All Lined Up

Chapter 3 Carson

It’s like she took the scream right out of my throat. I’ve been out here alone, alternating between convincing myself to leave and convincing myself to stay. And here comes this gorgeous girl with a lion’s roar.

She leans over the ledge, her eyes searching until she finds me sprawled at the base of one of the wide oak trees in the yard. I sit up a little straighter under her gaze.

Her pale skin shines a creamy white in the moonlight, and dark red hair frames a heart-shaped face with full, pouty lips. Her eyes narrow on me, or maybe she just squints. After a few seconds of studying me, she offers an unenthusiastic, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. That was the best thing I’ve seen all night.”

“You can’t have had a very exciting night, then.”

No. No, I hadn’t. I’d tagged along with some other teammates, thinking I needed to make an effort to get to know them off the field. I’d gotten to know them all right. And I was already tired of them. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to walk on to a team like this, it never was. People were nice enough, but none of them took me seriously.

Just a walk-on.

Most people see us as just players for the real athletes to practice against with no real chance of getting any substantial playing time for ourselves. A few are more accepting.

But fitting in isn’t worth spending an hour with those assholes. They aren’t even drunk yet, so I can only imagine how much worse it will get.

I shrug off that frustration and tell the girl, “At least things are looking up now.”

She stiffens, shaking out her hair like a mane. The deep red shines, catching glints from the lights as she moves.

“Listen,” she says, “tonight is not the night to flirt with me.”

I should probably be annoyed by her brusque tone, but I find myself smiling instead.

“Who said I was flirting?”

She scoffs, her fingers curling tighter around the balcony banister.

“You were.”

I grin because, yeah . . . I was. She’s not cocky when she says it either, just matter-of-fact. I find it . . . fascinating.

“It’s not like I stood below the balcony reciting Romeo and Juliet.” Not like I could either. I never managed to finish that when we read it in high school English, and the movie version I watched with guns and gangs got me a big fat F on the exam. She makes a noise, and I can’t tell whether she’s scoffing at me again or laughing.

“Romeo was a tool.”

“Really?” I thought girls lived for that shit.

She crosses her arms over her chest and huffs, “He’s head-over-heels, mopey in love with Rosaline, and then in one night, he flip-flops and decides now he’s in love with Juliet. If he would have just thrown his whiny tool self at another girl, Juliet wouldn’t have died.”

“Well, I can promise I’m not going to suddenly declare my love for you. Satisfied?”

She shrugs, and I assume that’s the only answer I’ll get.

“So was it a Romeo who inspired that scream?”

“Nope. Just the regular kind of asshole.”

She stumbles over the last word, her cheeks pinking prettily, and I get the feeling her blunt honesty doesn’t usually include swear words.

“Well, fuck that guy.” My suspicions are confirmed when her blush deepens, and she pulls that full bottom lip between her teeth. I try to connect this shy piece of her puzzle with the brazen girl who called me on my flirting without blinking.

“Uh . . . yeah,” she replies hesitantly.

I make a mental note to cuss as much as possible to keep that sweet flush on her face. “Don’t let that dick ruin your night.”

I should probably learn to take my own advice. I’m the one hiding in the backyard of a frat house.

“They will not ruin my night.”

They? There’s more than one? Damn.

I start to ask her name, but then someone inside the house shouts out, “Dallas?” and her head whips around in response.

“That him?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes and nods.

“Well then, Dallas. As I see it, you have two options. You can turn around and unleash another of those screams on him, which would be entertaining. Or . . .”

I trail off, debating whether or not to try again considering my crappy flirting record with this girl so far.

“Or what?”

“Or forget about the prick, and hang out with me. I’ll make my best effort not to be an asshole.” She hesitates and I add, “Or a Romeo. Or a tool. Or whatever it is you’re sick of.”

There’s a third option that I don’t add, as appealing as it is. She could introduce me to the dick, and I could introduce him to my fist and work off some frustration. But that could get me in trouble with Coach, so while effective, it’s off the table.

I am fully prepared for her to say no and lump me in with whatever other guys have pissed her off tonight. Instead, she considers me. Her lips twist, somewhere between pursed and pouty.

