Page 146 of Hitting the Goal Line
“You’re bouncing up and down in your seat like you just ate a damn bag of candy,” he answers.
“Shut up, I’m not annoying,” I say back, flipping him off in the process. “If anyone is annoying, it’s you.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not annoying,” he throws back.
“Both of you are fucking annoying,” Christian says, inserting himself into the conversation.
“How?” Both Liam and I ask at the same time.
Christian rolls his eyes at us, but answers anyways. “You,” he starts, pointing at me. “You’re like a little puppy. A hyperactive puppy, who needs attention all the time. And you,” he says, pointing at Liam. “You use way too many punctuation marks when you text. A single period, exclamation point and question mark, are fucking enough. I don’t need a damn text bubble filled with them.”
Damn.
Why do I get the feeling that he’s been holding that in for a while?
“Oh my god,” Chloe exclaims from the row in front of us, turning in her seat to look at us four men. “All of you are annoying. Now shut up, the ceremony is about to start and I don’t want to hear your voice again until they call Sophia’s name. Got it?”
Mama Chloe means business.
She’s even giving us the same look that my mom and Maya have giving me more than a million times in my lifetime.
“Got it,” the three of us answer and she huffs and turns back to facing forward in her seat.
For a solid minute, Liam, Christian and I sit there as if we are in timeout or something. We don’t say a word and we don’t even move.
“Chloe, are you free to come to some practices back in Montana, bet if you can shut up three professional hockeyplayers, my kids will fear you,” Isaac says, inserting himself into all of this.
The three of us narrow our eyes and look over at the old man, well not that old since he’s only twenty years older than me, all the while the three woman sitting in front of us, Maya, Eliana, and Chloe, start to laugh.
“I’ll see if my schedule can allow it,” Chloe answers him, the sweetest smile known to man. That smile is nothing but sweet.
Liam picked a good one and I truly mean that.
Soon the women’s laughing dies down when the music to notify that graduation is starting begins.
All seven of us don’t say a peep until someone spots Sophia in the crowd of graduates and we all yell like it was our job.
As the ceremony moves through the speeches and they begin calling out graduates’ names and giving out diplomas, my mind starts to run through the plan for tonight.
Sophia thinks that we are going out to grab a bite to eat with her parents and our friends as soon as we leave here. While that may be true, there is more to the night that she doesn’t know about.
I’ve been planning this day for weeks now.
For the same amount of time, I’ve been both nervous and excited for today to come and now that it finally has, I want this graduation to move faster. That way we can move on to the next step and I can hopefully end the night with Sophia in my arms and getting lost in every single inch that is her body and her heart.
Name after name is called, and as each passing graduate gets called, it seems like Sophia purposely positioned herself at the end of the line to torture me. I wouldn’t put it passed her either, the girl knows how to light a fire under my ass and she enjoys every second of it.
A few more names get called when Maya points toward the crowd.
“There she is. The sixth in line,” she says and everyone scans where she is pointing.
I got eyes on my girl within seconds and as soon as I do, a part of me relaxes.
She’s almost there.
One step closer to getting to the rest of the day.
Five graduates cross the stage, then is Sophia’s turn.
