Unfortunately, I had only taken two steps in the direction of my car before the light slammed off behind me.
He was coming.
Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if he’d seen me, but my mind was too far gone to accept it. The car and the far corner of the building were just about equidistant from me, and I of course, made the predictably bad, slasher film-esque decision to flee mindlessly for the cover of the building.
The door opened just as I rounded the corner, and my heart beat rapidly against the metal siding exterior.
Two silent bangs of my forehead later, I peeked around the corner to get a glance.
Well-fitted jeans encased his muscular legs, and his plain white t-shirt had returned to its flesh-covering duty.
He glanced at my car once before approaching a motorcycle that was parked even closer to me, but he didn’t look my way. I didn’t trust that the subterfuge would last.
Talk about royally screwing this up.
I had the nearly skin-evacuation-inducing urge to get out of there before he spotted me, but as I watched my car from the corner of the building with him in between, I realized one important thing.
I had nowhere to—
Go.
As much as I doubted Callie would want to, my heart wouldn't stop shoving letters into the suggestion box of my brain.
“Ask,” my heart said. “What does it hurt to ask?”
My heart sounded a little like a girl.
I shook my head at myself, squeezing my eyes shut to quiet the riotous fluctuation of my emotions.
I’d known she was there between my fourth and fifth tumbling passes. A shadow had lurked on the far wall of the warehouse from behind a stack of mats. The swish of a ponytail confirmed the shadow’s identity.
She didn’t know I knew she was there though, and that was where asking got tricky.
To me, I’d felt like she was sitting there next to me the whole time despite her efforts to stay hidden, and to my complete shock—I didn’t mind.
I’d always liked to have my alone time at the end of the night. Always.
But tonight, with her, I’d liked having her there with me.
I was too confused to know what that meant, but I wasn’t too confused to know I shouldn’t be feeling it. Because I wasn’t feeling strictly professional thoughts and affection a coach has for an athlete. Hell, there’d been no time to form that kind of a formal bond.
Instead, I was feeling a draw to a near stranger, the things I knew about her inciting feelings inside of me on a chemical level. Nerves buzzed with extra excitement and the good kind of anxiety churned in my gut.
Her unique sense of self, so skewed from what the rest of the world thought, the small glimpse I’d gotten of her personality, and the way she held back in a manner that only she could understand or explain—all of it made the “couldn’ts” seem like “shouldn’ts” and really only “maybe shouldn’ts” at that.
It’d all gone wrong from the start, the spit that sealed our first handshake seeming to swear me into an alternate universe.
What was right got twisted upside down, and nothing mattered more than finding the missing pieces of her puzzle.
“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I called out into the silent darkness before I thought better of it.
And before I realized exactly how it sounded.
“Not for sex,” I clarified loudly, and then rammed my face straight into my palm.
Really, Nik?
Smooth.
It only took five seconds to hear irritated shuffling, a few muttered curses, and an aggrieved but clear, “How’d you know I was here?”
She still wasn’t visible, hidden by the corner of the building.
Not wanting to make the whole scenario any more embarrassing than it already was—for either of us—I decided to lie.
“Your car.”
A couple additional seconds of quiet consideration passed.
“How’d you know it was my car?”
I cleared my throat and called out loudly once more. “I think it was the ‘third Olympics or die’ sticker in the back window.”
“WHAT?” she shrieked, charging around the corner in horrified displeasure.
Angry, confused steps ate up the distance between us.
Of course, when she got there, there was no decal—never had been, thank God.
“Oh.” A deep sigh. “You think you’re being cute.”
I smiled deeper into my cheeks, but verbally ignored the comment.
When the silence became too much, she scrambled to cover herself.
“I, um, fell asleep in the locker room.” She cleared her throat once, twice, and ended with a third time. “What are you doing here?”
Her arms crossed over her chest as though to keep out a chill, but the hot air of a southern summer night sat stagnant around us. Any discomfort had to be coming from her encounter with me.
I wish I could have told her all her bumbling effort to make excuses was for her benefit alone. I didn’t mind that she’d watched.
But my father always told me to think of a man’s logic and completely reverse it. That’s where I would find the answers for dealing with a woman.
I thought it was sound advice. My mother had smacked him.
A confirmation.
“Tumbling,” I muttered instead, keeping it as simple as possible to avoid getting caught in a knot of unintended words.
She forced her eyes to widen and her jaw to relax like she didn’t understand.
“Your dad gave me permission to train after hours. I’m a power tumbler,” I explained simply, cringing slightly on the implication that I still intended to compete. I didn’t.
I only did it for fun and to clear my head. I wasn’t sure how I’d find mental peace when my body grew old and my joints broke down, but for now, it was my solace.
Her cheeks pinked just slightly with the embarrassment of her dishonesty and her hands rubbed roughly at her arms. She really thought I didn’t know she’d watched me.
I let her have it. For now.
“So…I asked if you want to go somewhere with me.”
Her feet drew her attention as her weight shifted back and forth between them. Nervous fingers twined and twisted with each other, whitening the skin with simple pressure. Her eyes jumped to mine, and her question was misleadingly simple. I thought I had her. “Where?”
“Ah, see, I can’t tell you that.” I wagged my brows, leaning my weight casually into the leather seat of my bike. “Ruins all the fun.”
“You want me to go on that?”
“That?” I asked, turning to look in the direction she was looking.
“That,” she said, pointing directly under the cheeks of my butt with emphasis.
I once again hid a burgeoning smile. “That’s a motorcycle. And, seeing as it’s my chosen mode of transportation…yeah.”
“I can’t,” she said quickly, looking to her car to me and back again.
“Why?” I asked, following the trail of her eyes with my own and stopping on her flushed face.
Her brows pulled slightly together, but it wasn’t in confusion. It was in search of an excuse. “Because I shouldn’t.”
“Okay,” I agreed. She relaxed, dropping her arms to her side and staring. I took in her markedly less confrontational posture and couldn’t resist trying one more time. “Just…”
She rolled her eyes.
“One more question?”
She nodded her permission, skeptical but listening.