I don’t reply. She doesn’t need any input from me to keep going, not with that singsong voice of hers which tells me everything I need to know about her intentions with this conversation.
“You like him, don’t you?”
“No.”
“But he’scute, right?”
Pursing my lips together, I fix her with a blank stare. “He’s Nick. NickRussell.”
Claire stops scribbling notes into her tablet, and her stylus drops to the table. “Don’t fucking fart around, man.”
“I’m not.”
My stomach drops when her lips curve upward. “How much do you know about him?”
“That he’s hot?”
“And?”
And that despite his blasé demeanor, he’s actually smartandhe tries hard, which is corkscrewing hard into my competence kink and stretching my self-control.
“He’s…a decent guy,” I say. “What, do you know more?”
“A little. I know his friends, through my teammate Sabrina, who’s friends with Nick’s best friend Ian.”
“Isn’t Ian the guy who went viral for kissing his boyfriend after a game last April?”
“You’re right,” she says.
And then there’s his roommate Jeremy who doesn’t keep what he thinks of me a secret.
“Sononeof his close friends are straight.” I press my hands together, gears turning in my head. “Does that mean anything for him…by association?”
“You really don’t know?” Claire asks. “Nick was dating a guy in his first year here. They broke up, and Nick hasn’t been seen with anyone else ever since.”
Woah, fuck, hold up.“You said he was dating aguy?”
She nods.
Nick’s into dudes?
Holy shit. Now that the idea of banging my tutee has entered the realm of possibility, I can’t shake the idea of getting my hands on Nick’s?—
“Hey, come back.” Claire laughs and waves her hand in front of my face. “Your eyes went all glassy.”
Heat rises up my neck, and I stare at my fidgeting fingers. “Oops.”
She shrugs, tapping her long nails against themetal of her water bottle. “Hey, I don’t blame you. Nick’s hot.”
“I’ll say,” I mutter. “Every time I go to his house, Nick’s lying ass-up on the couch in the most obscene pair of sweatpants I’ve had the privilege of seeing.”
“And you can’t stop thinking about burying your face deep in there, can you?”
That pesky blush creeps into my ears, and I glance around the foyer to make sure there’s nobody around who can potentially understand us.
“You aren’t wrong,” I admit, and I don’t elaborate. Claire knows too much about me already from being friends for the past four years, and now, being an open book is coming back to bite me in the ass.
“I know I’m not. There was the hockey guy from the summer who you were obsessed with.”
