Page 7 of What Are The Odds?
Her cheeks reddened before she giggled. At what I had no clue. Fake giggling grated my fucking gears. After another few moments of awkward silence, she finally scurried away.
“Anyway.” Ryker exhaled. “Fine. Let’s go with sport then. What about football?”
“Groundbreaking,” I shot back. “Soccer?”
“Nobody likes soccer.”
We agreed on that.
“How about footy?” Grace suggested.
Ryker looked at her quizzically.
“Mine,” she clarified. “Not yours.”
“Yours?”
“Australian Rules. The superior football.” Grace lowered her voice to a mock whisper. “Spoiler alert, we actually use our feet in our version.”
Ryker jarred back in mock shock. “We use our feet.”
Grace arched an eyebrow. “I’m sorry. What’s a quarterback’s role again?”
A playful smile tugged at Ryker’s lips. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one, Grace.”
He was definitely flirting with Grace. And she was either ignoring it, or she was completely oblivious. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter. Grace didn’t seem fazed at all by the status of Ryker or me.
“Is that the game you were watching the other night?” I asked.
She seemed surprised by my question. “Um. Yeah. It was the Grand Final. Which means we’d have a full season worth of stats to . . .”
She trailed off when her phone went off. Someone named Seth was calling. Clutching her phone to her chest, Grace got to her feet.
“Sorry. I have to take this. I’ll be right back.”
She took all harmony with her, leaving Ryker and me in a tense silence. He broke it first.
“Your coach find out about Monday?”
“No. Yours?”
Ryker shook his head. The SOS message I’d received from Will had been the start of an argument between one of Ryker’s guys and one of mine. Over a set of fucking dumbbells. But when you hated each other as much as our teams did, that was enough to set you off.
“Two almost-fights in one week,” Ryker said. “It’s only a matter of time before something happens that we can’t stop.”
“I know.”
While I wasn’t a fan of Ryker, neither of us were the real problem. We sledged, but that was it. I knew when to keep my temper in check. Fighting off the ice was dumb. It came with too many repercussions. Especially when you were a college athlete. Bad raps meant coaches weren’t really left with a choice other than to bench you. And school suspensions had translated to being kicked off teams altogether.
I sipped my coffee before saying, “Maybe your team needs to go back to training in the old gym.”
Ryker’s nostrils flared at my suggestion. While the Athlete’s Centre had a state-of-the-art gym for student athletes, there was a regular campus gym all Phil-U students had access to. Last year Ryker and I had made a bet that the team who finished lowest in their league had to use it and keep out of the athlete’s gym for six months. We’d been Frozen Four champs. They’d been runner’s up. During scheduled trainings, when coaches were around, our teams kept their cool. But at open gym time, when there was nobody to keep them in check, the gloves came off.
“I think it’s the hockey team’s turn,” Ryker returned.
“Not a fucking chance.”
“Let’s compromise then, give our teams windows when they can train.”
