Page 52 of Walk Off

Noah shook his head. “No, it wasn’t anything like that.” He stepped down off the treadmill and grabbed a towel from the rack next to him. “I saved her from a fire in college.”

The room went silent.

“Umm, what the hell?” Edwin was the first to speak.

“I came home one night to her in the apartment I shared with a friend and almost immediately, the fire alarm went off. I had to force her to leave and ended up carrying her out of the building. The whole thing burned to the ground right in front of our eyes.”

“Holy shit,” Kyle said. “That had to be traumatic.”

“It was, but it gets worse.”

“I’m not sure how much worse it can get,” Dallas said.

“She was naked.”

The room went silent once again.

“How? Why?” Edwin stuttered out.

“She was there to see my roommate, and from the looks of it when I walked in, she was trying to surprise him by being naked. My guess is Aiden never told her he shared the apartment so she assumed he’d be the only one coming through the door. It was a pretty normal occurrence to find naked women in our place when we were roommates.”

“Wait, you say this woman won’t talk to you,” Kyle asked. “Do you want her to?”

“Sort of,” he said with a shrug. “We run in similar circles and it would be nice to be on better terms.”

Dallas slapped Kyle on the back. “Just go ahead and say it. We’re all friends here. You like this chick.”

Edwin rolled his eyes. “Haven’t we talked about calling women chicks? You know if Zara heard you say that, she’d punch you in the dick.”

Was it Kyle’s imagination or did Noah tense up at the mention of Zara? Interesting. Was Zara the woman he’d saved from the fire? The one who was ignoring him? It would make sense since he said she wouldn’t take him as a client.

Maybe he could ask Celia as some sort of icebreaker to talk about anything besides their past.

He’d keep it in his back pocket, just in case.

Once into his workout with guys he was starting to consider friends all around him, he was able to put Celia and Jasmine out of his mind for a while. He needed to clear his head for a few hours and hopefully when he was finished, he’d have a better understanding of what he wanted to do.

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