Page 23 of Foul Line

I shake my head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Hayes moves forward. I’m startled when he drops to his knees in front of me, placing his hands in my lap. “I’m sorry for what we all did to you. I’m sorry I stood back and didn’t say anything. Don’t kiss that guy just because you’re upset about that.”

He’s right. That’s exactly what I was going to do.

Before I can stop the words from coming out, I say, “I’m so mad at myself. I let Lake get to me. I freaking let Alec and Sloan touch me when they obviously didn’t care about me the way I thought they did.”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” Hayes says. He grabs my hands and squeezes them in his own. “There’s more that you don’t know. Alec and Sloan—”

I squeeze his hands once. “Don’t answer for them. All I need to know is what they’ve shown me, and what they’ve shown me is that they let someone else dictate their feelings for me. Here you are apologizing, and you’re probably the last one who should be.”

Hayes shakes his head. His dirty blond hair flops over his face. “I have a lot to apologize for. I could have stopped Lake before. I should have told you I liked you before instead of always standing in the background. Maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe a lot of things would have changed if I had.”

Like before, I raise my hand to Hayes’s cheekbones, letting my fingertips graze them. His eyes flutter closed. His hands smooth up my thigh and around to my ass before he moves me forward on the bed. I bite back a yelp at his touch. Hayes has always been so quiet. I like the person I’m beginning to know, but I don’t know all that much about him. I’ve never seen his parents at games. Actually, I take that back. I think I remember seeing his parents at camp the year I first came. But ever since then, he rides in with one of the other Ballers’ families. “There’s a lot more I need to know,” I tell him. Already, I feel the urge to pull him against me, but I’m not doing that again. I gave in too easily to Sloan and Alec and look what happened. I don’t want to add Hayes to my whore list just so I can get made fun of again.

“I’ll be completely honest with you,” he says. He doesn’t take his hands away from me. They’re digging into my backside, sending steady pulses of heat to my core. It’s like torture. Wanting something but knowing it’s not right for you or if it ever will be. He glances up. “You’re so beautiful.”

I bite down on my lip as his words sink into me. “I need a minute.”

He backs up immediately. He sits in the chair a few feet away, looking like an adult in a children’s tearoom playset chair. With him over there, I can think clearly, and my head isn’t so mussed with him and everything else that’s going on. “I told Sloan and Alec to stay away from you until they’ve grown a pair of balls,” he says.

I smirk at that. “It doesn’t bother you that you all like me? Do you all like me? Still, I mean.”

Hayes’s jaw clenches. “We’ve shared before. Not at the same time. I think they thought it would be easy. It’s not.” He leans back, and the chair groans. “It’s a totally different scenario, but none of us have any right to say anything to you about that. As far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want. I just hope I’m a part of what you want.”

“Because you’re not going to stand in the background anymore?”

His blue eyes flare. “No, not again.”

“I’m going to need to see proof.” Offhandedly, I say, “I wish I’d seen you punch Lake.”

I can’t help but frown a little. Hayes has to hide a small smirk. “You’ll be able to tell when you see him next.”

I pull my legs up and hug them to my chest. “Why does he care who you guys see?”

“He usually doesn’t. I could see it was bothering him. Ryan could, too. Alec and Sloan were too caught up in you to care. I know you don’t want me to answer for them, but this is probably part of the problem you’re going to want to know. For a lot of us, the five of us are all we have. Sloan’s family life is a mess. You know that. Ryan’s mom flits from guy to guy. Alec is probably the only one of us who is semi-normal. We pick on him all the time about how he got mixed up with us. I thought he would be the one to tell Lake off first.”

Except Alec has a secret, too.

I sigh. He’s probably worried about losing his friends after the truth comes out about him wanting to go to college for baseball, not basketball.

“He just can’t stand the fact that I play the same position as him.”

“That, and that his friends all like you.”

I look into my lap. “Stop saying that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

He’s silent for a little while. “The problem is that he sees you as a threat. Not just on the basketball team, but in our little group, too. We’ve never all liked the same girl before. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

It probably is. But who am I to judge? I like all of them, don’t I? Besides Lake, of course. Lake can go burn in the fiery pits of hell for all I care. “Probably,” I tell him. “Ryan warned me that it would interfere with basketball.”

“Ryan brings everything back around to basketball.”

I can’t blame him. All of us have so much riding on the fact that we have to be great at it in order to accomplish our goals. Well, I guess everyone except for Alec now. But Alec’s still in the same boat, just a different sport.

---