Chapter 8: Our Secret Moments: Chapter 8

CAT I WISHED someone could give me more of a helping hand with this new project. I wish Coach Mackenzie had not just left the room, saying nothing but ‘good luck’ and gave me a double thumbs up. I wish Rotford had given me some sort of direction to where to take this instead of leaving me in the dark.

This is supposed to be a good thing. It’s supposed to show me how my writing could work in the real world and how I would conduct interviews with real celebrities or even with local people. But trying to organise a room full of football players is like trying to teach a puppy to potty train.

Coach managed to line them up in the sports classroom, but it feels fucking tiny with me at a desk, papers and my laptop in front of me and men who are way too tall to be considered students towering over me, pestering me with questions I don’t have the answers to. It’s only half of the team, but it feels like there’s at least fifty of us in here.

I’ve never been in a space with this many men and it’s starting to freak me out. They all talk too much and too loud.

They also smell disgusting and they keep giving me the heebie jeebies for looking at me for too long.

Worst of all? Connor fucking Bailey won’t keep his eyes off me. Since the party, I’ve felt him everywhere and in every fibre of my body. It’s like he’s attached himself to my mind and my body without meaning to. And I hate that it feels like I have no control. But I’m supposed to. I’m supposed to have the upper hand.

I take a deep breath, ready to calm them down and get my first person up. I stand, hoping to make myself visible to anybody who will listen.

“Can everybody calm down, please?” I ask as loud as I can without sounding insane. Nobody moves. “Hey!” I try again and nothing.

I’m about to give up and try again in a few minutes before Connor’s eyes lock with mine as Wes and another guy talk at both sides of him animatedly. I don’t know what’s going on in his brain, but he looks at me like he knows what I was trying to do and he nudges Wes and the other dude and they stop talking.

“Can everyone shut the fuck up so we can get on with this and you can all leave and get about your day?” he booms.

The deepness and roughness in his voice causes me to stumble a little and I catch myself on the table as everyone goes hauntingly silent. He is the captain of the team after all, and the bossy side of him is weirdly attractive.

He keeps his eyes on me and half of me is grateful that he has my back like that, but the other half of me is annoyed that they don’t listen to me. If I’m going to do this, it needs to be on my terms and under my leadership and control. I won’t be able to survive in the real world if I can’t get a bunch of twenty-year-old boys to listen to me.

“Thank you,” I mouth to him, and he nods, his cheeks turning the tiniest shade of pink before he continues talking to Wes at a manageable volume.

The classroom is big enough so the boys should be able to take a seat at the tables that are scattered around like a detention room, but most of them settle for sitting on top of the tables. There’s something so fascinating about boys and their inability to sit on furniture the right way.

I double check the list that Coach made for me. He suggested I get through as many as I could until I couldn’t take it anymore, which seems doable.

I call out the first name. “Michael Redford?”

The boys whoop and cheer as the unlucky guy walks forwards. Unlucky because he’s the same guy who suggested keeping his shirt off when I first went into the locker room and also because he’s ginger with the unlucky last name ‘Redford’ and everybody calls him ‘Red.’

He walks towards me, his cheeks – you guessed it – red. His legs are so long that they go way past my chair underneath the table. I scoot back a little, trying to put some distance between us.

As much as it’s easy to get information about the players from Coach’s files, I’ve learned that the best way to learn things about someone you already know is by asking them basic questions and seeing how they present the answers to you.

Which is why I shouldn’t be surprised by the number of stupid answers that I get when I asked three boys in a row what their height was, and they replied with some variation of “Do you want to know my shoe size too? You know what they say. Big feet means big dick.”

When I’ve gone through four boys, each of them having similar descriptions and hobbies, I’m already falling asleep. It’s not that they aren’t interesting. Some of them say the most outrageous things that confuse me so much that I need to take a step back. Some of the boys are quiet, a little shy and nervous that they’re being questioned like this on a random day.

But when Wes’s name is called, I can’t help but smile up at him. It feels like we’ve not spoken properly in years, but he’s always fun to be around. He’s usually attached to one of the Bailey twins’s hips and often has something inappropriate to say. It’s best when all of us are together and I can watch the way he feeds off everyone’s energy and becomes one huge ball of light.

Connor doesn’t think I notice the way his face scrunches up and he rolls his head back when Wes walks up to me. I’ve purposefully skipped his name off the list, moving to all the people around him instead of him.

I also don’t think he’s noticed that I’ve picked up on him trying to skip the queue – if you can even call it that – by attempting to bribe others to make up an excuse and leave early so he can get to me quicker. He’s getting antsy and I’m having way too much fun watching him squirm.

“Cathy!” Wes calls, pulling out the chair and immediately man-spreading as he sits. Like his dad, he has dirty blonde hair that is a messy heap on his head and he’s one of the lucky people whose eyes change colour depending on the lighting. Now, they look sort of grey. It’s fascinating.

“Don’t call me that. You make me sound like an old woman,” I say, laughing as I pull up a clean page on the document I’ve been working on.

He sulks, crossing his arms against his chest. “But you’re my old lady,” he says.

