It’s written all over her.
I can read her like a book, and that book wants to be open to me.
That’ll have to be enough for me.
My self-control isn’t that good. At the last moment, I stretch out my hand, my fingers grazing hers. We’re so close that this could look like an incidental brushing. For a split second, her fingers curl into mine.
It’s all the confirmation I need. This is hell for her too.
The moment the pictures are done, she all but sprints out of there. Part of me understands. She can’t be caught fraternizing with the team she’s about to officiate. She can’t be caught fraternizing withme.
Slowly I walk behind my teammates to the locker room where I’d pitched my bag upon arrival. I strip off my long socks and shin guards, sliding my feet into my flip-flops. I have time to run home for a quick shower and lunch before I need to report back for the game.
I wonder what Andi’s going to do with this downtime. There’s not enough time for her to drive home and back. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have her number. I don’t have the willpower not to text her and offer to let her shower at my house. With me.
I said I’m working on being a good person. I’m not one yet.
Chapter 34: Andi
Thank goodness forlong cold showers.
Mostly because it’s 85 degrees with oppressive humidity, and it’s only early afternoon. Also because standing next to Brandon Nix sets my body on fire. My fingers still burn where he touched me.
As the water sluices over me, I think about the saltwater fish tank my dad bought for Benj and me right after we’d moved to Colorado. It was super cool, and Benj and I used to sit in front of it for hours and watch the fish and other reef dwellers who called our 35-gallon tank home. He’d bought something called live rock from the aquarium supply store. It looked like big pieces of rock with a lot of holes in it. Nothing special. Certainly nothing exciting. As time went on, more and more critters and creatures emerged from the rock. It really was alive.
This was before the internet, so I used to have to go to the library and get books out to look up what I was seeing to identify it. Eventually, Benj and I were able to label all the residents of our tank. There were tons of limpets, some snails, and even a crab that emerged. We had Aiptasia, of course, which is an invasive and problematic type of anemone. My dad was looking up how to kill those, but I thought they were pretty. Hands down, the coolest thing to come out of the rock was a spiny sea urchin.
Benj and I named him Spike.
Spike was super active, moving around the tank on a daily basis. My dad liked him because he ate algae. Benj and I liked him because he was entertaining. All in all, Spike was an unexpected, added bonus to our lives. Until the morning I came out to find the water in the tank cloudy and every single creature—fish and invertebrates alike—dead. Spike included, lying on the sandy gravel at the bottom of the tank, his oral surface facing up. Spike was right underneath the heater, which had a hole in it.
He’d eaten it, causing the heater to malfunction and raise the water temperature from a balmy 78 degrees to over 100. He’d boiled them all alive.
That’s how being around Brandon Nix makes me feel. Like I’m boiling alive. Maybe that’s why he has an ice bath.
Spike is the perfect analogy for Brandon. That should be his spirit animal. Comes out of nowhere, looks poisonous, is actually pretty cool and entertaining, kills you in the end.
