Page 51 of In Doubt
“Shame.”
“Yep, especially as we only have limited days here.” She looks up at me and smiles. “Although this isn’t too bad. I wonder if I could convince my brother to build a pool.”
“Then you’d definitely have to learn to swim.”
“Yeah.” She meets my eye and I can’t help smiling at her. It’s something about her countenance. Infectious. “How come you didn’t join the rest of the motley crew this morning? I thought you guys were inseparable or something?”
“We’re not joined at the hip,” I say firmly.
“Really? Jakey couldn’t even come on this trip without you.”
“Jakey?” I raise an eyebrow at her and she grins with mischief. “I couldn’t come this morning. I had my physio exercises to run though.”
She glides her hands through her wet hair. “Physio exercises?”
“Yeah. I’m injured. You didn’t know that?”
“Not every girl at uni is glued to every snippet of news about your team.”
“I got taken out a couple of weeks ago. It was big news,” I say, sulkily. Most people do know about it. I’m the linchpin in the team. Everyone was devastated. It’s been all anyone’s wanted to ask me about, to talk to me about, since it happened.
“I’m really not into rugby,” her eyes sparkle with amusement.
“You should be. It’s the best game in the fucking world.”
“Better than football?”
“Bunch of pussies,” I tell her.
“Cricket?”
I scoff.
“Hockey?”
“Please!”
She laughs and skims her hand across the surface of the water, a spray of water hitting my face.
“Hey now,” I warn her.
“You’re so full of shit.”
“I’m speaking the truth!” I splash her back and she giggles. A noise that I’m coming to like a lot.
“So how bad is it?” Her gaze runs over my body as if she’s searching for signs of an injury and I like that too. Like the interest I see spark in her eyes.
“My knee. And it’s pretty bad. But getting better. Just need to keep plugging away at the exercises. The pool really helps it actually. It’s one of the main reasons we decided to tag along on this trip. I needed to find somewhere with a pool. So it seemed to make sense to follow,” I pause and smile. “Jakey out here.”
“Oh,” she says, for a moment looking embarrassed, caught out. I’ve heard plenty about her assumptions of our pack. Bet she wasn’t expecting a legitimate reason for this trip. She bobs around in the water. “What were the others?”
“Other what?”
“Reasons?”
I simply smile at her. I’m not about to confess that we’re also here for moral support in Jake’s daily battles of frustration when it comes to her.
“Mysterious,” she purrs.