The laughter rushes out of my chest. He’s been calling me that for as long as I can remember. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’d always get chosen to be the grandma when we’d play house as kids. Wes was always the pet on a leash and he always belonged to Nora.

“Keep doing that,” he whispers, turning back to the group of boys as most of the room has cleared now. I end up gasping, trying to catch my breath and process his words at the same time.

“What?”

“When you have the next person come up to you, laugh and smile at them like they’re the funniest person you’ve ever met,” he says quietly, leaning into me. I smile, shaking my head slowly at his mischievousness. “It will drive Connor up the wall. He’s already being pushed back and he clearly wants to talk to you.”

“What’s his problem? He seems nervous,” I say to Wes.

He shrugs. “Talking to people isn’t his thing, apparently.” I nod, feeling a strange pang in my chest for drawing out this process for him when he probably would have benefitted from going first and getting this over with. Wes takes my silence as dismissal. “Just do it, Cat. Please. I’m begging you.”

I sigh, catching Connor’s eye as he fiddles with the hem of his shirt. “Okay,” I say quietly. Wes’s eyes light up at the challenge. “Okay, fine.”

He whispers a silent ‘yes’ to himself before using every given moment to try to make me laugh as I ask him the basic questions like his age (nineteen), birthday (June 14th), star sign (Gemini), height (six-one, but he looks five-eleven) and hobbies which ranged from kayaking to chess. He answers them all lazily and I keep my face painted in a smile the entire time until he winks at me and moves on.

When Sam Cho takes a seat at the table I smile so hard that my cheeks hurt. It helps that he’s an attractive guy – smooth face, adorable dimples and a smile to match. He’s also one of the boys who gave me the eyes in the locker room the other day.

“Hi, Sam. It’s nice to meet you,” I say when he crosses his arms against his chest.

“You too,” he says. I laugh as if he said something funny, tucking my curls behind my ear. His eyebrows crunch as he looks left and right for the joke he must have missed and when I train my gaze over his head where Connor’s eyes are burning holes through the back of Sam’s head. “Ooh, Connor? Tell you what would make him mad?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” I say, shrugging. Connor has no right to be this upset over not getting a chance to talk to me and I’m having the time of my life seeing how far he’ll go before he has a tantrum.

Sam’s smile creeps up on his face as he leans into me and I lean forward. I have no idea what I’m doing, or what he’s going to do, but my heart is pounding with anticipation. The desk isn’t that big so he reaches over easily, tucking another strand of hair behind my ear. His face is so close to mine now I can feel his steady breathing against my neck, the sensation so weirdly foreign to me that my eyes flutter closed for a second.

“I’m not going to do anything, but from his angle it probably looks like I’m saying something filthy,” he murmurs softly. “I’m giving him three seconds before he comes over.”

CONNOR What the fuck is he doing?

I know the comments he made about her were harmless, but this, right in front of me, is anything but harmless. The room is almost cleared now, and I’ve been standing in here for what feels like hours.

I don’t bother to hide my annoyance as I storm over there, pull Sam out of the chair and sit in his seat. It’s petty and extremely pathetic, but I’ve been watching her laugh with all the guys on the team while I have to wait around to have a five-minute conversation with her. And those five minutes with her would mean the world to me.

“I told you,” Sam mutters, laughing as he walks away.

Cat doesn’t even look at me as I sit down, spreading out my legs, pinning my arms against my chest. She stares down at the papers in front of her, taking notes as if I’m not right here.

When I get more comfortable, my leg stretches out further and my jeans brush against her tights. I watch her actively try to fight it, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip. I brush my leg against hers again, needing some sort of reaction.  It might be doing nothing for her, but I know I’ll be thinking about this tiny interaction for weeks.

“Catherine,” I press.

“Connor,” she says lazily before finally meeting my eyes.

It’s impossible for someone to get more and more beautiful every time I see them, right? Like, that shouldn’t happen. So, why is it when I look into those dark brown eyes, I can see a golden pool of light swirling within them that I’ve never seen before?

“It’s my turn now, right?” I ask, nodding to her sheets which she’s neatly piled up.

“Actually, no,” she quips, beaming at me. “That’s all I’m going to do today.”

There is no way she’s being serious. “What?” I ground out.

She sighs, tilting her head to the side playfully. “Well, Coach said to go through as many as I can and I’m tired,” she says, clearly faking a yawn as she stacks her sheets on top of her laptop before leaning on her forearms. “Besides, I know most of the answers to the questions I was going to ask you, so it’s not like I really need much from you.”

I tilt my head to the side. “So, you strung me along this whole time just to say you don’t need me?”

“No, Connor,” she says, pulling out her chair as she stands. She presses her palms to the table as leans into me, her strong scent of her cherry and macadamia shampoo invades my senses. I lean into her too, needing to be closer to her, but she moves her head to the side of my face and all I can hear is my heart pounding in my ears. Suddenly nothing else exists other than her proximity and the tight feeling in my chest as she whispers, “It’s called edging.”

Fuck.

My.

Life.