She took a long whiff of the fragrant tea Kris had brought her and exhaled with a sigh.
‘I do want to bang him,’ she admitted, ‘but I also want to just sit and listen to him talk for hours, but I can’t just ask him out. If I’m wrong, if you’re wrong, then I lose him as a student and he might tell Coach Gwynn about it, then Professor Gwynn won’t send me any more clients.’
‘Or you could be right and the next time you listen to him talk he could be doing it from between your thighs.’
‘Oh, my God, Kris, we are in the faculty lounge,’ Julia said through ground teeth, but the thrill that ran through her stole some of the heat from her embarrassment.
Kris cupped both hands around her tea and shrugged. ‘You can either ask him out or make me go all junior high and send him a Facebook message on your behalf.’
Julia straightened. ‘You’re friends with him on Facebook?’
‘Yes, and why aren’t you? His relationship status is “single”, by the way,’ Kris added. ‘Though he does have about a hundred and fifty friends, and at least a hundred and twenty-five of those are female.’
‘That’s why I’m not friends with him: I did not need to know that,’ Julia murmured. While it was encouraging to know that Mick wasn’t attached to anyone, at least as far as Facebook was concerned, the idea that he could just be a big flirt and not at all interested in her came creeping on the tail of the latter part of that revelation.
‘Why don’t you get sneaky about it?’ Kris suggested. ‘Abuse your grasp of the French language. Ask him a series of questions about going out on a date and see if he catches on. If he doesn’t, you can just act like it’s part of the lesson.’
‘That’s…’ Not a bad idea, she had to concede, but she still shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Yes, you could. As much as you squirm at the thought of asking Mick out, I have a feeling that he’s holding back just as much. I mean, honestly, who needs three French lessons a week? He’s probably waiting for a signal from you but you pull back every time – yes, I have been spying. You do that thing where you play with your hair and tilt your head, and just when you should be reeling him in you go back to business.’
Julia’s phone beeped with the ten-minute warning to get a wiggle on her meeting with Mick. It was a blessing to get away from Kris’s assessment about this mad crush on Mick, but also a curse: she had been given far too much to think about while in his presence, and now there was the looming challenge of actually finding out whether he was just a raging flirt or was actually interested in her.
She tossed her phone and computer into her laptop bag, then pushed her untouched tea towards her roommate.
‘I’ll be home by eight o’clock.’
‘God, I hope not.’
One dirty look later, Julia vacated the faculty lounge. She felt exhausted and old as she mulled over the conundrum of her crush on Mick. Not since middle school had she been so tied up in knots about the opposite sex. She had honestly thought she was over the nerve-scattering high of playing the does-he-or-doesn’t-he game.
I’m a grown woman, for God’s sake, she thought, though the voice in her head sounded more like Kris’s confident, smoky one than her own. I can ask a man out, and I can take rejection if that’s what I get. What’s that, Mick? You’re seeing someone? You’re not interested? No big deal, plenty of fish in the sea, now how about that public transit? Combien est ticket de bus?
Mick rented a house just outside one of the nearby student ghettos. Their appointment had been for three o’clock, but Mick had emailed her that he’d had an unexpected appointment for four and asked if they could meet afterwards. The language lab had been booked for an exam, and rather than waste their time on two separate commutes to her place across town, Julia had suggested they meet at his place and she could just walk.
A tradition had sprung up between them after that first meeting. It was up to Mick to provide the coffee while Julia brought along something sweet. Today she popped into a coffee bar and picked up two soft brownies wrapped in cellophane and tucked them into her tote. She bundled deep into her coat and pulled her collar up. She hoped that Mick had at least a cupful of instant to warm her.
His house was situated in a row of cheerful Victorians, each the same as the next but with its own distinct personality shining from the outside. Mick’s home was a bright yellow with white steps, identifiable by the Bandits decal on the front door and his silver Mazda parked at the curb outside.
As per his instructions, she let herself in and called out for him.
‘Keep coming, I am in the living room.’
And not alone, she could hear. There was another voice, female, and the tinkling sound of their combined laughter stung her.
‘I can come back in a bit,’ she called to him, the heels of her boots clicking on the hardwood. Her stomach churned: this was the moment she was going to meet the girlfriend she didn’t know he had and realise what a fool she had been.
He didn’t answer, and so she followed the murmur of voices into the next room.
‘Oh, Jesus!’ she exclaimed, swivelling around at the sight of so much flesh on display.
Her brain registered muscles and hair, but the imprint she’d been left with wasn’t complete: was he alone where he reclined on the sofa, or was there someone kneeling between his legs?
God, why would he invite her in? What a kick in the pants it would be if all this crushing culminated in her hot Russian trying to recruit her for a threesome.
She turned her head just enough to make out shapes, and as Mick’s laughter rumbled around her she rotated completely.
Oh, what a sight. His hair gelled down combined with the scruff and that blackened eye and swollen brow to create something that was both naughty and nice. He wore a blue shirt – or rather he was half covered in a blue shirt. It was opened to the waist and pulled apart to show off glorious pecs and abs. The top two buttons of his black trousers were loosened to show a peek of the white band and logo of his Ralph Laurens.
