, but when you see a guy in prison crying over the dog he’d rehabilitated… You’d have to have a heart made out of stone to not feel something!
Hudson wasn’t crying, but I’d like to think the way his forehead had creased here and there during the documentary, and the hard swallow at the end, meant he’d felt something, too.
Speaking of feeling things, I couldn’t deny that my nerve endings were firing on all cylinders. Tiny zips of heat darted out from our joined hands and traveled up my arm before settling in my chest.
Once I trusted my voice, I said, “Now you know my nerdy secret. I love documentaries.”
“I can’t really comment on the nerdiness, can I? Because there were conditions against mocking it, and I’m afraid of what you’ll do to me if I cross you.” The teasing tone made it clear how little I scared him.
Too bad I couldn’t exactly say the same about him. He scared me in ways I couldn’t understand, even as I told myself I was controlling this situation by making him part of a study. That I was…
He slipped his fingers between mine, tightening his grip on my hand, and my heart relocated to my throat. Control the situation. Do…something.
I licked my lips. “Everyone’s got at least one nerdy thing about them,” I said, echoing what Lyla had told me. “What’s yours?”
I waited for the denial, or the smirk accompanied by a flirty “Don’t you want to know,” but he said, “Dinosaurs. I know a ridiculous amount about dinosaurs.”
“Really?” I asked, and he nodded, a boyish grin playing on his lips.
“Tell me more.”
“What’s there to tell?” He shrugged a shoulder. “Do you want to know the fastest dinosaur—Ornithomimids. Or that the biggest—well, the one with the most convincing evidence of being the biggest—is the Argeninosaurus?”
A lightness entered my chest, the floaty sensation making it impossible not to be sucked further into Hudson’s magnetic pull. “I did want to know that. So, when did you get hooked on dinosaurs?”
“For Christmas one year, a lady I knew gave me a hu
ge book on them—I was about six or seven. They were big and tough, and I read that book over and over, until I had it memorized. After that, any money I had went to collecting dinosaur books and figurines.”
“Aw, that’s so cute.”
His dark eyebrows drew low over his eyes. “It’s not cute—dinosaurs are not cute. If we were at my place, I’d show you how scary my dinosaurs are—there are sharp teeth involved.”
“Wait,” I said, twisting so I could see his face better but also keep holding his hand. “You’re saying you have dinosaur figurines in your room right now?”
“It’s not like… I didn’t… There’s just one or two on my desk. They’re badass.”
I bit back a smile and nodded. “Got it.”
He ran his hand along his jaw and exhaled. “I can’t believe I admitted that—you’re going to torture me with that information now, aren’t you?”
“It’ll probably come up in every interview.”
He turned his head, his nose coming dangerously close to my cheek. His warm breath skated over my neck and sent a pleasant chill tumbling down my spine. “You smell really good.”
My heart thumped, hard and fast. I knew I should move away—stand up and end this night. A little over an hour ago I’d had my notes out, and I’d been cursing athletes and their superiority complexes. Now here I was mere inches from one I knew had an ego the size of Texas, and I wanted to curl up next to him, talk about documentaries and dinosaurs, and just forget the rest of the world existed for a little while.
Being blind to the obvious is what screwed you over before, my annoying conscience whispered. We’re talking three guys in a row.
This wasn’t Connect Four, stack them all together and you win. This was four in a row, you end up crying and feeling like crap, and totally losing respect for yourself.
Not to mention, as a player and an athlete with special perks, Hudson was the enemy on two fronts.
Reluctantly I straightened, putting space between us. I flinched when that stupid muscle in my neck caught again, but pushed through the pain. “Well, I have an early morning tomorrow, so…”
He grabbed my arm, just above the elbow. “Whitney.”
I looked back at him, wanting the next words he said to justify the way my heart skipped a beat, while hoping they didn’t, because I couldn’t develop feelings for Hudson Decker.
“Sorry I crashed your night, but I really needed this.”
A line? Truth? I didn’t know anymore. He seemed genuine, but that was coming from someone missing playdar. Besides, all we’d done was watch a documentary, something most people considered boring, and I couldn’t imagine it’d truly been the highlight of his week.
“Now, let me…” He pressed his lips into a line. “How to say this without you getting the wrong idea?”
I tensed.
“Let me do something nice for you,” he said. “If it doesn’t help, I’ll leave it alone.”
When I continued to stare, he laughed. “It’s not going to be scary, I promise. I know you said you’re fine, but I can tell by the way you’re holding your neck and shoulders that you’re not.”
He grabbed one of the pillows from the couch and dropped it on the floor. Then he guided me to sit on it and pulled me back against the bottom of the couch, his legs on either side of me.
He gripped my shoulders and dug his thumbs into the muscles leading to my neck. I nearly groaned, and I was sure it would’ve come out sounding completely sexual and then I would’ve had to die of embarrassment, but it might be worth it anyway.
He started to knead the muscles, each circle relieving the tension that had seized my body sometime in the middle of the night and had followed me around all day, only getting worse with each passing minute. “What’s got you so stressed? Talking to too many angry girls with boy haircuts?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, letting my head drop to the right when he nudged it in that direction.
