Even when he’s passed out cold after giving blood, I still actively dislike Fletcher Huxley.
2
Fletcher Huxley, aka a guy who doesn’t need to catch a break, because he’s making his own fate, dammit
Goldie Collins is a badass.
Good thing. I need a badass.
“She has more followers than I do,” I mutter to my dog. The two of us are in the driver’s seat of my Range Rover, stalking Goldie’s Instagram page for any last tidbits of information about her before we get out and accidentally run into her as she’s finishing up the soccer practice she’s coaching this morning.
I flip over to the tab where people have tagged her in posts.
UnlikemyInstagram page, she doesn’t have a hundred tags with the four pictures random people took of me passing out on her at the blood drive the other day.
Plus the photos we’re pretending my own photographer didn’t take.
They’re all bloody awful. I’m sprawled across her midsection,shirtless, my mouth hanging open, my eyes half open too like I’m dead, in almost every last one of them.
Goldie, though?
In one photo, she’s gaping down at me, her dark hair splayed across the tile floor, one arm trapped. In another, she’s squeezing her eyes shut while she tries to shove my shoulder. The third, she’s grim-faced as she makes athis wasn’t how I saw this going down when I came over to help himface at a nurse who’s showed up. And in the last, she’s smiling at an older Black lady while sitting on the floor beside me as a nurse touches my face.
Probably tapping it and trying to wake me up.
Would’ve been more effective if she’d slapped me though.
Fucking needles.
Fucking blood draws.
But the publicity from me passing out is selling tickets and getting attention for the team.
Worth it.
As for Goldie—her Instagram page has satisfied clients tagging her in pictures of them graduating college or opening their dream bakery or lifting weights or posing with her while she signs one of her books for them.
The picture of Goldie cheering on the lady lifting weights is hella impressive.
The older woman must be three hundred if she’s a day, with arms about the width of a pencil, and she’s curling thirty pounds.
I can curl a little more, but my arms are also thicker than a pencil. Plus, I’m not even a half-century old yet, much less three.
Sweet Pea licks my phone screen.
I stroke her short dark fur with my thumb, the rest of my hand tucked around her tiny body. “Knock it off, you little beast. That’s not breakfast.”
She grins up at me, pink tongue lolling out, big black eyes shininghappily. She’s five pounds of fearless in a short-legged, long-bodied, overactive waggy-tailed miniature dachshund body. If she could speak, she’d be like that tree guy in those Marvel movies, except instead of saying her name, she’d yelpeverybody loves meall day long.
As they should.
While I tell people I got her because I knew it would look good on my socials, the little creature owns my cold, black heart, and we both know it.
“Time to do this,” I tell her.
The pipsqueaks have been out on the soccer field for half an hour now. Not likely they’ll go much longer.
Not at their heights and not in this weather.
