Page 6 of Elevator Pitch

I sit up straighter. Not a suggestive hint filled my voice. I wouldn’t know how to seduce a man like him. While I’ve been on a slew of dates over the years, sexually enticing were two words I would not pair together to describe myself. Then again, neither were the men I’d swiped on.

“Let me have a look at your social media.” Ross doesn’t appear to have a phone and the command implies he wants mine.

“What?” I scoff. “Why?”

“I swear I know you.”

“I’m certain you do not.”

Ross Davis and I are not likely to round the same social circles nor have our paths crossed in any manner other than I’m a baseball fan and he was once a well-known player.

My phone is plugged into the base of the lamp on the opposite nightstand. Earlier, I’d left the dead device behind to charge when I met friends in the lobby bar. Ross sets down his drink and shifts on the bed, suddenly lunging across the wide berth of the mattress and extending his long arm for my phone.

“No,” I canter, scampering after him, reaching for the back of his sweatshirt and missing. Instead, I catch the back of his leg using it for leverage to climb up on the bed and partially over his broad body as if I can get to my phone before him. His arms are longer. Once he has the device in his hands, he shifts, forcing me to fall to his side while he flops to his back and holds up my phone.

“Use your own phone,” I argue, irritated by his intrusiveness.

“Nope. Coaching makes me a strategist. I always look for the straightest path forward. And right now, that’s to open your apps, not search mine.” He rolls his head to look at me. “Passcode?”

Is he serious? “So invasive,” I mumble.

Our eyes meet. Blue to blue, we’re a matching set, yet we couldn’t be more opposite. Think book nerd and popular jock in high school.

“Fine.” I grumble out the six-digit code, knowing he’ll never remember it nor hold my phone in his hands again.

Once the device is unlocked, he easily finds my Instagram, scrolls through the images, and pinches his brow.

“You really like books.” Curiosity fills his voice.

I reach for my phone, but he rolls to his left side, body-blocking me and forcing me to drape over him a second while he holds the device out of my grasp.

I hitch my shoulder. “I like books.” The truth is more complicated than that, but he doesn’t need to know my life’s work.

Ross pauses to glance at me again, reading my tee.

Cool Girls Read Hot Books.

Without a comment, he turns back to my phone and continues to scroll. My heart hammers the longer he searches. Then he taps over to the reels and my stomach drops. There aren’t many saved videos, but there’s one I’d rather he didn’t see. His roaming thumb stills, and he presses on the screen.

“Put Me in Coach” screeches into the room and gives away exactly what he’s watching.

A thirty-second blip on the jumbotron at Anchor Field of a woman dancing. Arms raised. Hips swaying. Exaggerated movements which express enthusiasm and suggest one too many margaritas. There’s no way Ross watched the screen during that game or recalls a video from years ago.

However, the video hit social media and went viral.

Ross quickly turns his head; eyes searching my face once again. “I knew you looked familiar.”

“How would you remember thirty-seconds from eight years ago?”

Yep, that embarrassing moment captured on film and shared across the internet was me.

Wiggling. Jiggling. Shaking my then-thirty-something groove thing.

Slightly ashamed by the antics on the video, I tug the phone from his grasp and collapse on my back, holding the device so the screen faces me.

The video replays, splashing the image of me dancing in the bleachers of Anchor Field, rhythmically waving my arms and over-enthusiastically rocking my hips, when the girl beside me holds up a posterboard with a giant arrow pointed at me that read:

Hey-hey Ross Davis. Date our mom.