Page 43 of Hate the Game
She winked at me as she opened the truck door. “Play your cards right and maybe you’ll see.”
I sat there staring after her, my heart beating harder than it had during any game ever.
Her laughter danced over my heated skin. “You should see your face. I’m joking, Cole. I have no plans to lift my dress and show you my ass. At least not until the sun goes down and it’s pitch black out here. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
My anger spiked. “What the hell does that mean?”
She froze as she leaned back in the truck to put her phone down. “I’m not stupid, Cole. I know that I don’t look like the other girls you’ve been spotted with. My body is-”
“Fucking perfect.” I had a wave of unhinged anger at myself for ever being seen with thin women. It was that anger that had me slamming my truck door closed and stomping around to Savannah. The vulnerability on her face as I approached her made me want to do anything and everything to wipe it off permanently.
“Cole?” She stumbled back a step and her back hit the side of my truck.
I caged her in and gripped her waist. “If you ever do get the urge to show me your ass, you’d better fucking believe that I’ll get on my knees and pant like a dog for you. Don’t use my voice to paint your negative thoughts about your body. I want to devour this body. It’s the personality that gives me pause.”
Her eyes widened and then narrowed when she realized what I’d said. She was doing her best to get pissed when I winked and grinned. She groaned and pushed me away. “Jerk.”
I set us up on a boulder that looked out over a darkening valley and then rushed back to the truck to get the cooler of food from Antonio. It was getting darker by the minute but I wanted to feed Savannah. After hearing her insinuate that her body wasn’t perfect I had the insane need to prove to her that I liked the thickness of her thighs and fullness of her ass.
She stretched out on the blanket, long legs bare and exposed to the chilly wind. “I needed this.”
“This?” I sat beside her and pulled out two sealed containers of horchata. Shaking them up before stabbing a straw through each of them, my mouth watered at the promise of Antonio’s famously good drink.
“This open space. This distance from the crush of humanity on campus and in LA. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a people personmost days, and I love being able to hang out and do things whenever and wherever. There’s always something happening here and that’s nice. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, though. Open land as far as you can see in every direction, more cows than people, and this sometimes overwhelming sound of nature. The crickets, the bullfrogs, even the cicadas… I miss that.” She took a drink and let out a filthy moan. “Jesus Christ, we don’t have horchata like this at home, though.”
I shifted to hide the effect her moan had on me. “What was it like growing up like that?”
“Depends. During football season it was lonely. I went to every game and practice but just had to sit back and watch. That’s how I ended up wanting to be a sports journalist, actually. By the time I was eight I could describe every play that happened in detail and knew where it’d gone wrong or right. I’d get home from a game and scribble in my journal about it and when I realized I could do that professionally, I was all in.” She leaned back on her elbows and tilted her head to watch me. “The other times of the year were fun with my brothers. I stressed them out all the time. I liked to explore and then forget that I was supposed to be back at home for lunch or dinner or whatever. I’d sit down somewhere especially pretty and daydream for hours.
“When they finally found me they’d never get onto me. They’d sit with me for a while, getting my daydreams out of me. Later on, I realized that they were always nervous when they couldn’t find me. They never let me see that they were bothered, though.” She shook her head like she was clearing the memories. “Sorry. I’m rambling.”
I was lost in my own imagination, trying my hardest to imagine the lonely little girl she must’ve been, sitting alone in the middle of nowhere. It was gutting. It also made me feel a moment of appreciation for her brothers.
“Cole?”
I cleared my throat. “I like hearing you talk. You don’t need to apologize.”
She reached over and put her hand on my thigh for just a second. “Tell me something else about you.”
I caught her hand when she tried to pull it away and pinned it to my thigh. “What do you want to know?”
Her throat worked as she swallowed, eyes on our hands. She took a greedy drink and then took a deep breath. “The tattoos. Tell me about the tattoos.”
***Cole***
“What’s to tell? They’re tattoos and they’re there.” I almost laughed at the way her lip stuck out in a pout that I doubted she knew she was making. “Okay, okay. AJ and I had a small group of guys we hung with. One of the guys, this kid we called Ink for obvious reasons, was into tattoos. We were around fifteen and I’d just had this fucking awful fight with my mom. Ink had been practicing on anyone who’d let him so when he asked me, I just went with it.”
“You were fifteen?!” Her fingers tightened on my thigh. “Cole!”
I grinned, happy to reestablish myself as a badass. “I was so pissed at my mom and I clearly was not handling puberty very well because my emotions were all over the place. My whole idea was so fucking stupid. My mom loved her art enough to be sober for it? I’d give her art.”
She sat up and moved closer so she could inspect the tattoos marking my right arm. She traced the lines with her fingertip. “What were your thoughts when you chose this?”
I looked down at the mass of lines that wrapped all around my arm, tangling and twisting themselves together and apart again.“I think it was how I viewed her art at the time. Just a bunch of random ass lines that meant more to her than me. I mean, I can say that now. Back then I told myself I was mimicking her, showing her what I thought of her work.”
“What’d she say when she saw it?”
I blew out a sigh and stared up at the deep purple sky. “She didn’t come back for a week from that fall off the wagon. When she did come back she felt guilty enough to not mention it. Of course, now she’s over the moon with it. She decided that it’s a work of art that shows my depth or some shit.”
