Beautiful Player
Page 4
“Do you want to do something today?” I blurted. So much for calm.
He hesitated and I could have smacked myself for not considering that he’d already have plans. Like work. And after work, maybe a date with a girlfriend. Or a wife. Suddenly I was straining to hear every sound that pushed through the crackling silence.
After an eternity, he asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Loaded question. “Dinner?”
Will paused for several painful beats. “I have a thing. A late meeting. What about tomorrow?”
“Lab. I already scheduled an eighteen-hour time point with these cells that are really slow-growing and I will legitimately stab myself with a sharp tool if I mess this up and have to start over.”
“Eighteen hours? That’s a long day, Ziggs.”
“I know.”
He hummed before asking, “What time do you need to go in this morning?”
“Later,” I said, glancing at the clock with a wince. It was only six. “Maybe around nine or ten.”
“Do you want to join me at the park for a run?”
“You run?” I asked. “On purpose?”
“Yes,” he said, outright laughing now. “Not the I’m-being-chased running, but the I’m-exercising running.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling the familiar itch to follow this through, like a challenge, a damn assignment. Stupid Jensen. “When?”
“About thirty minutes?”
I glanced out the window again. It was barely light out. There was snow on the ground. Change, I reminded myself. And with that, I closed my eyes and said, “Text me directions. I’ll meet you there.”It was cold. Ass-freezing cold would be a more accurate description.
I reread Will’s text telling me to meet him near the Engineers Gate at Fifth and Ninetieth in Central Park and paced back and forth, trying to stay warm. The morning air burned my face and seeped through the fabric of my pants. I wished I’d brought a hat. I wish I’d remembered it was February in New York and only crazy people went to the park in February in New York. I couldn’t feel my fingers and I was legitimately worried the cold air combined with the windchill might cause my ears to fall off.
There were only a handful of people nearby: overachieving fitness types and a young couple huddled together on a bench beneath a giant spindly tree, each clasping to-go cups of something that looked warm, and delicious. A flock of gray birds pecked at the ground, and the sun was just making an appearance over the skyscrapers in the distance.
I’d hovered on the edge between socially appropriate and rambling geek most of my life, so of course I’d felt out of my element before: when I got that research award in front of thousands of parents and students at MIT, almost anytime I went shopping for myself, and, most memorably, when Ethan Kingman wanted me to go down on him in the eleventh grade and I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to do so and breathe at the same time. And now, watching the sky brighten with each passing minute, I would have gratefully escaped to any one of those memories to get out of doing this.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go running . . . actually, yes, that was a lot of it. I didn’t want to go running. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to run for sport. But I wasn’t dreading seeing Will. I was just nervous. I remembered the way he’d been—there was always something slow and hypnotic about his attention. Something about him that exuded sex. I’d never had to interact with him one-on-one before, and I worried that I simply lacked the composure to handle it.
My brother had given me a task—go live your life more fully—knowing that if there was one way to ensure I’d tackle something, it was to make me think I was failing. And while I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Jensen’s intent that I spend time with Will to learn how to date and to, lets face it, get laid, I needed to get inside Will’s head, learn from the master and be more like him in those ways. I just had to pretend I was a secret agent on an undercover assignment: get in and out and escape unharmed.
Unlike my sister.
After seventeen-year-old Liv had made out with a pierced, bass-playing nineteen-year-old Will over Christmas, I’d learned a lot about what it looks like when a teenage girl gets hung up on the bad boy. Will Sumner was the definition of that boy.
They all wanted my sister, but Liv had never talked about anyone the way she talked about Will.
“Zig!”
My head snapped up and toward the sound of my name, and I did a double take as the man in question walked toward me. He was taller than I remembered, and had the type of body that was long and lean, a torso that went on forever and limbs that should have made him clumsy but somehow didn’t. There’d always been something about him, something magnetic and irresistible that was unrelated to classically symmetrical good looks, but my memory of Will from even four years ago paled in comparison to the man in front of me now.
