by Anne Leigh
Kara left and Hanna moved closer to my side, “Mighty protective of my girl, huh?”
I turned to my side, glancing at her. “She’s Rikko’s sister and Scott’s girlfriend. I want to make sure she’s okay.”
“Hmm…” Hanna said with a slight tilt to her lips. She was a pretty girl. At first glance, she looked like a mix between Kylie Bunbury and Kerry Washington. Two ladies that my teammate, Jose, had pictures of in his locker.
I watched Scott and the rest of the SDU’s offense take the field. They needed to score to take command of the game. It was early but no one wanted to play catch up.
“So, she hasn’t told you then?” Hanna’s voice was loud on my side.
I eyed Silas and he was focused on the game, as were the rest of my brothers.
I would have been too, if not for the distraction of the beautiful ladies sitting beside me.
“Told me what?” I felt a slight chill from the night air. I could’ve gone without removing my shirt since senior officers didn’t have to. But I wanted to do it for team spirit and for the long-legged beauty who showed up tonight, who I really didn’t have business of messing up with.
“That while she’s still Rikko’s sister…” Hanna’s eyes sparkled in what I call mischief, “she’s now Scott’s ex-girlfriend.”
My jaw literally fell on the stadium’s floor.
Or ground.
Or concrete.
Shit, I’d played inside this stadium for three, going on four years but if you asked me right now what lay beneath the bleachers, there was a high probability that you’d get a blank look from me.
Kara and Scott had broken up?
Since when?
Why?
“If I could bottle up the chemistry between the two of you, my father would have disowned me for carrying triplets right now.” Hanna’s hazel eyes laughed as she made a motion of fanning herself with her hands.
“When?” I asked, barely hiding the briskness in my voice. “How?”
“Five days ago, or was it six days? I can’t remember.” Her lips pointing to the quarterback on the field, who was signaling plays to his teammates. “I don’t know why she hasn’t said anything to you, but all I know is that she’s making room for you in her life.”
“I don’t know about that. She hasn’t said much to me,” I said, countering Hanna’s thoughts. “We don’t know each other well.”
“Are you making up reasons on why you’re not going to act on your attraction to her?” Her right brow was higher than her left. “I don’t know you either. But I know this – I’ve never seen Scott look at her once like the way you’re looking at her, especially when she’s not looking.”
“How do I look at her?” I asked even if I knew exactly how.
Like she was the most precious thing in the whole world.
That if I had her, I’d do everything I could to keep her.
That she’d come first, in everything.
“Like you don’t want to blink because you’re scared she’s going to disappear,” Hanna said in a wistful voice. “Give her time, but don’t give her too much space. She loved him. He’s her first love.”
My right hand rubbed on a physically invisible pang inside my chest.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, wondering how in the world Kara’s friend knew what to say to me.
Her hazel eyes grazed on the field and amid the cheering home crowd for the Continentals who had just scored a touchdown, she said, “Because I’m a romantic fool. I’m a sucker for great love stories. Because for the first time in her life, my best friend is fighting for something for herself. All of her life she’s fought for other people – for me, for her brother, for Scott, for everyone else. But she’s never once fought for her. You know what she said about you the first time I heard your name from her?”
“What?” Intrigue laced my voice.
Kara was single.
She didn’t belong to anyone anymore.
She was making room for me and her.
At least, that’s what Hanna was saying.
“She said, ‘Hanna, today I met this boy and the first thing that came to my mind…” Hanna’s voice hitched, as if pulling a great memory from her memory bank. “…was graphite.’”
“Graphite?” I intoned, my head completely out of the game.
“Ask her about it.” Hanna smiled, “She’s fired off the first shot, Bishop. What are you going to do about it?”
What am I going to do about it?
I straightened my back and felt the tingle on my spine.
Kara was back.
This time, when she passed by me, I touched her wrist with my right hand and let it linger for a second.
Her blue eyes boomeranged with enough heat to combust a reactor.
I never wanted a girl as much as I wanted her.
I never wished for a woman to warm my bed at night except for this stunner beside me.
This time, when she sat down, I tore my eyes from the field and turned towards her.
Sensing my stare, her eyes met mine as her pink lips moved, “What? Do I have something on my face?”
I shook my head and replied, “No.”
“What are you doing?” She said again, her pale eyebrows knitting together. I could see Hanna’s shoulders shaking by Kara’s side. Silas was making her laugh.
“I’m trying to remember how I solved a problem…,” I said, my chest expanding and contracting in relief and excitement.
It’s game time, Kara.
You laid the groundwork.
Now it’s time for me to make a move.
“You’re thinking about homework right now?” Her melodious laughter broke through the noise in the stadium.
I said, “If you cut up the surface of a sphere into edges, vertices, faces, and let E be the number of edges, V the vertices, you’ll always get V – E + F = 2.”
“Seriously? You have Euler’s equation inside your head right now?” She chuckled, her shoulders moving in accord.
