“Make it up to me,” I echo, the words coming out slowly. “By being my tutor slash fake boyfriend?”
“You’re the one who came to me for help with school.”
True, but that isn’t the part that’s confusing me. It’s the fake boyfriend part I’m not quite grasping, though I refuse to admit it aloud. The last thing I want is another verbal beatdown about how stupid I am.
“Okay, so help me with school. I can’t ask you to pretend to date me, though.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering. There’s a difference.”
“Whatever the difference might be, it still isn’t necessary,” I counter, and he arches a brow.
“If it wasn’t necessary, then why are you worried about it affecting your prospects next year?”
Shit, he has a point.
My lips roll inward, and I nod a couple times.
“I mean, even if we did do this, how would it benefit my image? Lots of guys are in relationships and it doesn’t do anything to make them more desirable to NHL teams.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t dating a Reed,” he muses with a shrug. “Whether I like it or not, I’m a descendant of hockey royalty. Which might be annoying ninety-eight percent of the time, but in this case…it may be useful. A good PR move for you to make people look past the video. Agents or teams or whatever.”
Tilting my head to the side, I murmur, “Louis did mention I need to clean up my image.”
“See?” he says, tossing a hand out toward me. “I might not know a lot about hockey, but Louis is like another uncle to me. He knows what he’s talking about.”
That he does, which is why I trust Louis implicitly, especially when it comes to this kind of thing. After all, Quinton’s reputation as hockey’s hotheaded bad boy stuck to him like superglue for his entire college career, and Louis still managed to get him the deal of a lifetime.
I run my hand over my face, part of my brain refusing to process the craziness I’m hearing. Because itiscrazy. Downright insane, actually. Not to mention, I have no idea how to be someone’s boyfriend. Sure, I’ve seen all my friends do it, but I have zero experience in the department myself.
Part of me is tempted to get Louis on the phone right now and ask his opinion on this, but I don’t want to make Logan’s offer disappear by getting a second opinion. I mean, he’s offering himself up as the perfect solution to all my problems, and I’d be insane to not take it.
It just seems too good to be true.
“Look, I’m not trying to look a gift goat in the mouth, but—”
“Horse.”
I frown, his interruption completely derailing my train of thought. “What?”
“Look a gifthorsein the mouth. That’s the saying.”
A little hum slips out, and I purse my lips briefly. “Yeah, I guess a horse would be a better gift than a goat. Like, there’s a reason little kids ask for ponies, right?”
“Uh, sure,” Logan says, his brows drawn together.
“Either way, I’m not trying to like…I don’t know…” I pause, struggling to find the words. “I appreciate the offer, but I still don’t understand why you’re willing to do this. I mean, is it really just because you feel bad about what happened earlier?”
Okay, maybe it does sound a little bit like I’m looking the livestock in the mouth.
And who came up with that expression anyway?
Logan stares at me for a second, his eyes scraping over my face, before he shakes his head. “It’s ninety-eight percent selfless, but the other two percent of me thinks it would be nice to get my parents off my back. They’ve been badgering me about actually ‘getting out’ and ‘experiencing college,’so maybe if I’m dating someone and my friends corroborate the story, it’ll get them to chill out a bit.”
I nod a few times, finally starting to understand the bigger picture in this whole scheme.
While I might not know a whole lot about the family dynamic with his parents, I know for a fact there have been plenty of times Oakley’s checked in on how Logan is doing. Both last year with all of us still here and also just asking me a couple times since school started this semester.
It obviously comes from a place of love and caring, though from the hint of indignation laced in Logan’s tone, it must be getting on his nerves.
