The First Score: A Best Friend's Brother Sports Romance

by Amie Knight

  “You owe me!” I yelled back, trying to keep things light. Compliments made me uncomfortable and she knew it.

  She rolled her eyes and closed her car door.

  We pulled into traffic, me behind Scarlett, and I cranked the radio to some R.E.M. and sang along.

  It wasn’t long before we pulled into the parking lot of Mint Valley University where Ollie attended college and played ball.

  I parked beside Scarlett in the stadium parking lot, which was mostly empty except for a few cars I assumed belonged to football players. “I’ll wait here!” I yelled out the car window to Scarlett.

  She shook her head. “Oh, no, you don’t. You know Ollie will want to see you. Besides, it’s a long walk down there to the field. Come keep me company.”

  I turned my car off and debated thunking my head against the wheel. I would love to see Ollie, too. But not in his damn football uniform. I knew what it did to me. And it wasn’t pretty, damn it. I mean, he was pretty. But not my reaction. “Fine, I’m coming.” I got out of the car and closed the door, telling myself over and over that I would not look at his ass in those pants the whole ten-second walk over to Scar.

  “What did you do today?” I asked Scarlett as we made our way down to the football field.

  “I was doing lesson planning. Which, by the way, I got my class roster today and guess what?”

  “What?” It was warm out and I was starting to sweat under my hoodie. I was thankful for my short jeans shorts.

  “Do you remember Luk Callihan from high school?”

  I laughed. “Do I remember Luk Callihan? Do I remember Luk fucking Callihan? Are you joking right now? You lost your mind over that guy and you think I forgot him!”

  “Oh my God, Hazel. Quiet down, you maniac. Why don’t you say Luk’s name a little bit louder next time.” Her shut-the-fuck-up eyes probably should have stopped me, but I was Hazel. She should have known better.

  I opened my mouth to shout it and was practically tackled to the cement steps we were walking down, and one of Scarlett’s hands covered my mouth. “I swear to fucking God, bitch. I will kill you.” Her crazy eyes stared down at me.

  I cackled behind her hand. I loved getting sweet Scarlett worked up. I pried her hand off my mouth just in time to see Oliver walking up behind her.

  “What are you two doing goofing off up here?” He smiled, his teeth a blinding white against his bronzed skin. While Scarlett’s skin looked like it had never met the light of day, Ollie’s was the exact opposite. A couple of his brown curls fell over his sweaty forehead and his hazel eyes sparkled at me.

  “Brought you my car.” Scarlett stopped tackling me long enough to jangle her keys in front of his face.

  I tried not to look at him too hard, instead opting to enjoy the rest of the eye candy on the field near us. All kinds of hot guys wearing green jerseys and white football pants covered the field. There were plenty of hot behinds to ogle down there. See, I didn’t need to check out Ollie’s after all. I was fine. Everything was fine.

  “Thanks so much for taking her home, Hazel.” Ollie nudged me to get my attention and I turned to look at him, not having much choice in the matter now. I couldn’t be rude. It was a mistake. The green of his eyes was deeper today, less brown. I knew it was the jersey. It was always that way. A bead of sweat slid down the side of his face and he ran a hand through his hair like he always did. I knew it was a habit of his, just like I knew so many other things about him.

  “You owe me.” I tried lightening the mood like I had with Scarlett. I nudged his shoulder but only came into contact with a pad.

  Dragging his bottom lip into his mouth, he raked his teeth over the fullness and his eyes heated. He leaned his face close to mine. “You name it and it’s yours, brat.”

  My face flamed and my mouth watered. Lord, he was a terrible flirt and by terrible I meant amazing. I swallowed the saliva pooling in my mouth and stepped back.

  “Cut it out, Olls. Quit giving her a hard time. She came all the way so your ass would have a way home tonight.” Scarlett attempted to save me.

  He eyed me. “Oh, I haven’t even started giving her a hard time yet,” he said before walking backward down the stadium steps, hot eyes still on me. I was thanking whatever gods were listening that he was walking backward. Please, God. Spare me that ass. I couldn’t handle it after his damn lip trick.

