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“I don’t tweet,” I said with a curl of my lip.
“Not yet, you don’t,” Quinn Bailey agreed with a wink. “But we’re going to teach you.”
“No.”
“Yes!” Winnie said, excited and nodding.
Fuck.
“Fine.”
All of them just stood there and stared. Winnie with happiness, Quinn with way too much knowledge, and the others waiting for Twitter to grow roots and spring from the ground right in front of me, apparently.
“Well?” I prompted. “Do I just email it?”
Earnie Fletcher, one of the best tailbacks in the league and all-around monster runner, choked on a laugh before straightening himself up when my face didn’t change. “Oh. You’re serious.”
My eyes burned with the effort I put into telepathically saying, Fuck all of you.
“Okay, so you’re going to need to go to the App Store. Do you know what the App Store is?” Quinn asked with a tremor of humor in his voice, jerking his head to my phone.
I honestly wasn’t sure I did, but fuck if I was going to let them know that.
“Yes,” I sneered with a tilt of my head. “I know what the App Store is.”
Winnie smiled, all the way from her mouth to her eyes, and touched her nose. She knew I was lying.
Holding up her phone from behind the crowd while the guys looked at me, she pointed to a blue button on the screen. I searched for the same icon on my phone and pushed it.
“Now, just search for Twitter,” Sean instructed.
I did that and pushed the little box that said “Get.” I didn’t know anything about this shit, but I also wasn’t an idiot.
“Now what?” I asked when it loaded.
It only took them five minutes and a heated discussion over what my “handle” should be to get me in the position to actually tweet something.
It was @NYMavsTopGun, by the way—a cute play on the movie Top Gun and being the guy in charge. I was both disgusted and impressed by the argument those four men had while strategizing my name. It was a lot like any exchange between Kline, Thatch, and me. Apparently, almost all grown men are children.
“All right. What do I say?” I asked testily, growing a little frustrated with the whole thing. I wasn’t really great at being the guy who didn’t know what was going on.
From a very young age, and likely because of the lack of my mother’s influence, my father had raised me to be independent and in charge. Honestly, I think he just needed me to help him raise me by raising myself. He hadn’t planned on having to teach me all of life’s lessons on his own. But men like him never did. They walked into the hospital with a smile on their face and excitement in their hearts—and they left, brand-new baby bundle in their arms, heartbroken and without a wife.
“Anything you want,” Fletcher offered. I had to focus in order to remember what I had even asked.
Winnie’s eyes shot to mine, and she almost shouted. “Not anything! Jesus. Don’t get him into trouble, guys.”
Quinn rolled his eyes with a smile. “It’s just Twitter.”
Oh, yeah. Twitter.
“And how many followers do you have on Twitter, Quinn?” Winnie fired back pointedly.
God, I loved when she got heated. I had to look down in order to conceal my smile, but I peeked up from underneath my lashes so I could watch Quinn’s reaction.
He didn’t even have to think about it. I was guessing, by the line of his jaw, Southern charm, and cut body, he had a lot. “Point taken.”
“He could just say something about practice,” Rollins suggested.
“He should say something funny,” Sean insisted as he jumped up onto Winnie’s table and leaned back on his elbows, feet dangling.
“How about he doesn’t say anything?” I grumbled.
Winnie laughed. “Relax.”
I thought about it, and out of nowhere, something came to me. I moved my fingers over the keyboard and then showed it to the room. “How’s this?”
They passed the phone around, starting with Winnie, and I thanked fuck I had my messages set to show the notification without the message. I didn’t need something popping up on there while any of them had their hands on it. Especially because, when you were friends with someone like Thatcher Kelly, you never knew what was going to show up at any given moment.
Winnie’s eyes grew moist, just barely—but enough that I noticed—and I knew no matter what any of the other fucks said, I was posting it.
“It’s perfect,” Quinn thankfully agreed.
“He just needs a hashtag,” Sean said as he passed the phone back to Rollins.
