Page 20 of Wish You Were Mine
“Oh, I’ve definitely sprained my ankle and torn muscles before,” Nora said. “But no broken bones.”
“Knock on wood,” Lucy said. “You still have this coming season to get through.”
Nora must still be in college if she still had a competition season coming up.
Which I guess would be a reason why the girls were hanging out with the college hockey team on Sunday…that was, if Lucy wasn’t dating the hockey player who had started the fight.
Lucy had said she was done with college, right? So maybe she was a year older than Nora. So that would probably make Lucy around twenty-two or twenty-three.
Possibly six years younger than me.
Which was…quite a bit of an age gap.
Though, since I’d marked my dating range as five years younger than me on the Meet Your Match app, one year younger than that wasn’t too bad.
Not that I was thinking about dating her. I didn’t really know her.
“Oh right,” Nora said, her eyes going wide as she looked behind her for some wood to knock on. There was a beam not too far behind the corner of the hot tub that Ky was in, so she quickly got up from her spot and bent over the edge to knock on it.
While she did that, I asked Lucy, “Did you have many injuries during your gymnastics career?”
“Oh yeah,” she said easily. “I’ve torn my calf, shattered my toe, broke my arm once…”
“Not to mention the bruised ribs you had last spring,” Nora added, plopping back down beside her.
“Oh yeah.” Lucy laughed. “Gymnastics is fun,” she said lightly—though her tone caught for a fraction of a second, a flicker of shadow passing behind her smile.
“Yikes,” I said.
“What bones have you broken?” she asked.
“Just my arm,” I offered. “Crashed my bike when I was a kid.”
“Okay, Lucy, it’s your turn,” Ky interrupted our conversation when Nora had taken her seat again.
“Okay. Just a sec.” She bit her lip for a moment, like she was trying to think of just the right thing to say. Then, with a mischievous look in her eyes, she glanced briefly at Nora before saying, “Never have I ever kissed someone to make someone else jealous.”
“Oh geez, I wonder why you picked that one,” Nora saidbefore making a face and throwing her head back to take a sip of her drink.
“Sorry.” Lucy laughed. “All the other things coming to mind were too boring.”
“It’s okay, Nora,” Miles said, nudging her with his elbow. “Alessi has done it, too.” He shot Alessi a teasing look across the hot tub.
Alessi held up her cup and said, “Well, let’s cheers to that then, sweet stepbrother, because we both know you love playing those jealousy games as much as I do.”
“You got that right.” He chuckled and they both took their sips at the same time.
Which was not surprising at all. Those two were always tangled up in one mess or another when it came to relationships.
It was my turn next, and I must have had Bash’s midnight-kiss challenge in my mind mixing with my curiosity about Lucy’s relationship status, because before I could think better of it, I was saying, “Never have I ever kissed someone who wasn’t single.”
A collective gasp sounded in the group. I must have hit a nerve because I caught a few members of the group glancing around like they were curious if anyone had kissed someone who was in a relationship with someone else…
And after a few strained seconds, Miles shook his head and said, “Fine. You got me.”
“What?” Bash asked. “When was this?”
“In college. Just a girl I was hung up on.” Miles shrugged. “But don’t worry, karma kicked in real quick. Just when I was thinking she might be feeling the same thing as me, she pushed me away and told me it could never happen again. And then stopped hanging out with me for a couple of months.”