  “You’re shameless, Oliver Knox,” Scarlett called down to him.

  She wasn’t wrong. Oliver flirted with all the women. I never could tell if he had a preference for a certain kind of girl. If it walked and had tits and a vagina, he flirted.

  “Bye, ladies,” Oliver said loudly and jangled Scarlett’s keys over his head before doing the most awful thing in the world to me—he spun around and gave me his ass. And God, was it a marvelous ass. Immediately my eyes ate it up. Was there anything better than a hot ass in some football pants? It was round and firm and high and I bet I could have bounced fifty quarters off of it. But I didn’t have any change. Damn. That was just my luck.

  I was being mesmerized by the twin all white globes when they stopped just barely and my eyes diverted up to see Oliver looking over his shoulder and smiling. Damn him. He gave me a slow wink before continuing down the steps at a trot.

  The tease. The bastard. He knew how good-looking he was. It didn’t matter a bit that he was my best friend’s brother or that he was a year and a half younger than me. Oliver Winston Knox was fine on a regular day, but in a football uniform he was the stuff dreams were made of. My dreams to be exact.

  He knew what he was doing. Winnie knew he was off-limits to me, but goddamn, he looked good in those football pants. And a girl could only take so much.

  Scarlett put her arm through mine and pulled me up the steps slowly. “Stop giving him the satisfaction of him knowing how adorable he is.”

  “I didn’t say he was adorable,” I denied. And I would deny deny deny until the cows came home.

  “You didn’t have to. Because your face did,” she deadpanned.

  She had me there. “So, finish telling me about The Luk Callihan.” I changed the subject quickly.

  “Well, his baby sister will be in my class this year.”

  “Wow, that’s crazy. But pretty cool, too. What’s he doing now anyway? Did he end up playing professional ball?”

  We climbed into my car. “Yeah, I think he plays for some team down in Florida.” She opted for looking out the window and not at me.

  “Like in the NFL?”

  “Mmmhmm.” She nodded at the window.

  “Do you know what team?” I asked, curious why she was being weird.

  “Yeah,” she squeaked out.

  I giggled. “Because you’ve been cyberstalking him?”

  Her head jerked to mine, eyes big. “I didn’t say I’d been cyberstalking him.”

  I pursed my lips. “No, but your face did.”

  Rolling her eyes, she laughed. “Touché. Now drive me home, whore.”

  After dropping Scarlett at her apartment, I headed right home, ready for a nice hot shower and dinner.

  I checked the house for Pops, but I assumed he must have been at Amor’s for dinner. I made a microwave meal since I wasn’t much of a cook. I depended on Scarlett to feed me meals of actual nutritional sustenance a couple of times a week.

  I went to the bathroom and stripped my shorts and hoodie off after laying my glasses on the counter. I stood there in my panties and bra. I looked myself over. I wasn’t tall, but I wasn’t short. I wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t fat either. I was average. That pretty much summed me in one word. I was okay with that. Average was secure. I looked down at the scars on both of my arms from my elbows to my wrists. They were old and almost gone, so thin they were barely a memory anymore. I didn’t despise them. I wasn’t embarrassed of them. They were as much a part of me as Pops’s tattoos were a part of him. We’d both gone to war at a time in our lives and come back with marks on our bodies to prove it.

 
; Age 12

  It was very late and I probably shouldn’t have been up, but I was, because I was twelve, my hormones were raging, and Hazel was in my house. She was here nearly every weekend now. It was amazing. It was awful. Because lately, I’d had these thoughts. Not the ones from last summer where I put a frog in her sleeping bag while she and Scarlett had camped out in the backyard. Torturing Hazel was out and torturing me was in. It sucked. I wanted to put different things in her sleeping bag. Like myself. It was exciting, this feeling. It was equally terrifying.

  It was scary as hell because I knew Hazel didn’t feel the same. She wasn’t sitting across the room giving me goo-goo eyes. Nope, that was all me. Instead, she was usually giving me a hard time. In fact, she’d found out last summer that my middle name was Winston. I know, it was hard to believe that my parents had gifted me with Oliver and Winston, but they had. And it was my cross to bear. Especially now that Hazel had taken to calling me Winnie instead of Ollie. Never in my life did I think I could hate a nickname worse than Ollie. But Hazel proved me wrong, as usual. Yeah, her favorite thing in the world seemed to be giving me shit. And still I sought her out like a fool.

