Page 24 of Tempting the Teammate
“You’re never gonna focus on the essay if you keep looking us up,” I said, feeling like a hypocrite for lecturing him on something I was failing to do just as badly.
Lately, it was impossible to unlock my phone without a slew of slow-motion shots fromBlades of Northwoodedited to some cheesy, romantic song that was trending on that particular day. Every single one of them ended with the shot of us exchanging a perfectly innocent look during our first interview together.
I racked my brain to remember if there had been more to it. We’d been talking about our friendship since we were peewees. I’d remembered the time Andrei used his hockey stick as a guitar to make fun of my misguided attempts at guitar lessons, but he’d lost his balance and fallen right on his ass.
I guess mischief made my eyes twinkle like a lovesick teenager because the number of sudden zooms into the grin on my face upon mentioning that memory was ridiculous.
Just the other day, I’d read a new story about us. It began with the words straight out ofBlades of Northwood, with the retelling of that very memory. The prologue wasn’t particularly long. Just after the opening shot, the author cut to us changing in the locker room, and it was my gaze that wandered over the lean cut of Andrei’s torso. The towel I supposedly wore around my waist had failed to conceal my cock entirely, and Andrei noticed it, lifting one corner of his mouth into a little smirk.
I quit there.
Not that I was so insecure and touchy that I couldn’t plow through some fan fiction that had me and my best friend doing nasty things to each other. The truth was, they were portraying me as a plank-pulling devil—not far from the truth—but Andrei was smirking coolly far too much. I knew my best friend. He would never have survived such an encounter looking so cool. He would have burst into flames at a mere mention of something naughty.
Andrei didn’t do well with sex talk in any circumstances. I just couldn’t see him nodding and winking at my dick.
Not that I could see myself getting hard around him just like that. The idea was…gross. He was like a brother I’d always wanted. He was like a twin spirit fused permanently to me. He was my whole other half.
He was also a guy, I reminded myself, scrolling through a few more tags that had appeared in my notifications. Hearts fluttered all over my screen.
“I need a cold shower,” Andrei said as he pushed himself away from the desk, the rickety chair under him creaking.
He was peeling off his T-shirt before he even stepped into the bathroom. He tossed it on his bed, slipped into the bathroom, and shut the door. He hummed some song I’d never heard. The noise of water hitting the tiles drowned his voice, and I continued the scroll of doom.
There we are again, I thought, running into the images from Toby’s edit. The fucker had posted them right after playing the reel to us, and it put him squarely on the map as part of the main cast. His profile exploded with attention, in no small part thanks to the fact that he had plugged the Griffdrei hashtag.
Just this morning, Dad called me for our weekly chat. He didn’t ask, but everything he said had an air of a question around it. And when he asked about Andrei, I could hear the expectation bubbling in his voice.
“Were you on Instagram, Dad?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he asked innocently.
“Andrei’s fine. We’re both fine. We’re just getting the wrong kind of attention.”
“Son, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Dad said seriously, and I nearly rolled my eyes right out of my skull. It was bad enough that I’d been looking at Andrei for signs of truth in the goddamn fanfics; now my own father wanted to know if I was secretly hooking up with my best friend.
Jen Harding emailed us to book an afternoon next week for a buddy day shoot. It would be for an episode that heavily featured the two of us. She explained that every trope would get an episode with more focus, and apparently, the Casanova trope I’d been given at the start no longer mattered so much. We were all about Griffdrei.
Andrei stepped out of the bathroom in a pair of white boxer briefs, rubbing his hair with a towel. He opened the closet and rummaged through his clothes.
“Going out?”
“Library,” he said.
I didn’t ask more questions. It was becoming difficult to talk about the most mundane things because there was always something that would remind one of us about the virality of the thing we’d always taken for granted. Somehow, our simple, loyalfriendship was blown so out of proportion that we were almost starting to lose it.
As Andrei tossed the towel on the back of his chair, I watched the way his pec stretched and his bicep extended before curling. He was a pale shade of bronze, summer fading from his skin, and as lean as the stories described him. “Cut like Michelangelo himself had carved him,” one short story had said, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I’d always been aware of Andrei’s good looks. This was nothing new. Sure, I’d never before noticed the way my mouth went dry around Andrei or the way I couldn’t quite tear my gaze off the curve of the small of his back or the drowning pain in my chest that flared out of nowhere at the sight of his lean torso, but I’d never been a particularly observant person anyway. It could have been going on for years, and it meant nothing.
Andrei bent down to push each leg through his sweatpants, then yanked a hoodie down his torso, concealing the last of his bare, smooth skin before packing notebooks into a backpack and heading out.
As the door shut, my gaze lingered on the space where he had just stood.
I shook my head. I needed a shower, too. Lying in my bed and testing myself with thought experiments would get me nowhere. I needed to wash off the cold sweat that had covered me the moment Andrei had stepped out of the bathroom, drops of water still holding onto his collarbone.
I wondered what went through his head when he discovered the edits.
He was the only person on the planet with whom I could speak virtually telepathically, yet I couldn’t decipher his feelings about this.