“A hashtag?” I asked. Fletcher smiled when he read the words on the screen and lifted his eyes to mine. There was noticeably more warmth within them—as though I’d finally proven myself as human.
“Usually something ironic, funny, and common-ground building,” Quinn explained.
“You put this little thing—”
“The pound sign?” I asked.
Sean bit his lip and bugged out his eyes, muttering under his breath, “Hashtag: signs you’re old.”
I was pretty sure the little asshole was mocking me, but as he typed away in order to give me whatever the fuck the all-important hashtag was about, I realized I couldn’t kill him until he was done.
Winnie, as though reading the murder in my eyes, stepped forward and took the phone from Sean to pass it to me herself. I looked down to read what he’d added.
@NYMavsTopGun: Season rush yards: 5468. Pass yards: 4367. Lessons from a six-year-old. #areyousmarterthana1stgrader #no
It looked good to me. “What do I do now?”
“Push tweet,” Sean said with a roll of his eyes.
God, this was ridiculous. My thumb hovered for the barest of seconds before making contact with the screen.
“Okay, done.”
“Congratulations,” Winnie offered enthusiastically, and the guys laughed.
“Why does this feel like the beginning of the end?” I asked with a groan.
“Because it is,” Quinn said with a wink.
Another fucking winker.
I shook my head.
Struggling to take my eyes off Winnie and her warmth, and completely done with the other bozos in the room, I forced myself to focus on the phone in my hands and use it for something other than tweeting and chirping and shit.
Me: Meet me in the storage room?
Winnie’s phone pinged, and her cheeks got rosier the instant she read the message. The blush overwhelmed the peach of her skin even further when the guys noticed her reaction.
“What’s up, Dr. Double U?” Quinn asked with a good-ol’-boy smirk and far more knowing eyes than Winnie or I would have liked.
“‘Who is it, Pooh?’ asked Tigger,” Sean Phillips teased. He was smart and had a good head on his shoulders—despite being related to Cassie.
In fact, all four of these young men were smart, and they’d pretty quickly become some of my favorite picks. Picks I’d make again, repeatedly, if fate saw fit to give me a Groundhog Day scenario.
Rollins and Fletcher were quieter. Reserved. Watchful.
But what they lacked in exuberance, they more than made up for with intelligence.
Win squatted down and reached for something from her supplies so she wouldn’t have to meet any of our eyes.
I kept my phone up, my fingers typing, and my face neutral—what Thatch often referred to as my “natural state.”
Me: Tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s none of their business.
She read again, and the very corner of one end of her mouth curved up. I could actually feel her fighting the pull to meet my eyes. And it wouldn’t be the players she’d be telling to go fuck themselves if and when she gave in.
I typed again.
Me: Tell them it’s Coach Bennett. They’re all late.
Her face after I said that was my favorite, the horror and realization of a prospective assumed affair between her and the head coach making that excuse a definite no.
I was seconds away from sending another suggestion when she killed my fun but put a whole other kind into motion.
“It’s my babysitter,” she announced to the room. That seemed to calm the inquisitive young minds around us. “I have to make a call.”
As she approached the door, and me, her eyes finally, briefly, caught mine. They said soon I would pay.
I just hoped it was in all the ways I liked best.
Unfortunately for me, when I escaped the guys and followed her to our supersecret location—the storage room—there weren’t actually pleasurable things waiting for me.
A lecture. But no pleasure.
Though, really, I had to admit, I really liked when Winnie shoved my shit right back at me. So maybe there was a little pleasure.
“You can’t text me like that in front of people,” she commanded, backing me into the door with a finger in my face, and I did my best not to smile. Smiling right now would lead to nothing but trouble. Not one goddamn good thing. And I was really trying to be on Santa’s Nice List at the end of this exchange so I’d get the orgasm I’d spent so much time writing the letter asking for.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked as innocently as I could manage. “Spell things out?”
“No!” She swatted at me. I watched her hand move and then looked back to her face and pretended to think about it.
“You’re right. Not only would the guys know, but Lex would too. No way spelling will work. She knows more words than I do. So hand signals it is.”
