A glance in Ash’s direction revealed the amusement in his gaze.
Ah, shit. First the idling outside his office door, and now the squirming next to him. I was batting a hundred in embarrassment points.
“Yep. All good,” I replied, keeping my tone level and not like I wanted to melt into the couch cushions and disappear.
My serious tone muted the glint in Ash’s eyes. Instead of saying anything else, he shifted the computer so it sat halfway between us and our legs acted as supports on each side to allow the bottom of the laptop to span the eight or so inches.
Not saying anything more, he clicked through a few folders on the screen.
The absence of Ash’s amusement left a tension in the air that had a shiver lingering under my skin. The silence between us was charged, but my introverted self couldn’t figure out if I was the only one feeling it.
Did he regret his offer to spend some of his downtime going over tape with me by ourselves now that he had a front-row seat to my awkwardness?
My unease increased.
He’s probably just concentrating on what he’s doing.Thereason he’s quiet now doesn’t mean he thinks you’re acting weird.
I tried to talk my anxiety down, but my own voice could barely scrape the surface of my instinctual reactions. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a dam trying to hold back Niagara Falls for how effective it was.
After years of hearing what a burden I was from my dad, I couldn’t stand the thought of being an inconvenience to anyone, let alone the hockey player I’d looked up to since my time in the juniors.
It was even worse now because I was starting to know Asher Landry as a man. He was so different from what I’d imagined him to be all those years I’d spent staring at the poster I still had of him in my old room at my parents’ house.
Sure, I’d known he was a good guy before I met him, based on the amount of charity work he did with the Titans, but any decent agent could manufacture a consistent series of photo ops to make a client look good to the media.
As an alternate coach for the Hammerheads, Ash seemed to have an endless well of both praise and easy-to-hear constructive feedback while we were on the ice.
But it was the little—I didn’t want to call them intimate, even though that’s how they felt—moments where he focused on me as “Caden” and not the team’s second-linecenterthat made me soften toward him. I was comfortable with him in a way I hadn’t been with another person since Kait had befriended me.
“Can I help?” I blurted out, not able to stand the silence any longer.
Ash’s shoulders jolted with the sound of my voice, gaze moving from the screen to my face.
“Sorry, what?” He blinked, as if I’d brought him out of a moment of real concentration. “I thought I knew exactly where the video I wanted to show you was on the Cloud. But now, I can’t find it. Hell, I know Evan is trying to sort out the old system, but. . .”
He dragged the hand not on the touchpad through his dark waves, ruffling his hair a bit higher on one side. Not that Ash’s slightly dishevelled appearance made him any less magazine-cover-ready.
“Can I try? I’m okay at figuring these things out.” I repeated my offer. “Just let me know the name or date of the file you were looking for.”
“Absolutely,” he muttered, eyeing the device with distaste. “Surely, there had to be a better way of sorting shit while they overhauled the system.”
There were likely several. But I kept my mouth shut.
He slid the laptop fully onto my lap.
My attention shifted from the man beside me to the screen, clicking through the various file paths laid out haphazardly on his home screen.
The nerves in my left eye wanted to twitch with the restraint it took not to start reorganizing what I saw on his screen.
Apparently, I was more meticulous than I thought when it came to this stuff. That, or it really was just a mess in pixel form.
Finding the file he’d wanted, I cued up the video, moving the computer back so it was balanced on both our legs.
Hoping I hadn’t overstepped, I brought my focus back to Ash’s face.
“Okay at this stuff, eh?” His eyebrow raised with his words. “Seems like a little more than that to me. How’d you know how to find that file so fast? Even I can tell there’s practically zero organization on that thing.”
“Um, yeah. It’s no big deal,” I choked, not really wanting to bore Ash with my moderately intense computer-related obsession.