“I’m not sleeping with you,” she says.

Surprised, I bark out a laugh and feel the last of the night’s frustration ebb away. She says exactly what she’s thinking, and I love it. I’m shocked by how much I want to keep prodding until I’ve unraveled every little thought that crosses her mind.

“Again with the assumptions,” I say.

“Like you weren’t thinking about it.”

I hadn’t actually gotten that far, but now I’m thinking about it, about how it would be an even better way to work off my frustration than fighting. I bet that flush is just as pretty across her chest as it is across her cheeks. It’s hard to tell from down below her, but she’s tall, maybe just a few inches shorter than me, and her legs go on and on. I imagine them going around and around my hips.

I clear my throat before I can wander too long down that trail of thought. “Thinking about and expecting it are two different things. One makes me a douche-bag, the other just makes me a dude.”

Tempting or not, I don’t have time for that kind of thinking. It was one thing to hook up with girls at Westfield. It didn’t take nearly as much effort to secure my spot on the team or keep up my grades there, but I am on an entirely different playing field here. Literally.

“Dallas!” The guy calls out again, and a light a few rooms down switches on. There’s a shrill scream before the light switches off and a door slams shut, the guy clearly having interrupted something.

Dallas’s face screws up in a laugh, but no sound comes out.

When another room lights up down the hall, she sobers quickly.

“Why would you want to hang out with me? I’m likely to be a roaring bitch for the rest of the night.”

So honest. And gorgeous. It’s a rare combination. I have to remind myself again that I don’t have the time to really appreciate this particular rarity.

“What can I say? I have a thing for screamers.”

Her blush had calmed, but now it detonates across her cheeks again, and I’m laughing before I manage to hold it back.

“I’m kidding, little lioness. I’m not looking to hook up with you. I just find your honesty refreshing. That makes you better company than every person I’ve run across tonight.”

She watches another light switch on, just two rooms away, and lifts her chin. She seems to come to a decision. Then she braces her hands on the railing, hefts herself up, and throws a long leg over the balcony’s edge.

“Holy shit!” I jump to my feet, sprinting to stand beneath her. She has both legs over by the time I’m standing under her, her toes tucked carefully along the ledge on the outside of the railing.

“Dallas, be careful.”

Her legs look even longer now that they aren’t blocked by the balcony, and her pale skin almost glows in the moonlight.

“You better not be looking up my skirt right now,” she says.

“I’m not!”

Anymore.

She twists her head around, and her eyes meet mine, and I am so caught. Even at night, the bright green of her gaze stands out like emeralds against her porcelain skin. I note, with a wry grin, that her underwear is the same color.

“Does this make me a coward?” she asks, glancing in the direction of the seeking voice.

“You’re currently dangling off a balcony. Coward was not the word I was thinking of.”

She grins, a vibrant gleam in her eye, and before I can smile back in response, she lets go and starts dropping toward the ground.

“Oh shit!”

I throw my arms up while simultaneously jerking my head away so I can’t be accused of looking up her skirt again. Her knee makes contact with my shoulder, and when I try to catch her I end up catching her skirt instead, and then I’m tipping backward with her somewhat in my arms. My ass hits first, then the top of her head cracks against my chin a second before her weight slams into my midsection.

“Fuck,” I groan at the same time she declares, “You are an idiot.”

With one hand pressed to the top of her head, she uses the other to push herself up enough to look at me, her elbow planted firmly below the socket of my shoulder.

“I could have landed that on my own. It was one floor.”

My ribs feel on the verge of caving in, and I force a shaky breath with her weight still on top of me.

“I didn’t know. You could have broken an ankle or something.” She shifts, and I groan. “Instead I broke my ass.”

She laughs again, the same silent one I saw her give on the balcony, and I catch sight of one lone dimple on her right cheek. She lets go of her head to shift herself higher, and before she can climb off me, I reach out to touch her forehead. She stills, and those large green eyes peer down at me. I trace my fingers across her skin, brushing through the bangs swept across her forehead.

“You okay? You hit my chin pretty hard.”

