Page 21 of Scoring the Player
Bobby chuckles, but nothing about his reaction feels mean or malicious. I’ve basically put him in the position to laugh or cringe at my weirdness.
“I’m kidding. Consent is important.” The more I talk, the more flustered I feel. I should have prepared a standard response for the many times I expect to be recognized tonight.
Felix takes a step closer until his arm rests against mine. It’s a small amount of contact, but it does the trick of shutting me up. It isn’t exactly reassuring; it’s more like a jolt, but I revel in it.
Bobby laughs, taking in our body language. “I love it. I thought it was a joke, but you two are hooking up for real?”
I expect Felix to correct him, but instead, he glances over at me with a smirk that I bet has gotten him laid every single time he’s used it. “You saw the video. Who else would she be hooking up with?”
My body tingles from head to toe.
“All right. Well, I gotta deliver these.” Bobby lifts the cups filled with beer in his big hands. “See ya around, Walters.” Then he nods to me.
Felix stares at him, only long enough to say bye, and then his attention is back on me.
I think this dress is too tight because I’m struggling to breathe. Did I misread him completely? Is Felix expecting me to sleep with him tonight? A large part of me says, hell yes, but there’s this tiny, annoying part that doesn’t want to be a funny story he tells his friends for years to come.“This one time at college, a girl told the entire school how much she wanted to have sex with me, so I asked her out and we did it in the bathroom of a frat house. She was spectacular. Best sex of my life.”
All right, that last part is unlikely, but a girl can dream.
9
FELIX
“Listen,”Dahlia says, looking at the ground with those big, royal blue eyes lined in black. I’ve never seen her wear so much makeup. It’s all dark and sexy, and it’s such a contrast to her sweet and shy personality.
“I need to get something out of the way.”
“What’s up?” I ask.
She takes an audible breath and then looks me dead in the eye as she says, “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight.”
I nearly spit out my beer. Her cheeks turn red.
“Come again?”
“It’s just…I know that because of the video, you’re probably expecting me to tear off your clothes and make good on all the things I said. So, if you invited me here because of that, then you should know now that isn’t going to happen.”
“That thing with Bobby, I was just trying to shut him up. I didn’t invite you out to have sex with you.” I bounce my head from side to side, trying to decide how honest to be with her. Something about her rambling makes me want to open up more than usual. “Okay, I might have been hoping that we’d end the night partially naked, but even if we don’t, I still want to hang out with you and get to know you better.”
“Why? I’m not that interesting.”
“Sure, you are. And for the record, I’ve been trying to get to know you better since last semester. Long before that video.”
“You have?”
“Is that really surprising?”
She nods, biting the corner of her lip. “What do you want to know?”
So many things, but none of my current questions feel appropriate now that she’s taken sex off the table for tonight.
“Do you like beer pong?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s not very enthusiastic, so I’ll take that as a no. What about cards?”
This time she shakes her head.
