Page 30 of Tempting the Teammate
Any moment now, Griffin would grin, slap my shoulder, and say he’d see me later.
I wouldn’t say I was fine with it, but I didn’t have any other choice, so I braced myself for it.
TWELVE
Griffin
Jen’s voicecut through the autumn air with cheer. “That’s a wrap, boys. Great work today. Really authentic stuff.”
Authentic. The word sat wrong in my mouth. It tasted like copper and guilt. I forced a smile and nodded while she gathered her tablet and notes, directing her crew to pack up the equipment. The cameras finally stopped their relentless observation, red lights blinking out one by one like dying stars.
They took the microphones off our torsos while taking notes.
Andrei stood a few feet away, hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold or maybe against me. He’d been like that all day, present but distant, going through the motions of our friendship for the cameras while something vital bled out between us.
I’d done that to him. To us.
When the last van pulled away from the curb, the silence that settled between us felt heavier than anything I’d carried during practice. Andrei shifted his weight from one foot to the other, eyes fixed on something across the street that probably didn’t exist.
“Well,” he said, voice flat and carefully neutral. “I guess that’s done.”
The words hung between us. Resignation. Maybe accusation. I couldn’t tell which was worse.
My throat tightened around all the things I couldn’t say. That I was sorry. That I’d been avoiding him because looking at him hurt in ways I didn’t understand. That every time I closed my eyes, I saw him stepping out of the shower with water clinging to his shoulders, saw the lean lines of his torso, felt the phantom weight of fabric I had no business touching pressed against my face.
That I’d used him. Used the thought of him. Used the memory of his scent to get myself off in the shower while shame and arousal warred for dominance in my chest.
“Andrei,” I started, then stopped. What could I possibly say that wouldn’t make this worse?
He looked at me then for the first time in days, and I saw the hurt there. Raw and unguarded in the glow of the streetlight above us. It gutted me. I’d put that expression on his face by being a coward, by pushing him away because I was terrified of what he might see if he looked at me too closely.
Because Andrei could always see through me. That was the problem. That had never been the problem. Not until I had something to hide.
I could either keep pushing him away or risk having him figure out exactly what had been happening to me. What I’d done. What I’d been thinking about when I lay awake at night, listening to him breathe in the bed across from mine.
Every time I looked at him now, I saw things I’d somehow missed for years. The sharp angle of his jaw. The way his hair fell across his forehead when he was concentrating. The fullness of his mouth that I’d never paid attention to before but couldn’t stop noticing now. How had I been so blind? How had it takenme all these years to realize that Andrei Sokolov was possibly the most beautiful person I’d ever known?
Last night at that party, I’d tried to lose myself in the chaos. Tried to find some girl who could make me forget about the confusion tangling itself into knots in my chest. But I’d ended up sitting in a corner with a beer I barely touched, watching people dance and laugh while my thoughts circled back to Andrei.
The way he’d looked at me when I’d made that stupid joke about his balls at the gym. The hurt that had flashed across his face so quickly I’d almost missed it. The careful distance he’d been maintaining ever since, like I was something dangerous he needed to protect himself from.
I’d done that. I’d made him feel like he needed protection from me.
I opened my mouth to make an excuse, to say I was tired or had homework or literally anything that would let me escape this conversation before I said something I couldn’t take back. But the words wouldn’t come. My feet stayed planted on the sidewalk, my body refusing to cooperate with my brain’s desperate need to flee.
“Hey,” I said instead, the word coming out softer than I’d intended. “Let’s have a drink. Just you and I.”
Andrei’s eyebrow lifted in that way that meant he was skeptical, suspicious, and trying to figure out my mood shift. “We don’t have to, Griff.”
The implication stung. As if spending time together had become an obligation instead of the default state of our existence. That he thought I was offering out of pity or guilt rather than genuine want.
I snorted, falling back on the casual tone that had always been my armor. “I know we don’t have to. I want to.”
Something shifted in the air between us. I watched emotions flicker across Andrei’s face too quickly to catalog them all.Wariness. Hope. Anger. The anger hit me hardest because I knew exactly how much I deserved it. I’d been pushing him away for a week, sending him photos of girls at parties like proof of normalcy, avoiding eye contact in our own room like we were strangers sharing an elevator instead of best friends who’d known each other for over a decade.
The silence stretched long enough that I thought he might refuse. Might tell me to go to hell and walk away, leaving me standing alone under the streetlight with nothing but my guilt for company.
“Our room, then,” he said finally. “We’ll grab the drinks from the fridge.”
