Page 15 of Blindside Me
That look? It’s a scalpel. Sharp, precise. She knows exactly what she’s doing.
“Guess you’re stuck with me.” She sets a recording device between us. It looks like something out of the nineties. “Hope you don’t mind. I borrowed this from Dear Uncle.”
I do mind, but it’s not as if I have much choice. The tape curls under my thumb, useless. I toss it aside and grab another roll.
“I finally figured out why you look familiar.”
My jaw clenches as I glance up, meeting her gaze. “Yeah?”
“Yep.” She pops the “P.”
I just stare, waiting for her to elaborate, but she takes her sweet time, sipping that damn coffee.
After a few beats, she sets the cup down and grabs her pen. “You’re in my media class.”
“Really?” That catches me off guard, and not in a good way.
“I sit in the back row. You breeze in, sit in the front, and bolt as soon as class ends.”
I turn back to the blade, wrapping it slower this time. My fingers are steadier, but something under my skin isn’t. There’s a project coming up that requires a partner. If we get pairedtogether, I’m screwed. The last thing I need is Coach’s niece tempting me for an entire semester.
“I don’t like to stick around class.”
“Hmm. Interesting.” She scribbles something in her damn notebook.
“That girl back at the dance club.” My spine stiffens as I instantly regret mentioning that night, but she doesn’t miss a beat.
“Isn’t my thing.”
Right. Because dancing like that in a sea of sweaty strangers screams “private.”
I shake off the image of her tight, round ass grinding against me and focus on the tape. This gym is empty. It should be silent. But with her here, it hums like it’s wired to explode.
“If grinding against strangers isn’t your scene”—I tamp down my skepticism—“then what is?”
She leans forward, grinning like I just handed her the punchline. “Don’t know yet,” she says. “But I’m sure I’ll find one.”
That answer shouldn’t get to me, but it does.
She wanders closer, eyes roaming the gym like she’s taking inventory. The weight plates scattered across the floor. The shifted mats. The damp towels that someone forgot to clean.
“So,” she says, “nobody here’s heard of neatness?”
“We don’t do late either,” I mutter.
She hums like she finds that funny and scoots a little closer. Vanilla with a hint of coconut fills my senses, and I’ve never yearned for a pina colada so badly in my life. It’s a flashback to Sunday night, and the reminder throws me off all over again.
Great. Now every tropical drink has me drooling like Pavlov’s dog.
“Looks like you’ve been here for hours.”
Her words make me pause, my thumb pressing flat on the tape. “Got something to prove. But you probably figured that out.”
She studies me long enough that I feel it.
“You have me all wrong, you know,” she says. “I barely even know you.”
“You knew who I was the other night.”
