Can I add another “ever” in there?
Because EVER.
The rush of what happened tonight is still zinging through my pulse points, even more than an hour after my last touchdown.
Forty-five minutes after shaking hands with the other team, my helmet off, hair down—the looks I got from Wyandotte Rural were fabulous.
Thirty minutes since I shot a confident smile across the locker room at Kelly, her annoyance level stuck at eleven.
Fifteen minutes since I hopped out of the shower.
And about a minute since Grey touched my facelike that.
So I don’t brush off their praise. But because I can’t reconcile the thrill zipping through my veins with the burn of butterflies in my gut as I meet Grey’s eyes, I go with a trick play to buy myself some time.
“Who wants pancakes? I’ll drive.”
Grey’s got his arm around my shoulders. More technically, he’s got it around my chair, Mr. Manspreader Supreme at work at ten thirty on a Friday night.
No one seems to notice or care. Jake and Kelly are working very hard to ignore us at the opposite end of five tables strung together. The boys between us don’t seem to give a shit. And directly across from me is Addie, who would normally be cataloging every inch of Grey’s body language in embarrassing detail to tease me about later, but who isn’t paying a lick of attention because she’s found something infinitely more fascinating: Nick Cleary.
The attraction was instant, like freaking lightning. He immediately recognized Addie as “the hot girl who trashed my twin sister at state.”
Note to all boys: There is no better way to pick upAdeline McAndry than to call her hot and talented in the same sentence. The steak-and-potatoes Prince Harry thing probably didn’t hurt his chances.
Kelly was either not amused or a strawberry jam tubjust happenedto bean Nick in the jugular 2.3 seconds later. Addie immediately swept the jam off the banquet and squeezed in beside him, smile a bazillion watts.
“Earth to O-Rod,” Grey whispers into my ear as a note of boy soap, crisply sitting atop his skin, drifts my way.
Rather than whipping around—which would put our mouths way too close together—I side-eye him with a little smile.
“Yes?”
“Seen a Martian yet?”
“Very funny, Captain Kirk.”
His lips tip up at the corners. “Don’t worry. It happens to everyone. It used to happen to me even.”
“What did?”
“That posttouchdown buzz.”
My smile widens. I can’t help it. “How do you know I’m not always like this when I win? How do you know touchdowns make it different?”
“Because I know enough about your softball career to know that if you were like this every time you won or scored, you’d probably be permanently high.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes. You going to actually accept it?”
“I do believe I will.”
“Oh shit,” Addie screeches. “Liv,curfew.”
My head whips around to where she’s sitting across the table, stack of pancakes vanished in a sad swirl of used syrup and melted butter. Her eyes are wide, and Nick looks as surprised as she does that everything has come grinding to a halt.
I glance at my watch. Crap. It’s now a quarter to eleven, which is pumpkin time in both our houses. Cop Dad is one thing, but Mrs. McAndry, Johnson County district attorney, is also not a person you want to defy. Neither set of parents is going to be happy if we’re late, even if they think Addie and I’ve just been bumming it at the mall or movie theater tonight. Which is totally what they think—Ryan even asked Danielle to drop him and Jesse at the football stadium because I was “with Addie.”