In response, she just reaches out and traces my chin in the same manner. In the silent night, I can hear the short stubble along my jaw rasp against her skin. She shivers.

Her eyes are open, and I swear I can see every thought in them. She runs her finger one way across my jaw, and then back, and I can tell she’s trying to decide if she likes the facial hair. Then her eyes touch on my lips briefly before flicking away, and then back again, like she knows she shouldn’t be looking, but then doesn’t really care.

And for all the promises I made her (and myself), I think about kissing her. I think about it, and I fist my hands against her back to keep from following through. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, and they glisten, calling to me. I’m breathing heavy, and I hope she just chalks it up to having the air knocked out of me, not to the reemergence of the mental image of her legs wrapped around my waist that’s the true culprit.

“Dallas?” The voice is in the room directly above us, and we hear heavy footsteps stomp toward the balcony door.

I reach for her hips to shift her off of me, and I touch bare skin. We realize at the same time that when I’d grabbed her skirt as she fell, I’d tugged it up somewhere around her waist, leaving her bottom half mostly bare against me.

Panic flits through her eyes. In her haste to cover herself, she sits up, rushing to pull down her skirt, which leaves one knee on either side of my hips. My hands are still frozen against her warm skin, now hidden beneath her skirt. I stiffen and swallow a groan because I like her draped across me. Entirely too much. And if she doesn’t move off me quickly, she’s going to know it.

Her name comes again, from outside on the balcony this time. I let my hands fall away from her hips, and I don’t mean for my fingertips to brush against her thighs, but I’m certainly not sorry. Not when she lets out a breathy noise that I might have called a moan if she didn’t fix me with a glare half a second later. She pulls herself up, more gracefully than I would have thought possible. Her face drawn tight in anger, she steps over me, and I cover my eyes with a groan too late not to catch another brief forbidden glance of emerald green.

This girl is going to be the death of me.

As I pull myself up to a sitting position just below the balcony and out of sight, she turns around to square off against the guy above.

“Pretty girl, what are you doing down there?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she crosses her arms over her chest and gives him a cold look. “Did your buddy ever give you that hint you were wanting? Because if not, I have one. Not in a million years, asshole.”

She doesn’t hesitate over the curse word, and I barely resist the urge to applaud her improvement.

“Don’t be mad, pretty girl.” The guy actually sounds a little worried. Hell, I’m a little worried, and her anger isn’t even directed at me. “That was just guy talk. We were being stupid. Nothing serious.”

Her expression morphs from cold to fiery, and I have a feeling that if she could get back up on that balcony, she would make that guy use his own small intestine as a straw.

“Stay away from me. I’ll keep my mouth shut about tonight, but bother me again, and I might just feel the need to unburden my worries. Got it?”

The dick doesn’t reply, and the balcony door opens and slams shut once more.

She’d more than held her own, but I can’t help being unsettled by what I heard. What had that dude done to her? And who was she threatening to tell that had him bailing without even a reply?

I climb to my feet slowly, my back complaining and my ass bitching like nobody’s business. Trying not to grimace, I ask, “You okay?”

She pulls her gaze away from the now-empty balcony and focuses on me.

“Better.”

Her eyes turn wary, and I’m pretty sure she’s thinking about the skirt mishap. Her hands confirm it when they slip into two hidden pockets at her hips and casually push down to make sure her skirt is as long as she can make it. Fortunately for me, that’s still not that long.

I mimic her, placing my own hands into my pockets. A cold front is just creeping into town, the first hint of fall, so it’s cold enough to keep everyone inside, but not so cold that it’s unbearable. Hell, I hadn’t been cold since the minute I’d laid eyes on Dallas.

For a few seconds, we just stare at each other, unsure how to proceed. She reaches up and gathers her thick red hair into her hands like she’s going to pull it up into a ponytail. Then she seems to think better of it, releasing it until it settles in crimson drifts across her shoulders. I fist my hands in my pockets, nearly overwhelmed with the urge to wrap that long hair around my fingers. She links her hands behind her back, and it draws my attention to her slim, tall frame.

And damn, I really need to get a handle on this.

When we do speak, it’s in a rush and at the same time.