“I think it’s the most beautiful equation because it simply states the pure nature of spheres,” I said, and with my eyes on her, I added, “It’s how I think of you, Kara.”
Her blue eyes darkened in an instant and her pink lips formed an O.
The game was heating up on the field but I could care less.
I watched as understanding dawned on her face and she remarked, “You know.”
“What do I know?” I asked with a teasing manner. It always seemed like she had the upper hand, but now I felt the surge of power. Because now I know that she thought of me in a way that could incinerate the bed sheets that I often fisted when I was thinking of her.
“That I broke up with Scott.” Her eyes flitted to the field and then slowly she turned those blues back to me.
I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t want to. I wanted her to say it. Say something about me. That she felt a fraction of the magnitude of this attraction between us.
So I waited…
Waited.
And waited…
In the lightest whisper, which was almost indecipherable to my ears because of the raucous crowd, she said, “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I became a cheater. And trust me, I’ve come so close to doing that – because I couldn’t stop thinking of you. I broke up with him because of you.”
For all the nevers in my life.
She was the one I’d never let go.
There are many theories about love.
But the fact is – only the people who experience it can substantiate love.
Therefore, only they hold the proof.
Kara
I’d never been wooed, or courted upon.
I didn’t know what it was called nowadays, but whatever its equivalent was, it had never been done to me.
Until now.
From the time Bishop had known I was single, thanks to my BFF, he’d showed me that he was pursuing me, and the way he was doing it was completely
riveting.
Every day, I received a delivery of random items to my dorm room. Flowers of different varieties – roses, daisies, lilies, chrysanthemums, alstroemerias, peonies, hyacinths, and some of which I couldn’t name. Thank goodness my roommate and I didn’t have any allergies or we’d both have a hard time breathing inside our dorm. He also sent chocolates – white, dark, milk, the fruity kind, the chewy kind, every kind I could think of. And he sent food – chips, granola, European biscuits, Asian pears, and fruits I’d never heard of.
They always came with a note. “Hope you enjoy these – B.”
Anissa and I had a guessing game going on about what he was going to send every day.
I’d confided to her that Scott and I had broken up. She just listened and said that I had to do what I felt was best for me. No judgment there. Just plain understanding.
Scott and I hadn’t talked face-to-face for over three weeks. He would text every now and then and I responded like a friend would.
The last time I saw him was after the Continentals’ won against Miami. It was the night Hanna had accompanied me to the game. I only saw him briefly, but he’d greeted Hanna and I by the bleachers and I knew he wanted to hug me, but I stayed a considerable distance away from him.
Bishop was there, too.
Throughout the football game, I’d been aware of Bishop’s half-naked body mere inches away from me. And boy, what a body he had.
The guy packed on the muscles and I could see why he had no shame in taking his shirt off (which was I guess, a frat tradition). I’d been around athletes my whole life – from my brother, then to my boyfriend and their friends. Athletes had the hottest (except for Rikko because ewww) bodies because you knew that they pushed themselves to their physical limits and it showed.
It was undeniable that Bishop had a great body. I couldn’t even speak when he’d tossed his shirt to the side. I wasn’t an anatomy buff, but I knew that pecs and biceps weren’t supposed to look like that. His chest was so well-defined that you could make out all the major muscle groups, knowing that there wasn’t a hint of fat covering it.
And his abs, darn his abs, they were layered in lean muscle and when he’d bent down to talk to Cody, the guy who’d accompanied me to the bathroom per Bishop’s order to which I didn’t even object to because I knew he was second in command to Rikko, I couldn’t tell if he was a liar or he was just blessed with great genes.
If I ate the amount of carbs that Bishop had told Sicily, the College Sports’ announcer, I would definitely have a kangaroo pouch growing on my tummy.
I’d seen hot bodies all of my life, but I never reacted to them the way my hormones did to Bishop.
He’d been half-naked, but I wanted to strip him down so I could see the rest of the amazing sculpture that he was.
I’d been replaying his Game Day interview to gain more insight about the man who had my feelings in the mixer. Bishop knew how to work the camera; he knew the politically correct way to avoid answering questions without the audience knowing it. His well-defined jaw and angled look made him a camera darling and the way he spoke with eloquence made you think that you were talking to a guy who could have been doing interviews for a long time even though when I’d searched the mighty library of the world wide web, only two ten-minute interviews were brought to the top results.
Aside from his interview with Sicily, the only other interview he had was when he’d made a press appearance a few years back, when he committed to SDU instead of other top colleges and universities. I saw the presser and even back then, Bishop’s good looks were evident. He was younger, but he held the same assessing eyes, solid stance, and dignified resolve. When asked why he was going to play rugby instead of hockey which he’d played all throughout high school, he’d shrugged his shoulders and replied with a, “I want to try something new.”
The reporters tried to finagle answers from him, but Bishop never relented. He held the composure of a seasoned athlete rather than a newbie to the sport of rugby. Well, at least that’s what everyone in the sports arena thought. But even then, I could tell from his answers that he was confident that he was going to be fine as a rugby player.