“That day at the library, the same day we ended up playing pool.”
“That wasn’t a boy haircut—it’s called a pixie cut. And she wasn’t angry, she was passionate.”
Skepticism filled the eyebrow he arched. “If she had bangs, maybe,” Hudson said, “But that was crazy short.”
I tried to frown at him, but it wasn’t exactly possible at this angle. “I thought you were going to pick your battles with me. Is this really the one you’re choosing to fight?”
“Hey, I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
I shook my head and he laughed. I would pull away, but it was the first time my neck had felt good all day. “You’re impossible.”
“I think you mean charming.” Before I could argue, he dug his thumbs deeper into my sore muscles. To call my day stressful would be an understatement. My attempt to get a statement from the professor had gone horribly—I knew journalists didn’t always get the friendliest reception, but I’d seriously thought the guy might backhand me.
From there I’d gone to my last two classes of the day, only to find out that I’d blanked on the assignment due in Mr. Jessup’s class, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, even though I’d spent a lot of time studying for my Mass Communication Ethics class, I was pretty sure I’d failed the quiz.
Who was going to hire a journalist who got a bad grade in an ethics class?
Right as worry started to rise up again, the soothing rhythm of Hudson’s fingers made it fade away. “That feels amazing,” I said, then immediately worried it’d come out too breathy. He moved a bit lower, to my shoulder blade area and I tipped my head back—he was as devastatingly good-looking upside down, which seemed totally unfair, as I was sure I looked like the hellish day I’d had. “I thought you weren’t majoring in sports medicine.”
He grinned and tapped the end of my nose. “Hazard of the job—I learn it whether or not I want to. After a rough week of hockey, or an especially tough game, I practically run to the team’s massage therapist.”
I’d like to be annoyed about that perk, but I could hardly complain when he’d used his knowledge to relieve my pain. He knew just which muscle to press to release the knots, and as they all loosened, I felt like I could melt into the floor and live there forever.
• Hands: A player is good with his hands. From the lightest brush to moves requiring more pressure, he knows exactly how to use them for maximum effect.
My thoughts drifted to all the ways he might use his hands in more R-rated scenarios, and desire tingled its way through me, bringing every inch of my skin awake. Bad thoughts. Bad, intriguing, tempting thoughts.
I needed to shut them down before I got carried away. I forced away the images and brought up my shoulders.
“Relax,” Hudson instructed, but I couldn’t—any more relaxing and I’d lose my inhibitions and throw myself at the mercy of his magic hands.
“Thanks so much for the massage, but I was serious about needing to get up early tomorrow morning,” I said. “I still have another assignment I need to do tonight, too, so I better get to it.”
He stood, his crotch barely missing my head, and turned to face me. “I may not be able to save a thousand dogs, but if it’ll make you happy, I’ll give on the Tinkerbell haircut thing.”
“Pixie cut,” I said. “Tinkerbell had a bun.”
“I’m letting you win here. Don’t make me give you a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.”
Something told me he didn’t give on things very often. Still, I couldn’t help but tease back. “At this point, a forced, four-minute time-out sounds nice.”
He gave me a funny look that I couldn’t quite translate. Weren’t we using sports metaphors? I started to push to my feet and he extended a hand to help me up. Like the day at the library, my body nearly bumped his. Mischief flickered through his eyes, and he gave another quick tug, causing me to stumble into him.
I braced my hands on his firm biceps, and while I wasn’t so sure he should get a special perk for the muscles, I couldn’t sa
y I didn’t appreciate what the training had done for them.
I knew if I looked up, he’d kiss me. Time froze and I fought with myself, wishing he weren’t so hard to resist, while telling myself I had to be strong. I gave him a quick hug and then took a giant step back. “So, um, good night.”
One corner of his mouth kicked up, way too much amusement dancing across the curve. “Night, Reporter Girl.”
With his hand on the doorknob, he hesitated and glanced over his shoulder at me. “I wrote my number on your notebook. That way you can hit me up if you need another massage or…anything else.”
“Thanks,” I said, even though I knew the last thing I should do was use that phone number. Mentally, I flipped through my calendar, wading through my class and work assignments to when I’d get to see him next. The event that had stressed me out when I’d first found out about it now sent an excited flutter through my stomach—one that I so shouldn’t feel, but there it was anyway. “I’m sure I’ll see you at the fundraiser tomorrow?”
His smile spread, the other corner getting in on the action. “I’ll be there.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Whitney
As I waited at a stoplight, I caught sight of the top of my bun in my car’s rearview mirror. It had been so long since I’d flat ironed my hair, I worried that the frizzy half-wave would grow strong enough to resist all attempts at future straightening.
Telling myself that the story and my prospective career were more important than my vanity didn’t make me feel much better.
Especially when I thought about how unsuccessful I’d been when it came to finding a source who’d talk to me, much less blow the lid off the…whatever I was blowing the lid off. What was with that expression anyway?
Even Professor White, who I’d thought would be on my side emailed back today to say she was sorry, but she was too busy to do an interview. Code for she wouldn’t.
Maybe Professor Jessup was right. I’ll only ever be a news anchor, but after sacrificing my hair for a college story, they’ll insist I cut it short or wear a wig.