“What were you doing out here alone?”

“So, you jump off balconies often?”

We apologize in sync, and then laugh together, too.

I leave the shadows of the balcony and cross to her. “I needed some space to think. I just transferred to Rusk from a junior college, and it’s not as easy to settle in as I thought it would be.”

“What junior college?”

I shove my hands deeper into my pockets. I hadn’t meant to tell her about that. Most people are weird when I mention junior college, like I am somehow lesser than because I went there first. But she is so open and honest, I didn’t even think about filtering myself before I spoke.

“Westfield.”

She smiles. “I have a few friends who went to Westfield and are planning to transfer here after a year or two. It’s pretty smart, really. So much cheaper to get the basics out of the way there first.”

Her smile is genuine, and I’ve not felt this at ease since I set foot on this campus a few weeks ago to officially try out for the team. “So what about you? Balcony jumping a habit? Favorite pastime?”

She tilts her head to the side and scrunches her nose up cutely before shaking her head. “Not so much. Probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done either.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Oh really? What happened to your whole Carson, you’re an idiot. It was only one floor bit?”

She bites back a smile before asking, “Carson?”

I hadn’t told her my name before? Oh, right. I was too busy getting my tailbone broken and accidentally undressing her.

“Well, Carson. Normally, I’m much more graceful than . . .” She laughs before adding, “All of that.” She circles her hand, gesturing toward the general vicinity where we’d ended up after my botched attempt at catching her.

I step up beside her, and I’m close enough to her now that I can see the way her eyelashes brush against her cheeks when she blinks. And I must be insane because just the simple act of her blinking has me staring, dumbstruck.

I can deny myself all I want, but one thing I cannot deny is just how fucking gorgeous this girl is. And exactly the kind of distraction I’m supposed to be staying away from.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who go to junior college because it’s cheaper or the smart thing to do. And yeah, the cheaper thing definitely helped. A lot.

But mostly I went because I didn’t get accepted into any state schools, and my high school team hadn’t been good enough to get the kind of exposure I needed to land a football scholarship. So Dad and I had made a plan. One year at Westfield—get my grades up, play football there, train every spare second, reach out to the coach at Rusk, and nab a walk-on spot. Eventually, the goal is to leverage that spot into something more permanent, something with a scholarship.

So far the plan is working perfectly. Right on track.

But the hardest part is standing right in front of me.

Don’t get distracted by a girl.

That’s Dad’s number one rule, and he’s probably right.

It’s going to take everything I have to keep my grades up here. And I don’t exactly have it easy on the field, considering I’m playing second string to Levi Abrams. The guy won two high school state championships, and still holds the high school state record for all-time leading passer. He was redshirted the year before last, his freshman year, and though he had decent numbers in his first season last year, the team as a whole had a disappointing year.

Normally that might have given me a little hope.

But considering the university’s new coach was the one to coach Levi to those two state championships in high school, I figure I’m shit out of luck.

I’m sure one of the reasons he was hired was to get Levi back on his game.

Which is why I give myself a break and let myself step a little closer to Dallas. I can afford to get distracted for one night. How much could it hurt?

“So what did that guy do to piss you off? You know . . . just so I don’t make the same mistake.”

“Unless you’re lying to me and trying to trick me into sleeping with you . . . you should be good.”

“So what if I’m up-front about trying to get you to sleep with me . . . Does that still get me yelled at?”

I expected a blush, but I don’t get one. Her face is carefully blank.

“I thought you weren’t trying to hook up with me.”

“Just keeping my options open. I like to be prepared for all possibilities.”

She rolls her eyes. “You can be as up-front as you want. I can promise I will be, too.”

There’s a devilish glint in her eye, and I wonder how many hearts this girl has broken with her honesty. Not that I’m worried about my heart. I’m more concerned with the hard-on I can’t get to subside with her so close to me.

“Then in the interests of honesty, I should say I’m trying really hard not to kiss you.”

She straightens, and the strand of hair she was lazily twirling drops from her grasp.

“Why would you tell me that?”

“So that when I slip up and break my promise, you’ll at least know I tried.”