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Same as her—backside on top of the step down, feet on the bottom.
Like she was giving him the same comfortable feeling as he had given her.
Or at least she was starting to give it to him, with just the right levels of being silly. “I was thinking something like me putting my knee on your chest. You know, to get some leverage when I really have to yank to get things out,” she said, and got his eyes actually sparking with laughter in response.
Though he shook his head. “You’re not thinking that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re not a yanker.”
“So tell me what I am, then.”
She leaned back on her elbows, waiting for what she knew he’d already gotten.
And sure enough, here it was: “A tricksy little shit who gets you all turned around. Then next thing you know you’ve shared seventeen of your most painful life stories and that terrible thing you did when you were twelve and swore you’d take to your sodding grave,” he said—because he was perceptive.
A quality he didn’t always let show to much of the public.
Or even had to her, for much of their time together.
But he was. He did. He caught things easily.
And that should have made her careful.
Yet somehow it didn’t.
She just went with it.
“Sounds like I’m pretty good at my job then, hmm,” she said, and when she did he showed her exactly why she didn’t try todeny it with him: because she knew he wouldn’t really hold it against her. Or if he did, he wasn’t going to act like it was the worst thing in the world that she was decent at something and said so.
Though even knowing this, she didn’t expect what she got.
“You’re excruciatingly good at your job. Better than I ever was at football,” he said. Almost wearily, too. Like he was telling her something annoying instead of giving her an outrageous compliment.
“That’s ridiculous. You’re one of the greatest flipping footballers of all time.”
“All right, steady on. I was decent. And you’re a lot better than decent.”
“But I’ve barely done anything to deserve being deemed as such.”
“You don’t need to do things to deserve it—like getting out that little notepad and jotting things down and trying to wrangle me around to revealing things. You just do it naturally when I’m least expecting it. Like a superpower you don’t know you have and didn’t really mean to use.”
Fucking hell, she thought.
Though she stayed calm about it.
Because sure, that was a cool thing to say.
But she couldn’t let herself get too gooey and excitable over something cool, the way she usually did back in the nonprofessional portion of her life. That would have been a complete novice mistake at this stage of the game. Especially when he was possibly only gushing about her to throw her off guard and make her go soft on the questions. Which she absolutely was not going to do. She couldn’t do it, no matter how kind he was to her. She had to go in a certain way, from particular angles, or she wasn’t going to get what she needed.
And she intended to get what she needed.
“So. You somehow think you were only a decent footballer,” she said while he was still probably waiting for her to react to that nice thing he’d tried. Then got the reaction she was looking for. He was on the backfoot again, just like that.
“IknowI was only a decent footballer.”
“Think a lot of people would disagree there.”