Before she could lose herself completely in that sinful portrait, she dragged her gaze away and looked at the others in the room. One, a small woman with red hair clipped to the scalp, took his picture with a SLR camera while the other, a stockier girl with square glasses and a round face, sat in an enormous easy chair with a laptop open in front of her.
‘Mick, are you familiar with the term “This isn’t what it looks like”? Because right now would be an awesome time to say it.’
‘This is just what it looks like,’ he said, and joined his hands together behind his head with a grin.
Her knees almost buckled, and she slid her tote to her feet in case she needed something semi-soft to land on.
The photographer stopped snapping, laughed and held out her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Amy. I work for The Buccaneer. That’s Jenna.’
‘Hi,’ Jenna chirped, but she didn’t look up from her computer, nor did she look at Mick.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Julia said and cleared her throat. She didn’t dare cast her gaze upon Mick again. ‘So it either looks like you’re getting some sort of beefcake picture taken, or this is the beginning of some homegrown porn.’
Amy laughed and let her camera rest by its strap against her university T-shirt. ‘We’re profiling the team this year. It’s just a silly Q&A on the last page, but you’re right, it’s all about the beefcake. We put a shirtless hockey player on the front page for twenty weeks and our advertisers loosen the purse strings a little more.’
Julia tried to maintain eye contact with the photographer, but it was impossible to keep from turning her head.
Mick didn’t look like he cared one bit about getting some press. He looked thrilled to be on display, and he positively beamed at Julia as she stole her second quick look down his body.
‘Don’t worry, I put on shirt for lesson.’
Jenna glanced up at Julia. ‘He says you’re teaching him French. What kind of a student is he?’
‘She does not think it is valuable skill,’ Mick countered, then leaned forward with his forearms on his knees.
Amy laughed as she moved closer to him and dropped to one knee to capture that gorgeous pose. ‘Planning on using it against the Royals next week? Specifically Regan MacKenzie?’
Mick’s smile was mangled by a half scowl. ‘That is what my fist is for.’
‘So we can expect to see you sitting in the penalty box for the whole game.’
The women wrapped up quickly after posing for selfies with Mick and then posting them to Twitter, then made promises to send a digital copy of the issue before it went to print. Mick removed himself from his throne and let them out, and in his brief absence Julia clawed her scarf off and her coat open before she burst into flames.
Little good it did when Mick returned, hands dug into his pockets as he blocked the archway.
‘I am sorry. I thought we would be finished before you arrived.’
Julia got the feeling that was a big fat lie. She couldn’t bear it, not with him standing before her half-dressed and with a whole new fantasy brewing in her head. Her palms itched to be upon him, to cover every inch of exposed skin and push that shirt from his round shoulders then blaze a sinful trail to free the rest of the buttons along his groin.
Just one step, she thought to herself. Just take one step and do it…
Yet when she moved towards him, she found herself toppling over her bag.
Mick sprang forward, then laughed as he hauled her back to her feet.
‘There you go again, almost face-down. I wonder how you make it through day without bubble wrap.’
‘You know, I’m never going to get over the fact that you have things like “bubble wrap” in your vocabulary but can’t get your head around “barista”,’ she replied, and burned with embarrassment as her great seduction became the great humiliation. ‘I also don’t know where you get this idea that I’m accident prone. I fell once in your presence. One slip doesn’t make a klutz.’
‘It is wishing thinking. You fall again, maybe you land in my lap again. Maybe this time I do not let you go so easy.’
‘Or I could fall and break something. Remember what you said about jail? No more French and no more hockey?’
He held out his hands. ‘New plan: you fall and break something, I pick you up and take you somewhere to save you from yourself. I become your hero, then you do not let go of me so easy.’
Julia felt as though her feet were rising off the ground, given wings by his saucy smile. Suddenly fearless, she returned it and matched his audacious look. ‘Mick, are you flirting with me?’
‘Always, but you do not flirt back. You crush my ego every time.’
Her bravado spent on that one moment of confidence, it retreated like a turtle into its shell and left her defenceless against Mick’s overpowering presence. She reached down and unzipped her tote. ‘You probably want to change into something more comfortable before you make me my cup of coffee and we get things started.’
‘No coffee today,’ he said, and regret punched in her chest as he drew his shirt together. She could have looked at him for hours. Hell, she could have taken a picture and made it her iPhone wallpaper for life.
She kept her gaze lowered as he started to work the buttons. Watching his fingers at such delicate work would only bring on another compulsion that would end with her falling all over herself.
‘There is a pub just three blocks away,’ he said. ‘Today I will learn French with cold beer next to me. We will have lesson in pub.’
‘Wait, hold it.’ Julia raised her hands as he started his forward march. She needed to keep that distance between them so she could think and breathe. ‘A pub on a Friday night is not exactly the best spot to learn, and it’s been almost a week since our last lesson, what with you out of town getting your face beaten open yesterday – though, you know, it doesn’t look half as nasty as it did in the pictures.’
