CHAPTER 3
Week 0 – Monday, September 1
For the fifteenth time that morning, I pulled the elastic band out of my hair and retied it. My pale blonde hair felt more like a hornets’ nest at the top of my head. A piece escaped, and I blew it out of my face before I rifled through the boxes in the corner of my bedroom.
“You’re still not dressed?” Lara drifted in, holding two steaming cups of coffee—one of which I accepted gratefully.
I sighed and took a long sip, collecting myself before replying. “I have no idea what to wear. And it doesn’t help I’m living out of cardboard right now.” I kicked the box closest to me. The top of it was torn open and dirtied. Packing tape rippled over the sides and stuck to my sock.
Lara lowered the mug from her lips before saying, “Dude. It’s school. Like it matters. Wear overalls.”
I picked up a wrinkled blouse from the box and whipped it at her. “Is that a joke?”
She danced out of the way, mug held high. “Spill my coffee, woman, and you submit to death by ceramic to the forehead.”
“That requires aim on your part.” I pointed at her with the blouse. “But seriously. You know what I mean.”
Lara’s lips puckered before she said, “Oh. Right. Those creepers.”
She was referring to our trip from the airport yesterday, when we’d first arrived in New York City. The discreet clicks. The dark clothing. The uncomfortable, slightly sneering smiles coming from behind the lenses.
I was used to the cameras that popped up around me when I was with Slade but never when I was alone. Never without him. Yet there I was, with Lara stumbling beside me as she wrestled with her tote, caught as I stepped into my new city.
“If I’d known I was going to be part of a photo shoot today, I would have at least tried not to look like a camel,” she’d said as she hiked her tote further up her shoulder.
I’d let my hair fall forward so it would hide my eyes. I was all too conscious of the fact my hair hadn’t been washed in a day, I was in old torn jeans, and the maroon sweater I’d chosen had a few well-worn, tattered edges.
I sighed, standing in my new room and surrounded by boxes that represented my past. My old clothes, the previous me.
“None of this is going to cut it,” I mumbled as I balanced my coffee on a waist-high box tower beside me. I started to tear through my average clothing again.
“Dude.”
I tilted my face toward her, my fine hair escaping its confinement once more and falling in strands across my face.
Lara flapped a hand at me. “Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
“What?” I found a white T-shirt and held it up to her in question. She shook her head balefully.
“Remember who you’re dating? You could just go out and—” She gestured toward the window with her mug. “And go to New York’s equivalent of Rodeo Drive and buy everything.” Her mouth dropped open, a clear indication an idea was forming.
Never a good thing.
“You could be like Pretty Woman! Be all, ‘No, ma’am, I can buy that gold-plated blazer and the gold pants that go with it. Go fuck yourself.’ ”
“I don’t think she said that.”
“Obviously.” Lara stood up, taking one last gulp of her coffee before swallowing with a satisfied sound. “We’re not ’80s chicks. So let’s go. Right now.”
“Lara,” I said, hating I sounded like a mom. “There’s no time. My first class starts in…” I checked the clock on the nightstand on Slade’s side of the bed. “Crap, in forty-five minutes.”
“Fine. You can borrow one of my more fabulous tops if you’re really that nervous about it. Go to your stupid higher level ‘I’m gonna be a lawyer even though I’m probably gonna marry a pro athlete’ classes, and I’ll be here waiting when you’re done.”
My look said it all. I didn’t claw my way out of the trailer park just to live someone else’s dream. Falling in love didn’t mean I’d fallen off my path.
“You have such a special way of getting me ready for my first day,” I said as I followed Lara into her room across the hall.
“Somebody’s gotta pep you up, considering Slade left at stupid o’clock this morning.”
She didn’t have to remind me. The thought of that blast of light from our attached bathroom at 4:00 a.m. made my eyes start aching again. But as he wandered around our room, pulling out drawers and slamming them shut, plowing his fingers through his hair and mumbling, he made me smile. The closer it came to the start of the season later this week, the more nervous he became. As if he still didn’t realize how great he was and what a champion he was going to be.
Once he stepped out onto that field, he would become the second youngest starting quarterback in all of professional football. The pressure on him was palpable, despite his winning record last season at USC and finishing with a passing efficiency of 187.2 and 4,982 total offensive yards—a reciting of statistics that made me drool out of the side of my mouth but essentially meant he was awesome. All that on top of the Heisman Trophy, a No. 3 draft pick, and a 3.8 GPA.
And there was my hero. Searching for a lost sock.
I’d sat up, letting the white sheets slide down my body. Goose bumps trailed across my chest as my skin was exposed to the air. He’d halted at the end of the bed, his mouth parting.
“See? All you need is a distraction,” I said.
He made that sound at the back of his throat that acted like a trigger for my body, a cross between an mmm and a groan. Then he stripped off his shirt, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me to him. He pressed me against his naked body, and all thoughts of statistics disappeared.
Just remembering it made me hot, and I wished he was here, if only so we could do that again.
Lara glanced at my face as she held up some sort of purple lace shirt and laughed. “Christ, woman, don’t ravage me right here and now.”
“Who me? I’m fine,” I said, smoothing my hair—until my fingers got caught in the snarls. “Totally f—shit. I have to get ready.”
“Yep, hit the books. That’ll make you wonder if horniness ever existed in this world in the first place.”
“You’re telling me,” I said as I eyed her shirt warily, wondering if I would even be allowed access to books in that thing.