Page 45 of The Secret

Yes, he definitely grinned, the type of grin that had deep dimples; the type of grin that could get me in a lot of trouble.

“Course he did, he knows he’s hot. You don’t look like that and not know.”

“Yeah I guess. I just wasn’t expecting it, ya know? I think I’m in shock. It’s so embarrassing and unprofessional. You could have literally wiped the drool.” I laughed through my mortification. “It was like that time I saw Hudson Forrester across Van Am when he was coming back from practice. Only better, much,muchbetter. His body…”

In our first year of college, Payton and I were walking across Van Am Quad on the way back from class, when Hudson Forrester jogged out of the shadows of the rotunda. He was a sophomore and already star quarterback of the football team, having had the best freshman season on record. He’d been sweaty and muddy, and sporting the beginnings of a black eye. And when he’d lifted up the bottom of his jersey to wipe his face, I’d gotten so distracted by his abs I’d walked into one of the lampposts, giving myself a very visible bump on the head. It had taken over a week for it to disappear.

But Hudson had nothing on Murray. Even if it had been equal footing, with a college aged Murray, I knew that had I seen him, no one else would have existed for me.

“I’ve never had the hots for a client before.” I shook my head hard and slapped my cheek. “Ugh. Okay, I need to give myself another five minutes then it goes in the vault.”

“But what if he’s got the hots for you too? OhEmGee, this would be perfect. Like that movie…” She snapped her fingers, thinking.

I smacked her on the arm, stopping her train of thought before her imagination got too carried away and I was swept along with it like a rip tide. “Shut up. He doesn’t have the hots for me.”

She smirked into her coffee. “Hudson had the hots for you, you know.”

My forked stopped halfway to my mouth. “What? No he didn’t.”

“Um, yeah, he did.” She would have made a good Blair Waldorf impersonator with the smug, pursed smile she was wearing right now.

My face scrunched as I looked at her with a lot of skepticism, and more than a little disbelief. “He never ever said one word to me.”

“That’s because you intimidated him.” She casually popped a piece of pancake in her mouth like she hadn’t just delivered a Hiroshima sized bombshell of information.

“Okay, have you smoked something? He was Captain of the Football Team,” I replied, as if that explained everything, which it should. Even before he’d been drafted, Hudson was always surrounded by girls. Any type of girl. Sometimes you couldn’t even see him through the gaggle. We hadn’t lived in the same area; we hadn’t shared the same classes. The only day we ever crossed paths was Tuesday mornings between eleven and eleven o’ five a.m. Payton and I would be leaving our class on Romanticism and the Victorian poets, and he would be walking toward the Fairchild Building for whatever class he had, again surrounded by girls.

“Exactly. He was all brawn and you were the brains. He didn’t know how to have a conversation with you. To be fair, he didn’t know how to have a conversation with most people, which is why he was always stuck to theGamma Phigirls. They didn’t care.”

“Okay, now you’re being ridiculous,” I scoffed, “and he wasn’t all brawn. He was a biology major.”

She held the Girl Scout salute. “I’m not, I swear. Deacon told me once. It was after that time we were at O’Malley’s, when they’d beat Harvard.”

Deacon Hills had been Payton’s boyfriend through our sophomore year. He was the year below Hudson, but they’d played together on the football team and hung out after games. We’d joined them sometimes, although, usually by the time we arrived, they were too drunk to form coherent sentences and Hudson was nowhere to be seen. So I was still very unclear about how this had taken place.

“We graduated six years ago, how have you never told me this?”

“I forgot for a while,” she shrugged. “At the time I didn’t think it would matter. Plus, I wanted to keep your secret intact.”

“What secret?”

Her eyes twinkled with amusement. “That you’re a dirty little perv with a fetish for big muscles.”

I gasped and smacked her again. “I am not.”

Perv wasn’t entirely accurate, but she had a point. I did love a guy with muscles. Add brains to the brawn and it was a deadly combination, one I was a certified sucker for, and something Murray had, not just in spades, but commercially-sized digger quantities.

She mopped up the maple syrup on her plate with the last of her pancakes. “Don’t worry about it, you can pretend all you want, but I know better. I blame myself actually, and the fact we’ve not been out for a while. You need to blow off some steam. Want to go and see Magic Mike?”

“Ewww, fuck no,” I scowled. “I haven’t had time to go out in a while. If you remember, I got conned into taking this job just as I was about to enjoy having my life back.”

She continued like I hadn’t said anything. “Now I come to think about it, you haven’t been on a date for a few months since that guy from the gym…”

“The one who only talked about protein shakes?”

“Yep, him. So we definitely need to get back on it. We both know you need more substance than someone who only talks about protein shakes.” She pointed her fork at me. “Let’s go out next weekend. You think you can get the night off?”

“I can’t next weekend because we’re going out of the city for Easter, but let’s go for drinks on Wednesday. I’m off then.”

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