Page 35 of Who's Playing You
I’m sorry to hear you’re tired, but I hope it was at least a good one for you.
Nicholas:
It’d certainly be a million times better if I’d be able to see you. Guess I have to take what I can get and texting you. *wink emoji*
That’s very sweet of you. But I’ll see you in the morning for our next excursion. And we don’t have to hike far at all to get to it.
Nicholas:
If I’m with you, I don’t really care how far I have to go.
My breath stuttered when I read that, because he was flirting - this was flirting, right? It wasn’t just my imagination and something I was building in my head? Ugh, God, I’d be so mortified if I realized that I was making so much more out of this, but when he said stuff like this it made me feel… like he liked me.
I might be naive and oblivious when it came to matters like this, but I liked the attention. I liked being the center of someone’s attention after spending all of my life being a second thought and always someone’s second choice.
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that last message from him so I just stared at my phone, trying to come up with something cute and flirty yet smart. Not desperate.
I drew a goddamn blank.
After another ten seconds had passed, the buzzing of an incoming call scared the shit out of me and I jumped in response, nearly making the phone fly halfway across the room.
After catching the damn device and seeing it was Nicholas calling, I hesitantly swiped to answer his call, “He-hello?”
“Hey, beautiful!” I could hear him smiling through his greeting. “I’m in the car, driving home, so I figured it’d be easier to just call you. I hate the voice-to-text that my car does. It never hears me right and the texts get all messed up.”
“Yeah, totally,” I said, not really knowing what he was talking about because I’d never voice-to-texted in my life.
“How was your day?”
“Oh, you know, just…” And I felt pathetic. As I traced back my day in my head, I was coming up empty-handed. What the hell had I done today? It felt like nothing.
“Just hanging?” he said, as if he had some insight into my day, which felt… odd.
“Umm, yeah, I guess you could say that. How about you? How was work? You said you were tired.”
“Yeah, busy day. Work’s kicking my ass this week,” he chuckled.
“And,” I hedged, “I just realized that I don’t know what you do…” I let the last word hang in the air. He began laughing at my question though.
“Oh, yeah,” he chuckled. “I guess we never got to that, huh?” I hummed anoin response. “So, I umm, work for the football team, The New York Rage. Ever heard of them?”
I felt a little foolish because no, I hadn’t really heard of them. I hoped this wasn’t like a common knowledge thing where I was totally coming up short. “Umm…” I began.
He full-on began laughing. “You don’t know about them, do you?” he responded right away in an amused way, without judgement. “That’s alright, Scottie. That just tells me that you’re at least not rooting for the competition. Maybe we can make you a fan this season though.”
I chuckled at that. “Yeah? Well, good luck with that. I’m not very athletically inclined, I guess, and sports never interested me much. No offense.”
“None taken,” he replied without any judgement. “But I think that just means that this is your year.”
I laughed again at that. “Oh yeah? Well, maybe. So…” I drew up the last word, “what exactly do you do for The Rage?”
“Good question,” he said and went quiet for a minute. “I work with the team to help them do their jobs so that they can win championships.”
“Oh wow!” I said, feeling impressed. “That’s a lot of pressure,” I stated without really knowing what went into making a football team work or win nor the significance of his job.
He just chuckled, “Sure is. I guess some days it feels like I’m carrying the weight of the whole team and their success on my shoulders.”
“Oh geez, Nicholas, that’s a lot of responsibility.” I felt for him because, wow! That felt like a lot.
