Page 38 of Playing to Win
Chapter 13
After bagging up their food, Callie and Kyle went to the kitchen for Kyle to sign the promised autographs. While he was signing autographs, Callie went to the bathroom and tried to wash the sauceout of her hair as best as she could. While she was in the bathroom, their waitress, Samantha, brought Callie one of the restaurant’s t-shirts. That’s why she was currently in Kyle’s car, sporting a black BBQ Mafia t-shirt, eating a rib out of her Styrofoam takeout container.
“You know you’re the first person I’ve ever let eat in my car,” Kyle told her, glancing her way to make sure she wasn’t spilling anything.
“That’s the price you pay, buddy, for dousing me with barbeque sauce.”
“I think you still have a little in your hair,” he said, grinning at her mischievously.
“It was the best I could do in the bathroom sink!” she told him, swatting his arm, a smile on her face. She reached up to her hair that she had put in a bun with a hair tie she always kept handy. “Do I really still have it everywhere?”
“Not that much. I really am sorry. At least you got a free t-shirt out of it.”
“I know. I’m part of the barbeque mafia now. You better watch out. I’ll slice you with a rib bone in your sleep,” she said, slicing the air with the rib she was holding in her hand.
“Careful with the food, Curly!”
“You mean this food?” she asked, dangling the rib over the console of his car, acting like she was going to drop the greasy bit right on his Italian leather.
“Curly, you wouldn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, popping the bone in her mouth and sucking off the remaining meat. “I just like to watch you squirm.”
All of a sudden, Kyle got a lot less preoccupied with the thought of Curly dropping food in his car and a lot more preoccupied with the fact that Curly just did an incredibly sultry thing with that piece of meat that had him thinking about nothing but how her lips felt when he was kissing her.
“What?” she asked, her eyes wide. “I wasn’t going to drop the food. I promise.”
“I don’t care about you dropping the food, Curly. Right now, what you just did with that rib bone had me thinking less about you dropping the meat and more about me pulling off the side of the road and kissing you senseless.”
“Oh,” she said, her face turning red. “I’m sorry. I was just kidding.”
“I know you were,” he said, taking his eyes off the road to caress her cheek. “You just don’t know what you do to me. Got me all twitterpated.”
“Twitterpated?”
“Haven’t you ever seen Bambi, Curly?”
“Um, no?”
“How have you lived and not seen Bambi?”
“I grew up without a mom for the majority of my life. My dad and I watched Die Hard, The Sandlot, and Top Gun. We didn’t do Disney. How are you a twenty-six-year-old man and admit you’ve seen Bambi?”
“My mom loved it. It was her favorite Disney movie. We would have movie nights each week and we would rotate through the family who got to choose the movie. On mom’s night, we almost always watched Bambi.”
“Okay, your knowledge of the supremely girly Disney flick is forgiven. So what is twitterpated? I’m dying to know.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll pay for that, missy.” Callie just gave him a mischievous smile. “But to answer your question, twitterpated means a really big crush. The bunny in the movie, Thumper, meets a female bunny who gets him all twitterpated. She rubs his ears and he follows her everywhere from then on, even temporarily forgetting his friends because he was so caught up in who she was. She bewitched him. Twitterpated. That’s how I feel when I’m with you, Curly. I’d pretty much follow you anywhere.”
Callie feltthe blush creeping up her neck onto her cheeks. Her breath hitched and she felt like her heart had skipped a beat. Or two.
Twitterpated. Huh. Who knew such a dumb word would have such a deep meaning? And that smoldering look Kyle was giving her was doing some funny things to her girly parts. This boy of hers was trouble with a capital T.
Woah! Hold the phone. Since when did she start thinking about Kyle as her boy? Oh, man, Callie thought, this was bad.
