“Are other people in your family big readers, too?”
The question sobers me up quickly. “Uh, not really, no.” I straighten a little, my spine stiff. “My dad’s not in the picture and my mom”—how do I nicely say my mom’s only into herself?—“has other interests.”
Cole doesn’t ask me to expand or give me the sympathetic look I’ve become so used to when the topic of my dad comes up, but his brow does furrow. “My dad played basketball growing up. He tried to get my brother and me into it, but we were obsessed with hockey.”
My brows raise at the mention of a brother. “I didn’t know you had a brother. Does he play hockey?”
“You didn’t google me?”
Umm.
“Nope,” I half lie. I definitely did, but I quit after reading about two sentences of his Wikipedia page. It was full of too many numbers and stats and phrases like “second-longest point-scoring streak.”
“Hmm,” he says, as if he doesn’t quite believe me. “Yeah, I have two sisters and a twin brother, but he passed away a few years ago in a car accident.”
“Oh my God,” I blurt out, my hand flying up to cover my mouth. “I’m so sorry, Cole. I had no idea.”
“Probably because you didn’t google me.” He chuckles and throws me a small smile. “But yeah, he played for the Miami Trailblazers.”
“Who the hell names these teams?” Head dropped back, I mutter the words to the ceiling. This isn’t my smoothest segue, but based on the pain in his eyes, he could use a change of subject.
Cole lets out a mock gasp, the sound easing the tension I hadn’t even realized was coiled in my shoulders. “What’s wrong with the Trailblazers?”
“Nothing,” I say slowly. You know what?Fuck it. “That’s a lie. All hockey team names sound ridiculous. It’s like someone scribbled a bunch of random nouns and a few adjectives on scraps of paper, tossed them into a hat, and had team owners or coaches or whatever pick them out, and voilà—whatever they pulled out became their team’s name.”
Cole clenches his jaw in an attempt not to laugh, though his amber eyes are still a bit dull. “That’s a very astute observation. My hometown team is the San Diego Devils, and I never could figure out the meaning behind the name.”
Sensing he still needs a change of topic, I blurt out, “Want to hear a funny story about devils?”
“Duh.”
“Okay, in elementary school, a few days before Halloween, my class played this game where we could each give our classmates one clue about what we planned to dress up as for Halloween. If you guessed correctly, you’d get an extra piece of candy from our teacher. I wanted to dress up as the devil. Want to guess what my clue was?”
“Lucifer?”
“Nope.” I cringe. It’s been over fifteen years, and my body still goes into fight-or-flight mode at the memory. “I announced to the entire class that I was horny.”
Cole throws his head back and laughs from deep in his chest. The throaty sound makes me clench my thighs together. “Oh, God. That’s amazing.”
I wince. “If you mean amazingly embarrassing, then sure.”
“We’ve all got our embarrassing childhood stories.” He waves me off. “I once accidentally said orgasm instead of organism in science class.”
“I once inadvertently started a rumor that a girl named Mary Juana was found hiding in a locker because I overheard teachers talking and didn’t know marijuana was a drug.”
His wide smile is almost blinding. “I think I have you beat. When our childhood fish died, we flushed him down the toilet, but I was convinced he’d jump back out, so I refused to use the toilet for over a week.”
My breath catches. “Wait, you didn’t go to the bathroom fora week?”
“Oh, no, I did,” Cole says, rubbing at his nape. “I snuck outside and went in my mom’s vegetable garden.”
“Cole!” I gasp, though I quickly dissolve into a fit of giggles. “Oh my God.”
“My parents were appalled,” he admits. “Rightfully so.”
“I cannot believe you told me that,” I wheeze, my body sinking farther into the couch. “If I were you, I would’ve taken that shit to the grave. No pun intended.”
He pouts, that luscious lower lip stuck out. “C’mon, I was just a kid. I didn’t know any better.”
