He chuckled. “I work out with the team every morning at six.”
Yuck. That sounded awful. “I’ve never been able to work out in the morning. I do much better working out at night.”
“With early morning workouts and then afternoon practice, by the time night rolls around, I’m pretty beat.”
“But not too tuckered out for all the ladies,” I teased.
He smiled and winked at me. “Never.”
My cheeks heated, no match for that wink of his. I shook my head at him, trying to hide my smile as I took another sip of the hot, delicious coffee.
Thinking about the worddelicioushad me remembering how I had used that word to describe Slate. Today he wore a simple t-shirt paired with jeans, but it looked anything but simple on him. The sleeves fit snugly around his biceps, and the material pulled at the width of his chest. His dark hair was freshly styled, his strong chin clean-shaven. Delicious was definitely the word for him.
“What?” he asked, noticing me staring at him.
Instead of telling him my true thoughts, I said, “What has you sitting by me today?”
He hadn’t sat next to me for the last several classes, and I had just assumed his choice of seat on our first day had been a random thing.
He shrugged. “I figured we’re friends now. Do you not want me to sit by you?”
“No!” I said too loudly. “I mean, yes. Ugh. I don’t know the right way to answer that.”
I could see he was trying to hold back a smile, and it had me feeling embarrassed again. Taking a breath, I tried again. “What I’m trying to say is I’m fine with you sitting by me.”
He let out a smile. “Okay, good. Glad we got that cleared up.”
I tried not to feel all warm and fuzzy about the fact that he thought we were friends now. I had a feeling he didn’t have a lot of friends who were women, and I was happy to be one of them. Plus, I could really use a friend here. Making friends had proven to be harder than I’d anticipated.
“Did you ever hear from that boyfriend of yours?” he asked.
“Josh?” I replied, amused at how he didn’t want to use his name. “Um, no, not yet, but it’s still early.” At least that was the excuse I was telling myself.
“Interesting.” His voice was flat.
His distaste for Josh was no secret, but I didn’t know where it came from. “Why do you dislike him so much?”
He looked straight ahead when he answered. “We’ve had a few interactions, and let’s just say we aren’t huge fans of each other.”
Before I could ask him for more details, Professor Larsen stood at the front of the class to begin his lecture. I pushed thoughts of Slate and Josh out of my head and focused on taking notes.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Slate typing notes into his laptop, and I was impressed by how seriously he seemed to be taking this class. I could easily see someone like him not caring about his classes, only caring about football and women, but maybe there was more to him than what I could see on the outside, more to him than he let on.
But I was quick to shut down that thought. It wasn’t my business what made Slate the way he was. We were just friends, and that was fine by me.
Class ended, and I was already feeling underwater with how much I was going to need to read and study for this course.
“Are you feeling overwhelmed after that, or is it just me?” I put my laptop back in my bag.
“Not too much. School comes pretty easily to me.” He zipped up his backpack and stood.
“Of course it does,” I mumbled. He was gorgeousandsmart. Why did some people have it all?
He waited until I was done packing up my stuff before walking with me to the door in the back of the room. “If you ever need help studying, let me know.”
I looked over at him as we walked to make sure he wasn’t referring to something else. “As long as there is no double meaning to your offer, I might take you up on that.”
He laughed. “My offer is genuine. And you have a boyfriend, remember?”