  I tiptoed down the stairs and toward the glowing light of the TV in the living room where I knew Hazel and Scarlett had put pallets on the floor. I heard the soft sound of snoring and thought maybe they were both asleep as I crept closer. I had to admit I was itching for a glance at Hazel’s sleeping face. She was still the prettiest girl I’d ever seen and I was looking forward to just watching her without worrying about her noticing. And boy did she notice. When she caught me staring at her, she’d raise her eyebrows at me and give me a what look that usually sent me scurrying back to my room and to my Nintendo Wii for the remainder of the day.

  “What are you doing awake, Winnie?” Hazel’s voice made me jump and my gaze darted around the room, looking for her in the dark.

  She was in the corner of the couch, sitting there alone in a pink hoodie and some leopard print pajama pants, the light of the TV casting a faint blue glow on her face.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” I laughed awkwardly, hoping I didn’t come off like a crazy obsessed stalker who came down here to watch her sleep. Because that’s exactly what I was.

  “Shhh.” Hazel placed a finger to her lips before pointing down to the floor in front of the couch where Scarlett was snoring away in her purple sleeping bag, not a foot from where I was standing.

  I nodded and stepped around Scarlett and sat on the other end of the couch. “What are you still doing awake?” I whispered.

  Hazel shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep either, I guess.”

  I nodded again, not sure what else to do or say. I looked over at the infomercial that was playing on the TV with the volume so low there was no way she could hear it. I wondered what she was doing up this late sitting by herself in the dark looking so lonesome because it sure as hell wasn’t watching TV.

  Hazel adjusted the knot of hair on her head and looked at me expectantly like she was waiting for me to say something, anything. And I knew I should because, for God’s sake, I was the one who had come down here.

  So, I thought of the first thing that came to mind because it was what I had been doing before I’d dragged my behind down here to see her. “Want to go play the new Zelda?”

  She perked up, her eyebrows rising high. “You have the new Zelda? For the Wii?” It was the loudest whisper ever.

  “Yep,” I said with a sly grin. Hazel loved video games and about the only time I got to hang out with her and Scarlett was when they allowed me to play with them on the Wii or PlayStation. Which wasn’t that often since I had football practices most days after school while they were being lazy bums.

  A matching smile broke out across her face and she stood quietly and said, “Yeah, let’s go.”

  I followed her to the stairs and then up them, and I couldn’t help but stare at her really nice ass the entire way. Lately, Hazel had been getting curves everywhere and it didn’t matter that all of the clothing she wore was probably meant to cover them, I still saw them all the same. And the ones I couldn’t see, I had no problem imagining.

  We padded over the soft carpet on deft feet so we didn’t wake anyone and made our way into my room, Hazel first. I closed the door softly behind me, my heart beating a mile a minute. It wasn’t the first time Hazel had been in my room, but it sure as hell was the first time without Scarlett. And I’d never had a girl other than my sister in my room with the door closed. I wiped my sweaty palms on my sweatpants and looked around my messy room, overthinking every damn thing in the world. Would she think my Star Wars poster was stupid or would she think I was a slob because of all the dirty clothes on my floor, including my stinky football socks? I kicked them into a corner.

  “Well, put it on, Winnie.” She gestured to the TV and sat on the edge of my bed. My throat damn near closed up at the sight. There she sat. On my bed. In my room. Door closed. It didn’t get much better than this. Ya know, unless she let me kiss her, too. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. What fourteen-year-old girl wanted to kiss a twelve-year-old boy?

  I was doing the goo-goo eyes again and the only thing that snapped me out of it was Hazel giving me the what-the-heck look.