Mick gently touched his thumb to his injured brow as he regarded her. ‘You checking up on me?’
He might as well have set her on fire, she got so hot, and the heat spread everywhere.
‘I heard some people talking,’ she admitted, and beat that fantasy with the tub right back down into the fiery depths from which it sprang. ‘I had to check it out to make sure your face wasn’t hamburger and you should probably –’
‘See, I am not the only one worried. I worry when you fall down, you worry when I get hit in the face.’
‘– cancel,’ she went on over him, ‘but I see your injury has had no effect on that mouth of yours, so to the dining room.’
He shook his head. ‘Pub. I am thirsty now.’
Once he crossed his arms over his chest, she knew there was no budging him without a concession, and with the V of his chest still exposed and a peek of his belly teasing her she’d never win a fight when he had so much in his arsenal.
‘All right, big man, but be prepared to work for it. You will order in French and I will translate for you. No fee for today’s lesson. If you make no mistakes, I will pick up the tab. However, if you make just one mistake, you’re paying the check. Now bundle up, it’s a bit of a walk.’
Mick laughed and finished off those last few buttons. ‘It is a date.’
Is it? Julia couldn’t tell as he returned in the same clothes, albeit buttoned and wrapped in a leather jacket. She was sure that Kris would argue that this was entering date territory, but she found herself hopelessly clueless as to Mick’s motivations from moving the lesson from his house to the pub, save for the potential for beer.
If he had been thinking of making a move, wouldn’t he do it here in his comfort zone? At his home he could easily set the scene and take advantage of their seclusion from the world. A pub meant noise and activity and distraction.
Once inside the noisy pub filled with students sharing pitchers of cheap beer and massive plates of nachos, Mick took over the navigation and steered her towards an empty table in the corner.
‘No books, no pencils, no computers,’ he said as she reached into her bag. He grabbed the strap and dragged her belongings out of her reach. ‘No phones. Just beer and snacks. Give me two minutes to go to the –’
‘French,’ she reminded him, and chuckled as he stood, hands on hips like Superman, and stared her down.
‘Je dois aller à la salle de bain.’
‘Well done.’
‘Gold star?’
She shrugged one shoulder. ‘Maybe silver, but don’t worry: that doesn’t count towards your final score.’
‘Gold star next time. Now, salle de bain.’
‘La salle de bain.’
Julia didn’t know what to do with herself in his absence. Her pub days ended when she got her undergraduate degree. House parties had become the setting for most of her social intercourse. On a Friday night at the pub, the beer flowed and the music pumped, and the chatter was non-stop.
And so she propped her chin on the heel of her hand and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Ten minutes passed and she got antsy. She hopped down from her stool and moved to the other side of the table for a better look around.
Just beyond the corridor leading to the washrooms she found Mick standing at a table posing for pictures with a group of young men while pointing to his wounded brow.
Definitely not a date, she concluded with a sigh, but had to admit that it was a little charming to see Mick surrounded by an adoring public. As soon as he finished with one group of fans, another cropped up and herded him towards a new table, and he accommodated all of them.
He was all smiles, but twice he glanced towards her with an apologetic look. She wa
ved it off and settled back into her seat.
OK, so I’m not on a date with a local celebrity. She reached into her bag and worked on a few emails, having to stop once to prompt the waitress to return in a few minutes.
Out of the fray, Mick appeared at her side and plucked the phone out of her hand.
‘I said no phones,’ he told her, and dropped it back into her bag.
‘Hey, now, I needed something to do while you were off being a superstar,’ she teased, but to her ears the remark came out bitchier than she intended.
Either he didn’t notice or it rolled right off his big shoulders as he took his seat. ‘I was at urinal with dick in my hand when boy asked me for a photo. I told him picture of dick will cost him twenty dollars. He didn’t get joke, I felt bad, I posed for pictures.’
‘You should probably stop making jokes of a sexual nature in public. You are pretty bad at it,’ she said and passed him a menu.
Mick peered at the selection of appetisers, but she caught a hint of a naughty smile at the corner of his mouth and braced herself.
‘I will save my sex jokes for you. It is more fun to make you blush.’
Julia followed suit and honed in on the ingredients in the nachos, then quietly asked, ‘Are you still trying to get me to flirt back with you?’
‘Yes, so you had better flirt back or…’ He shrugged.
‘Crushed ego.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, then gave her a sly look. ‘Also, I will not invite you to my Hallowe’en party this weekend, and that would be tragedy for you.’
This, at least, was confirmation that he didn’t merely look upon her as his tutor. Friends? Maybe. Or something else?
She took a discreet look in his direction and found his gaze upon her, expectant.
‘My costume is better seen in person than in picture on computer,’ he went on, and snapped his menu shut. ‘I will be happy to see yours, too, if you have no plans already.’
She did. She and Kris had already agreed to go to a party at a friend’s house. She’d booked her ice-queen costume weeks ago and had booked her Saturday morning to make some blue Jell-O shots and other treats to take with her.
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