He hesitated and I could have smacked myself for not considering that he’d already have plans. Like work. And after work, maybe a date with a girlfriend. Or a wife. Suddenly I was straining to hear every sound that pushed through the crackling silence.
After an eternity, he asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Loaded question. “Dinner?”
Will paused for several painful beats. “I have a thing. A late meeting. What about tomorrow?”
“Lab. I already scheduled an eighteen-hour time point with these cells that are really slow-growing and I will legitimately stab myself with a sharp tool if I mess this up and have to start over.”
“Eighteen hours? That’s a long day, Ziggs.”
“I know.”
He hummed before asking, “What time do you need to go in this morning?”
“Later,” I said, glancing at the clock with a wince. It was only six. “Maybe around nine or ten.”
“Do you want to join me at the park for a run?”
“You run?” I asked. “On purpose?”
“Yes,” he said, outright laughing now. “Not the I’m-being-chased running, but the I’m-exercising running.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling the familiar itch to follow this through, like a challenge, a damn assignment. Stupid Jensen. “When?”
“About thirty minutes?”
I glanced out the window again. It was barely light out. There was snow on the ground. Change, I reminded myself. And with that, I closed my eyes and said, “Text me directions. I’ll meet you there.”It was cold. Ass-freezing cold would be a more accurate description.
I reread Will’s text telling me to meet him near the Engineers Gate at Fifth and Ninetieth in Central Park and paced back and forth, trying to stay warm. The morning air burned my face and seeped through the fabric of my pants. I wished I’d brought a hat. I wish I’d remembered it was February in New York and only crazy people went to the park in February in New York. I couldn’t feel my fingers and I was legitimately worried the cold air combined with the windchill might cause my ears to fall off.
There were only a handful of people nearby: overachieving fitness types and a young couple huddled together on a bench beneath a giant spindly tree, each clasping to-go cups of something that looked warm, and delicious. A flock of gray birds pecked at the ground, and the sun was just making an appearance over the skyscrapers in the distance.
I’d hovered on the edge between socially appropriate and rambling geek most of my life, so of course I’d felt out of my element before: when I got that research award in front of thousands of parents and students at MIT, almost anytime I went shopping for myself, and, most memorably, when Ethan Kingman wanted me to go down on him in the eleventh grade and I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to do so and breathe at the same time. And now, watching the sky brighten with each passing minute, I would have gratefully escaped to any one of those memories to get out of doing this.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go running . . . actually, yes, that was a lot of it. I didn’t want to go running. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to run for sport. But I wasn’t dreading seeing Will. I was just nervous. I remembered the way he’d been—there was always something slow and hypnotic about his attention. Something about him that exuded sex. I’d never had to interact with him one-on-one before, and I worried that I simply lacked the composure to handle it.
My brother had given me a task—go live your life more fully—knowing that if there was one way to ensure I’d tackle something, it was to make me think I was failing. And while I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Jensen’s intent that I spend time with Will to learn how to date and to, lets face it, get laid, I needed to get inside Will’s head, learn from the master and be more like him in those ways. I just had to pretend I was a secret agent on an undercover assignment: get in and out and escape unharmed.
Unlike my sister.
After seventeen-year-old Liv had made out with a pierced, bass-playing nineteen-year-old Will over Christmas, I’d learned a lot about what it looks like when a teenage girl gets hung up on the bad boy. Will Sumner was the definition of that boy.
They all wanted my sister, but Liv had never talked about anyone the way she talked about Will.
“Zig!”
My head snapped up and toward the sound of my name, and I did a double take as the man in question walked toward me. He was taller than I remembered, and had the type of body that was long and lean, a torso that went on forever and limbs that should have made him clumsy but somehow didn’t. There’d always been something about him, something magnetic and irresistible that was unrelated to classically symmetrical good looks, but my memory of Will from even four years ago paled in comparison to the man in front of me now.
