Page 41 of Taking It To Overtime

Robbie is already at the door, reaching for the handle, and I fling myself off the mattress to land in a heap on the floor. He turns at the thud, no doubt wondering when I stopped being the graceful dancer he once knew and turned into the pile of blankets on the old hotel carpet.

“Wait,” I say, panic turning my muscles watery. “Wait no. It’s not that I don’t want to.”

“It’s okay, Vera.” He has his soothing voice on. “I misunderstood. This isn’t real. After last night…” he rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I forgot for a moment, but you’re right. It would probably be a bad idea.”

It probably will be. Just like kissing him was. Just like telling everyone we’re back together and letting him share my hotel room and just looking at him. All of this is a colossally bad idea, but I can’t make myself stop. I don’twantto stop.

“I can’t do lunch because I already have plans with Birdie, Bridget.” Her new name is going to take some getting used to. “But we could do dinner. Just the two of us?”

“Birdie?” He asks and shakes his head. “I thought… I’m an idiot.”

“You thought I was saying I didn’t want to?”

He shrugs and my eyes once again slip to the shift of his shoulders. Robbie Oakes used to be the hottest boy I knew. Nowhe might be the hottest man, and I’ve met some of the objectively most attractive men in the world.

“It’s not smart. Getting close.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Not when our lives are heading in different directions.”

“No, it’s not.” I agree, but right now I don’t care. I just want to spend time with him. “Do you take back your invitation?”

“I don’t know if I can stay away from you,” he says. The words a careful confession.

“I don’t want you to.”

The only sound is the whir of the over-powered air conditioning. I notice the chill at the same time Robbie does, his eyes dropping to where my nipples are trying to punch holes through the front of my silk pajama set. He’s seen it before, when I put it on last night, but even then the lights were out and I hopped right under the covers. On instinct, I bring my arms up to cross them over the girls, but Robbie makes a strangled sound and I freeze. My throat goes dry. My heart pounds.

I drop my arms and Robbie shudders.

His eyes squeeze closed even as he smiles, pulling his hat off to run a shaky hand through his dark hair.

“Vera Aster Novak. Would you please have dinner with me tonight?”

I’m grinning, smiling so wide my cheeks ache, when I close the distance between us and press my lips to his cheek. It’s possible I say my “yes” aloud, or maybe I just think it, but Robbie can read my answer in the sweep of my lashes and the curve of my grin. He turns his head and takes my mouth with his.

Checkers has beena Kimmelwick institution since the Mesozoic Era, a classic small-town diner complete with black and white flooring, bubblegum pink stools, cherry red booths, and anti-freeze blue chairs. It might be in the town bylaws that every Kimmelwick family has to have at least one photograph taken in the small, square space. And I don’t just say that because the owner knows the name of every person who’s ever spent over seventy-two hours in the town proper. My family has photos from my childhood and my mom’s. I think I even saw a photo once of Nan and Pop sharing a milkshake. A first date forever saved in grainy black and white.

The summer after my twelfth birthday, there was a small fire at the restaurant. It came courtesy of a “freak power surge” that everyone knew was Early Gumpter in the parking lot selling fireworks out of the hatchback of his battered Yugo. The doors were back open in less than a week, the whole town banding together to fix the damage and collectively agreeing to buy their illegal pyrotechnics from the empty lot down by the fire station. Just in case Early fell asleep with a cigar in his mouth. Again.

“Welcome to Checkerboard Café, be right with you honey,” Mol says from behind the counter, barely lifting her eyes from the change she’s counting into a customer’s hand. “Your booth’s taken, but I think they’re finishing up.”

“No need,” I glance down at my watch, “I can sit anywhere.”

Stepping into this place is like stepping back in time. Mol—“just Mol, not Molly, never Mary.”—in her cat-eye glasses with the emerald green frames, a gold chain looping around the back of her neck just in case they jump ship into the cash register or a pot of chili. Both of which really happened. I can swear to it in a court of law. Those two afternoons are how I learned three of my juiciest curse words and earned the respect of all the other kids in the third grade.

“Where’d your little duckling go? Jack something?” She thanks the customer in front of her, gray beehive not moving an inch even as she bobs her head goodbye. “That one’s a handful, but he’s a cutie.”

Considering I’ve heard that phrase before in reference to toddlers and hyperactive dogs, I agree with her.

“The usual?” She holds her pen between the knuckles of her second and third finger the same way she always has. As if she needs to write down my double turkey burger on a toasted sesame bun, piled with everything but onions, extra pickles on the side, and an order of sweet potato fries and honey. Balance. “Or double it today?”

“Double. Please.”More like triple it, I almost say.

I’d run drills with the kids today, pushing them to the edge of their limits and then showing them how to stretch their capabilities even farther. It’s not the skating itself that worked up my appetite. A high school training camp will never come close to team practices, no matter how many times I rush the blue line with the eager teens, but I may have pushed myself to go harder, faster, to show off a set of passing drills with Spags that left both of us red cheeked and winded.

It wasn’t just the workout that got up my appetite. My breakfast ended up being the nastiest coffee to ever exist. If aliens were to land in the middle of Colton Boyle’s farm at theend of town—leaving one of those pretty little circles in the corn—and took a cup back to their ship for analysis, they’d categorize it as some form of toxin.

I didn’t set out to forget to eat. I didn’t have time to grab breakfast from my parents’ kitchen. Not after running late getting out of the Staycation. There had been more important things on my mind. Like standing in a frigid hotel room, staring at the woman who stars in all of my filthiest fantasies, trying to hide both my erection and the way my heart was threatening to put me six feet under as we navigated our misunderstanding about a lunch invitation. At first my brain could barely follow the swings from relief that she said yes, to devastation that she said no, to arousal as I caught sight of her hard nipples. My cock took them as a permission to follow suit.

Given that I hadn’t rubbed one out in over twenty-four hours—Iusedto be able to live like a monk, I swear—and hadn’t had a joint orgasm in significantly longer than that, we’re both lucky I didn’t come in my pants. Immediately. Embarrassingly. Like I did several times in my teenage years that now, no matter how hard I try, refuse to be blocked from my memory. Kind of like that jingle for those two lawyers that specialized in car accidents and shit. One of them died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, something like that, and still the damn jingle stays hidden in the corners of my brain, usually retrieved right as I’m about to fall asleep.

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