Page 20 of The Girlfriend Card
“As I was about to say, don’t get your hopes up,” I warned. “Because I’ll tell you right now, I’m not going to do this. You’re only wasting your own time.”
“Well, Olivia, I look forward to changing your mind,” he said with a cocky bravado.
“We’ll see about that.” I dismissed his confidence with a scoff. “Bye now—and this time for real. Don’t even try to stop me from leaving, okay?”
I waited a beat to see what he’d come up withthistime to keep me from hanging.
But this time, he surprised me by saying nothing at all.
After an awkward lull, he laughed. “You’re still on the line, aren’t you? I can hear you.”
“Ugh!” I groaned, annoyed. “Wellyeah,I’m still on the phone! Because you never said bye!”
“Good night, Olivia,” he said. “Can’t wait to meet you.”
“Bye,” I said and hung up.
Staring off into the distance, I couldn’t help but shake my head and grin, left with the most perplexing mix of frustration and curiosity. Dakota certainly had a way of getting under my skin. The strange part was, I wasn’t sure if I hated it … or not.
Dakota.
Hm.
6
Girlfriend Card
Dakota
Beads of sweat glistened on my forehead and trickled down my face. I held a hundred-pound dumbbell in my hands, a fire in my legs as I pumped out one goblet squat after another.
“Nine … ten … eleven,” Parker, our strength and conditioning coach, counted reps. “One more, Dak. As soon as you drop that dumbbell, I want you goingstraightinto alternating lunge jumps. Don’t you dare take a breather.”
With the last rep, I dropped the weight from my hands and exploded into a series of lunge jumps. But after a few lunges, my form began to falter. This was my fourth pass through this circuit, after all, and I was gassed.
“Don’t half-ass these, Dak!” Parker roared in reprimand.
“Fuck off!” I yelled, but my outburst of anger gave me a boost of superhuman strength—and I pushed harder and fought through the burn.
Yeah, Parker knows what he’s doing. Don’t be fooled by me telling him to fuck off—he’s a good dude. When he’s not killing us with his workouts, that is. In his mid-thirties, Parker was a hockey player himself upon a time, but his playing days endedonce he graduated college and it was time to find a job. With the way he’s always pumping iron in the weight room, though, you’d think he was an NHL’er with a regular shift. Us boys in the locker room love to give Parker shit, joking that he never got the memo that his playing career’s over and he can take it easy on the training now.
Hm.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he’s so sadistic on us with his workouts …
“That’s it! Last one!” he yelled, rushing me over to the incline bench. “Chest press, let’s go!”
My tired body practically flopped onto the bench. Getting the eighty-pounders in the air was miserable. I could barely get six reps, let alone the twelve Parker demanded.
The exercise circuit ended on the floor, in an adductor side plank, with Parker pacing around me, his eyes glued to his stopwatch.
“Stay strong, Dak … thirty more seconds …”
I gulped, trying to stay focused, but every muscle fiber running up the side of my body strained. A terrible searing sensation engulfed my abdomen, and I wanted to give upsobad. My body began to quake and tremble.
“Twenty more seconds! YOU GOT THIS, DAKOTA!” Parker bellowed. “DO IT FOR JANE!”
If he was trying to motivate me, Parker couldn’t have said anything worse. As soon as he said “Jane,” I deflated like a balloon with a leak, and I sounded like one too, as my body slowly sank into the lush astroturf. “Pffffffffffffffffff.”
