Page 42 of Treat

The ball sailed high, bringing Mac up out of his crouch to catch it, and Jude threw his mitt down in disgust. “Shit.”

“No, that was good distance, and it was over the plate. We can work with that.” He started to throw the ball back, saw Jude wasn’t wearing his glove, and jogged over to put it in his hand. “Again.”

For the next two days,Brynn didn’t see much of Jude. He went to his workouts in the mornings, had informal on-ice practices in the afternoons, and the evenings…well, she didn’t know where he went but it wasn’t here. She told herself it was fine, that the distance was healthy, and it wasn’t as though she didn’t have anything to keep her busy. There was video editing to do, of the footage from the gym and the scrimmage, social media posts to schedule, and the cleaning service started on Thursday.

She had her own work to do, too. Her back pay had hit her account, so she caught up on bills, dumped the rest into a newly opened savings account, and worked up a monthly budget based on how much the rent would be at the apartments she’d looked at.

And in between work and personal stuff, she fretted about just where her relationship with Jude was going. Or if they had a relationship at all.

She had no doubt that he wanted her. Happy Pants had been observed, after all, and then there was that wink he’d given her at the rink Wednesday afternoon. Correction, she thought—the wink and the eye-fuck. She’d thought it was for the camera—had told herself it was for the camera—but when she’d been editing it had been clear that he’d been looking ather.

But of course he’d been going out onto the ice so the moment had passed—literally, walked right past her—and then Kara had gone into labor and had the baby and Angela had called to ask if Jude could take over the first pitch gig and just like that, she was back in assistant mode.

She was beginning to see why people who worked together shouldn’t get romantically involved. And the more time that went by after the Happy Pants and Eye-Fuck incidents, as she thought of them, the more she thought she might have exaggerated their significance.

So, the man’s dick had gotten hard. So what? Getting hard is what dicks do, it doesn’tmeananything. And the eye fuck? She’d told him she’d wanted juice for his social media accounts, urged him to play it up for the audience, so that’s what he’d done.

“Don’t you think?” she asked Amy.

“Don’t I think what?” Amy mumbled, sounding half asleep.

“That he was just playing along,” Brynn said, carefully lining her eyes.

“I have no idea,” Amy said. “It’s too early to think.”

“It’s eleven o’clock,” Brynn pointed out.

“On Saturday,” Amy countered. “Eleven o’clock is early on a Saturday. Especially when you were up until three-thirty.”

“Hot date?”

“I wish,” Amy said over the rustle of blankets. “Thesis.”

“Again?”

“Again, still, always. Forever.”

Brynn frowned. Amy sounded even more fatalistic than usual. “You okay?”

“Absolutely not. Now, what about Jude?”

“Never mind, it’s not important. Go back to sleep.”

“Believe me, I’m going to. But before I do, I have one final piece of advice for you regarding Jude Bessonette.”

Brynn leaned into the mirror to feather her liner at the corners. “Oh, I can’t wait.”

“Fuck his brains out.”

Brynn fumbled the eyeliner, almost stabbing herself in the eyeball before it clattered to the floor. “Excuse me?”

“Ride that mustache till you come screaming, fuck him dry. And when he’s a shriveled, dried up husk of a man, pour a glass of water down his throat and do it all over again.”

Brynn bent to pick up the eyeliner. “What happened to ‘this is a terrible idea, you’ll lose your job’?”

“Fuck that shit. You’re only young once, and there are other jobs.”

“I’m very confused,” Brynn confessed. “Did you get hit on the head?”

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