“I missed you last night.” It’s the truth, as ridiculous as it sounds, and I think she knows that.
“You forgot your jacket. You’ll freeze.”
“It’ll take them longer to realize I’m gone.” I kiss her again. “And my Jeep will warm us up.” I lace my fingers through hers and wonder if maybe letting her all the way in is less distracting and time consuming than trying to stop this.
Chapter Fifty-One
Savannah
Lucky Charm
I’m normally self-conscious about my body. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, and I try to be forgiving with myself, but it takes someone a lot stronger than me to be confident and comfortable strutting around in a bikini while surrounded by athletes and their cheerleader girlfriends, which was how I spent high school.
Lying in Noah’s bed, however, wearing nothing but my panties while he lazily draws shapes on the soft plains of my stomach, and the swell of my breasts…he’s looking at me with a combination of lust and veneration that instead of self-conscious, I feel sexy. Confident.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” Noah asks as he lies across my thighs, placing a kiss on my hip bone, which shouldn’t send shivers down my spine, but it does, especially when he keeps going lower.
“What?”
“Tomorrow night,” he repeats with one last kiss before he switches back to his hands, resting them on my hips like it’s where they belong. “We have a game.”
“Can Izzie stay up that late?” I ask, since it only starts at seven. So far, we’ve only gone to the weekend afternoon games. “Or I could drive her home at half-time, but?—”
“Intermission,” he corrects me with a smile. “Iz has a sleepover, so she might not even make it to practice tomorrow. One of her friends got a mini trampoline for her birthday, so they need to get together and train for the Olympics.”
“That’s adorable.”
“So, are you busy?”
The confusion must be all over my face.
“Unless you don’t want to?”
“Are you asking if I’m coming to your game?”
I’ve been once without Izzie, but that was because we’d already made plans and it would have been rude for Noah to uninvite me, or for me to no longer go. Not that I saw him after we got to the rink anyway, so I might as well have watched on my phone from my dorm room.
“More like asking you to come.”
“Why?”
He looks nervous as he gets up and hunts down his clothes, which is unsettling, because I’m usually the nervous one. And not that I think he would ever set me up to be humiliated, but we don’t do this. We hardly even claim each other as friends in public.
“I could point out that you need it for research, because I’m told it’s a completely different experience to go to a game wearing a player’s jersey, especially without the buffer of his kid sister, but honestly, I kind of just want you there. You might be my lucky charm,” he adds quickly.
“You lost your last game because I went without Izzie,” I remind him.
“The team did,” he agrees while getting dressed. “But I got four points, so…”
“You want me to come?” I try to read his expression, to see if this is a superstition thing, to help with my book research, or if Noah Callahan, a hotshot college athlete who sometimes sleeps with me, actually wants me to be there for him.
“Wearing this,” he agrees, taking something out of his backpack.
“I can’t,” I argue as soon as I see the jersey with a C stitched onto it, which Lacey implied means something.
“Please?” he asks. “It’s just like my sweatshirt you wear all the time, only you’ll fit in more.”
For story research, this would be helpful, to understand how differently people treat you when they know you’re with one of the players. But as me, someone who is very much in love with him, pretending sounds like a recipe for heartache.
