Page 1 of Wildcat
1
THAT ONE IS A WILDCAT
LEO
I plugone ear with a finger and press my phone into the other as I walk away from my table toward a quieter corner in the bar.
“Yo, College, where you at?” My buddy, Ash, asks on the other end of the line.
“A bar near campus. I had a meeting with my advisor this afternoon, and a couple of buddies from my summer classes invited me out.”
“I’m bored. What time will you be back?”
“Probably not until late. It’s trivia night.”
“Trivia night?” Ash snorts with laughter. “You don’t get enough of that in school?”
I roll my eyes, letting him get his jabs in. I’m used to the guys poking fun at me for taking classes while playing in the NHL. It’s all in good fun. Mostly.
“Wait.” His voice goes serious, and I can almost picture him sitting up straight and preparing to move from his favorite spot in the middle of the couch in his living room. “What’s the girl situation? Are hot girls still into trivia?”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re all totally out of your league,” I say as I glance around the busy bar that’s popular with Whittaker students. My gaze lands, not for the first time, on the gorgeous bartender working tonight. She’s new, or at least I’ve never seen her before.
This place is packed. A month into the new semester and it looks like all those good intentions to stay in and study during the weeknights have been tossed out the window. Man, some days I really miss college. Nights like this are few and far between for me during the season.
For the next eight months, I will live and breathe hockey. With any free time, I’ll hang at Ash’s house, or he’ll be at mine. We’re neighbors and teammates. He has the better TV setup, complete with every gaming system you can imagine, but I have the better patio and pool.
“Maybe I should drive down,” he says. I can hear him punching buttons on the controller and the video game in the background. “I’ve got you covered in Philosophy and History. I bet some other guys would be up for it, too.”
“By the time you get here, trivia will be done.”
“Then we can still have a beer and get you tucked in by midnight, Cinderella. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to keep me away. Afraid I’ll steal all the hot girls for myself?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I say dryly. “I’ll see you in the morning.” I hang up before he can goad me anymore or talk himself into coming for real. It isn’t that I don’t want to hang with him, but if the entire Minnesota Wildcats team shows up here, it’s going to be a shitshow.
I can usually go undetected in a crowded bar, save the occasional hardcore fan. On the ice, I might want the attention, but not here. At the reminder, I pull my hat down a little lower over my eyes and keep my head down as I walk.
Before I’ve made my way back to the table, Ash has sent me a series of texts with the middle finger emoji.
Brad and Micah stop their conversation when I slide onto my chair.
“What’d I miss?” I ask.
Micah leans forward, elbows on the table and beer bottle dangling from one hand. “Settle a bet for us. Did you or did you not hook up with that reporter after you eye-fucked her boobs during this interview?”
I groan, and their cackles fill my ears.
Brad slides his phone onto the table, the infamous video playing. Last week, guys from teams all over the league attended a pre-season strength and training camp. It was a great week. Lots of media stopped by. It was interview after interview on how strong we were feeling going into the new season, our expectations for our teams, blah blah blah. Interviews are not my thing. Guys like Jack, our team captain, and even Ash are much better at handling the mundane and repetitive questions.
I press pause on the video and slide it back to him. “I wasn’t staring at her boobs.”
Or I hadn’t meant to be anyway. I was tired and hungry and concentrating on coming up with something more to say than“I’m feeling good”and“The team looks good,”which I’d already said a half-dozen times that day alone.
“You are hardcore staring at her cleavage, Lohan.” Brad holds up his phone, the screen paused on a frame where my eyes are downcast, and indeed it very much looks like they’re focusing on her boobs. And they’re great boobs, so I get why people would think that, but I was so exhausted after a long ass day of workouts, she could have been topless, and I still might not have checked her out.
The other problem? She’s very obviously checking me out. Her gaze dips several times in the video over my sweaty chest and abs, even dropping to my crotch at one point. Yeah, not my best interview.
“We didn’t hook up.”
