Page 119 of The Locker Room

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had a sudden, real conviction that he couldn"t do this. He was smiling at

her, getting up the courage to tell her that it had been nice, but he had an

early morning, when she suddenly looked him dead in the eye.

“Hey—do you want to get out of here?”

And he felt trapped, as locked into sex with her as he had been

locked into this whole encounter, and his eyes sought Chris"s across the

bar. Chris nodded and held up two fingers. Xander nodded back, and

Chris held up his index finger and his thumb, perpendicularly, like a big

L. Xander laughed like his buddy was chiding him for being a Loser, but

102 Amy Lane

he knew the code. It meant “locker room.” They both had keys, and it

was a convenient place to meet.

“Do you live nearby?” he asked smoothly, because his silent

exchange with Chris had lasted less than a second.

“Only about ten minutes,” she told him, and Xander looked up at

Chris and made a little X with his fingers. An hour and a half, max, and

so he left.

She actually lived less than five minutes away, although it seemed

longer because he went in her car. It was tiny, and he felt as though his

knees were at his ears, and Audrey laughed and chattered nervously the

entire way. He got to the apartment and was a little surprised; it was

about a block away from that first apartment he"d had, the one with the

couch and the garbage bag, and his heart started to flutter in his stomach

and his throat and behind his eyes.

It was pounding like a kettledrum when he got inside.

She had a couch in the front room, and a laptop on the coffee table

as a television. There were stacks of books and a printer and computer

paper in the corner, but no table to put them on. He looked beyond her to

the one bedroom and saw that it had clothes—not a lot, but enough to

indicate she"d moved from somewhere—and a dresser, but no bed.

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