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BLACKBURN: Depends. Do you like having an unbroken nose?
Cal rubbed the bump spanning the bridge of his nose that had never gone away after his attempts at juggling frozen pucks had gone really wrong. Technically, it hadn’t been busted, but it had never looked the same after that.
MATSEN: Now I’m definitely giving your wife my number.
BLACKBURN: Fuck you.
Cal chuckled and sent a quick right back at you. Three dots appeared and disappeared on his screen several times before a new message came through.
FALLON HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE CHAT.
FALLON: Looking forward to the little talks we’re going to have.
BLACKBURN: You’re fucked now. She’s going to tell you what to eat and to go to the doctor when you feel like shit.
FALLON: You say that like I’m bossy.
BLACKBURN: Bingo.
FALLON: As if you don’t like it when I tell you what to do when I come to bed after a long shift and I just need to work out some frustration by—
Cal flipped his phone over and put it screen-side down on the kitchen counter. Fucking TMI group chat. There was some shit about his friends that a man didn’t need to know.
He shoved the grocery bag into the trash and took stock of the rest of the apartment. It would take a miracle to make it not look pathetic, and that wasn’t going to happen. And he was totally fine with that fact right up until the knock on his door a few minutes later. Then his stomach dropped like he’d just let in the goal that tied up the game. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about his depressing apartment, though, so he might as well just man-up and answer it.
Which he was going to do.
Any minute now.
It might not even be her.
It more than likely wasn’t her.
Yeah, dumbass, it’s probably the Easter Bunny on the other side of the door giving away free blow jobs instead of eggs.
Three quick knocks jolted him into action, and he strode over to the door, opening it just as Astrid was turning away.
“Hey,” he said, just barely stopping himself from wincing at his own ineptness.
Turning around to face him, she put her hand on her hip and cocked her head to the side. “I figured you either weren’t home or had changed your mind.”
“About you?” He leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms to keep himself from either fidgeting or grabbing her and hauling her inside like some kind of ’roided-up asshat. “No.”
“Glad to hear it.” She didn’t make a move other than to raise one eyebrow. “So are you going to invite me in?”
Chapter Five
Cal didn’t answer her seriously dorky question, which—fine—was to be expected, but now Astrid had run out of flirty things to say, not that she had a lot to begin with.
Give people a hard time? She could do that in her sleep.
Call out an asshole? Was it a day that ended in Y?
Chat up a hot guy without sounding like an idiot when there wasn’t a bar between them? Only during every third blue moon when it was a Tuesday and the flowers were in bloom.
Despite the past five years of Astrid being on what her friend Thea called The Worldwide New Dick Tour, she sucked at flirting. Like she’d once gone into depth about the absolutely pure happiness known as enchiladas during a date in London. Okay, yes she had been traveling through England at the time and had discovered the true horror that was Mexican food week on the Great British Bake-Off was not a one-off thing. To say she was scared for her stomach after seeing for what passed as a taco was putting it lightly. As the size of her ass could attest, she was a woman who took her food as seriously as she used to take goals against averages and penalty kill percentages.
None of that had anything to do with why she was standing in the hallway, brain blanking on what to say next. It wasn’t just that she kept getting distracted by the way the sleeves of his pink sweater stretched around his biceps—although that was an issue because damn, she’d always thought of herself as a forearm woman until now. So yeah, that was an issue, but the bigger one was that her palms had gone clammy and a whole flock (swarm?) of butterflies had taken up residence in her chest. She’d never admit it to another soul (not even Nola and Thea), but she was fucking nervous.
