Page 28 of Iced Out

I’m still feeling them until the moment he leaves for the locker room over an hour later.

Ten

Quinton

This is so stupid.

Those four words are stuck on repeat inside my brain as I pace the hall near the locker room’s back entrance. I’ve been waiting for Oakley for twenty minutes now, and now I’m wondering if he agreed to meet me and then ditched out because it’d be funny.

Newsflash, it’s not.

He was still in there after I’d showered, though. Talking to Coach in his office. So there’s still a chance he’s being kept by whatever they need to discuss. So I keep waiting for another half an hour before he finally appears from the locker room.

He glances up, and the curious yet weary expression on his face lets me know he wasn’t expecting me to still be hanging around this late.

“Wow, you’re still here,” he muses before brushing right past me toward the exit.

“I told you we needed to talk,” I say, falling in step right beside him.

“So talk.”

Be nice. If you bite his head off, he’ll never even consider it.

It would be a lot easier to say if I knew he was actually listening. Looking me in the eye to know just how serious I’m being about this, no matter how crazy it might sound.

Grabbing his arm before he reaches the set of double doors to the parking lot, I drag him in the other direction.

“What the—”

“Somewhere private,” I hiss, pulling him down a deserted hallway leading to who knows where. But we’re sure as hell less likely to be overheard by some random person down here than by the main exit.

Once we’re about halfway down the vacant corridor, I come to a halt and face him.

“Private enough for you?” he asks, a fair amount of snark in his tone.

My jaw ticks, another bolt of irritation zapping through me, and I realize this will be a lot more difficult than I thought. Maybe even impossible with the way we constantly take digs at each other.

Plus, I don’t know how to broach this other than blurting my theory out and hoping for the best. Which, with my track record, won’t do much good.

“God, this is insane,” I mutter more to myself than him.

He shifts, leaning back against the wall, and I look up to find a frown line creasing his forehead. “Not exactly the way you wanna lead into something, de Haas.”

“We need to start hooking up more.”

I wince at the words tumbling out of my mouth in a spectacular display of word vomit before I have the chance to figure out the right way to phrase it. And believe me, I’ve spent every minute since he walked into the weight room this morning trying to piece my thoughts together well enough to pitch this idea to Oakley.

And this was not the execution I was hoping for.

Fucking smooth. How can he resist that offer?

Oakley blinks a couple times, studying my face. I do my best not to let my confidence falter under his stare, but it’s hard not to feel completely transparent right about now.

After a few more seconds of watching me, he smirks and shakes his head. “You almost had me there, de Haas.”

Well, fuck. I’d imagined him laughing in my face, but because he thought the idea was as insane as it truly is. Or because he can’t stand me on my best day.

But I never imagined he’d think the offer was anything less than genuine. It kind of pisses me off.

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