Page 29 of Elite Player
There are worse ways I could try to secure my spot on this team. Pretending to be in love with Josephine Atkins is a piece of cake.
By the time she returns to the table a few minutes later, I’ve finished my beer, and since I promised we’d only stay for one drink, I catch her around the waist as I stand. “You ready to head out?”
She nods with a quiet, “Please.”
“We’re outta here.” I clasp hands and fist-bump my teammates, and they all smile and wave at Jo. JP invites her to hang out again, but she doesn’t answer, and I doubt I’d be able to convince her to come out with me again since the season is starting next week. Once it does, we won’t have many nights off, but I appreciate my friends all being cool about her.
Outside, I lace my fingers with hers, and I like that she’sstopped acting shocked every time I touch her, with her jaw open slightly, as if she’s never held hands with anyone before. As if no guy has ever put his arm around her and tugged her into his side.
I unlock my car and walk her around to the passenger side. “You have fun?”
“They’re nice guys.”
“Were you afraid they weren’t going to be?”
“No, but I only know them in passing, through my camera.”
“But that’s how you like it, isn’t it? So nobody sees you.”
She inhales deeply, blinking a few times, and even now, she’s clearly afraid of meseeingher. It’s so obvious, her fear of sticking out, of being noticed, but now that I have noticed, I can’t stop. Everything about her is interesting, from how her lipstick stays on even though she’s constantly sawing her teeth into her bottom lip to how she smiles but only with her mouth closed. I like how she seems to relax around me, and I wonder if she can tell how tense she makes me.
If she knows just how much I want to impress her.
Show her she made a good choice in jumping into this pretend engagement with me.
I don’t realize how close I’m standing until she relaxes, and I force myself to step back, lower my hands from where they boxed her in, placed outside of her shoulders on the hood of my car.
“Sorry,” I murmur and clear my throat as she curls her long legs in to sit down, and I only briefly imagine them around my waist.
Briefly.
Like, less than three seconds.
But by the time I get behind the wheel, she’s nibbling on that bottom lip, and that has me wondering what it would take to remove that color from her mouth. It’s a deep reddish-purple, and it’s impossible not to imagine her lips around my cock.
I am but a lowly man.
One step up from an ape.
Tryingnothaving dirty thoughts about my pretend fiancée is useless when I have dirty thoughts about women who aren’t my pretend fiancée on the regular. Really, it seems only appropriate I’m having them about her.
It’s monogamous.
I’m being monogamous.
I should be having dirty thoughts about her.
It’s only right.
Right?
I’m so confused about all of this that I mindlessly follow directions to her apartment on my GPS and don’t realize that we’ve arrived until Jo knocks my elbow, saying, “Where are you going?”
“Parking.”
She turns over her shoulder, presumably looking back at the entrance to her apartment. “Why?”
“Am I not supposed to park?” I find a spot by the end of the block and parallel park like a champ, but she’s not impressed like I hoped she’d be.
