“You don’t want me to play next week, do you?” Zach inserts, his tone softer than silk as he toys with a strand of my hair.
It makes me wish that smug contentedness was back and not this twisted tension.
“You’re touchy about her.” Alec folds his arms across his chest. “It’s caused a lot of arguments?—”
“I was touchy about her before, so you can bet your ass that’s doubled now.
“You’re so quick to tell me I’m a walk-on, Alec. You forget that I can walk off too.”
Alec’s shoulders stiffen. “You wouldn’t risk your spot.”
“What spot?” Pecan counters. “He doesn’t technically have one, does he? Except Coach Ridley keeps centering his plays around him as a forward so… maybe he does and no one told him.”
Zach thanks Lex when she places a massive plate of food in front of him. “Make sure to dose Alec’s breakfast with Ex-Lax, Lex. I think he’s having stomach troubles.”
Lex’s brows lift. “He does look constipated.”
Snickering, I shoot her a grin when she winks at me.
I get the feeling I missed something Alec said because the next thing I know, Zach’s biting off, “She’s my girlfriend.” The words no way match his tone.Thisis a declaration of war. And it settles something inside me. Something that quivers to life. Something that didn’t dare to before. “So you better watch your words, Alec, or you’ll be down a player.”
When Lex serves the captain, I turn to Zach with a warning look. “Your ego will get the better of you.”
Hey, just because I like what he had to say doesn’t mean I won’t give him shit for it.
“Has nothing to do with my ego. Everything to do with statistics, D. And if that’s what I have to wield around like a sledgehammer to get him to back off, then I will. Who I date has nothing to do with him or the team. He’s overstepping.”
I place my hand on his knee and gently squeeze.
Once Lex’s done serving us, an unlikely alliance pops up in the form of her and Gregg. She snags one of the stools that sit at the edge of booths for overflow and drags the extra over to ours.
“I’m taking my break with you,” she proclaims, then makes it clear she’s here to talk to me.
Outside of Dopie’s and the fact we have modern civilization together, I’ve never talked to her before. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen this moment of female solidarity and I dig it.
“Didja watchPassion Islandlast night?”
“Passion Island?” Pecan hmphs. “Hailey likes that show. She digs Fabio. Who calls their kid Fabio?”
“The mothers of sons who stole their mom’s romance novels,” Lex teases.
“Huh?”
“Fabio was a famous cover model on romance novels.”
Our small group tenses when a voice enters the fray. Wynter Kinnock, she ofPifame, shoots us a wary smile and a ‘hi.’
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding,” is Lex’s kind reply.
“Yeah, take a seat if you want. I need all the estrogen around me I can get. The testosterone fumes are particularly suffocating today.”
Shyly, she waves but borrows a stool from another booth and slipsonto it. She shoves her phone at Pecan who, frowning, accepts it. “That’s Fabio.”
I poke at an avocado cube that’s fallen onto my dish. “Your mom had a crush on him when she was a teenager, Pecan.”
“How do you know that, D?”
