Page 50 of Overtime
I don’t tell her about the Venezuelan saying my mom mocked me with the first time she saw me cooking. Ya te puedes casar. Which maybe one day, when I find the one woman who can put up with my bull crap long term, I will. Though it will definitely not be anywhere between now and graduation.
“You don’t cook?”
“Eh, so-so,” she admits. “I bake a mean casserole, but I’m extremely adept at burning pancakes.”
I snort and flip the smaller arepa first. “How come you’re vegetarian?”
“Ugh. Meat is the most disgusting thing that’s ever been on my tongue.” Gagging sounds.
“Strawberry.” My voice carries a warning. “You keep saying things that are very easy to tease you about.”
“Oh. Um. Maybe you’re the one with the problem.”
Definitely me. But I need help. What do we do?
“Anyway.” She clears her throat once. Twice. “Maybe let’s start the reverse tutoring.”
I turn over my shoulder, cocking an eyebrow. Her face was already flushed to the roots of her hair, and it only grows warmer.
“On hockey! Oh my gosh. Do we need to wash your brain with bleach?”
“Maybe.” I shrug and go back to flipping arepas. As they hiss against the heat and the oil, I slide back to the fridge and pull out a container. “I hope it’s just the taste you don’t like, because it’s about to smell real meaty once I pop this into the microwave.”
“Your house, your rules.”
I file that one away for future reference and instead say, “So, why hockey?”
“Everyone’s going nuts about it right now.” I must’ve pressed the right button because she goes on. “My debut book is a young adult—that’s fiction for teens—and it sold pretty well, but the way things work in trad—that’s traditional publishing—is that they chop up the payments into checks smaller than those vegetables you diced. So I need to keep paying my bills until my next check, you know? And soon I’ll have to start paying my student loans, which means I have to write what’s popular even though I don’t know squat about it.”
She sucks in air and finishes off with, “And on the day I decided to write a hockey romance, I met you. It was fate!”
My eyes are as wide as saucers. I imagine if the sun could smile, it would look like this, with gunky brown hair framing it, a pink glow to its cheeks, and sparkly eyes.
“Fate, huh?”
Strawberry nods rapidly. “Yes! Everyone says write what you know, but I didn’t know, and now I will, thanks to you.”
She… could compete with my sisters when it comes to who speaks faster.
My head spins with her words and I try to train it on not burning the food. I pop the container with pulled beef from last night into the microwave and set the timer.
This confirms my suspicion. She was taking notes about me not because she was an analog stalker, but for book research.
“What’s TDH, then?” I ask.
Only silence greets me. I let her be until the microwave pings. Even as I take out plates and set them on the counter. I glance at her and almost laugh at how tightly she’s biting her lips.
“If you want me to answer hockey questions, you’ll give me that one.”
Her brow crashes. She looks freaking adorable. “This is bribery.”
“I call it building trust.”
With a clean knife, I slice the three arepas, and before much of the heat escapes, I stuff each one with a mountain of cheese. To hers, I only add pico de gallo and put it on her plate. Then I load mine with the rest of the veggies and the meat.
“Thank you. It looks amazing.” She’s a clever one, watching how I wrap a napkin around my first arepa, then doing the same. She picks it up and takes a big bite.
The moan that comes from deep in her throat almost fells me like a tree.