  “Sorry,” I said, softly running my hands through my curly, too-long hair. It was time for a haircut. I busied myself turning on the TV and Wii and trying my damnedest to get it together. This was just Hazel, I kept telling myself. But the truth was she’d never for one second ever been “just Hazel” to me. So, it was hard to rationalize it in my head that way now. She’d always been more. The girl I’d wanted to make happy. Then the girl I wanted to torture. And now the girl I just wanted.

  I sat down on the bed next to her, controller in hand. I tried to pretend my hands weren’t shaking and that my heart wasn’t in my throat. We decided we would play it on story mode so we would just have to take turns since it was only one player. Which was awesome because while she played, it gave me all the time in the world to sneak looks at her while she was concentrating. And her concentrating face happened to be one of my favorites. She stuck her tongue out a little and bit it, her eyes squinted and her forehead wrinkled. It was pretty damn cute.

  But when she discovered something awesome or beat a villain, she would laugh and beam, her smile sitting in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but laugh back until she’d shush me for fear of waking my parents.

  An hour went by in a flash and it didn’t escape me that Hazel was being a bit of a turn hog. “You gonna let me have a turn or what, brat?”

  She paused the game and turned to look at me, her eyes wide. “Did you just call me a brat, Winnie?”

  “I sure did. You’re hogging the controller,” I said with a smile. “Brat.”

  She leaned her body toward mine and nudged me hard with her shoulder. “Well, now you’re never getting it back,” she smarted and pressed start again.

  “Is that so?” I said, inching toward her and the remote. Up until then, I’d been doing my best to give her some space, but right then I was caught up in the lightheartedness of the moment. Of just hanging with a friend I’d known since I was a little boy.

  Hazel backed up on my bed toward my pillows at the top, holding the controller high over her head like she could keep it from me. She may have been over a year my senior, but she was a hell of a lot smaller comparatively. I was big for my age. Tall and lanky, my mom called me when she complained that I was going to eat her out of house and home.

  These lanky arms were about to come in handy. I crawled up the bed after her quickly, straddling her and pushing her back into the pillows and mattress. And still she held that damn controller up so I couldn’t get it.

  “Get off me, Oliver,” she whisper-yelled through her giggles, pushing at my chest.

  “Give me the controller, you Zelda hog brat,” I said back, laughing.

  She tried to tuck the controller and her right hand under my pillow. “Never!”

  It onl
y occurred to me then that I was wrestling on my bed with a girl. And not just any girl. Hazel.

  I paused above her, staring down at her caramel, brown, smiling eyes. God, she was gorgeous.

  “What?” she asked, laughing, breaking whatever spell her baby browns had put me under.

  I pursed my lips, smiling. “Nothing. Give me my damn controller.”

  She sucked in a feigned shocked breath. “Why, Winnie. I do declare. Did you just say damn? You know you are too young for those kinds of words. What would your momma say?” She pushed the controller farther under the pillow.

  I rolled my eyes at her jokes. I’d heard Scarlett and Hazel dropping F-bombs like they were sailors last weekend over a game of Monopoly.

  I used an elbow to hold my weight above her and tickled her side with my free hand.

  “No,” she cried between giggles. “Oh my God, stop, Ollie. Please.”

  While she was weak, I slipped my hand up and under the pillow toward her palm that was gripping the controller. She wouldn’t give it up, so I grabbed the sleeve of her hoodie and pulled it hard, trying to snatch her hand out from under the pillow.

  But the more I pulled, all that happened was that the sleeve of the hoodie moved up her arm. And the more skin it exposed, the more I felt something rough against the skin of my hand.

  I stopped pulling, trying to look at her arm, wondering what I was feeling. The only light from the room was my small TV and it made it almost impossible to see anything, but still I leaned closer and kept pulling her sleeve up, the controller long forgotten.

  “What’s on your arm?” I asked quietly, trying to see in the dark. It felt rough and thick and long. Like a deep scratch.

  And that was when all hell broke loose. If I thought she had been fighting me before, I was completely wrong. She pushed at my chest with one hand with all of her strength and tried to pull her hand away.

  “Stop, Oliver. Get off me right now!” She was still whispering, but she sounded panicked and terrified, and I immediately moved off her but not before I noticed the long, deep scratches all along the inside of her arm from elbow to wrist. So many.