“Wear protection!” Hendrix calls to Aleks’ back.
“No glove, no love!” I second.
He gives me a look before hollering out his next words of wisdom. “No means no!”
“Use a safe word!”
“Prepping is important!”
“And have fun! Wait—” I stare at Hendrix, brows pinched together. “What do you know about prep?”
He shoves his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “Women have assholes, too.”
I’ll be damned if I don’t get instantly hard in my shorts. “Fuck,” I mutter and adjust myself. Thankfully, the Twister game is still going strong, so none of those guys notice my predicament.
Chuckling, Hendrix tries, and fails, to hold in a small grin. “Damn, it doesn’t take much for you, does it?”
Is he . . . talking about my hard-on? Fuck me, he is. I can’t very well say he is the reason my dick is on a hairpin trigger, so I roll with it. “Nope.” I pop the P and try not to sound too husky. He has no idea what he does to me.
Just. Friends.
He’s. Straight.
Fuck. Me.
Hendrix clears his throat and rocks on his feet. “Feels weird staying here knowing what they’re doing back there.”
“Haha, yeah.” I rub the back of my neck, nervous all of a sudden when I think about asking him . . . Come on, T. Nut up. I clear my throat. “Wanna get out of here? I know a twenty-four-hour burger place with vegetarian and vegan options.”
Groaning, he rubs his flat belly. “That sounds fucking amazing. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 16
TAHEGIN ELLINGSWORTH
“How have you never ridden a bike?” Hendrix demands to know as we eat our veggie burgers in the bed of my truck. We’re parked in the restaurant parking lot after ordering in the drive-through, eating here instead of inside the cab because these burgers are slathered in a special sauce that is messy as hell but so worth the workout I’ll have to do to make up for it. We would have eaten inside, but neither of us felt like having our pictures on the front page of a gossip column tomorrow because some fan happened to recognize us. Trust me, it’s happened before.
“Football stars dress up for Halloween and eat at local business.”
Don’t people have anything better to do with their lives? Apparently not.
I shrug in response to Hendrix’s question. “My parents were really protective when I was a kid, and then I just . . . wasn’t interested as an adult.”
He gives me an incredulous look. “They wouldn’t let you ride a bike, but they did let you play football.”
“Well . . .”
“And baseball.”
I hold up a finger to stop him there. “Only until my teeth got knocked out. I had to quit baseball after that.”
“Yeah, how did that happen exactly?”
My cheeks heat as the memory surfaces, and I can’t bear to look at him while I explain. “Um, so. I played outfield, and . . . You see, there were these pretty wildflowers—the tiny white ones with the yellow centers—and I was picking some to give to my mom.”
“Mhm,” he hums. “That’s very sweet. There wasn’t, by chance, a game going on, was there?”
“There was,” I mutter sheepishly. “I heard someone shout my name, and when I looked over, everyone was pointing at the sky. The ball was coming down when I looked up.” Sucking air through my teeth, I grimace as the phantom pain briefly returns. “Got me right here—” I point. “Broke my nose and knocked out my top two teeth. They weren’t even all the way grown in yet.”
Hendrix lets out a sympathetic whistle. “Damn. How old were you?”
“Seven,” I mutter, picking at the hem of my shorts and debating if I want to confess the secret I’ve never shared with anyone. But this is Hendrix. This is what we do. A cool breeze blows through, and I shiver. Without a word, he scoots closer until we’re shoulder to shoulder, his body heat warming me slightly. I decide that, yes, I will tell him because he’s my friend, and maybe I’ll get something out of him in return. “My nose healed crooked,” I blurt.
“Really?” he asks, sounding genuinely surprised. “I haven’t noticed.”
Turning to face him, I run my index finger along the bent ridge. “It crooks to the left. My left,” I clarify.
He squints at me. Even goes as far as to tilt his head in scrutiny. “Huh. Now that you’ve told me, I can maybe see it.”
“It’s more obvious with my glasses on.”
“Haven’t noticed it with your glasses either.”
The stupid muscle in my chest flutters. He’s noticed my glasses? He only sees them right before we go to sleep at away games, when I take out my contacts and wear my glasses for all of sixty seconds. And, I guess, when I wake up, too.
Since all my blood is rushing so fast through my brain, it seems I have no filter for my thoughts because I keep going. “My smile crooks to the left if I don’t consciously fix it, and you already know about my left earlobe. I got my ear piercing”—I thumb the small hoop in my cartilage—“to distract from it. I got superstitious about it, too. My nipple piercing is on the left side, same as the design in my hair, and my tattoos.”
Hendrix takes a long drag of soda through the straw. “They mean anything?” he asks, gesturing with the Styrofoam cup at the tribal sleeve on my arm.