I could not stop myself from digging more about his past because he was an enigma. He was called Boy Genius by his father, hockey legend Beau Cordello, because of his ability to predict plays and to evade the defense. From the video footages of Bishop playing for the all-boys boarding school, St. Ignatius, he looked like he ruled the ice.
It reminded me of the way Bishop moved on the grass when he was running during rugby games.
He could’ve easily been NHL’s newest sensation, but he chose to play a sport that before him, had hardly been covered by television networks.
And as great of an athlete as he was, no one really talked about how smart he was, academically.
He’s had two away games since he’d started wooing me, so I hadn’t seen him much. But he texted me and sometimes I fell asleep with us texting each other.
At Quantum, he’d started sitting behind me since I always sat in the front row. I felt his stare the whole time during class, and after class he either walked with me to my study group for Econ or drove me to my dorm. He only had an hour to spare before his rugby practice so we couldn’t really do much.
And as much wooing as he was doing, he had not done anything physical to me, other than a few brushes of his hand on my hand and an accidental graze of my shoulder on his chest when he helped me get into his truck.
I’d never been the one to initiate physical contact.
But Bishop was driving me crazy.
As far as I could tell, the boy wanted to be intimate with me, judging from the way his eyes turned darker every time he stared at my lips. I knew he was giving me time, especially since I was coming off a breakup but it had been a month since he’d compared me to Euler’s equation, which by the way, was the hottest thing anyone could have ever said to me, and I was dying, parched, ready for him to kiss me and my other girlie parts.
Which was why I spent half a day over the weekend visiting my newfound favorite bikini waxing place by the beach and today, I was hoping that Cody, the sophomore student who was following me wherever I went, obviously per Bishop’s orders, could help me execute my plan.
“Cody,” I said as I got out of my Econ class.
“Yes ma’am.” He stood up from the lazy way he was sitting on the floor of the hallway.
“Hey Cody!” Tara waved and blew him a kiss as she passed us by.
Cody gave her a quick smile and nodded his head, “Hey beautiful. See you next week.”
I rolled my eyes because Cody was a flirt. He called every girl beautiful, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but he also got their numbers as quickly.
Tara had just started dating a guy she really liked so Cody was a little too late on that conquest, but it wasn’t like he was hurting.
He’d been my constant companion for the past three weeks, a fact that I had grown accustomed to.
The first time Cody started following me to class, I’d texted Bishop that he was going overboard.
Bishop had texted back, “Either he follows you around and makes sure you’re safe when I’m not there or he can have bathroom duties for six months.”
Cody had literally begged to be my quasi-bodyguard and I couldn’t find myself to be cruel to the light green-eyed, six-foot hound, so I went along with it. He’s actually become a big help since he knew his way around campus and if it weren’t for him, I’d have been late a few times talking to my advisors who never held office hours in their actual offices because of the construction happening all over campus.
“Where’s Bishop today?” I asked. Bishop had texted me late last night that the team bus had just arrived on campus. He wanted to see me, but I was already asleep.
I’d responded with an early picture text this morning, making sure that my side boob was showing with the pink tank top that I wore for sleeping and I may have lifted my
sleep shorts higher than where they were before I’d taken the picture.
He didn’t text back, but within five minutes my phone was ringing.
“You could wake up the dead with your sexiness.” He’d groaned over the phone and I’d smiled to myself and moved around my room to get ready for the day.
“Good morning to you too, handsome.” The morning was good and it was even better because he was on campus.
He laughed huskily, making my lady parts tingle and I thought of how much I wanted to be close to him.
“I miss you.” It was the first time he said it and it cooled my overheated body. “Facetiming doesn’t cut it.”
We’d been Facetiming every day for the past four days and it’s what we’d been doing when he was out of town to play.
“I know what you mean, I miss you, too,” I admitted. Ever since I said it out loud that I broke up with Scott because I wanted to be with Bishop, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of me. It would have been wrong for me to stay with Scott even when I was hugely attracted to Bishop. It would have been a mistake to pursue something with Bishop when I was committed to another man.
Another woman might have been able to go through with it and at the end of the day, her stomach contents would remain inside her abdomen, but I couldn’t find it in me to do so.
I respected myself.
I respected Scott and what we had.
“What do you miss about me?” He asked, his voice sounding muffled, as if he was covering the phone’s speakers with his pillow.
“Hmm…” I said, willing myself to remain calm and not run outside and go to his place. A place that housed my brother. A house where a lot of other guys lived, including my ex-boyfriend.
“Are you fishing for compliments?” I teased. Bishop’s confidence wasn’t in short supply. He had that in spades. It was in the way he stood, and moved, and spoke, as if he knew that the world would wait for him to be heard. But he never paired it with arrogance.
I found that the most self-assured men didn’t have the inkling to be arrogant because they didn’t need to. Because they knew that they were enough. That what they brought to the table was something that no one else had.