Page 4 of Claimed By the Goalie Alpha
He turned. "I didn't forget, Julian. You didn't tell me."
Then he was walking away, and though his shoulders were still tense, they seemed less rigid than before. I watched him go and hated how I wanted him to look back. And all this over a guy who'd spoken maybe twenty words to me total.
"I know," I told Bailey, who was whining at my feet. "He's interesting, isn't he?"
Interesting was an understatement. Renard Conley was intense and apparently incapable of small talk, but something about him made me want to push at all that careful distance and see what was underneath.
That evening my friend Marshall showed up at my apartment with Thai food and the expression he wore when he'd already decided something was going on and wanted confirmation.
"You've been weird the past few days." He settled onto my couch with his pad thai. "What's going on?”
"I'm not and there’s nothing happening."
"You absolutely are. You've been grinning at your phone whenever I see you." He grinned and shook his fork at me. "Who is he?"
"There's no he."
"Julian."
I stabbed at my curry. "Okay. There might be a he. But it's nothing. I've run into this guy at the park twice and he’s… " I couldn't find the right word. "He's really hard to read."
"How so?"
"I can't tell if he's annoyed when I talk to him or if he secretly doesn't mind. He barely says anything, but then he does these small things." I thought about his hands on Bailey's ears and how he'd saidI didn't forgetlike it was obvious. "I'm probably reading too much into it."
"You like him though."
"I don't know him well enough."
"That's not what I said.”
But he was right. I was attracted to Renard in a way that didn't make much rational sense. Two conversations that barely qualified as such, and I couldn't stop thinking about his jaw and the careful way he'd touched Bailey and the hoarse edge to his voice when he'd said my name.
"Yeah," I admitted. "I do."
"So what are you going to do?"
"The Storm have a home game Tuesday. I might place myself where he happens to walk."
Marshall pointed his fork at me. "You're going to stalk him."
"I’m strategically positioning myself in a public space."
"That's literally what stalking is."
"It's a public park, Marshall."
"You're hopeless." He was smiling though. "Just don't be weird about it."
"When am I ever weird?"
He gave me a look that covered approximately four years of friendship and didn't answer.
After he left, I found the Storm game on TV, telling myself I was watching to understand the sport better. That lasted about two minutes and I just watched Renard.
But really, I was watching him and how he moved to the crease. I drooled a little when he dropped to his knees and stretched across the goal with a flexibility that shouldn't be possible in all that equipment. Every save looked effortless. When he made a particularly impressive glove save, the camera zoomed in on his face. My tummy dipped as though I was going up in an elevator.
This was what he looked like when he was doing something he loved and I wanted to see that expression directed at me.
